"What could make that cut through the outer shielding and hull without heating them at least to half-sun?" Bickel asked.
No one answered.
Bickel looked at Flattery, seeing the white, drawn look of the man's mouth, thought: He knows!
"Raj, what could do that?"
Flattery shook his head.
Bickel took a reading on the laser-pulsed timelog off his own repeaters, extracted a position assessment, noted transmission-delay time to UMB, swung his transmitter to his side and keyed it for AAT coding.
"What're you doing?" Flattery asked.
"This we'd better report," Bickel said. He began cutting the tape.
"How about some gravity?" Timberlake asked. He looked at Prudence.
"System reads functional," she said. "I'll try it." She thumbed the reset.
The ship's normal quarter gravity pulled at them.
Timberlake unlocked his cocoon, stepped out to the deck.
"Where're you going?" Prudence asked.
"I'm going out and have a look," Timberlake said. "Some force takes a slice off our hull without crisping the area or spreading a shatter pattern? There is no such force. This I've got to see."
"Stay right where you are," Bickel said. "There could be loose cargo out there... anything."
Timberlake thought of lovely Maida crushed by runaway cargo. He swallowed.
"What's to prevent it slicing us neatly right down the middle, next time?" Prudence asked.
"What's our speed, Prue?" Timberlake asked.
"C over one five two seven and holding."
"Did... whatever it was slow us at all?" Flattery asked.
Prudence ran the back check on the comparison log. "No."
Timberlake took a deep, quavering breath. "A virtually zero-impact phenomenon with a force effect of... what? Infinity?" He shook his head. "There's no kinetic equivalent."
Bickel tripped the transmission switch, waited for the interlock, looked at Timberlake. "Did the universe begin with Gamow's 'big bang' or are we in the middle of Hoyle's continuous creation? What if they're both..."
"That's just a mathematical game," Prudence said. "Oh, I know: the union of infinite mass and finite source can be accomplished by postulating zero impact - infinite force, but it's still just a mathematical game, a canceling-out exercise. It doesn't prove anything."
"It proves the original power of Genesis," Flattery whispered.
"Oh, Raj, you're at it again," Prudence remonstrated, "trying to twist mathematics to prove the existence of God."
"God took a swipe at us?" Timberlake asked. "Is that what you're saying, Raj?"
"You know better than to take that attitude - under these circumstances," Flattery retorted. When they get that message at UMB, they'll know we've achieved the stage of rogue consciousness. There's no other answer.
"You were going to make a guess, Bick," Timberlake said.
Bickel watched the signal timer creep around its circle. It had a long way to go yet before giving them the blip that would tell them the message had enough time to reach its mark.
"Maybe some kind of interface phenomenon that exists only out here in the trans-Saturnian area," Bickel said. "A field effect, maybe, from pressure waves originating in the solar convection zone. The universe contains a hell of a lot of oscillatory motion. Maybe we've hit a new combination."
"Is that what you suggested to UMB?" Flattery asked.
"Yes."
"What if it isn't a mathematical game?" Timberlake asked. "Could we program for a probability curve to predict the limits of such a hypothetical phenomenon?"
Bickel lifted his hands from the AAT keyboard, considered Timberlake's question.
Such a program could be figured in matrix functions, he felt. It was something like their hunt for the Consciousness Factor - trying to trace an exceedingly complex system on the basis of scant data. They could approach it through stacks of linear simultaneous equations, each defining parallel hyperplanes in n-dimensional space.
"What about that, Prue?" he asked.
She saw where Bickel's imagination had led them, and took a trial run in her mind, visualizing the diagonal entries when they appeared as coefficients of the simultaneous equations.
The entire process was over in seconds, but she held herself to silence, savoring the experience. It was a new one. She had set up a programming simulation in her mind, checked it out and filed the results in memory, recalling the bits precisely where she needed them. It was a feat of which she had never thought herself capable. Her own mind... a computer.
She told Bickel what had happened, replayed the results for him. Bickel found himself filling in the gaps where she skipped over the process to the answers. Somewhere - probably in the long skull sessions back at UMB - he had absorbed an enormous amount of esoteric math. Necessity and Prue's lead had pushed him over onto a plateau where that knowledge became available.
He felt suddenly robust, inches taller. The mental effort had lifted him to a hyperawareness - relaxed, yet ready, aware of his entire vascomuscular state and emotional tone.
The sensation began to fade. Bickel sensed the ship and its pressures on him - the steady, solid motion of matter bound outward from the sun.
The entire experience had taken less than half a minute.
Bickel felt raging sadness as the sensation faded. He thought he had experienced something infinitely precious, and part of the experience remained with him in memory. It was like a thin thread linking him to the experience, holding out the hope of once more following that thread - but the pressure of the ship and those around him wouldn't permit the indulgence.
He realized abruptly that he carried some enormous weight within him that might shatter that precious thread completely, and this sent a pang of fear through him.
"Do you think such a program's possible?" Timberlake pressed.
"Programming it is out!" Bickel snapped. "We can't limit the variables." He turned back to the AAT keyboard, began punching out the message with savage motions.
Bickel thought about the alterations he had made to the computer system. Black box - white box. The ignition of this thing they were building required a black box and there was only one obvious black box to give itself over to the imprinting process on the computer's white box: a human brain.
I will be the pattern.
Would the computer/thing then be another Bickel?
Prudence stared up at the big console, wondering at Bickel's sudden anger, using the focus on this as an excuse for not thinking about what had happened to the ship. But she couldn't avoid that problem.
The damage had been caused by something outside the ship. There had been a faint lurch transmitted through the Tin Egg, but that had come afterward. The damage telltales already had been flaring out red and yellow. The lurch had been associated with power drain and a shift of switching equipment to the necessities of automatic damage control.
Zero impact - infinite force.
Something outside the ship had sliced through them like a razor through soft butter. No - infinitely sharper.
Something from outside.
She put a hand to her cheek. That pointed to something beyond the dangers programmed into the ship.
They'd encountered something out of the wide, blank unknown. She thought suddenly of sea monsters painted on ancient charts of the earth, of twelve-legged dragons and humanoid figures with fanged mouths in their chests.
She restored a degree of calmness by reminding herself that all these monsters had faded before humanity's monkey-like inquisitiveness.
Still - something had struck the Tin Egg.
She ran another visual survey of her board, noting that automatic damage control had almost completely flooded out Stores Four with foam seal. Section doors were sealed off for two layers around the damage area.