Destination: Void: Prequel to the Pandora Sequence

by Frank Herbert

  The oxygen meter reset itself.

  This, then, was a hybernating man. That feedback reaction, with its elaborate encephalographic play, could not be programmed for the unexpected. The oxygen shift at this moment in time obviously could not have been anticipated. A human homeostat had detected it, though, and reacted correctly.

  Timberlake dropped down to the gridded catwalk, checked a tank opposite, and another farther down the line.

  He went through them at random, pausing only to check that each held a living human.

  Names leaped out at him from the I.D. tags:

  “Tossa Lon Nikki.”

  “Artemus Lon St. John.”

  “Peter Lon Vardack.”

  “Legata Lon Hamill.”

  One of them he recognized—black hair, olive skin with its waxy undertone, chiseled features—Frank Lipera, a fellow student in human engineering.

  Presently, Timberlake went on to the next section … and the next. He found he recognized many of the occupants. This filled him with a feeling of loneliness. He felt that he might be the keeper of a museum, guarding old relics for a brief human life span, sequestering beneath these blue cold lights a share of man’s culture and knowledge.

  He came at last to a corner of section seven, another recognizable face from his UMB past—blond and Germanic pale wax skin. Timberlake read the name etched above the inspection port: “PEABODY, Alan—K-7a.”

  Yes, it was Al Peabody, Timberlake agreed. Yet, in a way it wasn’t Al.… It was as though the companion of Timberlake’s gym classes, his opponent in handball and moon tennis, had gone away somewhere to wait.

  But Peabody, Alan—K-7a proved to be a viable human with individual homeostatic reactions. He could be awakened to speak and act and think. He could be awakened to consciousness.

  And consciousness is a thing beyond speaking and acting and thinking, Timberlake thought.

  He loosed the handhold, dropped lightly back to the catwalk, feeling no particular need to check further. He knew with an inner certainty that all the tanks held hybernating humans. Bickel might be correct about the Tin Egg being an elaborate simulation, but in here the simulation went too far to be anything other than what it seemed. The hyb tanks had not been larded with obvious deception.

  I was supposed to come through here, surprise Bickel and stop him, Timberlake thought. Stop him from what?

  Some tiny, unregistered perception worked on the edge of Timberlake’s awareness, assuring him that whatever Bickel was doing right now in the shop held no immediate danger to these helpless sleepers.

  Whatever Bickel’s doing, he must be doing it right now, Timberlake thought. I’ve been gone … almost an hour.

  He looked up at the rows of tanks.

  Yet, every tank I checked was functioning at peak efficiency, as though the entire system were tuned to a critical optimum.

  Timberlake nodded to himself. You might almost think a mental core still rode monitor on the ship’s vital parts. He felt that he could almost hear the tremendously slowed oscillations of life around him.

  The spot between his shoulder blades had ceased to itch, but he felt painfully tired now, slightly dizzy, his body dragging at his muscles.

  It occurred to Timberlake then that they could be going at the problem of reproducing consciousness too literally. Will we have to install mechanisms that permit the Ox to grow tired? he wondered. We’re too literal … like peasants asking the genie for three wishes. Maybe we won’t like our wishes if we get them.

  God, I’m tired.

  Something moved near the far bulkhead—a spacesuited figure. For one instant of unreality, Timberlake thought that one of his hybernating charges had revived itself. Then, the moving figure came full into the glare of the cold light and Timberlake recognized Flattery’s features behind the anti-fog plate of the helmet bubble.

  “Tim!” Flattery called.

  His voice boomed from the suit amplifiers, echoed with a metallic ringing through the cold air of the tank.

  “Something wrong with your suit receiver?” Flattery asked, stopping in front of Timberlake.

  Timberlake looked down at the command set near his chin, saw that its circuit-indicator light was dark.

  I left it off Timberlake thought. Never even thought of turning it on. Why’d I do that?

  Flattery studied Timberlake carefully. The man’s motions when first seen across the tank had indicated nothing seriously wrong. He moved. He seemed aware of his surroundings.

  “You feel all right, Tim?” Flattery asked.

  “Sure. Sure … I feel all right.”

  Like three wishes, Timberlake thought. Like the three S’s of our school joke: Security, Sleep, and Sex.

  Something touched his shoulder, and he realized he had heard the inner bulkhead open. He looked around to see Bickel standing there.

  “You feel up to some work, Tim?” Bickel asked. “I need your help.”

  Some carrier inflection of Bickel’s voice, a subtly shaded overtone, told Timberlake that Bickel had been worried about him.

  But he must know I was sent through here … to try to stop him.

  In that instant, Timberlake realized they were very close, the three of them standing here. And the closeness went beyond physical proximity.

  “Whatever you’re doing, Bick,” Timberlake said, “it’s having no adverse effect on the hyb tanks. Every sleeper I checked was humming along nicely.”

  “Every …” Bickel nodded. “You found … ahh …”

  “Look for yourself,” Timberlake said, realizing Bickel had not dared test his own suspicion that the hyb tanks were a sham. “They’re all occupied.”

  “Excuse me.” The politeness sounded odd coming out of Bickel’s suit speaker. He jumped to an overhead handhold, swung to a ladder and, oddly, picked the tank of Peabody, Alan—K-7a.

  Presently, he worked his way along the K-line of tanks, pausing only to peer into the inspection ports. He dropped back down to the catwalk near its center, returned to them.

  “All of them?” he asked, nodding back toward the other sections.

  “The only empty tank’s the one that held Prue,” Timberlake said.

  “Prue!” Flattery said. “She’s all alone in Com-central.” He thumbed the outside switch of his transceiver, changing circuits. They saw his lips move, but his voice was only a faint chatter.

  Bickel looked down, saw that he had ignored his command set. He flicked the switch, caught Prudence saying: “… so far. But I don’t like the idea of being all alone in here in case there’s a real emergency.”

  Bickel, too, preferred silence, Timberlake thought. He wanted a moment alone.

  Flattery returned his suit circuits to voice amplifier, looked questioningly at Bickel. “Had we better be getting back?”

  Raj seems more relieved than Tim that these tanks are what they, seem, Bickel thought. Why? “You don’t want to check the tanks for yourself?”

  “I can take your word for it,” Flattery said.

  “Can you?”

  What’s he doing? Flattery wondered. Is he trying to goad me?

  Timberlake heard the derision in Bickel’s voice, felt their moment of closeness shatter. Without moving their bodies, they had pulled apart. But Timberlake realized with an odd feeling of elation that he had aligned himself with Bickel.

  “This isn’t illusion,” Flattery said. He waved at the tanks around them.

  “And you are conscious,” Bickel said.

  Flattery suppressed a feeling of rage, but felt a sour taste in his mouth. I will not let myself be goaded, he thought. “Of course I’m conscious.”

  “Never apply ‘of course’ to consciousness,” Bickel chided. “Consciousness can project illusions—insubstantial stimulus objects—onto the screen of your awareness.” He motioned to the tanks above them. “Go ahead, check. We’ll wait.”

  Flattery felt stubborn now. “I will not.” He started to push past Bickel.

  “Where’re you go
ing?” Bickel asked, catching the arm of Flattery’s suit in one gloved hand.

  “The shortest way back—through the shop,” Flattery said. “If you don’t mind!” He shook his arm free.

  “Be my guest,” Bickel said, and stepped aside.

  Timberlake stared at Flattery as the psychiatrist-chaplain wrenched the hatch dogs, opened the hatch and slipped through to the next chamber.

  Flattery’s fear was something other than worry about me, Timberlake realized. He’s still afraid!

  Bickel took Timberlake’s arm, helped him through, followed, and dogged the hatch. Flattery already was at the next hatch, had it open.

  Damn poor procedure, Timberlake thought, but he let it go.

  Presently, they came to the inner locks and the back passage beneath the primary computer installation and up into the shop. They slipped through, sealed the hatch.

  Bickel threw back his helmet. Flattery and Timberlake did the same. Bickel already was loosening his glove seals.

  Timberlake stared at Flattery, watching the way the man studied the jutting boxes and angles, the interwoven leads of the Ox.

  “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 lur
ch and the immediate weightlessness as the caged fail-safe switch disconnected 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?