"Yeah," Timberlake said. "He thinks the other six ships had the same kind of failure - something rotten with the OMCs."
Bickel's far more alert and suspicious than anyone suspected, Prudence thought. Raj or I will have to side with him; there's no other way to keep control of the situation.
"Why... the OMCs?" Flattery asked.
"Let's not tiptoe around it," Bickel said. "The thing's obvious. What feature of these ships is never mentioned in the stress analyses? What feature do we assume is proof against failure?"
"Surely not the OMCs," Flattery said. He tried to hold his voice to a bantering level, failed, and thought: God help us. Bickel's seen through the sham far too soon.
"Certainly the OMCs," Bickel said. "And they gave us three of the damn things! One in service and two for backup. Never a hint that an OMC could fail, yet we had three on the Tin Egg!"
"Why?" Prudence asked.
"To make damn sure we got beyond the point of no return before we got the cold-turkey treatment," Bickel said.
I guess I'm elected, Prudence thought. She said: "More of Project's goddamn maneuvering! Sure. It'd be right in character."
Flattery shot a startled look at her, returned his attention to the big board before Bickel noticed.
"Cold turkey;" Bickel said. "This ship's one elaborate simulation device with a single purpose - and my guess is the others were the same."
"Why?" Flattery demanded. "Why would they do such a thing?"
"Can't you see it?" Bickel asked. "Don't you recognize the purpose? It casts its shadow over everything around us. It's the only thing that makes any sense out of this charade. The secrecy, the mystery, the maneuvering - everything's calculated to put us on a greased slide into a very special ocean. It's not just cold turkey, it's sink or swim. And the only way we can swim is to develop an artificial consciousness."
"Then why such an elaborate sham?" Flattery asked. "Why all the colonists, for example?"
"Why not the colonists?" Bickel countered. "Ready replacements for any members of the crew slaughtered on the way. Another arrow in the quiver just in case we do get over the hump to a habitable planet where we can plant the seed of humankind. And... maybe there's another reason."
"What?" Prudence demanded.
"I can't say just yet," Bickel said. "It's just a hunch... and there's something a hell of a lot more important we have to consider - the destructive potential of this project."
"You'd better explain that," Flattery said, but he could feel in the dryness of his throat and mouth that Bickel already had seen through to the horror element of Project Consciousness.
"Let's not kid ourselves," Bickel said. "If we really solve this, the whatever-you-call-it we develop could be a kind of ultimate threat to humankind...ogue, Frankenstein's monster, cold intelligence without warm emotions, an angry horror." He shrugged. "Once there was an island in Puget Sound; you all know about it. What happened? Did they solve it?"
"So we install inhibitions, fail-safe features," Prudence said.
"How?" Bickel asked. "Can we develop this consciousness without giving it free will? Maybe that was the original problem with our Creator - giving us consciousness without permitting us to turn against... what? God?"
Consciousness, the gift of the serpent, Flattery thought. He wet his lips with his tongue. "So?"
"So this ship has an ultimate fail-safe device to protect Earth and the rest of humanity," Bickel said. "The only sure one I can think of, given all the variables, is a human being - one of us." He looked at each of them. "One of us set to pull the pin and blow us all to hell if we go sour."
"Oh, come now!" Flattery said.
"It could be you," Bickel said. "Probably is... but maybe you're too obvious."
Prudence put a hand to her breast, thought: Holy Jesus! I never once considered that. But Bickel's right... and it's Raj, of course. He's the only one that fits. What do I do now?
Timberlake stirred out of a deep silence. He had heard the argument and the only thing that surprised him was how easy it was to accept Bickel's summation. Why was Bickel right? He was right, of course. But why did they accept it when the thing really wasn't that obvious? Was it awe of Bickel - clearly the strongest mind among them? Or was it that they already knew the facts - unconsciously?
"I tell you something," Timberlake said. "Bickel's right and we know it. So one of us is set to pull the pin. I don't want to know who."
"No argument," Bickel said. "Whoever it is... if this thing goes sour, I'd be the last person in the... Tin Egg to stop him."
The Zen master tells us that an omnipresent idea can be hidden by its own omnipresence - the forest lost among the trees. In our normal daily behavior we are most estranged, most in the grip of an illusory idea of the self. Every enchanting inclination of pride and its ego, of convention and its master - social training - conspires to maintain the illusion. The semanticist calls it the inertia of old premises. And this is what holds our analyses of consciousness within fixed limits.
SHE WROTE "Prudence Lon Weygand" at the foot of the log tape, started it rolling through the autorecorder, made the synchronous shift to Flattery's tape as he took over the board. The counter said it was her thirty-fifth change of shift.
Flattery squirmed in his couch, settling himself for the four-hour watch. Reflections on the dial faces were hypnotic. He shook his head to bring himself to full alertness, heard the hiss of fabric as Prudence got out of her couch. She stood there a moment stretching, did a dozen deep-knee bends.
How easily they accept the possibility that I'm the executioner, Flattery thought. He noted how wide awake and alert Prudence appeared. This four-hours-on, four-hours-off routine could be endured as long as no serious problems arose, but it played hob with the metabolic cycle. Prudence should be headed for food and rest, but she obviously was wide awake.
She glanced at Flattery, saw he was settled in for the watch, checked the repair log. Nothing was flagged urgent. That made it a bit more than twenty-five hours with nothing more than minor adjustments on the big board. Smooth. Too smooth.
Danger keeps you honed to a fine edge, she thought. Extended peace makes you dull.
But she wondered if Project had anticipated the special danger she had found for herself, and she thought: Am I the stick to beat not only the others, but myself?
The line of her own research seemed so obvious, though: define the chemical sea in which consciousness swam. The ultimate clue lay, she thought, in the serotonin adrenalin fractions. The thing she sought was an active principle, something between synhexyl and noradrenalin, a flash producer of neurohormones. The end product would be the root-stimulator of human consciousness. Find that chemical analogue and she could give fine detail to the workings of consciousness; provide a point-to-point sequencing which they could follow with machine simulation.
On the course she had chosen, the dangers to her person were enormous. She had no other guinea pig upon whom to test the derivatives her ingenuity produced. The possibility of deadly error was always present. The last substance, a relative of cohoba with an extra nitrogen addition, had ignited her mind, transported her into a weird consciousness. All sounds had become liquids which merged within her to be translated by a centrifuge process of awareness. It had been a terrifying experience, but she refused to stop.
It was only possible to make the tests during the deep rest periods in her own private cubby, and there was always the possibility some physical response would betray her. She could not afford that; the others would unite to prevent the tests, she knew: Such was their conditioning.
"You'd better get something to eat and try to rest," Flattery said.
"I'm not hungry."
"At least try to rest."
"Maybe later. Think I'll wander in and see how Bickel and Tim're doing." She looked at the big screen overhead. It was tuned to the peak-corner lenses of the computer shop.
"We have to have a constant monitor on each other," Timberlake had argued. "We can't wait for somebody to yell help."
The screen showed Bickel alone in the shop, but another eye had been keyed; it showed Timberlake asleep in his cubby adjoining the shop.
Four hours on and four hours off plus this constant looking over each other's shoulders will have us batty in a week, she thought.
Bickel looked up to his own screen-eye, saw Prudence watching, said: "Satan finds mischief for idle hands."
They mock me, Flattery thought. They laugh at God, at the Devil, at me.
"How about some coffee?" Prudence asked, speaking to Bickel.