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When they did face this fact, Bickel saw, he was going to have a fight on his hands. Too much of the ship was almost totally dependent on the master programs. Juggling those programs involved a kind of all-or-nothing danger. It was a flaw in the Tin Egg’s design, Bickel felt. He could see no logical reason for it. Why should everything on the ship depend on conscious control or intervention—even down to the robox repair units?
Prudence sensed Bickel’s attention on her, saw his face reflected in a gauge’s plastic cover. His questionings, doubts, and determination were all there for her to read just as surely as she read the dial beneath the plastic reflector. She had set him up—she had done that part of her job as well as could be expected, she thought. She focused now on the total console, feeling the sensory pulses of the ship reaching outward to the hull skin and beyond.
Job routine was beginning to smooth off the harsh edges of her fear. She took a deep breath, keyed a forward exterior sensor to the overhead screen, studied the star-spangled view of what lay ahead of the Tin Egg.
That’s our prize, she thought, looking at the stars. First, we clean out the Augean stables—then we get to be first … out there. The candy and the stick. That’s the candy, a virgin world of our own (and we have our tanks full of colonists to prove Earth’s good faith) and I … I am the stick.
The screenview appeared suddenly repulsive to her, and she blanked it, returned her attention to the big board and its pressures.
It’s the uncertainty that gets to us, she thought. There’s too much unknown out here—something has to go wrong. But we don’t know what it’ll be … or when it’ll hit. We only know the blow when it falls can be totally destructive, leaving not a trace. It has been before—six times.
She heard Bickel and Timberlake leave, the hiss of the hatch expanders sealing behind them; she turned and looked at Flattery. He had a small blue smudge-stain on his cheek just below his left eye. The stain appeared suddenly as an enormous flaw in an otherwise perfect creature. It terrified her, and she turned back to the big board to hide her emotion.
“Why … why did the other six fail?” she asked.
“You must have faith,” Flattery said. “One ship will make it … one day. Perhaps it’ll be our ship.”
“It seems such a … wasteful way,” she murmured.
“Very little’s wasted. Solar energy’s cheap at Moonbase. Raw materials are plentiful.”
“But we’re … alive!” she protested.
“There are plenty more where we came from. They’ll be almost precisely like us … and all of them God’s children. His eye is ever on us. We should—”
“Oh, stop that! I know why we have a chaplain—to feed us that pap when we need it. I don’t need it and I never will.”
“How proud we are,” Flattery said.
“You know what you can do with your metaphysical crap. There is no God, only—”
“Shut up!” he barked. “I speak as your chaplain. I’m surprised at your stupidity, the temerity that permits you to utter such blasphemy out here.”
“Oh, yes,” she sneered. “I forgot. You’re also our wily Indian scout sniffing the unknown terrain in front of us. You’re the hedge on our bets, the ‘what-if’ factor, the—”
“You have no idea how much unknown we face,” he said.
“Right out of Hamlet, she mocked him, and allowed her voice to go heavy with portentousness: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”
He felt an abrupt pang of fear for her. “I’ll pray for you, Prudence.” And he cursed inwardly at the sound of his own voice. He had come through as a fatuous ass. But I will pray for her, he thought.
Prudence turned back to the big board, reminding herself: A stick is to beat people with … to goad them beyond themselves. Raj can’t just be a chaplain; he has to be a super-chaplain.
Flattery took a deep, quavering breath. Her blasphemy had touched his most profound doubts. And he thought how little anyone suspected what lay beneath their veneer of science, deep in that Pandora’s box where anything was possible.
Anything? he asked himself.
That was the bind, of course. They were penetrating the frontiers of Anything … and Anything had always before been the prerogative of God.
Chapter 11
Symbolic behavior of some order has to be a requisite of consciousness. And it must be noted that symbols abstract—they reduce a message to selected form.
—Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase
“Spread out that software on the bench, Tim,” Bickel directed. “Start by putting the pertinent parts of the loading plan on top of what we need’ll be in robot stores. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Timberlake looked at Bickel’s back. Control had passed so obviously into the man’s hands. No one questioned it … now. He shrugged, began laying out the manifests and loading plans.
Bickel glanced around the room.
The computer maintenance shop was designed in such a way that Com-central nested partly into the curve of one wall. The shop presented one flat wall opposite Com-central, a wall about four and a half meters high and ten meters long—its face covered with plugboards, comparators, simultaneous multiplexers, buffer-system monitors, diagnostic instruments—dials and telltales.
Behind that wall’s hardware and shields lay the first banks of master-program routing that led down to core memory sections and the vast library of routines that marked out the limits of the equipment.
“We’ll have to block-sort the system to find all the audio and visual links and the AAT bands,” Bickel said. “It’s going to be a bootstrap operation all the way and the only information going back into the system will have to come from us. That means one of us will have to monitor the readout at all times. We’ll have to sort out the garbage as we go and keep a running check on every control sequence we use. Let’s start with a gate-circuit system right here.” Bickel indicated an optical character reader on the wall directly in front of him.
It was all clear to him—this entrance into the problem. If only he could keep this gate of his own awareness open—one step at a time.
But there remained the weight of those six previous failures … reasons unknown: more than eighteen thousand people lost.
They don’t think of us as real people, Bickel told himself. We’re expendable components, easily replaced.
What happened with the other six ships?
He wiped perspiration from his hands.
The conference hookups with station personnel had served only to frustrate him. He remembered sitting at his pickup desk staring into the vid-eye screen across his ink stained blotter, watching the movement of faces in the screen divisions—faces he knew only in an untouchable, secondhand way.
The memory was dominated by Hempstead’s voice issuing from that harsh wide mouth with its even rows of teeth:
“Any theory introduced to explain the loss of those ships must remain a theory at present. In the final analysis, we must admit we simply do not know what happened. We can only guess.”
Guesses:
System failure.
Mechanical failure.
Human failure.
And subdivisions within subdivisions to break down the rows of guesses.
But never a word of suspicion about the Organic Mental Cores. Not one hint or theory or guess. The brains were perfect.
“Why?” Bickel muttered, staring at the gauges of the computer panel.
The stacked schematics on the bench rustled as Timberlake looked up. “What?”
“Why didn’t they suspect OMC failure?” Bickel asked.
“Stupid mistake.”
“That’s too pat,” Bickel protested. “There’s something … some overriding reason we weren’t given all the facts.” He approached the computer panel, wiped away a small smudged fingerprint.
“What’re you getting at?” Timberlake asked.
“Think how easy it w
as to keep a secret from us. Everything we did or said or breathed or ate was under their absolute control. We’re the orbiting orphans, remember? Sterile isolation. The story of our lives: sterile isolation—physical … and mental.”
“That’s not reasonable,” Timberlake said. “There’re good reasons for sterile isolation, big advantages in a germ-free ship. But if you keep information from people who need it … well, that’s not optimum.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of being manipulated?” Bickel asked.
“Ahhhh, they wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t they?”
“But …”
“What do we really know about Tau Ceti Project?” Bickel asked. “Only what we’ve been told. Automatic probes were sent out. They say they found this one habitable planet circling Tau Ceti. So UMB began sending ships.”
“Well, why not?” Timberlake asked.
“Lots of reasons why not.”
“You’re too damn suspicious.”
“Sure I am. They tell us that because of the dangers, they send only duplicate-humans … Doppelgangers.”
“It makes sense,” Timberlake said.
“You don’t see anything suspicious in this setup?”
“Hell, no!”
“I see.” Bickel turned away from the glistening face of the computer panel, scowled at Timberlake. “Then let’s try another tack.
Don’t you find it at all difficult to focus on this problem of consciousness?”
“On what?”
“We have to make an artificial consciousness,” Bickel said. “That’s our main chance. Project knows it … so do we. Do you find it difficult to face this problem?’
