Destination: Void: Prequel to the Pandora Sequence (4 page)

Chapter 5

The thing about computers—it’s like training a dog. You have to be smarter than the dog. If you make a computer smarter than you are, that has to be accident, synergy, or divine intervention.

—Interview with John Bickel (original) at La Paz

Bickel watched Flattery’s hands fight the gravity system back into balance. It had taken several bruising minutes, but the tugging and jerking had begun to ease. The system centered slowly. Flattery waited it out. Presently, he made a fine adjustment in the controls.

“Where were we?” Timberlake asked.

“We were raking through our data, seeking anything useful,” Bickel said. “It’s a clumsy way to operate, but necessary.”

“Guilt-sharing,” Flattery said.

“What?” Bickel was outraged.

“Never mind,” Flattery said. “Back to square one: You will recall that OMC/Myrtle said: ‘I have no incarnation.’ That may have been the only accurate thing in her jabbering. After all, except for gray matter, she had no flesh. But then, remember, after a long silence she said: ‘I’m counting my fingers.’ She had no fingers, no conscious memory of fingers. And that final question: ‘Why are you all so dead?’ The best guess is that any meaning in these statements and questions was purely accidental.”

“I think she was referring to us, to the crew,” Bickel said. “It’s nuts, yes, but it was a direct question over the vocoders and we were the only possible audience.”

“Unless she was referring to the colonists in the hyb tanks,” Flattery said. “They might appear dead under some—”

“Myrtle had direct contact with the hyb-tank sensors,” Timberlake pointed out. “She’d have known if they were alive.”

Bickel nodded. “What do you make of Little Joe roaring out over every vocoder in the ship. I’m awake! God help me, I’m awake!’”

“A cry for help, perhaps,” Flattery said. “Most insane raving is a cry for help in one form or another.”

“That leaves Harvey,” Bickel said. “Harvey screamed: ‘You’re forcing me to be unhealthy.’ And when we—”

“What could we do?” Timberlake asked, and Bickel heard the note of hysteria in his voice. “There was nothing wrong with any of their life systems. I know there wasn’t!”

“Easy does it, Tim,” Flattery said. “That was just another nonsense statement.”

“We all knew what it meant, though,” Bickel said. “I did not see anybody showing surprise when Harvey said: ‘I’ve lost it!’ and signed off … permanently. And there we were with three dead
brains
and no spares.”

The callous way Bickel put it sent a shudder through Timberlake, and he could not explain it. He had never been deeply attached to the OMCs. There had always been something faintly accusing about the “ship creatures.” Raja Lon Flattery had assured him this was strictly subjective, something from his own attitudes. Raj had always been so positive that the OMC-ship-computer entities were perfectly reconciled to their way of life, happy with their own compensations.

What compensations?
Timberlake wondered.
Expec-tancy of long life? But what is three or four thousand years of living if each year is hell?

Timberlake realized then that none of the pat answers from his training classes really touched the basic issue of OMC happiness.

What if it really is a hellish way to live?
he wondered.
It must be. They are harnessed like engines to all this metal and glass and plastic and time stretches out ahead of them
…
forever. Maybe death was preferable.

Chapter 6

Every symbol has hidden premises behind it. Every word carries unspoken assumptions buried in the his-tory of the language and the conditioning experiences of the speakers. If you snatch those buried meanings out of your words, you spill a whole stream of new under-standing into your awareness.

—Raja Lon Flattery,
The Book of Ship

Almost half of Prudence Weygand’s recuperation time had passed and it had been marked by recurrent uncom-fortable silences in Com-central.

Flattery did not like those silences. He felt that every one of them carried his companions farther away—perhaps beyond control. And he had to maintain that delicate contact, that means of control.

One of those silences gripped them now. It seemed to reach into them from the space beyond the ship’s hull. Flatery knew he had to say something but he felt oppressed by the silence. He cleared his throat before speaking.

“I wish to say something about anger. I’ve seen several shows of anger since our emergency—my own anger included.”

The formal tone, the set of his face—all signaled that Flattery was speaking officially as their chaplain. “Anger could destroy us,” he said. “The Proverbs warn us: ‘He that is soon angry dealeth foolishly: and a man of wicked devices is hated. He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding: but he that is hasty of spirit exalteth folly.’ Let us practice the soft answer and not stir up wrath.”

Bickel took a deep breath. Flattery was right, he knew, but Bickel resented the way the man retreated into religion to make his point. How much simpler just to say they were clouding their reason with excess emotion. That was the thing he resented about religion, Bickel thought—the way it appealed to emotion rather than intelligence.

“We’ve been floundering around, trying to do too much,” Bickel said. “That master board is a jury-rigged monstrosity. We need a consistent, organized plan to meet our problems. When Moonbase answers, I want to be able to say we have—”

Sharp, heavy X3 force pressed him against the side of his couch cocoon. It struck without klaxon warning or alarm light. Cocoon safety locks sealed home. Now, red alarm lights flashed with the yellow in long webs across the master board.

Flattery slammed the gravity disconnect with the heel of his left hand. G force ebbed. Yellow alarm lights winked off as their pressure switches released. A line of red alarm lights remained.

“Damage to hull three, section six/fourteen,” Flattery said. He began activating remote sensors to inspect the area.

Without conscious thought or discussion, Bickel took over ship command: “Tim, take the G repeaters. Leave gravity disconnected while you trace the relays and get the system back in balance.”

Timberlake pulled his board close to obey.

Bickel swung the AAT board to his side, keyed for ship systems/computer control, began feeding coded demands into the core recorders. What had the ship encountered that might explain that brutal deflection? What had the auto-matic sensors recorded?

The responders began kicking out tape almost immediately—much too fast.

“Data error,” Flattery said, reading the output over Bickel’s shoulder.

In abrupt fury, Bickel pulled the master override stop from his core switch, jammed a set of jumper jacks across the AAT controls, opened the core system for standard reference comparison.

“You are into the core!” Flattery said, his voice sharp with fear. “You have no guide fuse or master reference. You could louse up the command routines.”

“Unhook that!” Timberlake shouted, lifting his head from the cocoon clamps to glare across at Bickel.

“Shut up, both of you. Sure, the core is delicate, but something in there is already loused up—bad enough to kill us.”

“You think you have time to check some eight hundred thousand routines?” Timberlake demanded. “Don’t talk nuts!”

“There are specific injunctions against what you are doing,” Flattery said, fighting to keep his voice reasonable. “And you know why.”

“Don’t try to tell me my job,” Bickel said.

While he spoke, Bickel rolled over core memory responders, direct contact, doing it gently to avoid current backlash.

“You make one mistake,” Timberlake said, “and it would take six or seven thousand technicians with a second master system and several thousand imprint relays to repair the damage. Are you ready to—”

“Stop distracting me!”

“What are you looking for?” Flattery asked, interested in spite of his fear. He had realized that Bickel, conditioned to deep inhibitions against turning back, was incapable of doing anything to deprive them of one of their basic tools.

“I’m checking availability of peripherals from the core memory,” Bickel said. “There’s got to be a bypass or pileup somewhere. It’ll show in the acquisition and phase-control loops of the input.” He nodded toward a diagnostic meter on his board. “And here we are!” The meter’s needle slammed against its pin, fell back to zero, stayed there.

Slowly, Bickel ordered a master diagnostic routine into direct contact, put the core standard back on fused auxiliary, began rolling the troublesome core-memory section. Wor-king with only occasional references to the core standard, he forced the routine through the data-reference channels as modified by new sensor input.

Error branchings began clicking from his responders. Bickel translated aloud as the code figures appeared on the screen above his board.

“Core memory/prediction region rendered inactive. Pro-ton mass and scatter relative to ship course/mass/speed did not agree with prediction.”

Aside, Bickel said, “We’re hitting something other than hydrogen and hitting it in unexpected concentrations—partly because of our speed/mass figure.”

“Solar winds,” Timberlake whispered. “They said we—”

“Solar winds, hell!” Bickel said. “Look at that.” He nodded at a code grouping as it worked its way across the screen.

“Twenty-six protons in the mass,” Timberlake said.

“Iron,” Bickel said. “Free atoms of iron out here. We’re getting a plain old-fashioned magnetic deflection of the grav field.”

“We’ll have to slow the ship,” Timberlake said.

“Nuts!” Bickel was emphatic. “We’ll put a fused overload breaker in the G system. I don’t see why the devil the designers didn’t do that in the first place.”

“Perhaps they couldn’t conceive of any force large enough to deflect the system,” Flattery said.

“No doubt,” Bickel’s voice was heavy with disgust. “But when I think a simple cage switch with a weight in it could have prevented Maida’s death …”

“They depended on the OMCs’ reflexes, too,” Flattery said. “You know that.”

“What I know is they thought in straight lines when they should’ve been thinking in the round,” Bickel said.

He unlocked his safety cocoon, shifted his suit to por-table, launched himself diagonally across Com-central to the Tool & Repair hatch. The weightless drifting reminded him they had a time limit on returning to gravity conditions. Too long without gravity and the crew would suffer permanent physical damage.

Chapter 7

I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror … A being whom I myself had formed, and imbued with life, had met me at midnight among the precipices of an inaccessible mountain.

—Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein

Bickel grabbed a hatch handle to steady himself and swung out the repair traveler. He opened a panel to get at the gravity system, identified the cables, and bent to his work. He went about it silently, angrily, with swift, decisive movements, and all the time he thought about their dilemma.

Iron. Free ions of iron out here?

Possible, but was there a simpler answer to the anomaly, something that would produce an illusory report on their instruments?

Was it possible that some part of the ship’s computer/ reporting system had been concealed from them, shielded away from their prying? He knew it not only was possible but probable. Why would Moonbase do that?

The complete answer escaped him, but he knew he would have to continue probing for it.

Presently, he had an improvised cage switch clamped into the main power cable into the gravity generator. He made the connections to the breaker, tested the circuits with a false load, replaced the cover plate.

“It’ll have to be reset manually each time,” he said. He put a foot against the bulkhead, propelled himself back to his couch, locked in, glanced at Timberlake. “System balanced?”

“Near as you can tell from here,” Timberlake said. “Give it a try, Raj.”

Flattery checked to see that both Timberlake and Bickel were sealed in their cocoons, closed the gravity switch. The sound of the generators building up grew to a faint hiss that subsided as the system stabilized. Flattery felt the pressure against his shoulder blades, reached up to the board, slowly refined Timberlake’s settings.

“Tim,” Bickel said, “I want the schematics for the OMC chamber—every sensor tie coded for function—and laid out in layers from gross to fine. I’ll need the same thing for servo control, a complete—”

“Why?” Timberlake asked.

“Are you thinking of tying in a colonist’s brain?” Flattery demanded, trying to hide his feelings of outrage at the idea.

“A mature human brain probably wouldn’t survive such a transfer,” Timberlake said. And he felt shame at how much the thought had appealed to him. Every inhibition of his training cried out against such a move. But if the OMC system were restored, none of them here ever again would have to undergo the nerve-crushing responsibility of that Com-central master board. He looked up at the live green arrow denoting that Flattery had the controls, felt himself go clammy with fear at the thought of that arrow swinging back to his position.

“What the hell!” Bickel snapped. “Where’d you two get that idea? Not from anything I said.” He lifted his head from the cocoon clamps, looked from Timberlake to Flattery. “We don’t know what happened to our three
perfect brains
. Why the devil’d I want to tie in an untested one?” He sank back. “It’s impossible anyway. A man should have some say in what’s done to him. How could we poll everyone in the hyb tanks? We can’t wake them all.”

“You thinking of dismantling the OMC controls and converting us to a closed ecological system?” Flattery asked. “If you are, you should—”

He broke off as the high-pitched hummm-buzzz-hummmm of the AAT receiver filled the room, alerting them that a message was being processed.

Bickel followed the play of lights across his board as the message was gulped by the receivers, fed through the comparison blocks, refined to a single playback (with probable accuracy quotient logged beside each character), and finally was slowed to make it intelligible for human ears.

Sure as hell took ’em long enough,
Bickel thought. He read the time log, subtracted the distance lag.
Almost seven hours.
He thought then of the first ships using single channel radio, punching their messages across the solar system with only a few watts—but the error-uncertainty factor built up with distance and cumulative adverse interference. The Tin Egg’s system had been engineered for computer-monitored automatic reports over stellar distances to tell watchers as yet unborn back on Earth how things fared with their star probe.

The message-ready chime sounded. Bickel keyed the vocoder. The voice of Morgan Hempstead, United Moon base director, rolled out of the speakers, recognizable and still with its iced iron overtones preserved by the AAT’s comparators.

“To UMB ship
Earthling
from Project Control. This is Morgan Hempstead. We hope you understand our distress and concern. Every decision from this point must have a prime motive of preserving the lives of yourselves and the colonists.”

So much for the record,
Flattery thought.
There are seven nations and four races represented in the hyb
tanks
—
but all just as expendable as the ones who went before us.

“We have several prime questions,” Hempstead said.

I’ve a few questions of my own,
Bickel thought.

“Why was Project Control not alerted when the first Organic Mental Core failed?” Hempstead asked.

Bickel mentally logged the question. He knew the answer, but it was nothing he would ever transmit. Hempstead knew it as well as he did. The Tin Egg had momentum as an idea that had survived six failures. Nothing short of another ultimate failure would stop it. Nothing short of desperate emergency could make them risk aborting the mission by calling for help.

“Doppler reference indicates you’ll be out of the solar system in approximately three hundred and sixteen days at present stabilized speed,” Hempstead said. “Time to Tau Ceti: four hundred-plus years.”

As he listened, Bickel pictured the man behind the voice: flintlike face with gray hair and gray-blue eyes—that aura of momentous decision even in his smallest gesture. The psych boys had called him “Big Daddy” behind his back, but they had jumped when he commanded. Now, Bickel focused on the fact that they never again expected to see Hempstead, yet the man still could reach into their midst with his decisions.

“First analysis indicates these possibilities,” Hempstead went on. “You could turn back to orbit around UMB until the problem is solved and new Organic Mental Cores installed. That would return us to the old problem of sterile control under less than ideal conditions. It also would remove the ship from the situation of probable cause in the OMC breakdowns, perhaps making solution impossible.”

“He always was a long-winded bore,” Timberlake said.

“Second possibility,” Hempstead said, “would be for you to convert to a closed ecology and continue at present speed, enlisting replacements from your hybernation tanks or breeding and raising your own crew complement. You would, of course, face high probability of genetic damage through the necessity of staying outside your core-shield areas long enough to build quarters for prolonged occupation. However, food would be your major problem unless you adopted a more closely integrated recycling system.”

“Closely integrated recycling,” Flattery said. “He means cannibalism. It was discussed.”

Bickel turned to stare at Flattery. The idea of cannibalism was repellent, but that was not what had caught Bickel’s attention. “
It
was discussed
.” That simple statement contained volumes of unanswered questions and hidden implications.

“Third possibility,” Hempstead was saying, “would be to build the necessary consciousness into your robo-pilot, using the ship computer as a basis. Our computations indicate you have sufficient materials, including neuron packages intended for colony robots in your stores. This is theoretically feasible.”

“Theoretically feasible!” Timberlake sneered. “Does he think we’ve never heard about all the failures in—”

“Shhhh,” Flattery hissed.

“Project Council suggests you continue present course and speed,” Hempstead said, “as long as you are within the solar system. If a solution has not been reached by then, present opinion is that you will be ordered to turn back.” There followed a long silence, then … “unless you have alternative suggestions.”

“
You will be ordered to turn back”
Flattery thought. He turned to see how those key words sat with Bickel. They were aimed at Bickel, contrived for him, fitted specially to trigger his deepest motives.

Bickel lay in thoughtful silence staring up at the speech microscope display above the vocoder, checking the accuracy of message reception.

“At this time,” Hempstead said, “Project Control requires a detailed report on the condition of all ship systems with special reference to hybernating colonists. It is recognized that prolonging the voyage increases probability of hybernation failure. We recognize that you must replace crew losses from the tanks. Suggestions on replacements will be made upon request. We share your grief at the unfortunate accidents among you, but the Project must continue.”

“Detailed report on all ship systems,” Timberlake said. “He’s out of his mind.”

How cold was Hempstead’s commiseration,
Flattery thought. The phrasing betrayed the care with which it had been composed.
Just enough grief; not too much.

The vocoder emitted a filter-dulled crackling, then: “This is Morgan Hempstead closing transmission. Acknowledge and answer our questions immediately. UMB out.”

“They left too much unsaid,” Bickel said. He sensed the “deletions for reasons of policy” all through the message. The thin political line they walked had been betrayed most in what was not said.

“Build consciousness into our computer,” Timberlake growled. “How stupid can they get?” He glanced at Bickel. “You were on one of the original attempts at UMB, John. You get the honor of telling ‘Big Daddy’ where he can shove that idea.”

“That attempt flopped and badly,” Bickel agreed. “But it’s still the only real course open to us.”

Timberlake raged on as though he hadn’t heard: “There were people on the UMB fiasco who make us look like a pack of amateurs.”

Flattery had heart, though, and he hid a knowing smile by turning away and speaking mildly: “We all read the report, Tim.”

“The only part worth reading was their summation.” Timberlake pitched his voice in a sneering falsetto:
“‘Impossible of achievement at present level of technology.’”

“That was an excuse, not a summation,” Bickel said. And he thought back to UMB’s fruitless search for the Artificial Consciousness Factor. There had always been that sterile wall between his part of the group and the station personnel, but the triple-glass walls had never hidden the smell of failure. It had been all around the project from the beginning. They had been lost in tangles of pseudoneuron fiber, in winking lights and the snap of relays, the hiss of tape reels and the bitter ozone smell of burnt insulation from overloaded circuits. They had looked for a mechanical way to do what the least among them could do within his own flesh—be conscious. And they had failed.

Over them all had hung the unspoken fear, the knowledge of what had happened to the one project that reportedly had achieved success—and its own doom—back on the surface of Earth.

Timberlake cleared his throat, lifted a hand out of his couch cocoon, studied his fingernails. “Well, how’re we going to answer their damn questions? They must be living in a dream world back there, expecting us to produce a detailed report on ship systems without the help of an OMC.”

“But they had to ask for it,” Bickel said. “And we’ll have to doctor up some kind of report.”

Bickel looked at Flattery. “You can cook up a report for Hempstead, Raj. Psychiatrists are experts at deception.”

At times, this Bickel is uncommonly aware of subtleties,
Flattery thought.
I must warn Prudence.
“All of us renounced deception, John.”

“Just like we renounced birth and parents,” Bickel said. “It was easy. Somebody did it for us.”

Flattery knew he had to speak quickly, before this conversation devolved into self-pity. He kept his attention on a tiny paint flaw in the hard-baked surface of the master board, chose his words carefully: “The ship has to have conscious direction for the long haul, John. It has to. The trip involves too many unknowns that have to be dealt with on conditions of immediacy. So what do we do?”

“You’re asking me?” Bickel asked. “You’re the psychiatrist.”

But I’m not the motivator here,
Flattery thought.
I’m not the one who can inject purpose into our efforts.

“This is going to require more direct methods,” he said.

Bickel stared at him.

“Well, what’re you going to tell them?” Timberlake asked. “They want to know why we didn’t alert them when the first
brain
conked out. Of all the—”

“There’s another thing,” Bickel said, shifting his attention to Timberlake. “They gave us no code for that particular emergency. Are we to assume they thought it impossible for the OMCs to fail? We are not! We have to assume they had some other motive. They put the threshold high on that one for a specific purpose.”

“Ah, for hell sakes,” Timberlake protested, “you’re finding bogeymen where they don’t exist, Bick.”

Bickel shook his head from side to side. “No … they were telling us in no uncertain terms that once we blew the whistle we were on our own. We have to find our own long-haul driver for the Tin Egg.”

He’s circling all around it,
Flattery thought.
When will he zero in?

Bickel wet his lips with his tongue. This borderline conversation, skirting the need for a consciousness to command the ship, disturbed him deeply. He was too honest with himself to ignore this fact.

Timberlake, picking up the threads of a previous conversation, said: “There was no physical reason for those
brains
to fail. The life systems were perfect. It’s as though they committed suicide … under some unknown stress.”

With an abrupt gesture, Bickel shifted his AAT board into transmit phase: “Okay, we’ll stall ’em on their detailed report. They know it’ll take time, anyway. As to why we didn’t alert them earlier, I’ve decided to tell ’em flatly it was because they goofed and didn’t give us a code for this particular emergency. If they—”