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Flattery crossed to the other hatch, breathing easier now that they were behind the shields and with a hatch between them and that robox. He grabbed the hatch dogs, twisted.
They remained firmly locked.
He applied more pressure.
The dogs wouldn’t budge.
“Come on, let’s go,” Timberlake said. He added his hands to the effort.
The dogs remained seated as though frozen.
Flattery and Timberlake looked at each other, their faceplates almost touching. Flattery’s hands felt slippery with perspiration inside his gloves. He could smell the stink of fear within his suit.
“Go … try the other hatch,” Flattery said.
Timberlake nodded, kicked back up to the baffle and the hatch they had just dogged. Flattery could see Timberlake’s muscles lift the shoulders of the suit with the effort of trying to reopen the other hatch.
It was obvious the other hatch also was blocked.
Timberlake dropped back down beside him, thumbed the command circuit switch beneath his helmet. “John.”
“John’s temporarily off the circuit,” Prudence said. “You’re out of danger … immediate danger, aren’t you?’
In short, clipped sentences, Timberlake reported their situation.
“Trapped?” she asked. “How could you be?”
“Something’s jammed the hatches,” Flattery said. “Why’s John off the circuit?”
“Oh …” Pause. “He left his helmet … down there. He just yanked it off, unplugged, grabbed up a bunch of equipment and headed for quarters.”
“Your sensors! Where do they show him?” Flattery demanded.
Silence. Then: “In your quarters, Raj. I don’t understand.”
“What’s this equipment he took?” Timberlake asked.
“A whole pile of stuff,” she said, “mostly from that bin where you were working, Tim, under the middle of the bench.”
In my quarters, Flattery thought. Our “organ of analysis” didn’t miss a thing!
“Tim, your torch,” Flattery said. He pointed to the cutting torch on its tool clip at Timberlake’s waist.
Timberlake shook his head. “A minute ago you were saying do nothing hostile.”
“Give me that torch!”
“No, sir, Raj. You know what’s out there jamming that hatch as well as I do. Another robox unit or two or four or fifty. You had the right idea the first time. Let Bickel—”
“Don’t you know what Bickel’s doing?” Flattery demanded, not trying to keep the desperation from his voice.
“Just as well as you do, Raj. I assembled most of that gear in the center bin according to his schematics. It’s a field-effect generator synchronized to a shot-effect generator. There’s an electroencephalographic feedback unit … a man-amplified, he calls it.”
“White box—black box,” Flattery said. “We’ve got to stop him.”
“Why?”
“He’ll wreck the computer.”
“Not that computer.”
Bickel has infected him with his cynicism, Flattery thought. “Then he’ll kill himself.”
“That’s his lookout, but I don’t think he will.”
“When that shot-effect hits him, his muscles will break every bone in his body! That’s a hideous way to die.”
“Maybe if he were connected directly to the generator,” Timberlake said. “But he won’t be. He’s going to get the shot-effect through that generator’s field—attenuated, buffered.”
“Do you know what’s in my quarters?” Flattery asked.
“A snooping device of some kind,” Timberlake said. “I’ve seen the clues on the meters.”
“A field sorter,” Flattery said. “It’s tuned to the computer, gated for output. If Bickel takes out those gate circuits …”
“And he will. Now sit down and be quiet. It’s our only chance.”
Flattery glared at him. “If Bickel turns that mechanical monster loose it could wipe out the Earth!”
“Why don’t you try ghost stories for a change?” Timberlake asked.
“I don’t have time to tell you the whole story. That monster has to be stopped. You’ve got to take my word for it.”
“You’re nuts,” Timberlake said, but Flattery could see that the idea had touched the life-systems engineer’s deepest inhibitions.
“You’re an engineer,” Flattery said. “You’re a structuralist. You know Bickel’s reasoning?”
“What’re you driving at?”
“He’s arguing from the internal evidence of the human body,” Flattery said, speaking with desperate quickness. “Structure’s vital to the mechanical origins—teeth, jaw muscles, digestive system, and so on. The evidence says humans are descended from carnivores—and he insists a killer instinct is an absolute necessity for a carnivore.”
“Are you saying a killer instinct is a necessary preliminary to consciousness?”
“Bickel’s saying that! I’m not.”
“Why’re you so sure of this?”
“His actions leave no doubt of it!”
“Ahhh … you’re making this up.”
“Give me that torch,” Flattery said.
“No,” Timberlake shook his head.
“I’m going to take that torch if I have to kill you to get it,” Flattery said. He inched toward Timberlake.
“Prue, did you hear this madman?” Timberlake asked, backing one step.
The command net remained silent.
“Prue?”
Flattery drew himself up straight, his own words replaying in his mind. “… if I have to kill you to get it.” He felt suddenly that he had been herded into a completely vulnerable corner.
Killer instinct? he wondered.
“Prue!” Timberlake called. Then: “Raj, snap out of it! Prue isn’t answering!”
Flattery had stepped backward. He felt nausea, extreme chill, a shaking in the calves of his legs and in his shoulders. Half-screened thoughts flitted about on the edge of his awareness.
I’m avoiding something, he thought. Hiding my awareness from something … that … frightens …
“What’s wrong with you, Raj?” Timberlake demanded; there was sudden concern in his voice.
Flattery put out a hand, grasped a stanchion to keep himself from collapsing. He closed his eyes, conjured up the image of the sacred graphic imprinted on his cell in quarters—picturing against his eyelids the field of serenity with its suggestion of holy faces and the dynamics of the overprinting that combined the religious symbols on which men had spent their faith and yearning throughout evolutionary eons.
They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength, Flattery told himself. Lord, let this strength be transformed in the renewal of our minds. Let us share the light.
The litany hung suspended in his consciousness, focused on the word “mind,” and Flattery’s mental image of the sacred graphic took on
motion. The field of serenity and sacred symbols dissolved into writhing atoms, drew a new pattern like the outline of a great river with its watershed.
Flattery opened his eyes to find the interior of this metal trap were he stood with Timberlake washed in golden light—glaring, yet soft.
Timberlake seemed unaware of the light, frozen in some private instant.
And Flattery found himself caught by the wonder of that revelation—a great river and its watershed.
All men are parts of the total stream, he thought. We are tributaries—and our minds, are tributaries, and our most private thoughts. Every pattern in the universe contributes to the whole—some gushing like a freshet and some no more than a single touch of dew. All structure is an expression of the same law.
It was holographic—he saw that. The essential elements of the whole were carried in the smallest part. From the grain of sand you could project the universe. It could very well be the most elemental law of this universe.
The law was like a pulsing thread that he could experience but not express—simplicity becoming new complexity and again a greater simplicity that fragmented into a greater complexity that produced a greater simplicity …
He felt it in the touch of the suit’s fabric against his skin, in the awareness of the washed air entering his lungs, in every sensory impression.
How clean and unique was this shower of molecules upon his person and upon this place he occupied in the dancing pattern!
“I thank Thee, Lord, for this enlightenment,” he whispered.
And Flattery held himself in this supraliminal awareness, staring now at Timberlake. Timberlake appeared to him … somehow dead. He moved, but his eyes behind the faceplate were like holes in skull sockets. Each movement was the sticklike articulation of a skeleton.
Remembering Prudence and Bickel, Flattery felt that they shared this deadness: eyes empty of life. Their breasts moved with breathing, but the labored irregularity of that motion contained the same pattern (differing only in degree) as the breathing of a terminal sickness, the breathing of a dying person preserved beyond his time by artificial means.
We’re doomed, Flattery thought. Lord, why didst Thou enlighten me only to show me this?
