"Threshold," Flattery said and there was wonder in his voice.
"Yes," Prudence said. "A hyperconscious subject has a low threshold. Impulses pass into his awareness with ease. You're suggesting the OMC brains couldn't handle hyperconsciousness."
"Something like that."
"Look," she said, "the assault of nerve impulses on the human... consciousness..." She looked defensively at Bickel. "Well, what else are we going to call it?"
"Okay," Bickel said. "Go on."
She stared at him a moment. "This assault is constant, gigantic. The impulses are always present. They swarm around you. There has to be a limiting factor, a threshold. Impulses have to pass a certain threshold before you grow... aware of them."
"And that threshold varies from person to person, even minute to minute in the same person," Flattery said:
"But how do nerve impulses get over that wall?" Bickel asked.
Why did he use that word? she wondered.
"Sometimes the impulses grow stronger," Flattery said.
"But that isn't the whole story," Prudence said. "There's activity on the side of the... experiencer, too. You focus your attention on something and that lowers your threshold."
"Danger can lower it, too," Flattery said. And he waited to see if Bickel would pick up that cue.
Bickel looked at Flattery, wondering. "We're in danger right now, Raj. Is that something they did to us - deliberately?"
"You think that danger out there isn't real?" Flattery asked, unconsciously hooking a thumb toward the shortest distance between himself and the outer hull.
Bickel held his silence, feeling his tongue go dry. Unreasoning terror pervaded him. It was a towering oblivion that threatened to engulf him.
"John," Prudence asked, "are you all right?"
"Just a touch of ship vertigo," Bickel managed. He forced a smile. "Perhaps... maybe I'm tired. I went more than two shifts at that haywire setup in the shop, and I haven't really had a good rest for I don't know how long."
Knowing when to relax the pressure is half the job, Prudence reminded herself. "Get some chow and shuteye. It might help if we let up on this problem a bit."
And she thought: I can give him that advice but I won't take it myself.
Those last chemical experiments on her own body were playing hob with her sense of reality. She wondered if she should take Raj into her confidence, but rejected this thought as soon as it occurred. Raj would say she was meddling. He'd force her to stop and she felt that she didn't dare stop now. There was something... something... something so close....
"What about answering Hempstead?" Bickel asked.
"Let 'em sweat," Timberlake growled.
"They'll figure it was a transmission breakdown if we go too long beyond the delay period," Bickel said. "They'll retransmit the message."
"That gets us the retransmission without committing ourselves," Flattery said.
"Isn't that a rather devious suggestion for our cleric?" Bickel asked.
"That was the psychiatrist speaking," Prudence said. "Go on, get your sleep."
"And I can sit here and twiddle my thumbs," Timberlake said.
Bickel looked at Timberlake, recalling the man's bitter anger over Hempstead's suggestion. For the first time in many hours, Bickel focused his full attention on Timberlake, seeing the pride the man had swallowed in relinquishing command of the ship, seeing Timberlake's primary concern - for the human lives around him.
There was no easing Timberlake's tensions right now, Bickel realized. The lives were in danger... every life on the Tin Egg from the lowliest chick embryo in the hyb tanks right up to Timberlake himself.
Timberlake sometimes saw through things intuitively, Bickel realized. And Timberlake was an engineer. It might help him if he were kept occupied... and this crew could use any available edge.
"Tim," Bickel said, "we have to solve for consciousness the way you solve for a specific effect in a transceiver or a tuner or an amplifier. You might be chewing that over while I get some rest. I need specific answers that can be translated into working schematics."
"But we're stuck with that thing in the shop," Timberlake protested.
"Only as a beginning. We have to use the Ox, yeah, because it's our only entrance into the computer for some of our vital data... now. But it's still a place to begin. Nothing's changed, really."
"Except we're two days closer to our deadline and no closer to a solution," Timberlake growled.
Bickel put down a surge of anger. "Suit yourself." He turned away, crossed to the hatch into quarters, let himself through, sealed the hatch behind him.
The sound of the hatch expanders hissed through him like a sigh and he found himself standing in the galley-round wondering if he had enough energy left to eat and get into a sleeping cubicle.
"I have to eat," he whispered. "Got to keep my strength up."
He pushed himself across to the quick-bar, sent half a heat charge through a squeeze tube of soup, gulped it. Chicken. He could feel the broth pouring energy back into him, took a tube of hot chocolate after the soup.
He crossed to his padded tank, checked the cubicle's life-systems repeaters. Every gauge was normal. He let himself into the tank, closed its hatch, pulled the pneumopin. Slowly, gently, the tank enclosed him, buoyed him. He felt the flow of oxygen-rich air across his face, the air filtered and refiltered so many times that it had lost most of its ship stink.
His muscles began to unwind and, as usual when he prepared for sleep in the cubicle, he wondered at the soothing effect. It was like a return to the womb.
What womb bore the original me? he wondered. Somewhere, there was a mother... and a father. Even if I was grown in a gestation chamber, somewhere flesh and blood conceived me. Who were they? I'll never know. Useless even to think about it.
He forced his attention instead onto the "cube" around him, the artificial womb with its deep sense of security to insure sound sleep.
Why do we get more and better rest in a "cube"? A quick nap on an action couch is nowhere near as restful. Why? Is it something atavistic, a phylogenetic return to the sea? Or is it something else, something we have yet to recognize?
Bickel focused his awareness on the billowing softness of the enclosure, the rich moist air. Sleep was sending its tendrils through him and he sensed how slow and even his breathing had become.
How rhythmic.
The set rhythms, he thought, holding back sleep. There's an oscillation factor in our problem. Oscillation is present in hypnotic captivation, in sleep-breathing, in the heartbeat... in sex...
And living cells possess north and south magnetic poles, he thought.
He recalled the biologist-designer, Vincent Frame, expounding on that theme in a lecture for Biological Engineering back at UMB.
I am a structure composed of many different cells, Bickel reminded himself. Coordinated.