A STARSHIP WITH A PROBLEM
No, I'm not the guy who tested the McGuire.
I'm the guy who stole it.
The "McQuire" is the MG-YR-7, a new kind of starship. It's supposed to be artificially intelligent, but it's AI unit has crashed six times, hence the "7."
Me, I'm Daniel Oak, Shalimar Ravenhurst, the guy, who built the McGuire, hired me to find out whose been crashing his project. This is on the asteroid Ceres, so there were limited prospects.
Oh yeah. There was one complication. I also had to babysit his hellion of a teenage daughter, Jaqueline Ravenhurst. Even though her nickname was "Jack," she filled out a spacesuit nicely.
Jack could talk just about anyone into anything.
And little did I know, she had some big plans for me!
Author Biography
Randall Garrett (1927 - 1987) was an American science fiction and fantasy author. He was a prolific contributor to Astounding and other science fiction magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. He instructed Robert Silverberg in the techniques of selling large quantities of action-adventure science fiction and collaborated with him on two novels about Earth bringing civilization to an alien planet. Garrett is best known for the Lord Darcy books, the novel Too Many Magicians and two short story collections, set in an alternate world where a joint Anglo-French empire still led by a Plantagenet dynasty has survived into the twentieth century and where magic works and has been scientifically codified. The Darcy books are rich in jokes, puns and references (particularly to works of detective and spy fiction: Lord Darcy is himself partially modelled on Sherlock Holmes), elements that often appear in the shorter works about the detective. Garrett wrote under a variety of pseudonyms including: David Gordon, John Gordon, Darrel T. Langart (an anagram of his name), Alexander Blade, Richard Greer, Ivar Jorgensen, Clyde Mitchell, Leonard G. Spencer, S. M. Tenneshaw, Gerald Vance. He was also a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, as "Randall of Hightower" (a pun on "garret"). The short novel Brain Twister, written by Garrett in conjunction with author Laurence Janifer (using the joint pseudonym Mark Phillips) was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960.
