Bickel heard Flattery slide onto his own action couch, risked a glance at the man. Flattery might be difficult to handle. Flattery was an M.D. and ship-trained, yes. He could stand a watch, repair the simpler servos and sensors, and obey the ordinary precautions that spelled out life-systems security. There was another Flattery, though: the psychiatrist-chaplain. To Bickel, the psychiatrist half of the man suggested special usefulness, but the enigma of the chaplain offered only mysticism and open-end arguments.
I never know which mask Flattery's wearing, Bickel thought. He wished then there could have been a way to avoid having a chaplain on the Tin Egg. But there had been no way; the world's religious millions paid an enormous amount of taxes. The psychiatrists, in training Flattery and his backups, had approached the job sincerely. They had had little choice. It had been a long time since psychiatrists denied they served a witch-doctor function... and the step from witch doctor to divine was a short one.
Timberlake came up beside Bickel, studied the gauge which showed the timed pulse in the navigational analogue banks.
"That acts like a Doppler reference pulse from the time log," he said. "You been checking our position?"
"No," Bickel said, and as he spoke, the answer to this variant pulse clicked home in his mind. He had set up a telltale warning net in the computer to alert him when ship damage reached a critical point. Damage to the navigational system could be most critical - especially internal damage. But unlike destruction of hardware, that internal damage would only betray itself by position errors. His telltale circuitry had alerted one of the ship computer's master programs. A running Doppler reference check was being made on their position.
Bickel shifted to the computer board, ran a series trial on the navigational loops, read the induced resonance off the pulsing gauges. It checked.
He explained what was happening.
"The computer acts... almost... human," Flattery said.
Bickel and Timberlake exchanged a knowing smile. Almost human, indeed! The damn thing merely was doing what it was designed to do.
"We'd better take the computer schematics and the design specs and have a real skull session on what the lack of an OMC may be doing to it," Timberlake said.
Bickel nodded. He was thankful then that Timberlake was, in many respects, as good an electronics man as anyone on the ship - the necessary foundation for his specialty. There was always that almost qualification on his abilities, though. Life-systems work trapped men into a "generalist" corner. They knew plenty of biophysics, but they were not doctors. They were adept in electronics, but fell short of that smooth juggling of variables which marked the creative engineer.
"You ready for a break, John?" Flattery asked.
"Anytime. How's Prue?"
"Doctor Weygand is asleep now," Flattery said. "She needs a few more hours recuperation."
Why is he so formal? Bickel wondered. Raj must know I shared classes with her. She was always Prue then. Why should she suddenly be Doctor Weygand?
"I'll take the board on the count," Flattery said, and they began the change of watch.
Timberlake, sensing Bickel's questions, realized that Flattery's emphasis on Doctor Weygand had not been aimed at the electronics engineer.
Raj was saying something to me, Timberlake thought. He was telling me that Doctor Weygand may have had medical reasons for her strange behavior. Raj is telling me to keep my mouth shut.
And Timberlake found himself resenting the fact that Flattery had found the warning necessary.
Bickel closed off his link to the controls, slipped off his couch, and began exercising the stiffness out of his muscles. Remembering the classes he had shared with Prue Weygand - computer math, servo-sensor repair, ship function - he recalled the woman. She was a disturbing female-plus creature, sensitive and with her feelings all too apparent. Bickel realized then that a photograph of Prue Weygand in repose would show a rather unassuming woman with regular features and a good, but not sensational figure. She was the kind who attracted male stares, though. She radiated some vital, sparking thing - especially when she walked.
Is that why I chose her? Bickel wondered. He broke off his exercises to consider the question. The Prue kind of woman presented a source of trouble in an otherwise all-male crew - unless they all went on anti-S. But they couldn't afford to dull their faculties that way.
I chose her because, in a ship of quintuple backup, she appears unique, Bickel reassured himself. She is trained in ecology, medicine, and computer math. She is going to be damned useful to us.
But doubts remained.
Bickel forced them out of his mind by looking around Com-central, focusing his attention on the ship. The ship-cum-computer-cum-hybernating-colonists - here was one set of resources that Bickel felt they could fit into a logical pigeonhole, assess and weigh and use as they needed.
He sensed the ship stretching out from him in its sixteen concentric shells, a great ovoid bulk almost a mile across its long axis. Beyond the water barrier and baffles that shielded the core lay miles of corridors and tubeways, self-sealing compartments. Through it all stretched the organized clutter of material needed to make life possible for humans in an alien environment.
In the hyb tanks they had two thousand adult humans, a thousand human embryos, and more than six thousand animal embryos...full ecological spectrum."
Bickel turned, looked at his own computer board. His plan involved dangerous risk to the computer, but the risk was necessary. The others might fight him, but they would have to come around.
He looked at Flattery busy on the big board, Timberlake taking a relaxing massage on his action couch. He looked back at the computer board. The Tin Egg's computer was basically a multisystem system with internal ruby laser "real time" clocks to log its own "experiences." It incorporated more than 800,000 specialized routines (installed by a prodigious spending of manpower). Bickel weighed the computers untried potential: its trinanosecond thoughtput and multischeduling facilities allowed it to interleave thousands of programs simultaneously. It could monitor sequencing, cuing, and input through a core memory with enormous reserves of trapping functions, branching operations, and alarm systems networks.
With an OMC tied in as supervisory program - as supreme decision-maker - the computer and the ship it controlled had been a living creature of metal. But three brains had failed in that delicately powerful linkage. And Bickel-the-pragmatist trusted only that which worked. Without an OMC, the ship computer remained an inert mass of machinery whose output-on-demand followed a fixed design and could be accepted or rejected only after a human decision.
"How long until Prue will be with us?" Bickel asked.
"About three hours," Timberlake said.
"I want her opinion on the postmortem," Bickel said. "I'm not satisfied with what we found in the first two brains."
Timberlake shut down his couch massage, directed a probing stare at Flattery.
The psychiatrist-chaplain only smiled, reminding himself that Bickel was logic-prone with a disregard of everything except the main line of reasoning that made him sound boorish at times.
"Moonbase'll ask some questions for which we have no answers," Bickel said. "We can't afford to sound fumbling." He looked at Timberlake. "They're going to take us apart, one by one - life systems to..."
"Life systems were perfect!" Timberlake snapped.
"We'd better be able to prove it," Bickel said.
"I went through the entire console when Brain One failed," Timberlake said. "Check it yourself."
"I did. A couple of things bothered me. Brain One preferred to be called Myrtle. Why? I find nothing in the memory core to explain that - except that Brain One was removed from a genetic monster that probably was female."
"Myrtle's personal life system tested within .0002 of homeostatic center on the Anders Base," Timberlake said.
"Don't let that identity preference seduce you," Flattery said. "It was for our benefit - so we could anthropomorphize the ship-OMC."
"Yeah," Bickel said. "That's the reason they each gave, but is it the right one?"
"Those brains were as perfect as any ever born," Flattery said, and he wondered why he allowed Bickel's attitude to irritate him. "Okay, they were raised from infancy as part of the total ship-sensor-servo system. So what? They didn't know any other life or want -"
"You said a couple of things were bothering you," Timberlake interrupted. "What's the other one?"
"Your life-systems report," Bickel said, "entry 9107 on Myrtle. It says: 'None of the systems appear then to have been at fault.' Why'd you use that word appear, Tim? You have some doubts you couldn't enter in the report?"
"Not a damn one!" Timberlake said. "Those systems were perfect!"
"Then why didn't you just say so?"
"He was only being cautious," Flattery said. "If you have checked the records, you'll find my medical report confirms his findings in every respect."
"Except one," Bickel said.