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Show Ida Needlesmith, along with her husband, Isaac, had been the oldest of the team of two hundred scientists, evenly divided between male and female and approximately half of them paired legally at the time of takeoff from Earth. The large, motherly Ida had quickly developed into a surrogate parent while Isaac with his phenomenal mind, developed into a sort of gnome-like oracle. During the two waking TwelveMonths of their trip-the first TwelveMonth out from the JupiterSpaceLab and the last TwelveMonth into BauerWorlde-when the ship nosed into some problem, say an asteroid storm, the terrified team would run to the stooped, stout Isaac and cry, "What sayest thou now, Isaac-by the blessed Jesu! What will happen to us?" And Isaac would peer at the view screen myopically, sit down at the nearby computer console, and commune with it mysteriously. Then he'd train his coke-bottle glasses on his flock and say, "Naught, my dears." But, assuredly, Isaac knew this long before they hit the storm, having the job of communicating directly with the computer navigating their journey. In truth, his mind was connected fast to the JupiterSpaceLab computer. Would such a machine lead all these babes into destruction? Isaac believed in the computer as he would in part of himself and it responded to his touching belief by taking him and his flock without mishap straight to fair BauerWorlde. Of course, that computer had not been programmed by the BauerWorlde Bauercrats, as the Doctors were fond of pointing out. Nor should the one the colonists brought to their new planet have been programmed by the Bauercrats, as the Doctors kept forgetting. 67 |