Destination Void

  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 … thi
s 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.

  Sometimes, he felt as though the ship carried ghosts within it—of the sixteen clones killed by accident during the construction on the Moon, of umbilicus crew members killed by the ship’s programmed savagery—or perhaps of the OMCs sacrificed on this altar. An altar to human hubris.… Those previous tests—all of the dead crews, colonists … and the OMCs. All ghosts riding with us.

  Did those bodiless brains have souls? Flattery wondered. For that matter—if we breathe consciousness into this machinery, will our creation have a soul?

  “Have the automatics finished sealing the break?’ Bickel asked.

  “All sealed,” Flattery said. And he asked himself: When will the rogue consciousness hit us again?

  “What was in Stores Four?” Prudence asked. “What’d we lose?”

  “Food concentrates,” Bickel answered. “First thing I checked.” His tone said, “You had the watch; you should’ve checked that.”

  “Raj, do you want us to start sharing watch and watch?” Timberlake asked. “After I’ve had some rest …”

  “After you’ve had some rest, you can help me in the shop,” Bickel said.

  Flattery glanced at Bickel, then at Timberlake, wondering how the life-systems engineer would take that rebuke. Timberlake had his eyes closed. His fatigue was obvious in the pale, flaccid look of his face. He appeared almost asleep … except for tight, shallow breathing.

  “You want to go right ahead; eh?” Prudence asked. “You don’t think we should wait for Hempstead’s trained seals to chew this over?”

  “Whatever hit us came from outside,” Bickel said. “That’s another problem.”

  “John’s right,” Timberlake rasped. He cleared his throat, unsnapped his action couch, sat up. “I’m bushed.”

  “We’ve just decided,” Prudence said, “just like that …” she snapped her fingers, “—that you can go on stirring around in the computer like a wild man?”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Bickel said. “Haven’t any of you realized yet we were supposed to use the computer as the basic element of attack?”

  Bickel stared around at them—Flattery busy on the board, Timberlake half asleep sitting up at his couch, Prudence glaring at him from her couch.

  “That’s no ordinary computer. It has elements we don’t even suspect. It was hooked up with an Organic Mental Core for almost six years during the construction and programming of the ship. It has buffers and leads and cross-ties that its own designers may not even know about!”

  “Are you suggesting it’s already conscious?” Prudence asked.

  “No, I’m only suggesting that we’ve come a long way using that computer and our Ox frontal-lobe simulator. We’ve come further than the UMB project did in twenty years! And we should go on with this. We’re cutting a straight line through—”

  “There are no straight lines in nature,” Flattery said.

  Bickel sighed. What now? he wondered. “If you’ve got something to say, spit it out.”

  “Consciousness is a type of behavior,” Flattery said.

  “Agreed.”

  “But the roots of our behavior are buried so far away in the past we can’t get at them directly.”

  “Emotion again, eh?” Bickel demanded.

  “No,” Flattery said.

  “Instinct,” Prudence said.

  Flattery nodded. “The kind of genetic imprint that tells a chicken how to crack out of its shell.”

  “Emotions or instinct, what’s the difference?” Bickel asked. “Emotions are produced by instinct. Are you still saying we can’t bring the Ox to consciousness unless it has instincts-cum-emotions?”

  “You know what I’m saying,” Flattery said.

  “It has to love us,” Bickel said. He chewed at his upper lip, caught again by the beautiful simplicity of the suggestion. Flattery was right, of course. Here was a loose rein that could satisfy the fail-safe requirements. It controlled without galling.

  “It has to have an autonomic system of emotional reactions,” Flattery said. “The system has to respond with a set of physical effects of which the Ox is … aware.”

  Emotion, Bickel thought. The characteristic that gives us our sense of person, the thing that summates personal judgments. A process in capsule form that can occur out of sequence.

  Here was a break with all machine concepts of time—emotion as process, an audacious way of looking at time.

  “There’s nothing of ourselves about which we can be objective,” Bickel said, “except our own physical responses. Remember? It’s what Dr. Ellers was always saying.”

  Flattery thought back to Ellers, UMB’s chief of psych. “Bickel is ‘purpose,’ the force that will give direction to your search,” Ellers had said. “You have substitutes, of course. Accidents do happen. But you’ve nothing honed as fine as Bickel. He’s a creative discoverer.”

  A “creative discoverer”—the failures of all who went before him … all of those clone-brothers, all was preparation for this assault on the problem. If we succeed we survive, and if we fail …

  And Bickel was thinking: Emotion. How do we symbolize it and program for it? What does the body do? We’re inside, in direct contact with whatever the body’s doing. That’s the only thing we can really be objective about. What does the body …

  “It has to have a completely interfunctioning body,” Bickel said, seeing the whole problem and answer as an abrupt revelation. “It has to have a body that’s gone through trauma and crises.” He stared at Flattery. “Guilt, too, Raj. It has to have guilt.”

  “Guilt?” Flattery asked, and wondered why the suggestion made him feel angry and half fearful. He started to object, grew conscious of a rhythmic rasping. He thought at first it was a malfunctioning alarm, realized then it was Timberlake. The life-systems engineer had reclasped himself in his action couch cocoon. He was asleep—snoring.

  “Guilt,” Bickel said, holding his attention on Flattery.

  “How?” Prudence asked.

  “In program engineering terms,” Bickel said, “we must install trapping functions, inner alarm systems—monitors that interrupt operations according to the functional needs of the entire system.”

  “Guilt’s an artificial emotion; it has nothing to do with consciousness,” Flattery objected.

  “Fear and guilt are parent and child. You can’t have guilt w
ithout fear.”

  “But you can have fear without guilt,” Flattery said.

  “Can you?” Bickel asked. And he thought: It’s the Cain-and-Abel syndrome. Where’d the race pick that one up?

  “Not so fast,” Prudence said. “Are you suggesting we install a … that we make this … Ox afraid?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Absolutely not!” Flattery said. He had his couch exerciser going, but shut it off, turned to stare at Bickel.

  “Our creature already has a large, fast memory,” Bickel said. “It has fixed memory—if you discount our addressing problems, which aren’t interfering with function at any rate—and I’ll bet this thing has a protected area of memory that’s even ready with illusions when they’re necessary for self-protection.”

  “But fear!” Flattery said.

  “This is the other side of your coin, Raj. You want it to love us? Okay. Love’s a kind of need, eh? I’m willing to give it a need for external program sources—that’s us, you? I’ll leave the necessary gaps in its makeup that only we can fill. It’ll have emotions, but that means an unlimited spectrum of emotions, Raj. The spectrum includes fear.’’

  Guilt and fear, Prudence thought. Raj will have to face it. She looked at Bickel, seeing the filmed-over, withdrawn look in his eyes.

  “Pleasure and pain,” Bickel muttered. He focused on Prudence, the sleeping Timberlake, on Flattery—each in turn. Did they see that the Ox had to be able to reproduce itself too?

  Prudence felt her pulse quickening, tore her attention away from Bickel. She put a hand to her temple, checked the pulse there, related this to her quickened breathing, to body temperature, to hungers, to stage of fatigue and awareness. The chemical experiments on her body were giving her an acute awareness of her bodily functions, and that awareness told her she needed chemical readjustment.

  “Well, Raj?” Bickel said.

  I must compose myself, Flattery thought, turning back onto his couch. I must appear natural and calm. He kept his eyes away from the false panel on his repeater board. Under that panel lay death and destruction. Bickel was growing exceedingly alert to the tiniest clues. Flattery marked the quiet green of the flashboard, the ticking of relays through the graph counters. Everything about the ship felt soothing and ordinary—all systems functioning.