Destination: Void: Prequel to the Pandora Sequence (15 page)

Some carrier inflection of Bickel’s voice, a subtly shaded overtone, told Timberlake that Bickel had been worried about him.

But he must know I was sent through here … to try to stop him.

In that instant, Timberlake realized they were very close, the three of them standing here. And the closeness went beyond physical proximity.

“Whatever you’re doing, Bick,” Timberlake said, “it’s having no adverse effect on the hyb tanks. Every sleeper I checked was humming along nicely.”

“Every …” Bickel nodded. “You found … ahh …”

“Look for yourself,” Timberlake said, realizing Bickel had not dared test his own suspicion that the hyb tanks were a sham. “They’re all occupied.”

“Excuse me.” The politeness sounded odd coming out of Bickel’s suit speaker. He jumped to an overhead handhold, swung to a ladder and, oddly, picked the tank of Peabody, Alan—K-7a.

Presently, he worked his way along the K-line of tanks, pausing only to peer into the inspection ports. He dropped back down to the catwalk near its center, returned to them.

“All of them?” he asked, nodding back toward the other sections.

“The only empty tank’s the one that held Prue,” Timberlake said.

“Prue!” Flattery said. “She’s all alone in Com-central.” He thumbed the outside switch of his transceiver, changing circuits. They saw his lips move, but his voice was only a faint chatter.

Bickel looked down, saw that he had ignored his command set. He flicked the switch, caught Prudence saying: “… so far. But I don’t like the idea of being all alone in here in case there’s a real emergency.”

Bickel, too, preferred silence,
Timberlake thought.
He wanted a moment alone.

Flattery returned his suit circuits to voice amplifier, looked questioningly at Bickel. “Had we better be getting back?”

Raj seems more relieved than Tim that these tanks are what they, seem,
Bickel thought.
Why?
“You don’t want to check the tanks for yourself?”

“I can take your word for it,” Flattery said.

“Can you?”

What’s he doing?
Flattery wondered.
Is he trying to goad me?

Timberlake heard the derision in Bickel’s voice, felt their moment of closeness shatter. Without moving their bodies, they had pulled apart. But Timberlake realized with an odd feeling of elation that he had aligned himself with Bickel.

“This isn’t illusion,” Flattery said. He waved at the tanks around them.

“And you
are
conscious,” Bickel said.

Flattery suppressed a feeling of rage, but felt a sour taste in his mouth.
I will not let myself be goaded,
he thought. “Of course I’m conscious.”

“Never apply ‘of course’ to consciousness,” Bickel chided. “Consciousness can project illusions—insubstantial stimulus objects—onto the screen of your awareness.” He motioned to the tanks above them. “Go ahead, check. We’ll wait.”

Flattery felt stubborn now. “I will not.” He started to push past Bickel.

“Where’re you going?” Bickel asked, catching the arm of Flattery’s suit in one gloved hand.

“The shortest way back—through the shop,” Flattery said. “If you don’t mind!” He shook his arm free.

“Be my guest,” Bickel said, and stepped aside.

Timberlake stared at Flattery as the psychiatrist-chaplain wrenched the hatch dogs, opened the hatch and slipped through to the next chamber.

Flattery’s fear was something other than worry about me,
Timberlake realized.
He’s still afraid!

Bickel took Timberlake’s arm, helped him through, followed, and dogged the hatch. Flattery already was at the next hatch, had it open.

Damn poor procedure,
Timberlake thought, but he let it go.

Presently, they came to the inner locks and the back passage beneath the primary computer installation and up into the shop. They slipped through, sealed the hatch.

Bickel threw back his helmet. Flattery and Timberlake did the same. Bickel already was loosening his glove seals.

Timberlake stared at Flattery, watching the way the man studied the jutting boxes and angles, the interwoven leads of the Ox.

“Infinite counting net?” Flattery asked.

“Why not?” Bickel asked. “You have it. You can count beyond the number of your own total nerve supply. The Ox has to do the same.”

“You know the danger,” Flattery said.

“Some of the danger,” Bickel admitted.

“This ship could be one gigantic sensory surface. Its receptors could achieve combinations unknown to us, could contact energy sources unknown to us.”

“Is that one of the theories?”

Flattery took a step closer to the Ox.

“Before you do anything destructive,” Bickel said, and he nodded toward the patterned confusion clinging to the computer wall with its wire tentacles, “you’d better know I’m already getting conscious-type reactions on a low scale—the system itself activating various sensors. It’s like an animal blinking its eyes—a heat sensor here, audio there …”

“That could be a random dislodge pattern due to the shot-effect bursts,” Flattery said.

“Not when nerve-net activity accompanies each reaction.”

Flattery digested this, feeling his conditioned fearalertness—the reaction for which he was but a trigger—come to full amplitude. His memory focused on the two red keys and the self-destruction program they would ignite through the computer links of the ship.

“Tim, how tired are you?” Bickel asked.

Timberlake looked at Bickel.
How tired am I?
Minutes ago, he had been shot through with fatigue. Now … something had keyed him up, filled him with elation.

Conscious-type reactions!

“I’m ready for another full shift.”

“This thing’s too simple yet to even approach full consciousness,” Bickel said. “Most of the ship’s sensors bypass the Ox circuits. Robox controls aren’t connected and it has no—”

“Just a minute!” Flattery snapped.

They turned, caught by the anger in Flattery’s voice.

“You admit this goal-seeking mechanism may operate entirely outside your control,” Flattery said, “and you’re still willing to give it eyes—and muscles?”

“Raj, before we’re finished, this thing has to have complete control of the ship.”

“To get us across the Big Empty and safely to Tau Ceti,” Flattery said. “You’re assuming that’s the ship-computer’s basic program?”

“I assume nothing. I checked. That’s the basic program.”

To Tau Ceti!
Flattery thought. He felt like both laughing and crying. He didn’t know whether to tell them the truth—the fools! But … no, that would render them less efficient. Best to play the charade out to its silly conclusion!

He took a deep breath to get himself under control. “Okay, John, but you can’t anticipate every goal of your … Ox.”

“Unless we design all its goals into it,” Timberlake answered.

Flattery waved Timberlake to silence. “That defeats your purpose.”

“We’d have to foresee every possible danger,” Bickel agreed. “And it’s precisely because we
can’t
foresee every possible danger that we need this conscious awareness guiding the ship, its … hands on every control.”

Flattery reviewed the argument, trying to find a chink in Bickel’s logic. The words merely echoed many of the UMB briefings to which Flattery had been subjected:
“You’ll be required to find a survival technique in a profoundly changed environment. Remember, you can’t foresee every new danger.”

“Fail-safes won’t work, of course,” Flattery said.

“Same argument,” Bickel said. “Fail-safes work only when your dangers are known and anticipated.”

“Can you prevent damage to the computer core?”

“It’ll be buffered forty ways from Sunday. I’ve already started the buffering.”

“The ship had an overriding supervisory program,” Flattery said, “a command to get us safely to Tau Ceti—you’re sure of that?”

“The command’s there. They didn’t fake it.”

“What if it develops that it’s fatal to go to Tau Ceti?”

Why is he quibbling?
Bickel wondered.
Surely, he knows the answer to that.
“A simple binary decision solves that. We give it a turn-back alternative.”

“Ahhhhh,” Flattery said. “The best of all possible moves, eh? But we’re in the Queen’s croquet game. You said it yourself. What if the Queen of Hearts changes the rules? We’ve no Alice in this wonderland to haul us back to reality.”

A deliberately poor move somewhere along the line changing the theoretical structure of the game,
Bickel thought.
That’s an indicated possibility.

He shrugged: “Then we get sent to the headsman.”

Chapter 21

“No distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused.… A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard and smelt at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses.”

—Frankenstein’s Monster speaks

Prudence, at the controls less than an hour, already was beginning to feel the edge of fatigue which she knew would have her hanging on only by willpower at the end of her shift. Part of the load on her was the seemingly endless wordplay of those around her—the concept-juggling.

Words were so pointless in their situation, they needed action—determined, constructive action.

Timberlake cleared his throat. He felt a powerful curiosity to inspect and test what Bickel had built—to trace out the circuitry and try to find out why it was not upsetting gross computer function.

“If we run into the Queen of Hearts problem,” Timberlake said, “the ship stands a better chance if it’s controlled by an imaginative, conscious intelligence.”

“Our
kind of consciousness?” Flattery asked.

There’s what’s eating him,
Bickel thought.
He’s obviously the one charged with seeing we don’t loose a killer machine in the universe. Homeostasis for a race can be different from the balance needed to keep an individual alive. But we’re isolated out here
—
an entire race in a test tube.

“We’re talking about creating a machine with a specific quality,” Flattery said. “It has to operate itself from the inside, by probability. We can’t determine everything it’s going to do.” He raised a hand as Bickel started to speak.

“But we
can
determine some of its emotions. What if it actually cares about us? What if it admires and loves us?”

Bickel stared at him. That was an audacious idea—completely in keeping with Flattery’s function as chaplain, colored by his psychiatric training, and protective of the race as a whole.

“Think of consciousness as a behavior pattern,” Flattery said. “What has contributed to the development of this pattern? If we go back …”

His voice was drowned in the klaxon blare of the emergency warning.

They all felt the ship lurch and the immediate weightlessness as the caged fail-safe switch disconnected the grav system.

Bickel drifted toward the forward end of the shop, caught a stanchion, swung himself around and kicked off toward the Com-central hatch, where he dislodged his lock. He went through the hatch in the same fluid motion of opening it, hurled himself toward his couch. He locked in, swept his gaze across his repeaters. Tim and Flattery were right behind.

Prudence was making only minimal corrections on the big console, studying the drain gauges.

Bickel saw that the computer was drawing almost eighty percent of its power capacity, began checking for fire and shorts. He heard cocoon triggers snap as Flattery and Timberlake took their places.

“Computer drain,” Timberlake said.

“Radiation bleed-off in Stores Four,” Prudence said, her voice hoarse. “Steady rise in temperature back of the second hull bulkheads—no; it’s beginning to level off.”

She programmed for a hull-security check, watched the sensor telltales.

Bickel, looking over her shoulder at the big board, saw the implications of the flickering lights as soon as she did. “We’ve lost a section of outer shielding.”

“And hull,” she said.

Bickel lay back, keyed the repeater screen for monitoring the sensors, began an analysis outward into the indicated area. “You watch the board; I’ll make the check.”

Images flickered on and out in the little screen at the corner of his board as he keyed it to new sensors farther and father out. Halfway through Stores Four, he was staring into the star-sequined darkness of open space. The sensor eyes revealed foam coagulant flowing into a wide, oval hole from the hull-security automatics.

Out of the corner of his eye, Bickel saw Flattery running a micro-survey along the edge of the break in the hull. “It’s as though it were sliced off with a knife,” he said. “Smooth and even.”

“Meteorite?” Timberlake asked. He looked up from a check of the hyb tanks.

“There’s no fusing at the edge or evidence of friction heat,” Flattery said. He took his hands off his board, thinking of the island in Puget Sound—the wild destruction in the surrounding countryside.
Rogue consciousness. Has it started already?

“What could make that cut through the outer shielding and hull without heating them at least to half-sun?” Bickel asked.

No one answered.

Bickel looked at Flattery, seeing the white, drawn look of the man’s mouth, thought:
He knows!

“Raj, what could do that?”

Flattery shook his head.

Bickel took a reading on the laser-pulsed timelog off his own repeaters, extracted a position assessment, noted transmission-delay time to UMB, swung his transmitter to his side and keyed it for AAT coding.

“What’re you doing?” Flattery asked.

“This
we’d better report,” Bickel said. He began cutting the tape.

“How about some gravity?” Timberlake asked. He looked at Prudence.

“System reads functional,” she said. “I’ll try it.” She thumbed the reset.

The ship’s normal quarter gravity pulled at them.

Timberlake unlocked his cocoon; stepped out to the deck.

“Where’re you going?” Prudence asked.

“I’m going out and have a look,” Timberlake said. “Some force takes a slice off our hull without crisping the area or spreading a shatter pattern? There is no such force. This I’ve got to see.”

“Stay right where you are,” Bickel said. “There could be loose cargo out there … anything.”

Timberlake thought of lovely Maida crushed by runaway cargo. He swallowed.

“What’s to prevent it slicing us neatly right down the middle, next time?” Prudence asked.

“What’s our speed, Prue?” Timberlake asked.

“C over one five two seven and holding.”

“Did … whatever it was slow us at all?” Flattery asked.

Prudence ran the back check on the comparion log. “No.”

Timberlake took a deep, quavering breath. “A virtually zero-impact phenomenon with a force effect of … what? Infinity?” He shook his head. “There’s no kinetic equivalent.”

Bickel tripped the transmission switch, waited for the interlock, looked at Timberlake. “Did the universe begin with Gamow’s ‘big bang’ or are we in the middle of Hoyle’s continuous creation? What if they’re both …”

“That’s just a mathematical game,” Prudence said. “Oh, I know: the union of infinite mass and finite source can be accomplished by postulating zero impact—infinite force, but it’s still just a mathematical game, a cancelling-out exercise. It doesn’t
prove
anything.”

“It proves the original power of Genesis,” Flattery whispered.

“Oh, Raj, you’re at it again,” Prudence remonstrated, “trying to twist mathematics to prove the existence of God.”

“God took a swipe at us?” Timberlake asked. “Is that what you’re saying, Raj?”

“You know better than to take that attitude—under these circumstances,” Flattery retorted.
When they get that message at UMB, they’ll know we’ve achieved the stage of rogue consciousness. There’s no other answer.

“You were going to make a guess, Bick,” Timberlake said.

Bickel watched the signal timer creep around its circle. It had a long way to go yet before giving them the
blip
that would tell them the message had enough time to reach its mark.

“Maybe some kind of interface phenomenon that exists only out here in the trans-Saturnian area,” Bickel said. “A field effect, maybe, from pressure waves originating in the solar convection zone. The universe contains a hell of a lot of oscillatory motion. Maybe we’ve hit a new combination.”

“Is that what you suggested to UMB?” Flattery asked.

“Yes.”

“What if it isn’t a mathematical game?’ Timberlake asked. “Could we program for a probability curve to predict the limits of such a hypothetical phenomenon?”

Bickel lifted his hands from the AAT keyboard, considered Timberlake’s question.

Such a program could be figured in matrix functions, he felt. It was something like their hunt for the Consciousness Factor—trying to trace an exceedingly complex system on the basis of scant data. They could approach it through stacks of linear simultaneous equations, each defining parallel hyper planes in n-dimensional space.

“What about that, Prue?” he asked.

She saw where Bickel’s imagination had led them, and took a trial run in her mind, visualizing the diagonal entries when they appeared as coefficients of the simultaneous equations.

The entire process was over in seconds, but she held herself to silence, savoring the experience. It was a new one. She had set up a programming simulation in her mind, checked it out and filed the results in memory, recalling the bits precisely where she needed them. It was a feat of which she had never thought herself capable. Her own mind … a computer.

She told Bickel what had happened, replayed the results for him. Bickel found himself filling in the gaps where she skipped over the process to the answers. Somewhere—probably in the long skull sessions back at UMB—he had absorbed an enormous amount of esoteric math. Necessity and Prue’s lead had pushed him over onto a plateau where that knowledge became available.

He felt suddenly robust, inches taller. The mental effort had lifted him to a hyperawareness—relaxed, yet ready, aware of his entire vascomuscular state and emotional tone.

The sensation began to fade. Bickel sensed the ship and its pressures on him—the steady, solid motion of matter bound outward from the sun.

The entire experience had taken less than half a minute.

Bickel felt raging sadness as the sensation faded. He thought he had experienced something infinitely precious, and part of the experience remained with him in memory. It was like a thin thread linking him to the experience, holding out the hope of once more following that thread—but the pressure of the ship and those around him wouldn’t permit the indulgence.

He realized abruptly that he carried some enormous weight within him that might shatter that precious thread completely, and this sent a pang of fear through him.

“Do you think such a program’s possible?” Timberlake pressed.

“Programming it is out!” Bickel snapped. “We can’t limit the variables.” He turned back to the AAT keyboard, began punching out the message with savage motions.

Bickel thought about the alterations he had made to the computer system.
Black box
—
white box.
The ignition of this thing they were building required a black box and there was only one obvious black box to give itself over to the imprinting process on the computer’s white box: a human brain.

I
will be the pattern.

Would the computer/thing then be another Bickel?

Prudence stared up at the big console, wondering at Bickel’s sudden anger, using the focus on this as an excuse for not thinking about what had happened to the ship. But she couldn’t avoid that problem.

The damage had been caused by something outside the ship. There had been a faint lurch transmitted through the Tin Egg, but that had come afterward. The damage telltales already had been flaring out red and yellow. The lurch had been associated with power drain and a shift of switching equipment to the necessities of automatic damage control.

Zero impact
—
infinite force.

Something outside the ship had sliced through them like a razor through soft butter. No—infinitely sharper.

Something from outside.

She put a hand to her cheek. That pointed to something beyond the dangers programmed into the ship.

They’d encountered something out of the wide, blank unknown. She thought suddenly of sea monsters painted on ancient charts of the earth, of twelve-legged dragons and humanoid figures with fanged mouths in their chests.

She restored a degree of calmness by reminding herself that all these monsters had faded before humanity’s monkey-like inquisitiveness.

Still—something had struck the Tin Egg.

She ran another visual survey of her board, noting that automatic damage control had almost completely flooded out Stores Four with foam seal. Section doors were sealed off for two layers around the damage area.

Whatever had hit them, it had taken only a thin slice … this time.

Bickel raised his hand to the transmitter pulse switch, depressed it. The room around him filled with the hum of the instrument as it built up the energy to hurl its multiburst of information back across space. The “snap-click” of the transmission interlock with its dim smell of ozone came almost as an anticlimax.

“They won’t make any more of this than we do,” Timberlake said.

“UMB has some of the top men in particle physics,” Bickel said. “Maybe they can solve it.”

“A neutrino phenomenon?” Timberlake asked. “Nuts! They’ll claim we misread the evidence.”

“Time for my watch,” Flattery said. “Prue?

Flattery’s words made her aware in a sudden rush of acceptance how tired she was. Her back ached and the muscles of her forearms trembled. She could remember only once before having been this tired—after almost five hours of surgery.

In many ways, she was making too-heavy demands on her flesh—with long watches, work in the shop, and the tests using her own body as a guinea pig. But the adrenochrome-THC was proving difficult. It wouldn’t cross the blood-brain barrier into active contact with neural tissue … unless she dared use a near-fatal dosage. She hadn’t yet dared, although the prize appeared dazzling.

If she could only inhibit the lower structures of the brain and release the higher structures to full activity, she could hand Bickel the sequential steps to duplicate as electronic functions.

“Shift the board on the count,” she said.

As they shifted the big board, Flattery scanned the instruments preparing to fit himself into the
mood
of
the ship.
And the Tin Egg does have her moods.