She took one low-grav step across to the hatch lock, let herself through, stopped just inside the shop to study what Tim and Bickel had accomplished since her last free period.
Where the optical character reader had been, on the big panel across from the lock, now stretched a mechanical excrescence...iled and jutting structure of plastic blocks: Eng multiplier circuits, each sealed in plastic insulator. Linking the blocks were loops and tangles and twists -a black spiderweb of insulated pseudoneuron fiber.
Bickel had heard her entrance. Without turning from his work at one end of that protruding angular construction, he said: "Take that other micro-tie viewer on the bench. I need 21.006 centimeters of the K-A4 neurofiber with random-spaced endbulbs and multisynapses. Connect it as I've indicated on that schematic labeled G-20. It should be the top one in that pile on the right end of the bench."
Bickel sat down on the deck, slid a new block of Eng multipliers into position. He swung a portable micro-tie viewer across the block, leaned into the viewer's forehead rests, began making the connections.
Yes, sir! she thought.
She found the indicated schematic, reeled off the neurofiber, fed it into the viewer, bent to the eyepiece. The enlarged image of the conductor line with its green-coded synapse sections and yellow endbulbs leaped into view. She looked once more at the schematic, began making the required connections.
"What're we doing now, boss?" she asked.
"Installing a system of roulette cycles," Bickel said.
"Why?"
"A machine can reproduce any form of behavior," Bickel said. "We can engineer this device to satisfy any given input-output specifications. It'll behave anyway we want under any specified circumstances. "Raj set me straight on that."
She kept her tone light. "That was wrong, huh?"
"You bet your sweet life. Specified environment and behavior - that's deterministic. The manufacturer is still in control. What's worse, it requires a completely detailed memory - everything in the machine's past has to be immediate... right there and now! Memory load gets bigger and bigger every second. And it's all present and immediate. And that throws you into an infinite-design problem."
She reeled off a required length of side fiber, made the loop indicated in the schematic. "Infinite design. That means an indeterminate form and, by definition, the indeterminate is impossible to construct. So what do we do now?"
"Don't be dull," Bickel said. "We build for a random inhibitory pattern in the net - behavior that follows probability requirements." He leaned back from his viewer, wiped perspiration from his forehead. "A behavior pattern that results from built-in misfunction."
The way this ship was programmed to behave for us, she thought.
"Deterministic behavior from unreliable elements," she said. And she sensed Flattery's hand in this, an argument, a gentle nudge.
"Bickel," she said, "I've been stewing about your suspicions. Even if you're right - about one of us being set to blow us up if we go sour - how can you be sure this failsafe person is still among us? I mean, three of the original crew are dead."
"Okay," Bickel said. "Let's say we brought you out of hyb and you found our chaplain-psychiatrist had been killed. What were your orders?"
"Orders?"
"Come off that! We all had special orders."
"I'd have insisted we bring another chaplain-psychiatrist out of hyb," she said in a small voice. "What would you have done?"
"I had my orders, same as you."
She looked up at Flattery visible on the overhead screen. He appeared intent on the big board, paying no attention to the conversation coming over the intercom from the shop. That was sham, she knew. Everything said here was going into his brain, being weighed and analyzed.
Bickel's right, she thought. It's Raj.
"Pay attention to what you're doing!" Bickel said.
She turned, saw him watching her.
"You foul up the ties on that loop and I'll put you back in hyb," he said.
"Don't make threats you can't carry out," she said. But she turned back to the micro-tie viewer, finished off an inter-ringed series of loops, tested to be sure they weren't mutually oscillating, traced the output sheaf, and attached a plug for an Eng multiplier connection.
"Let me have that G-20 assembly as soon as you're finished," Bickel said. He yawned, put his knuckles to his eyes.
Prudence checked her assembly against the schematic, saw it matched, lifted it gently out of the viewer and took it to Bickel. He was overdue for a rest and still driving himself, she saw.
"Here," she said, presenting the assembly. "When you get this tied in, why don't you take a break."
"We're almost ready to put this on an initial program," Bickel said. He took the assembly, began connecting it to the newly installed Eng multiplier block, running one sheaf back to a plugboard connection on the computer panel.
Prudence stepped back, studied the mechanical growth that jutted from the wall. As though she saw it for the first time, the construction abruptly took on a new meaning for her.
"That's more than a setup for analysis," she said.
"That's right."
Bickel stood up, wiped his hands on the sides of his vacsuit, swung his own micro-manipulator and viewer to one side.
"This, in addition to giving us our analysis of built-in misfunction, this little 'Ox' we're driving will provide a three-way energy interchange."
"You're tied into the computer," she accused, pointing to the connections in the plugboard.
"Every line in that board has a diode in it. Pulses can come from the computer to our test setup, but anything going into the computer has to be coded by one of us and inserted over there." Bickel pointed to the input heads lined up at the right corner of the wall.
"Three-way interchange?" she asked.
"We're going to test my field-theory approach. I have a source program ready to insert. If our Ox doesn't work, it'll just produce an unconditional transfer of the material at the readout. If the field is produced, it'll act as a filter, and we'll get truncation. It'll pass only the significant digits."
"What about the roulette cycles?"
"The zero suppress will be intermittent," he said, "but we'll still get only the significant digits at the readout."
Prudence nodded, looking at Bickel with a new understanding of what he was doing: "All sense data are intermittent into the human consciousness."
It was an explosive thought: Wave forms! Everything which consciousness could identify had to move in some organized way. It had to move against a background which set off... which outlined!... the organization. Therefore: intermittence. And Bickel had seen right through to this necessity.
She found the realization somehow deeply sexual, and awareness of this filled her with disquiet. There was no way she could include anti-S on her present testing regimen. She wondered if her body might finally betray her.
Forcing herself to a calmness which she did not feel, she said: "What we see and identify has to be discrete and significant, it has to dance against some other background."
"Now you have it," Bickel said. "But we assume that the one who views the data is continuous...low of consciousness. Somewhere inside us, the discrete becomes amorphous. Consciousness weeds out the insignificant, focuses only on the significant."
"That's judgment," she said, "and it's where physicalist theory falls flat on its face. If this is an introspection device, then it won't be conscious. Introspection confuses consciousness with thinking. But sensing, feeling and thinking are physiological processes... and consciousness -"