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—Education of the Psychiatrist/Chaplain Moonbase Documents
For a long, pulsing moment after Flattery spoke, they all gazed at that red button: the trigger of their destruction. They all knew this thing. Flattery’s intrusion had ignited a mutual awareness. They were supposed to accept this moment of oblivion. But something new had happened on this venture.
“A few more seconds of life aren’t important,” Bickel said. He held up a hand, hesitant. “You can … wait for just a few seconds.”
“You know I have to do this,” Flattery said.
Even as he spoke, Flattery savored the “Ahhhhh” of suspense which charged this moment with an electrical sensation. It filled the air around them like ozone.
“You have control of the situation,” Bickel said. His glance flickered toward the red switch with Flattery’s hand poised to touch it. “The least you can do is hear what I have to say.”
“We can’t turn this thing loose upon the universe,” Flattery said.
Timberlake swallowed, glanced down at Prudence. How odd, he thought, that we should die so soon after coming alive.
“How is it, Raj,” Bickel asked, “that we can explain more about the unconscious networks of the human body than we can about the conscious?”
“You’re wasting time,” Flattery said.
“But the thing’s dead,” Bickel said.
“I have to be sure,” Flattery said.
“Why can’t you be sure after hearing what John has to say?” Prudence asked.
She looked at Bickel to draw Flattery’s attention there. Two lights had begun blinking on the main computer console behind Flattery.
“It’s a paradox,” Bickel said. “We’re asked to discard logical positivism while maintaining logic. We’re asked to find a cause-and-effect system in a sea of probabilities where enormously large systems are based on even larger systems which are based on greater systems yet.”
Flattery looked at him, caught by the trailing ends of Bickel’s thoughts. “Cause and effect?” he asked.
“What happens if you push that key?” Bickel asked. He nodded to the trigger beneath Flattery’s hand.
Prudence held her breath, praying Flattery would not turn. More lights were winking on the main computer con-sole above Timberlake’s couch. She couldn’t say why the lights gave her hope, but the evidence of life in the ship …
“If I push this key,” Flattery said, “an action sequence will be alerted in the computer.” He glanced back at the winking lights. “You’ll notice that part of the computer is becoming active. These circuits—” he returned his attention to Bickel “—have extra buffering and emergency power. The master program set off by this key instructs the computer to destroy itself and the ship—opening all the locks, exploding charges in key places.”
“Cause and effect,” Bickel said. And he marveled at how automatic Flattery’s movements appeared. A zombie. “Cause and effect doesn’t square with consciousness,” he said.
A fascinating idea, Flattery thought.
“If any subsequent action proceeds with absolute and immediate causality from the sequence of past actions, then there can be no conscious influence of behavior,” Bickel said. “Think of a row of dominoes falling. The human willpower—the muscle and arm of our consciousness—couldn’t decide what behavior to use because that behavior would all have been predetermined by a long line of preceding cause and effect.”
Flattery felt the hand poised over the deadly key begin to ache. “We can’t predict what this beast would do,” he said. “I know.”
Bickel’s signing our death warrant, Prudence thought. She got to her feet. Her muscles still felt weak, but she sensed the stimulant doing its work. She gripped Timber-lake’s arm to steady herself.
Timberlake glanced at her hand, looked back at Flattery.
How calm Tim seems, she thought.
“Maybe consciousness doesn’t influence neural activity at all,” Timberlake said. “Perhaps we only imagine—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Flattery said. “That’d have no survival value and wouldn’t have arisen in nature. Conscious creatures would’ve died out long ago.”
Well, at least we’ve got him arguing, Timberlake thought. He smiled at Prudence, but she was watching Bickel. Timberlake returned his attention to Flattery. How dull … almost dead the man looks.
“Think of an electronic tube,” Bickel said. “A very tiny amount of energy applied at the critical bias junction produces a tremendous change in output. Consciousness does something on the same order, Tim. We have a neural amplifier.”
“Instant causality,” Flattery whispered.
Lord! How that hand ached—as though it had been held above the trigger key for a century.
“That’s what we have to toss out of our thinking,” Bickel said. “Instant causality says if we have complete knowledge of a natural law and complete knowledge of the given system at a given time, then we can predict exactly what the system will do from that point on. That sure as hell isn’t true at the atomic level and it doesn’t apply to consciousness. Consciousness is like a system of lenses that select and amplify, that enlarge objects out of the surround. It can delve deep into the microcosm or into the macrocosm. It reduces the gigantic to the manageable, or enlarges the invisible to the visible.”
This doesn’t change anything, Flattery thought. Why are we talking? Is he just trying to gain a little time? The pressures of the terrible necessity which had been built into him were becoming almost unbearable.
Bickel saw the faint stirrings of life in Flattery’s eyes. “But this consciousness factor isn’t a completely random thing. In a universe packed with random possibility of des-truction, random activity equals the certainty of encoun-tering that destruction—and we’re assuming consciousness is survival-oriented.”
“Unless it’s a healing process,” Flattery said.
“But the healing process would have to completely counteract any destruction,” Bickel said. And he saw the light of vitality grow in Flattery’s eyes, his manner.
“I have to push this key, John,” Flattery said. “Do you know that?”
“In a moment,” Bickel said.
“Raj, you can’t,” Prudence said. “Think of all those lives down in the hyb tanks. Think of—”
“Think of all those helpless lives back on Earth,” Flattery said. “What would we turn loose on them? John’s black box—white box transfer put his life—his entire ancestry—into the computer. Don’t you see that? Any of you?”
Prudence put a hand to her mouth.
Bickel saw the alertness in Flattery, the vital consciousness expressed in every movement, realized that death-conditioning tensions had pushed him over the threshold into something near full potential. But the new argument Flattery had produced staggered Bickel.
If we restore it … awaken it … I’d be its unconscious, Bickel thought. I’d be its emotional monitor, its id, its ego and its ancestors. He swallowed. And Raj …
“Raj, don’t push that key,” Bickel said.
“I must,” Flattery said. And as he spoke he sensed the poignancy of their awareness—this new vitality.
“You don’t understand,” Bickel said. “That field genera-tor in your cubby—you think there was no feedback from you into the system, but there was. Your voice, your prayers—every gross or subtle reaction went back into the system through its sensors. Whatever religion is to you, that’s what it’d be to the Ox. Whatever—”
“Whatever religion was to me,” Flattery said.
And he pushed the key. It clicked, locked.
“How long do we have, Raj?” Timberlake asked.
“Perhaps a few minutes,” Flattery said.
“And perhaps more,” Bickel said.
“Don’t you think we should’ve tried to limp back to UMB?” Prudence asked. “Awake as we are now, the ship control necessities would’ve been so much simpler.”
“Some fool would be certain to play
with this ship—just testing,” Flattery said. “And we …” He gestured to include all four of them. “This potential we’ve discovered without ourselves would’ve been engulfed on Earth, smothered, killed.” He shrugged. “What are a few minutes or a few years, more or less? I had a responsibility … and fulfilled it.”
“You had a death wish, too,” Bickel said.
“That, too,” Flattery agreed, recognizing how the deadly impulse had helped project him into his full awareness.
With that realization, Flattery began to glimpse the train of Bickel’s cryptic words—their other meaning.
“There were Greeks who said that even the gods must die,” Bickel said.
Flattery turned, looked at the big board. It was fully alight now, not a warning telltale showing, every gauge zeroed normal.
“It’s programmed to take us to Tau Ceti,” Bickel said.
Flattery began to laugh, almost hysterically. Presently, he stopped. “But there’s no inhabitable planet at Tau Ceti. You know what all this is, John—a set piece. We know what we are—cell-culture humans! A host gave a bit of himself containing the template of the total and the axolotl tanks took care of the rest. We were expendables!” He sighed, put down the urge to sink back into the deadly torpor. “They’re already growing our replacements, our duplicates, building another Tin Egg … back at UMB. Each failure teaches them something back at UMB. They’ve had a continuous monitor on the computer. When I depressed that key, that also launched a capsule back toward Earth—the complete report.”
“Not quite complete,” Bickel said.
“The ship is going to take us to Tau Ceti,” Timberlake said.
“But the self-destruction program,” Prudence said. And as she spoke, she saw what the others already had seen. The ship held control of its own death. It could die. And this was what had given it life. The impulse welled up into the AAT from the Ox circuits … and was repressed, the way humans repressed it. The ship had come to life the way they had—in the midst of death. Death was the background against which life could know itself. Without death—an ending—they were confronted by the infinite design problem, an impossibility.
All Flattery had done was to provide the AAT—the seat of consciousness—with a superenergizer.
