"Yes, he had some old moralistic and superstitious ideas about calculators. He thought his job depended on his pleasing it—when of course its job was to please him. But he gave it an idea. If it couldn't find the strange and the different, it would create it. It started with the first changing element in its environment—the captain—but I don't know where it would have stopped if Romero hadn't reversed its pleasure-pain synapse response. Now it loves the tried and true. It's not much good for space exploration, of course. But a museum may be interested in it now."
"So we'll have to go back to picking our phase points at random, trusting to chance. Or the judgment of some skunk like Birdsel."
Starbuck cleared his throat. "That's another thing. The men aboard the Gorgon and the cybernetics machine had something in common. I finally figured that out. Most men are afraid of the unknown—they fear and hate it. But obviously not space explorers. They spend their whole lives searching for the unknown. They don't suffer from Xenophobia—they are Xenophyles. They like anything that's new and different. Even a new member of the crew. It kind of lessens the cameraderie aboard a spaceship, but the Service must have found the trait valuable. They have searched it out in men and developed it. They even breed it in second-generation spacemen."
"Do you know what, Starbuck?"
"What, Kettleman?"
"All that talk of yours is beginning to get on my nerves." Kettleman's triceps flexed.
Starbuck sighed. The honeymoon was over for him, and the trip was just beginning.