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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.
