"Has it?" Bickel asked. He opened his eyes. There was only one logical way to be certain, of course. It would not do any more damage than already, had been done... if there was damage.
We didn't think of Bickel cutting us off from UMB this way, Flattery thought. Destroying the translator loops!
Without the translator system to decode the multirepetitive laser-burst messages, the umbilicus crew might just as well use hand signals for its messages to and from Moonbase. Bickel could build a radio transmitter, of course. It would take only a few watts to punch a message across these distances, but no preparations had been made at UMB for such a communications method. And the number of eavesdroppers would be enormous.
Carefully, because he had to be certain the first time, Bickel switched five patches in his AAT board, triple-checked them.
"What're you doing?" Timberlake demanded.
"Be quiet," Prudence ordered, as she recognized what Bickel intended.
"But he's already -"
"A diagnostic routine," Bickel said. "We'll use a simulsynchronous B-register search with a repeat on our original test of the Ox circuitry. If harm has already been done, this will just go right through the same channels. It can't do any more harm."
"And the B-register search could tell us where our data went," Timberlake said. "Yeah."
"Are you sure?" Flattery asked.
"The technique is right," Prudence said.
Working quietly, triple-checking, Bickel patched together the necessary program. He took a deep breath, sent the first elements of the diagnostic routine through the inputs, setting the balance of the test for off-line operation. He had to keep a constant check on this, key each step himself.
Presently, he began to get DDA output. He put it on conditional transfer with printout at each step in the control sequence.
He felt breathing at his shoulder, looked up to see that Prudence had abandoned her action couch, knelt beside him to stare up at the readout.
"The data has been shifted, not lost," she whispered.
"That's how it looks," Bickel said.
"It might as well be lost!" Timberlake barked.
"No," Bickel refuted him. "The computer's fully operative as long as we route everything through the Ox."
"Why didn't the AAT work?" Timberlake demanded.
"Come off that, Tim," Bickel said. "You helped me build that test setup."
"The incoming messages were going through the AAT circuits twice," Timberlake said. "Sure."
"The bits canceled themselves out all along the line," Bickel said. "We probably didn't get a fifth of the message."
"It did seem short," Prudence said.
"That message is the only thing we've really lost," Bickel said. "I'll ask for a repeat on -"
"Wait!" Flattery said.
"Yes?" Bickel looked at him.
"What do you tell UMB happened to the original message!" Flattery asked. He glanced away from the big board, met Bickel's gaze. "And what if they were telling us to cease and desist?"
"You know something," Timberlake said, "the beginning and end of Hempstead's message didn't seem to be garbled at all."
"Standard call and signoff," Bickel said. "They could be recognized and translated from the smallest fractional bits."
"But the message load was lightest at the beginning," Timberlake said. "And that could be part of the explanation there. You'd get minimum cancellation. We might be able to salvage more of the message... especially in the first parts before the load jammed it up."
This is exceedingly cautious for Timberlake, Flattery thought. Is he coming around to Bickel's viewpoint?
Bickel found himself moving hesitantly, not knowing why, but unable to escape the logic in Timberlake's argument. He slid out the message print, shuttled it to the replay rack. If only the print had been the first step in the reception, instead of intermediate, he thought. He removed his feedback patches, sent the print directly into the Ox and then into AAT, routed the readout through the Optical Character Print system and into the screen above them.
Hempstead's original call appeared there, and they all looked up at it.
That had to be accurate, Bickel thought.
There came that original long delay, then: "CHOOSE BY LOT FROM THE COLONISTS IN HYBERNATION A SUITABLE BRAIN TO REPLACE YOUR ORGANIC MENTAL CORE PERIOD MEDICAL PERSONNEL ARE DIRECTED TO TAKE A HUMAN BRAIN COMMA INSTALL IT AS TEMPORARY ORGANIC MENTAL CORE COMMA AND RETURN SHIP TO BIDGEYBIDGEYBIDGEY SOMETIMES WITH THE HIT IT PERIOD PERIOD PERIOD PERIOD PERIOD ON THE QUESTION OF DEFINING CONSCIOUSNESS COMMA YOU HAVE THIS DATA SEVERAL TIMES IN YOUR COMPUTER COMMA AND YOU CAN REFER THERE PERIOD REFERENCE IS MADE TO DATA ITEM ANINSZERO FOR NERVE BARRIER AND THRESHOLD DATA ITEM YOUR COMPUTER PERIOD BEST DIVE YET PERIOD NEW ORGANIC MENTAL CORE PERIOD MEDICAL PERSONNEL ARE DIRECTED TO ABANDON ALL SUCH REPEATS IN THEIR WASTE OF ORDER PERIOD"
Bickel broke the sequence. "Do you want any more of it?"
"It's getting increasingly unreliable," Flattery said. "I see no need."
"Those callous, dirty sons-of-bitches!" Timberlake snarled.
CHAPTER 17
"Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.... Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence.... Satan had his companions, fellow devils to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred."
FOR A LONG time after Timberlake's outburst they sat silently in the cocooned isolation of their action couches, absorbing their predicament. Only Flattery at the big board appeared animate. It was his couch which creaked with his movements. Switches clicked as he depressed them. The underlying stink of their enclosed quarters, by introspection, lifted across their awareness thresholds.
Take the brain from a colonist? Prudence thought. Had Hempstead really told them to commit such an atrocity? She believed it.
Bickel appeared almost asleep, but his hands clenched and unclenched.
Prudence looked at Timberlake, seeing how dark his face was, the way he instinctively bared his teeth. Those fools back at UMB, she thought. Didn't they realize they'd be stamping on the rawest inhibition of our life-systems engineer? Kill a helpless colonist in the hyb tanks!
No, she thought. What UMB asked was worse than killing.
Flattery, noting the effect of the message on Timberlake, felt the jangle of conscience... and personal fear. Where his own niche on the ship was concerned, Flattery maintained few illusions. He was both Judas goat and sacrificial goat, classic functions of religious extremity. He was giver of life and executioner - and lest he feel godlike in these powers, he was the ultimate victim of whatever would be the Earthling's destiny.
"As a bird that wandereth from her nest, so is a man that wandereth from his place," he quoted to himself.
Aloud he said, "What they command, we cannot do that."
"You'd better not suggest it," Timberlake said.
"Then we'd better assess whatever it is we've built there in the computer shop, and go on from that point," Flattery said. "What have we built, John?"
"Damned if I know," Bickel said.
"Well, it doesn't seem to be a consciousness, anyway," Prudence said.
"Goddammit!" Bickel snapped. "There you go again! Consciousness! Conscious! It isn't flobblegobble! That's what you might as well say. You don't know how to define consciousness. You don't know what it is. But you go around throwing sentences together as though they had meaning and -"