The moment of final decision had come.
Timberlake forced himself to act slowly and calmly. More than his own life depended on what he did now, he told himself. Stray heat inside there could play havoc with helpless lives. He passed his suit's baffles in front of a heat sensor, studied the gauge.
Zero.
His gloved hands went to the dogs of the inner hatch, broke the seal. The hatch popped slightly, indicating a small difference in pressure - nothing abnormal. He stepped through into the glittering dry chill of the first bank of hyb tanks. This was where Prudence had been. He saw her empty tank on his left, its leads dangling, the cushioned carrier still open inside.
Everything around him was revealed in harsh blue light. He studied the chamber.
It was like a giant barrel - an open space in the center surrounded by the smaller barrels that were the individual hybernation tanks. A grid-floored catwalk led down the open center, with short ladders and handholds branching up to the separate tanks.
Timberlake kicked off down the length of the tank in three low-grav jumps, caught a handhold beside the breaker lock that separated this section from the next one.
He looked back. No... they weren't little barrels, he thought. The individual tanks stretched away from him - all around - like so many sections of gray culvert pipe waiting to be assembled into something useful... like a drain.
There was no point examining the tanks in here, he knew. This was the No. 1 section: high-priority crew replacements. If there was deception, it'd be farther along the line - in one of the deeper sections.
Timberlake opened the safety valve at the breaker lock, swung open the hatch, let himself through, reset the mechanism to isolate the section in the event of partial damage.
He looked around the new section. It was the twin of the other except for the absence of a raided tank.
Timberlake swallowed. His cheeks felt damp and cold. A place between his shoulder blades itched.
Quite abruptly, he found himself remembering Professor Aldiss Warren, the lecturer in biophysics back at UMB. He was a goat-bearded old man with a senile-sounding voice and a mind like a scimitar.
Why do I think of old Warren - now? Timberlake wondered.
As though the question released a hidden awareness, he recalled the old man diverging from a seminar discussion to talk about moral strength.
"You wish to test moral strength?" he'd asked. "Simple. Construct a med-computer with a public callbox attachment. Set it so that anyone submitting to the computer's probes can find out to within a day or so when he'll die... of natural causes, of course. If you wish to call old age natural. Then you step back and see who uses the thing."
Someone...emale student, had asked, "Wouldn't it take a kind of courage not to use this computer?"
"Pah!" old Warren had exploded.
Another student had said, "Hypothetical questions like this always bore the hell out of me."
"Sure," old Warren had answered. "You young toughs haven't faced the fact we could build such a med-computer - right now, today. We've had the ability to build it for more than thirty years. It wouldn't even be very costly - as such things go. But we don't build it. Because very few people - even among those who could build it - have the moral strength to use it."
Timberlake held himself still and silent in the hyb tank, realizing why he had remembered that incident. Coming into this cold-lighted tank was like using old Warren's hypothetical death predictor.
Bickel infected me with the certainty that this ship is not what it seems to be, Timberlake thought. He took over command, pushed me aside. The only reason for being that was left me - He looked up and around the tank - was in here. If this is taken from me, then I'm truly useless... except as a kind of computer-shop flunky for
Bickel.
Yes, Bickel. Right away, Bickel. Is there anything else, Bickel?
With a sense of astonishment at how he had unconsciously dramatized the change of relationships within the crew, Timberlake rolled this realization over and over in his mind. There was a kind of pride in the awareness of his inner workings, the quirks his mind possessed, and an understanding that this stemmed in part from his conditioning.
Presently, he launched himself up to an individual tank hanging low on the left center. The tank was like all the others racked in curving rows around it. He activated the inner cold light, caught a handhold, and bent close to the tank's inspection port.
The light flickered, glowed. It illuminated the metered master tubes dropping from the tank's other side, a color-coded sheaf of spaghetti that trailed down left and right to the figure under the light.
A man's craggy profile lay there, waxy skin and faint black beard. He was like a mannequin figure - and Timberlake thought immediately of elaborate human-size dolls racked here to maintain the pretense.
The man's name was there on the tank's identification plate immediately below the place where the spaghetti of life-support connections entered.
"Martin Rhoades." And the code number which identified the specialties conditioned into him. He was an organizer, an executive... and another medical person.
If that were a real person.
Timberlake found his thoughts flitting from concept to concept. Person. Persona. Does a Persona provide a Raison d'etre? That meant "a reason to be."
What's my reason for being?
Timberlake studied the life-systems telltales above the spaghetti sheaf. They registered a faint flame of life within the tank. Timberlake made a tiny adjustment in the oxygen meter, caught the immediate feedback surge on the tank's electroencephalographic coupling.
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 - K7a."
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.