Destination: Void

"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."

CHAPTER 14

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.

"Coffee later," he said. "No more food of any kind in here, anyway. We have to keep the cover plates open and we can't risk contaminating the fine structure. If you're free, I could use some help."

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. Co

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 co

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 co

"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?"