"Is that question purely rhetorical," I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. "Or are you losing your memory?" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.
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."