Prudence said: "Raj?"
Flattery looked at her.
"I'm getting current drift on the auxiliary power supply."
"It's the shop," Flattery stated flatly. "John's taken a direct line to prevent us from shutting him off." He looked back at Bickel. "Right?"
"Right. It shouldn't cause you any trouble. I've isolated the line. Your main board is still functioning." Bickel turned back to the Ox, began tying in a series of timed neurofibers.
"What's the tested, effective method?" Flattery looked up at the telltales on the Com-central board, following Timberlake's progress by the heat sensors. Timberlake was out in the second zone now, turning in toward the opposite side of the shielding and the hyb tanks.
Why was Tim so reluctant to go? Flattery wondered.
Bickel finished a triple connection along the timed fibers, straightened. "The system you can't tear apart and examine is called a black box. If we can make a white box sufficiently similar and general in potential to the black box - that is, make it sufficiently complex - then we can force the black box, by its own operation, to transfer its pattern of action to the white box. We cross-link them and subject each to identical shot-effect bursts."
"What's your white box?" Flattery asked, his interest and attention caught in spite of his fears. "That thing?" He nodded toward the crazy-block construction of the Ox.
"Hell, no, this is nowhere near complex enough. But out entire computer system is."
He's gone crazy! Flattery thought. He can't be suggesting seriously that he'd throw a scrambling shot-effect burst into the computer!
Again, Flattery glanced up at the telltales. Timberlake was at the edge of the hyb tanks, moving at a maddeningly slow pace.
"Then... how does the Ox function in this?" Flattery asked, returning his attention to the screen.
"This is our sorter," Bickel said. "It sorts the rhythms of the system and acts as a crude set of frontal lobes." He linked two parts of his construction by cross-jacks in a patchboard. "There. Now to run a few tests."
"Shouldn't you wait?" Flattery demanded. "Shouldn't we discuss this a bit more? What if you've made a mistake and -"
"No mistake," Bickel said.
Flattery looked to the telltales. Timberlake was in the hyb tanks now, but he wasn't moving just stopped there.
We set Bickel, our "organ of analysis," at too high a pitch, Flattery thought. We should've known it could run wild.
What was keeping Timberlake?
"Straight line test, first," Bickel said, and closed a key on the computer wall. He stared at the diagnostic-circuit dials above him.
Flattery held his breath, turned slowly to look at the big board in front of Prudence. If Bickel's test loused up the central computer system, it'd show up first on the big board.
The flashboard retained its quiet green. The steady ticking of relays through the graph counters and monitors held at an even pace. Everything appeared soothingly ordinary.
"I'm getting individual nerve-net responses on the separate blocks," Bickel said.
Flattery kept his attention on the flashboard. If Bickel ruined the computer, the ship was dead. Most of the Tin Egg's automatic systems depended on the computer's inner lines of communication and supervisory control programs.
"Didn't you hear me?" Bickel demanded. "I'm getting nerve-net response! This thing'll behave like a human nervous system!"
"Raj, he is!"
It was Prudence. Flattery dropped his gaze to where she was pointing. She had shifted a small corner of her own auxiliary board into a repeater system tied to Bickel's diagnostic circuits.
"Beta rhythm," she said, pointing to the scope in the center of the board.
Flattery watched the sine play of the green line on the scope, digesting what Bickel had said, what that scope implied.
Black box - white box.
Perhaps it was possible, theoretically, to use the entire computer as a white box to take the transfer pattern called consciousness. But there remained many unanswered questions - and one was more vital than all the others.
"What do you intend using as a black box?" Flattery asked. "Where'll you get your original pattern?"
"From a conscious human brain. I'm going to take one of our spare hyb tanks and adapt the electroencephalographic feedback system as a man-amplifier."
He's utterly mad, Flattery thought. The shot-effect shock would kill the human subject.
Bickel looked out of the screen, stared at Flattery - realizing that the psychiatrist-chaplain had seen the possible deadliness of this proposal.
Who will bell the cat? Bickel thought. He swallowed. Well, if necessary, I will.
"How would you protect the subject from the shot-effect bursts?" Prudence asked. "Curare?"
Even as she asked, she wondered how she was protecting herself from her own experiments. The answer was daunting: No better than Bickel would! What had made this crew so prone to all-or-nothing efforts?
"I believe the subject will have to be fully conscious," Bickel said. "Without any medication... or narcoinhibitions."
He waited for the explosion from Timberlake. This idea was sure to outrage the conditioning of the life-systems engineer. Where was Timberlake?
"Absolutely not!" Flattery exploded. "It'd be murder!"
"Or maybe... suicide," Bickel said.
Prudence looked away from the console, met Bickel's eyes. "Be reasonable, John," she pleaded. "You're already endangering the computer with that..."
"The ship's still functioning, isn't it?" Bickel countered.
"But if you throw a shot-effect burst through that -" she nodded toward the stacked blocks and interwoven leads of the Ox beside Bickel "- how'll you avoid damage to the computer's core memory?"
"Core memory's a fixed system and buffered. I'll keep the Ox potential below the buffer threshold. Besides..." he shrugged, "we've already put shot-effect bursts through the computer without -"
"And scattered information from hell to breakfast!" she snapped.
"We can still find that information if we use the Ox to sort the addresses for us," Bickel said.
Flattery glanced at the sensors in front of Prudence. What was wrong with Timberlake? Was he injured? Unconscious? But the sensors revealed a narrow path of movement from the life-systems engineer... all of it within the hyb tank complex.
"If I understand you correctly," Prudence said, "you'll have to add nerve-net simulation channels to the Ox until it and the computer are as complex as a human nervous system. As you build it and test it, we become more and more dependent on that jury-rigged Ox monstrosity for our very lives."
"It has to have a full range of sensory apparatus," Bickel said. "There's no other way."
"There must be!" she said. "Where'd you get such a mad idea?"
"From you."
Shock momentarily stilled her tongue. "That's impossible!"
"You're a female," Bickel pointed out, "capable of biological reproduction of conscious life. In that method, you have a substrate of molecules that are capable of assuming a large number of forms... different forms. Those molecules assume a particular form in the presence of a molecule that already has that form." He shrugged. "Black box - white box."
"I thought you meant from me personally," she said, looking up at the telltale sensors and seeing the apparently irrational movements of Timberlake.
"Look," Bickel said, unaware of their preoccupation, "the basic behavior of the computer will remain intact. We won't interfere with supervisory programs or command constants. We want to set up a system dealing with probabilities, with mobility constant for the -"