Destination Void

  “You have an unknown that’s swallowing energy,” Prudence said, her excitement kindling. “Isn’t that our definition of—”

  “It isn’t conscious,” Bickel said. “Whatever the unknown system is, it can’t be conscious … not yet. This setup is too simple, doesn’t have enough source data …”

  “Then it’s some error in the hookup,” Prudence said.

  Bickel’s shoulders sagged. He took a deep, tired breath. “Yeah. Has to be.”

  “Where’s your record of assembly and circuit tests?” Prudence asked.

  “I isolated an auxiliary storage tank,” Bickel said. He gestured vaguely to his left. “It’s the red-flagged one. Everything’s in there … including all this.” He waved at the diagnostic panel.

  “You get something to eat and take a rest break,” she said. “I’ll start tracing circuits.”

  “We got a jam-up on the direct test,” Bickel said. “It wasn’t an open-circuit reaction. And the net-interchange test produces zero at the output without flagging the point of loss. The thing’s a goddamn sponge!”

  “It’ll be some simple error,” she said. “Wake Tim and send him in while you’re at it. He’s had more than his four hours off.”

  “I am tired,” Bickel admitted. He thought back, asking himself how long it had been since he had rested. Three full watches anyway.

  I let myself get too tired, he thought. I know better. This is exacting work. Going too long without a break is the surest way to make mistakes.

  “It’ll be some simple thing,” he said, but he knew as he said it that this was wrong. Sleep. He needed sleep.

  Bickel headed toward his quarters, pawing at the problem in his mind, rolling it over. The setup produced a contradictory reaction. Nothing simple was going to produce that complex a contradiction.

  Behind him, Prudence activated the readouts at the red flagged portion of the panel, started getting the feel of the setup. Sometimes with these computer problems, she knew, you could move intuitively into the area of difficulty, save yourself hours of hunting. Certain parts of a setup would feel wrong.

  Presently, Timberlake joined her, yawning. “Bick told me. Trouble.”

  “Odd trouble.”

  “So I gathered.” He cleared his throat. “Exactly what happened?”

  She told him about the tests, the jam-up at the fifth-layer nodes and the subsequent disagreement between input and output.

  “Zero linearity?” he asked.

  “Almost.”

  “And no heat?”

  “Nothing showed on the sensors.”

  Timberlake looked at the readout, the panel on both sides. “This is the storage tank we isolated. Have you examined the whole procedure?”

  “I was just getting acquainted with the setup when you came in.”

  “That thing should’ve worked,” Timberlake said. “It was a clean, straightforward construction all the way. I could’ve sworn it was going to give us that integrated readout, remove the nonsignificant digits, and we could just go on from …”

  He paused, then said, “Unexpected feedback would … might cause the thing to react the way it did.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “An oscillation. A flyback pulse that we didn’t take into account.”

  “That might jam up the direct test,” she said, “but it wouldn’t account for the other reaction. If you were into the computer, of course … but that’s one-way … isn’t it?”

  “Gated all the way. Our setup could receive selected data from the computer, but nothing went back in. No … I was thinking of this storage bank here.” He nodded toward the panel in front of Prudence.

  She turned toward the panel, puzzled. “But this is just a … a complicated recorder. All it does is keep track of our work, step by step. It is isolated from the rest of the computer, isn’t it?”

  “What if it isn’t isolated from the rest of the computer?” Timberlake asked.

  “But Bickel assured me …”

  “Yeah,” Timberlake said, “and he probably believed it. I checked the work, too. If the schematics are correct, it’s isolated. But what if the schematics are off?’

  “Why would they be?”

  “I don’t know, but what if they are?’

  Timberlake moved down the panel to the left, searching. He stopped at a translator output head. “Easy enough to find out. I’ll just sort to find out if any of that test setup got into the master banks.”

  “If it did get in, there’s no telling what it loused up,” she said.

  “Not necessarily,” Timberlake said. He began cutting a program tape, referring to the computer banks themselves for the necessary data. Presently, he said, “That should do it.”

  Within seconds the load-and-go signal flashed at the readout in front of Timberlake. He switched it for an online printout and began reading the automatic translation.

  “That was awfully fast,” Prudence said.

  Timberlake ignored her, scanning the tape as it chattered from the printer.

  “For Chrissakes!” he said.

  “What is it?” she asked, suppressing an irrational surge of fear.

  “Get Bickel,” Timberlake said. “This damn thing is giving us the truncated readout right here.”

  “What?”

  “The answer we expected to get back at that setup if it worked,” Timberlake said. “We’re getting it here right now!”

  “That’s impossible,” she said.

  “Sure it is,” Timberlake said. “You helped program this thing; look for yourself.”

  He whirled, brushed past her and headed for quarters.

  Prudence bent over the printout, scanned the selected bits, recognizing some of the math she had worked into the program for Bickel.

  With a breath-stopping sense of awe, she realized that the printout was devoid of insignificant digits. It had been weeded down to essentials.

  Chapter 15

  Computers are just systems with a great amount of unconsciousness: everything held in immediate memory and subject to programs which the operator initiates. The operator, therefore, is the consciousness of the computer.

  —Raja Lon Flattery, The Book of Ship

  It was at least five minutes before Timberlake returned with Bickel. While she waited, Prudence ran through the experiment a second and a third time. Both tests produced the truncated readout.

  She felt a constricting sensation in her chest. Every sound in the room pressed in on her—each tiny metallic click, the low humming of a timer, the faint breathing of a ventilator. She felt that this thing in front of her was something profoundly dangerous. It required her to act with delicate care. Something new had come awake on the Earthling.

  The hatch slammed open behind her. Bickel pushed her aside, bent over the terminal. “Let me see!” His fingers flew over the keys. He scanned the readout. “My God, it is!”

  Timberlake moved up behind him, peered over Bickel’s shoulder.

  “How?” Timberlake asked.

  “Tim,” Bickel directed, “take the panel off that storage bank. Check it with everything we have. There has to be a line from it into the main computer somehow … a line that doesn’t show on the master plan.”

  “But why would this thing start feeding us the right answer now?” Prudence demanded.

  “That?” Bickel dismissed it with a wave of the hand. “The program went in with a key showing what was expected. Every part of the program was worked out on the main computer. We never cleared our work. It’s still in there … acting as a filter. It filtered out everything except the answer that was keyed for optimum. Hell, anybody can make a computer act like that kind of filter. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Not so fast,” she said, excited by a sudden inspiration. “What do you really have over there in that test setup?” She looked at the construction which Bickel so irreverently referred to as “The Ox.” It still stood there like a surrealistic extrusion from the flat expanse of panel.


  “You call it a transducer … of sorts,” she said. “What’s that really mean? The thing you have there is composed of blocks of nerve-net simulators arranged to integrate three lines of energy. The operational term is nerve-net simulators.”

  She gets too excited and she talks too much, Bickel thought. He knew this was partly his fatigue thinking for him, but he felt keyed up, buoyed by the quick discovery of what had gone wrong. He wanted to cut the link with the computer and rerun the test.

  Timberlake was already removing the panel to get at the storage bank. The panel cover grated on the deck as he pushed it aside.

  “Yeah, nerve-net simulators,” Bickel said. He kept his attention on Timberlake, admiring the direct, purposeful way the man went at it. Timberlake was good at this work.

  Prudence misread Bickel’s answer, said: “And what’s a nerve-net but an embedding space? It catches energy … the way a spider web might catch ink you threw at it. The net makes a record in four dimensions of the energy you throw at it.”

  “Nice analogy,” Bickel said. “You finding anything, Tim?”

  “Not yet,” Timberlake said. He was on his back now, his head, arms, and shoulders into the crawl space beneath the first wiring layer of the panel-to-storage system.

  Noting where Timberlake had concentrated his attention, Bickel said: “I think you’re right, Tim. It’s most likely to be down there with the primary sheafs.”

  Prudence, concentrating on following her own train of thought, said: “So we have a multiple imbedding space, an energy catcher in four dimensions. The test program passes through this space as flux impulses in four dimensions and filters past the inhibitory roulette cycles in—”

  “How’s that again?” Bickel interrupted.

  She looked up to find him staring at her.

  “How’s what again?” she asked.

  “That about flux impulses.”

  “I said the test program passes through the imbedding space as flux impulses in four dimensions and filters past the inhibitory roulette …”

  “By God, you’re right,” Bickel said. “The roulette cycles would be a filter. I never thought of it that way. You’d get a pileup of nodal pulses at random points in the net layers. Your test program would have to find its own path through that, canceling out at some points, but passing on wherever it had a higher potential.”

  “And this filter screens the program through a system of random errors,” Prudence said. “So you have to be wrong about the way it produced your truncated answers. The program that got through to the computer couldn’t have been anything at all like what you previously punched into the banks. Yet it produced the right answers.”

  “Let’s play this over slowly,” Bickel said. “We have circuitry here—the Ox plus computer—that should connect point-events in spacetime. Right?”

  “Right. That’s your imbedding space in four dimensions.”

  “So we sent energy pulses through it. And those—”

  “Yoh!” Timberlake called, his voice echoing with a hollow resonance from the crawl space.

  Bickel looked down, saw that only Timberlake’s feet protruded into the shop now.

  “Found it,” Timberlake said. “It’s a fifty-line sheaf, single plug. Shall I pull it?”

  “Where does it lead?” Bickel asked.

  “According to the color code it leads right down into the accessory storage banks,” Timberlake said. His feet disappeared into the crawl space. “All these banks are linked that way! Why the hell doesn’t it appear on the schematics?”

  Bickel got down on his hands and knees at the mouth of the crawl hole. “Is there any kind of buffer or gating system in those lines?”

  A hand light wavered back and forth in the crawl space. “Yeah, by God!” Timberlake said. “How’d you know?’

  “Had to be,” Bickel said. “That’s a computer fail-safe system … and something else. Don’t mess with it.”

  “Why … what do you mean?” Prudence asked.

  “It’s a recording system,” Bickel said. And he had his answer to an earlier question. Would Moonbase install hidden elements in the ship-plus-computer system? Yes, and here was one of those hidden elements.

  “Recording?” Prudence was puzzled.

  “Yes!” He was angry. “Everything the computer does, everything we do—all recorded.”

  “Why?”

  “So they can recover it and analyze it even if we’re not around to help.”

  “But why wouldn’t they tell us about—”

  “They didn’t want us questioning the purpose of this … this voyage until it was too late for us to change course.”

  She was defensive. “We could still go back to—”

  “Don’t be dense, Prue. A one-way trip. They don’t want us back. We could be very dangerous. The only useful thing we have to offer is information … discovery.”

  Bickel rocked back on his heels, fighting a lost, sinking sensation.

  Those bastards! he thought. They knew we’d find this the first time we went looking into the computer’s innards. They’ve tied our hands.

  Timberlake came scooting out of the crawl space, stood up. “There’s a cover plate down there with a red-letter warning: ‘Extreme Danger! To be opened by Moonbase personnel only!’ Does that make sense to you?”

  “I wish it didn’t,” Bickel said. He peered into the hole.

  Timberlake was as puzzled as Prudence had been. “But a recorder and fail-safe system with such—”

  “That has ‘don’t touch’ written all over it,” Bickel said. “I guarantee you—mess with it and something really destructive happens. Don’t change a damn thing.” He stood up, removed the blocking plugs they had installed to isolate their test system. His movements were wooden and poorly coordinated.

  Isolate! He pushed past Prudence who still appeared puzzled. Did any of the others understand what was really happening here? The test leads clattered as he threw them onto the bench.

  All he’d done with his experiment was change the potential at one point and insure that they would not have the addresses on any of the test information they had just sent into the total computer system.

  Timberlake followed him to the bench. “But what about those results, the truncated—”

  “Use your head!” Bickel whirled on him. “This computer has a random-access system as far as we’re concerned—enormous blocks of information filed in it bit by bit in such a way that only the total computer can reproduce it for us. That’s why we have so many special-function routines and subroutines and sub-subroutines ad infinitum. The addresses of those we know.”

  “But the fail-safe, the warning …”

  “That’s a special kind of message to us,” Bickel said.

  Prudence knew she had to head him away from this conjecture. She spoke quickly:

  “The Organic Cores must’ve known where their information was.”

  “And they’re dead,” Bickel said. “Get the message?’

  “Wait a minute!” Timberlake said. “Are you trying to tell us …”

  “The computer is what keeps us alive,” Bickel said. “That’s all that keeps us alive. We win or lose with that computer.”

  Timberlake turned to stare at the open access panel. “But we …” He broke off.

  Prudence, seeing what Timberlake had just realized, felt her mouth go dry. Some of the information in this monster would be filed many times, depending on the power with which it had been inserted. Some information was filed just once and could be lost through the kick of a proton. And that total system controlled their destiny.

  “This computer’s storage banks amount to one enormous internally balanced system,” Bickel said.

  Prudence nodded. It was like a superb human memory in some respects—even worked something like a human memory—but it was a fine instrument with all the delicate weaknesses implied by that term.

  “Jeeeeesus,” Timberlake whispered. “And we shot an unknown p
rogram through it.”

  “Worse than that,” Bickel said. “Because of that unrecorded tie-in to the computer …” He swallowed, wondering if they already appreciated the extent of this disaster. Turning, he indicated the piled cubes and rectangles, the sheafs of quasibiological nerve fiber that constituted his “Ox.”

  The others turned in the direction he pointed.

  “That setup is, in effect, an extension of the computer,’’ Bickel said.

  “The error factor!” Prudence said. She put a hand to her mouth.

  “We’ve introduced an error factor into the computer,” Bickel said. “And that means, first, that we’ve introduced the probability—no, the certainty, of an unknown number of subspaces within the computer’s space time. The program we’ve just thrown into the computer … to land, we know not where, will produce unknown topological linkages, new networks all through the system.”

  “In the memory storage banks, primarily,” Timberlake said.

  “And in the transducer nets,” Bickel said.

  “But this storage unit here produced the circuit-analysis information when I asked for it,” Prudence said.

  “Certainly,” Bickel said. “But your demand amounted to a program for a subroutine. Where the information came from God alone knows. Just in the first stage, there are fifty lines leading out of this unit. And those lines filter through a buffer system, remember. The bits go out of here, charge through that buffer system, and are split up fifty ways, according to their differences in potential. That’s just the first stage. At the next stage, your division is fifty times fifty. And then fifty times fifty times fifty. And so on.”

  It was like trying to work with a memory whose only certain property was that everything stored in it was stored according to a scatter pattern and could only be recovered if you knew the pattern.

  Guaranteed selective amnesia. But that … was kind of human.

  “This bank here was just like a knitting machine,” Prudence said. “It took the threads of the record from this test setup and knitted them out through the storage banks of the entire system … smearing that record across an unknown number of retainer cells.”

  “An unknown number of times,” Bickel said. “Remember that. And we only have one address for the entire record of that test, the address of a subroutine program. If that’s lost, the whole record’s lost … unless we manage to match enough pieces of it in another program to pull it out of the system again.”