"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 going?" 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...eat 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 fear-alertness - 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."
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.