Destination Void

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Bickel demanded. “I’m getting nerve-net response! This thing’ll behave like a human nervous system!”

  “Raj, he is!”

  It was Prudence. Flattery dropped his gaze to where she was pointing. She had shifted a small corner of her own auxiliary board into a repeater system tied to Bickel’s diagnostic circuits.

  “Beta rhythm,” she said, pointing to the scope in the center of the board.

  Flattery watched the sine play of the green line on the scope, digesting what Bickel had said, what that scope implied.

  Black box—white box.

  Perhaps it was possible, theoretically, to use the entire computer as a white box to take the transfer pattern called consciousness. But there remained many unanswered questions—and one was more vital than all the others.

  “What do you intend using as a black box?” Flattery asked. “Where’ll you get your original pattern?”

  “From a conscious human brain. I’m going to take one of our spare hyb tanks and adapt the electroencephalographic feedback system as a man-amplifier.”

  He’s utterly mad, Flattery thought. The shot-effect shock would kill the human subject.

  Bickel looked out of the screen, stared at Flattery—realizing that the psychiatrist-chaplain had seen the possible deadliness of this proposal.

  Who will bell the cat? Bickel thought. He swallowed. Well, if necessary, I will.

  “How would you protect the subject from the shot-effect bursts?” Prudence asked. “Curare?”

  Even as she asked, she wondered how she was protecting herself from her own experiments. The answer was daunting: No better than Bickel would! What had made this crew so prone to all-or-nothing efforts?

  “I believe the subject will have to be fully conscious,” Bickel said. “Without any medication … or narcoinhibitions.”

  He waited for the explosion from Timberlake. This idea was sure to outrage the conditioning of the life-systems engineer. Where was Timberlake?

  “Absolutely not!” Flattery exploded. “It’d be murder!”

  “Or maybe … suicide,” Bickel said.

  Prudence looked away from the console, met Bickel’s eyes. “Be reasonable, John,” she pleaded. “You’re already endangering the computer with that …”

  “The ship’s still functioning, isn’t it?” Bickel countered.

  “But if you throw a shot-effect burst through that—” she nodded toward the stacked blocks and interwoven leads of the Ox beside Bickel “—how’ll you avoid damage to the computer’s core memory?”

  “Core memory’s a fixed system and buffered. I’ll keep the Ox potential below the buffer threshold. Besides …” he shrugged, “we’ve already put shot-effect bursts through the computer without—”

  “And scattered information from hell to breakfast!” she snapped.

  “We can still find that information if we use the Ox to sort the addresses for us,” Bickel said.

  Flattery glanced at the sensors in front of Prudence. What was wrong with Timberlake? Was he injured? Unconscious? But the sensors revealed a narrow path of movement from the life-systems engineer … all of it within the hyb tank complex.

  “If I understand you correctly,” Prudence said, “you’ll have to add nerve-net simulation channels to the Ox until it and the computer are as complex as a human nervous system. As you build it and test it, we become more and more dependent on that jury-rigged Ox monstrosity for our very lives.”

  “It has to have a full range of sensory apparatus,” Bickel said. “There’s no other way.”

  “There must be!” she said. “Where’d you get such a mad idea?”

  “From you.”

  Shock momentarily stilled her tongue. “That’s impossible!”

  “You’re a female,” Bickel pointed out, “capable of biological reproduction of conscious life. In that method, you have a substrate of molecules that are capable of assuming a large number of forms … different forms. Those molecules assume a particular form in the presence of a molecule that already has that form.” He shrugged. “Black box—white box.”

  “I thought you meant from me personally,” she said, looking up at the telltale sensors and seeing the apparently irrational movements of Timberlake.

  “Look,” Bickel said, unaware of their preoccupation, “the basic behavior of the computer will remain intact. We won’t interfere with supervisory programs or command constants. We want to set up a system dealing with probabilities, with mobility constant for the—”

  “Games theory!” Flattery sneered. “You can’t predict all the behavior of your machine.” He looked back at the telltales.

  What was Tim doing?

  “That’s just it!” Bickel said. “If the machine’s going to be conscious, we can’t predict all of its behavior … by the very nature of consciousness, by definition. Consciousness is a game where the permissible moves aren’t arbitrarily established in advance. The sole object’s to win.”

  Anything goes? Flattery wondered. He focused suddenly on Bickel, recognizing the essentially blasphemous nature of such a concept. There had to be rules!

  “The machine gets part of its personality from its creator, part from its opponents,” Bickel said.

  Something from God, something from the Devil, Flattery thought. There had to be essential error in this path … somewhere. Bickel was behaving far outside the predictions. Their “organ of analysis” was acting magically. He was not making the best possible move each time.

  “You’ll introduce error factors and loss increment into the entire computer,” Prudence cautioned. “That’s not only illogical, it’s—” She broke off, studied her board, made a pressure-balance correction in the atmospheric recirculation system, and waited to see if the automatics could hold the new setting.

  “You have to make the best possible move at all times,” Flattery said. “Your suggestion does not appear to—”

  “There you’ve hit it,” Bickel agreed. “Best possible move. Sometimes your best possible move is to make a dangerously poor move that changes the entire theoretical structure of the game. You change the game.”

  “What about all those lives down in the hyb tanks?” Prudence asked. “Do they have any choice in this … game?”

  “They already made their choice.”

  “And while they’re helpless, you change the rules,” Flattery said.

  “That was one of the chances they accepted when they accepted hybernation,” Bickel said. “That was their choice.”

  Flattery abandoned the argument, pushed himself off his action couch.

  “What’re you going to to do?” Prudence asked.

  “Check on Tim.”

  “Where is Tim?” Bickel asked.

  “Down in the hyb tanks,” Flattery said, knowing Bickel could get the answer himself—once he consulted the shop’s repeaters.

  “Deep in the hyb tanks?” Bickel asked.

  “Of course!”

  “Prue!” Bickel snapped. “Try to raise him on the command circuit.”

  She heard the urgency in Bickel’s voice, whirled to obey.

  There was no response from Timberlake.

  “You fools!” Bickel said.

  Flattery stopped at the tube hatch, glared up at the screen.

  “Who let him go down into the deep tanks?” Bickel demanded. “You blind idiots! Don’t you know what he’s likely to find down there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This whole damn ship’s nothing but a simulation device,” Bickel said. “There’ll be nothing down there except a few crew replacements. Those tanks have to be empty!”

  He’s wrong! Flattery thought. Or is he?

  The thought staggered Flattery. He saw immediately how that might pull the props out from under Timberlake—a man tuned as fine as the rest of them for a specific function.

  “He’d still have the crew systems,” Prudence said. She stared across the room at Flattery, feeling the lon
eliness. The Tin Egg with its programmed peril might contain only a few isolated humans launched into nowhere.

  They wouldn’t, Flattery thought. But if they’d prepare me to cheat the rest of the crew … His feet felt rooted to the deck. He swallowed in a dry throat. But it’s impossible! They promised me when I discovered the actual Tau Ceti records—if we succeeded we could just send back the message capsule and continue as …

  “Raj, are you sick?” Prudence asked. She studied him, seeing the lost, sunken look in his eyes.

  “The Tau Ceti planets are uninhabitable, yes,” Hempstead had admitted when confronted with the evidence. “No Eden, But the universe is known to contain billions of inhabitable planets. You realize you can’t come back here, of course. The danger to your hosts.”

  “The biopsy donors were all criminals,” Flattery had said, springing his other suspicion.

  “Brilliant people, but misdirected,” Hempstead had protested. “That is one of the reasons you can’t come back, but nothing’s to stop you from going on to explore and find your own Eden.”

  Remembering the words, Flattery felt how hollow they sounded.

  Sham and trickery all the way, he thought. But why?

  Chapter 20

  In a right-handed person, the so-called rational function operates mainly from the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex. The ‘intuitive’ operation, however, lives mainly in the right hemisphere. There is strong evidence for positive feedback between the two hemispheres operating along the corpus callosum. The substance of this interchange remains largely a mystery, but there can be no doubt that it serves an important function in consciousness.

  —Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase

  Timberlake had launched himself down the communications tube with desperate haste, knowing he had to move swiftly or become stalled in terror.

  At the tube-distribution lock, he sealed the hatch behind him, snatched a robox-monkey from its rack, tuned the sensors to the track imprinted in the tube wall, slammed its wheels onto the guide marks, and grabbed the handhold controls. Again he encountered that terrifying reluctance to move, and stared up the tube, studying the long, infinity curve of it visible through the transparent safety locks.

  I can’t go back, he thought.

  With a sudden wrench, he twisted the little robox tow unit’s drive to full on, let it jerk him ahead along that curving track.

  The wind of his passage was a dim hiss. He was like a loose piston driving down that tube. Locks opened automatically to the robox signal, closed behind him. He slowed for the protective jog through the shielding layer, twisted around through the branching outside the hyb tanks, dove back down along the flat angle that returned through the watershield, and stopped in the lock chamber to the tanks.

  He racked the robox, stared at the hatch. It was a big yellow oval, its seal warning in heavy blue letters: “This Hatch Must Be Closed And Dogged Before Inner Hatch Will Open!”

  Now that he was faced with it, Timberlake felt a calm submission to fate. He gripped the hatch dogs, broke the seal; seeing the line of frost inside as the hatch swung open. His suit generators hummed upscale, compensating for the drop in temperature as chill air spilled out of the lock.

  Timberlake slipped into the lock, closed and sealed the outer hatch, turned around. A rack of heavy-duty generators hung over the inner hatch with a big warning sign above them: “Extreme Danger! Deep Space Or L-T Suit Required Before Entering The Next Lock. Be Sure You Have Spare Generator In Working Condition Before Opening This Hatch.”

  Timberlake looped the straps of a spare generator over his shoulder, gave the thing’s turbine drive a short burst to check it. The generator hummed briefly. He swung the rack of them aside, broke open the next hatch, slipped through and dogged it behind him.

  Now, a smaller hatch greeted him, and lettered on its face: “Admission Only To Life-Systems Engineers Or Medical Personnel. Suit Security Must Be Maintained At All Times Beyond This Point. Do Not Open This Hatch Until You Have Adjusted Your Suit For The Extreme Low Of Hybernation Temperatures.”

  Timberlake coupled the auxiliary generator to his suit, checked both generators, adjusted them for temperature-security override. The remembered routine occupied his awareness, keeping his mind off the space beyond that hatch. Suit seals slithered under his gloved fingers as he secured them. He dropped the anti-fog viewplate over his faceplate, ran a check tape along the seals.

  The moment of final decision had come.

  Timberlake forced himself to act slowly and calmly. More than his own life depended on what he did now, he told himself. Stray heat inside there could play havoc with helpless lives. He passed his suit’s baffles in front of a heat sensor, studied the gauge.

  Zero.

  His gloved hands went to the dogs of the inner hatch, broke the seal. The hatch popped slightly, indicating a small difference in pressure—nothing abnormal. He stepped through into the glittering dry chill of the first bank of hyb tanks. This was where Prudence had been. He saw her empty tank on his left, its leads dangling, the cushioned carrier still open inside.

  Everything around him was revealed in harsh blue light. He studied the chamber.

  It was like a giant barrel—an open space in the center surrounded by the smaller barrels that were the individual hybernation tanks. A grid-floored catwalk led down the open center, with short ladders and handholds branching up to the separate tanks.

  Timberlake kicked off down the length of the tank in three low-grav jumps, caught a handhold beside the breaker lock that separated this section from the next one.

  He looked back. No … they weren’t little barrels, he thought. The individual tanks stretched away from him—all around—like so many sections of gray culvert pipe waiting to be assembled into something useful … like a drain.

  There was no point examining the tanks in here, he knew. This was the No. 1 section: high-priority crew replacements. If there was deception, it’d be farther along the line—in one of the deeper sections.

  Timberlake opened the safety valve at the breaker lock, swung open the hatch, let himself through, reset the mechanism to isolate the section in the event of partial damage.

  He looked around the new section, it was the twin of the other except for the absence of a raided tank.

  Timberlake swallowed. His cheeks felt damp and cold. A place between his shoulder blades itched.

  Quite abruptly, he found himself remembering Professor Aldiss Warren, the lecturer in biophysics back at UMB. He was a goat-bearded old man with a senile-sounding voice and a mind like a scimitar.

  Why do I think of old Warren—now? Timberlake wondered.

  As though the question released a hidden awareness, he recalled the old man diverging from a seminar discussion to talk about moral strength.

  “You wish to test moral strength?” he’d asked. “Simple. Construct a med-computer with a public callbox attachment. Set it so that anyone submitting to the computer’s probes can find out to within a day or so when he’ll die … of natural causes, of course. If you wish to call old age natural. Then you step back and see who uses the thing.”

  Someone—a female student, had asked, “Wouldn’t it take a kind of courage not to use this computer?”

  “Pah!” old Warren had exploded.

  Another student had said, “Hypothetical questions like this always bore the hell out of me.”

  “Sure,” old Warren had answered. “You young toughs haven’t faced the fact we could build such a med-computer—right now, today. We’ve had the ability to build it for more than thirty years. It wouldn’t even be very costly—as such things go. But we don’t build it. Because very few people—even among those who could build it—have the moral strength to use it.”

  Timberlake held himself still and silent in the hyb tank, realizing why he had remembered that incident. Coming into this cold-lighted tank was like using old Warren’s hypothetical death predictor.

  Bickel infected me with the ce
rtainty that this ship is not what it seems to be, Timberlake thought. He took over command, pushed me aside. The only reason for being that was left me—He looked up and around the tank—was in here. If this is taken from me, then I’m truly useless … except as a kind of computer-shop flunky for Bickel.

  Yes, Bickel. Right away, Bickel. Is there anything else, Bickel?

  With a sense of astonishment at how he had unconsciously dramatized the change of relationships within the crew, Timberlake rolled this realization over and over in his mind. There was a kind of pride in the awareness of his inner workings, the quirks his mind possessed, and an understanding that this stemmed in part from his conditioning.

  Presently, he launched himself up to an individual tank hanging low on the left center. The tank was like all the others racked in curving rows around it. He activated the inner cold light, caught a handhold, and bent close to the tank’s inspection port.

  The light flickered, glowed. It illuminated the metered master tubes dropping from the tank’s other side, a color coded sheaf of spaghetti that trailed down left and right to the figure under the light.

  A man’s craggy profile lay there, waxy skin and faint black beard. He was like a mannequin figure—and Timberlake thought immediately of elaborate human-size dolls racked here to maintain the pretense.

  The man’s name was there on the tank’s identification plate immediately below the place where the spaghetti of life-support connections entered.

  “Martin Rhoades.” And the code number which identified the specialties conditioned into him. He was an organizer, an executive … and another medical person.

  If that were a real person.

  Timberlake found his thoughts flitting from concept to concept. Person. Persona. Does a Persona provide a Raison d’etre? That meant “a reason to be.”

  What’s my reason for being?

  Timberlake studied the life-systems telltales above the spaghetti sheaf. They registered a faint flame of life within the tank. Timberlake made a tiny adjustment in the oxygen meter, caught the immediate feedback surge on the tank’s electroencephalographic coupling.

  The oxygen meter reset itself.