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“Infinite counting net?” Flattery asked.
“Why not?” Bickel asked. “You have it. You can count beyond the number of your own total nerve supply. The Ox has to do the same.”
“You know the danger,” Flattery said.
“Some of the danger,” Bickel admitted.
“This ship could be one gigantic sensory surface. Its receptors could achieve combinations unknown to us, could contact energy sources unknown to us.”
“Is that one of the theories?”
Flattery took a step closer to the Ox.
“Before you do anything destructive,” Bickel said, and he nodded toward the patterned confusion clinging to the computer wall with its wire tentacles, “you’d better know I’m already getting conscious-type reactions on a low scale—the system itself activating various sensors. It’s like an animal blinking its eyes—a heat sensor here, audio there …”
“That could be a random dislodge pattern due to the shot-effect bursts,” Flattery said.
“Not when nerve-net activity accompanies each reaction.”
Flattery digested this, feeling his conditioned fearalertness—the reaction for which he was but a trigger—come to full amplitude. His memory focused on the two red keys and the self-destruction program they would ignite through the computer links of the ship.
“Tim, how tired are you?” Bickel asked.
Timberlake looked at Bickel. How tired am I? Minutes ago, he had been shot through with fatigue. Now … something had keyed him up, filled him with elation.
Conscious-type reactions!
“I’m ready for another full shift.”
“This thing’s too simple yet to even approach full consciousness,” Bickel said. “Most of the ship’s sensors bypass the Ox circuits. Robox controls aren’t connected and it has no—”
“Just a minute!” Flattery snapped.
They turned, caught by the anger in Flattery’s voice.
“You admit this goal-seeking mechanism may operate entirely outside your control,” Flattery said, “and you’re still willing to give it eyes—and muscles?”
“Raj, before we’re finished, this thing has to have complete control of the ship.”
“To get us across the Big Empty and safely to Tau Ceti,” Flattery said. “You’re assuming that’s the ship-computer’s basic program?”
“I assume nothing. I checked. That’s the basic program.”
To Tau Ceti! Flattery thought. He felt like both laughing and crying. He didn’t know whether to tell them the truth—the fools! But … no, that would render them less efficient. Best to play the charade out to its silly conclusion!
He took a deep breath to get himself under control. “Okay, John, but you can’t anticipate every goal of your … Ox.”
“Unless we design all its goals into it,” Timberlake answered.
Flattery waved Timberlake to silence. “That defeats your purpose.”
“We’d have to foresee every possible danger,” Bickel agreed. “And it’s precisely because we can’t foresee every possible danger that we need this conscious awareness guiding the ship, its … hands on every control.”
Flattery reviewed the argument, trying to find a chink in Bickel’s logic. The words merely echoed many of the UMB briefings to which Flattery had been subjected: “You’ll be required to find a survival technique in a profoundly changed environment. Remember, you can’t foresee every new danger.”
“Fail-safes won’t work, of course,” Flattery said.
“Same argument,” Bickel said. “Fail-safes work only when your dangers are known and anticipated.”
“Can you prevent damage to the computer core?”
“It’ll be buffered forty ways from Sunday. I’ve already started the buffering.”
“The ship had an overriding supervisory program,” Flattery said, “a command to get us safely to Tau Ceti—you’re sure of that?”
“The command’s there. They didn’t fake it.”
“What if it develops that it’s fatal to go to Tau Ceti?”
Why is he quibbling? Bickel wondered. Surely, he knows the answer to that. “A simple binary decision solves that. We give it a turn-back alternative.”
“Ahhhhh,” Flattery said. “The best of all possible moves, eh? But we’re in the Queen’s croquet game. You said it yourself. What if the Queen of Hearts changes the rules? We’ve no Alice in this wonderland to haul us back to reality.”
A deliberately poor move somewhere along the line changing the theoretical structure of the game, Bickel thought. That’s an indicated possibility.
He shrugged: “Then we get sent to the headsman.”
Chapter 21
“No distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused.… A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard and smelt at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses.”
—Frankenstein’s Monster speaks
Prudence, at the controls less than an hour, already was beginning to feel the edge of fatigue which she knew would have her hanging on only by willpower at the end of her shift. Part of the load on her was the seemingly endless wordplay of those around her—the concept-juggling.
Words were so pointless in their situation, they needed action—determined, constructive action.
Timberlake cleared his throat. He felt a powerful curiosity to inspect and test what Bickel had built—to trace out the circuitry and try to find out why it was not upsetting gross computer function.
“If we run into the Queen of Hearts problem,” Timberlake said, “the ship stands a better chance if it’s controlled by an imaginative, conscious intelligence.”
“Our kind of consciousness?” Flattery asked.
There’s what’s eating him, Bickel thought. He’s obviously the one charged with seeing we don’t loose a killer machine in the universe. Homeostasis for a race can be different from the balance needed to keep an individual alive. But we’re isolated out here—an entire race in a test tube.
“We’re talking about creating a machine with a specific quality,” Flattery said. “It has to operate itself from the inside, by probability. We can’t determine everything it’s going to do.” He raised a hand as Bickel started to speak.
“But we can determine some of its emotions. What if it actually cares about us? What if it admires and loves us?”
Bickel stared at him. That was an audacious idea—completely in keeping with Flattery’s function as chaplain, colored by his psychiatric training, and protective of the race as a whole.
“Think of consciousness as a behavior pattern,” Flattery said. “What has contributed to the development of this pattern? If we go back …”
His voice was drowned in the klaxon blare of the emergency warning.
They all felt the ship lurch and the immediate weightlessness as the caged fail-safe switch disc
onnected the grav system.
Bickel drifted toward the forward end of the shop, caught a stanchion, swung himself around and kicked off toward the Com-central hatch, where he dislodged his lock. He went through the hatch in the same fluid motion of opening it, hurled himself toward his couch. He locked in, swept his gaze across his repeaters. Tim and Flattery were right behind.
Prudence was making only minimal corrections on the big console, studying the drain gauges.
Bickel saw that the computer was drawing almost eighty percent of its power capacity, began checking for fire and shorts. He heard cocoon triggers snap as Flattery and Timberlake took their places.
“Computer drain,” Timberlake said.
“Radiation bleed-off in Stores Four,” Prudence said, her voice hoarse. “Steady rise in temperature back of the second hull bulkheads—no; it’s beginning to level off.”
She programmed for a hull-security check, watched the sensor telltales.
Bickel, looking over her shoulder at the big board, saw the implications of the flickering lights as soon as she did. “We’ve lost a section of outer shielding.”
“And hull,” she said.
Bickel lay back, keyed the repeater screen for monitoring the sensors, began an analysis outward into the indicated area. “You watch the board; I’ll make the check.”
Images flickered on and out in the little screen at the corner of his board as he keyed it to new sensors farther and father out. Halfway through Stores Four, he was staring into the star-sequined darkness of open space. The sensor eyes revealed foam coagulant flowing into a wide, oval hole from the hull-security automatics.
Out of the corner of his eye, Bickel saw Flattery running a micro-survey along the edge of the break in the hull. “It’s as though it were sliced off with a knife,” he said. “Smooth and even.”
“Meteorite?” Timberlake asked. He looked up from a check of the hyb tanks.
“There’s no fusing at the edge or evidence of friction heat,” Flattery said. He took his hands off his board, thinking of the island in Puget Sound—the wild destruction in the surrounding countryside. Rogue consciousness. Has it started already?
“What could make that cut through the outer shielding and hull without heating them at least to half-sun?” Bickel asked.
