A globe of tactility threatened to overwhelm him. He felt movements - both gross and minuscule - atom by atom - gasses and semisolids and semi-semisolids.
Nothing possessed hardness or substance except the sensations bombarding his raw nerve ends.
Vision!
Impossible colors and borealis blankets of visual sensation wove through the other nerve assaults.
Pharyngeal cilia and gas pressures intruded with their messages. He found he could hear colors, see the flow of fluids within his ship-body, could even smell the balanced structure of atoms.
For one brief instant, the interplay of radiation merged, became a totally alien receptor that responded as though it were an artist creating new sensations for the sake of the creation - outflow and inflow, eccentric mergings. His awareness faltered at the edge of it and fell back.
Now, he sensed himself retreating, still pounded by that multidimensional nerve bombardment. He felt himself pulling inward - inward - inward, a structure collapsing inward - through the sensation-oriented skin awareness of a worm-self - inward - inward. The nerve bombardment dulled, leveled off, and he felt himself to be merely a body of flesh and bone cocooned in a sleep couch.
Bickel sensed his heart pounding, the slickness of perspiration against his back, the adrenalin urgency within his arteries. The roof of this mouth felt dry and painful. His upper lip trembled.
An emotion of terrible loss poured through him. It was as though he had glimpsed Heaven and been denied entrance. Tears passed from beneath his eyelids, rolled down his cheeks.
Now, he saw what had happened to the Organic Mental Cores.
The human-type brain had been prepared genetically for manipulating a limited sensory input - self-limiting. They had thrust these human-type brains into a full-on situation, permitted them no real unconsciousness, inflicted them with the sensory input of an organism infinitely more sensitive and more complex than the bodies of which they had been deprived.
The OMCs had tried to adapt, had grown themselves heavier conduction fibers, added switching capacity... but it had not been enough. When the necessities of existence reached a certain fierce tempo, they shorted out their own internal connections. They died.
They had been forced into hyperconsciousness by the pressures of enormous sensory data and the lonely knowledge of responsibility. They awoke to the full potential of being humans, but couldn't be humans because they'd been deprived of their autonomic emotional register, the organism. The ship had no equivalents.
Prue is near death.
The thought lifted into his mind from some great depth.
Bickel tried to make his muscles move, but they refused.
Raj! Where was Raj?
A flicker of awareness drifted through his bruised nervous system. As though through a gauze screen, he saw Flattery and Timberlake trapped in the lock, robox units holding the hatch dogs tightly closed.
Raj has to get out of there to help Prue, he thought.
He felt the thought go out like a free-standing program, feed through a memory-bank auxiliary while it gathered in the necessary data, become a reflexive pulse in control loops.
The robox at the inner hatch whirled the dogs, opened the hatch, and scurried aside.
"Raj," he whispered. "Com-central... quick... Prue... help."
He sensed the amplified whisper booming out through the memory bank and the vocoder loops, become a roaring hiss in the lock.
Flattery was already out the hatch heading down tube to ward Com-central.
Bickel felt himself fading. His awareness was a brilliant point of light that grew dimmer and dimmer, changing color as it went. It started almost violet, somewhere around 4,000 angstrom units, and traced a continuous wave shift until it flickered out at the red end.
In the instant before unconsciousness, Bickel wondered if he could be dying, and he thought: Red shift! Awareness fades like the red shift.
CHAPTER 30
Anthropomorphic assumptions have tended to lead humankind far astray. The universe does not work by our rules.
SOMEWHERE IN HIS own consciousness, Flattery felt, an accumulation of answer-bits had poured out of their storage circuits, fed into an analyzer punched for decode, and produced a terrible answer.
The ship had to be destroyed - and all its occupants with it.
As the lock hatch swung open, that one thought dominated him. He hurled himself through the hatchway and down the tube. The distance illusion that made the tube seem to contract ahead of him, filled him with a sensation that he must be growing smaller and smaller to pass through it. The thought intruded on him and he forced it aside.
He heard Timberlake close behind.
"You see that robox?" Timberlake panted. "What made it open up?"
Flattery sped on without answering.
"That voice," Timberlake said. "Was that Bickel, that voice? Sounded like Bickel."
They were at the Y-branch leading down to Com-central now, then at the hatch.
Flattery opened it, slipped through. His mind raced. Kill the ship now. Destroy this wild genie they had created. Timberlake mustn't suspect and try to stop him. And Bickel - Bickel was in quarters where he could block off that red trigger. But there was another trigger.
I must act normal, Flattery thought. I must wait my moment. Tim could stop me.
Prudence lay on the deck halfway between hatch and couch.
Flattery knelt beside her, becoming totally physician for the necessities of this moment.
Pulse thin, ragged. Lips cyanotic. Liver spots at her neck where it showed within the edge of the helmet seal. He loosed the hinged helmet from the back of her neck, pressed a hand there. Skin clammy.
Did she think she was fooling me? he wondered. She went off the A-S and was experimenting on her own body. Medical stores showed a gradual depletion of serotonin and adrenalin fractions.
Flattery thought of the neuro-regulatory shifts, the psychic aches that would arise from manipulating body chemistry in this fashion. Prue's moods and strange behavior became clearer to him.
He stood up, retrieved the emergency medical pack from its clips on the bulkhead, saw that Timberlake had taken over on the big board.
What difference does it make if I save her? Flattery asked himself. But he returned his attention once more to the comatose woman, began ministering to her. He kept on checking her condition as he worked. No broken bones. No evidence of external injury he could detect through her suit.
Timberlake had ignored Prudence after the first glance. She was Flattery's problem. He had darted across to his action couch, snifted the big board, keyed first for open circuits.
There was a sense of dullness in the equipment. He had to wait while servos hummed slowly about their work, while circuits balked and produced sluggish results.
He could feel his own hairline awareness of every control and instrument, his consciousness keyed up by necessity. The interrelation of every device in this room and throughout the ship was like a complicated ballet, a pattern growing simpler and simpler in his mind even through its slowness.
Timberlake made a delicate adjustment in hull-shield control, saw the resultant temperature change register on his instruments as a power shift in the radiation-cell accumulators, a minuscule shift of weight in the ship-as-a-whole brought about by adjustment in mass-temperature-proton balance.
But how slow it was. And growing slower.
Timberlake swung his computer board to his left side, keyed for diagnosis, got no response.
Telltales were winking out on the big board. With an increasing sense of frenzy, Timberlake fought to find the trouble.
Dead circuits.
No answers.
Keys on the main console began locking. No power in their circuits.
The last light winked out. Every key on the board was locked tight, all the servos silent. There was no whisper of air-circulation fans, no pulse of life to be felt in the ship. Slowly, Timberlake swung his gaze to the right, staring at the hyb-tank repeaters. The lights were dead, but the physical analogue gauges still showed feeder fluids flowing in the gross ducts of the system. Room lights flickered as local battery circuits took over the job of illumination.