With what was remarkably close to an air of incredulity, Smith looked slowly from one to the other.
"I gather you gentlemen haven't read my latest article."
"Not thoroughly," Cowles admitted.
"Then you don't know of my research work with an educatable computer," Smith said accusingly. Seeing that they didn't, he added: "I have named it 'Eddie'!"
"What ... what is an educatable computer?" ventured Cowles.
It was clear that Dr. Smith welcomed this question. His eyes glowed behind their thick lenses, and his high voice dropped its edge of sharpness.
"Eddie is a computer with a capacity to learn," he replied proudly. "It learns from assimilation of information and deductive reasoning—at a rate at least 10,000 times that of the human mind! That's why Eddie comes up with so many answers!... The only problem is, we seldom know what questions the answers answer."
His three interrogators had the look of men leaning into a heavy wind. General Sanders recovered first, and demanded:
"What the devil was it made for then?"
"Eddie was not designed for any specific task—that's why Eddie is so valuable ... and dangerous!"