My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. "Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey." "Your robotocists can change that," I said. This time, I was giving him my version of "genuine" innocence. A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did. He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. "No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated." "Then why don't they do that?" "There are two very good reasons," he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. "In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent." "It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst." He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely. "But," I went on, "hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you money?" "It has. I was reluctant to call you in again--understandably enough, I think." "Perfectly. It's mutual." He ignored me. "I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either." He scowled at me. "It seems," he went on, "that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes." "I can't say that I blame him," I said. "What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?" "It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System." He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. "Mr. Oak, I am _certain_ that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!"