Destination: Void

"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 co

"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 co

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 co

"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 -"

"Is something else," Bickel said. "It's a relationship, a field; a selective interchange. It drops the insignificant digits. It's a weeder. Now, we see if we have a device that can weed on the basis of intermittent data, some of which is erroneous."

"Erroneous data - significant results," she whispered.

"What?"

But she ignored Bickel to turn and look at the overhead screen where Flattery was revealed calmly monitoring the big board. Something Flattery had said came now into her mind as though it had been amplified to full volume:

"There's nothing concerning ourselves about which we can be truly objective except our physical responses - the reflections of behavior. We exist in a forest of illusion where the very concept of consciousness merges with illusion. "

She turned to look at Bickel where he worked, seeing the stretch of his muscles under the vacsuit fabric as he bent to finish the assembly. And she thought: To be conscious, you must surmount illusion. Bickel saw that where I didn't.

A moment of illumination filled her mind and she saw the man at his work as more than flesh and sinew and nerves - more than the physical chemistry with blanks to be filled in. Bickel was both a minuscule and vulnerable creature, but beyond that, he contained powers that could stretch across any universe. Something of this momentary understanding struck her as almost religious... holy. She savored it, realizing this was a private and personal thing she could never completely communicate to another creature.

Bickel finished the final tie of the G-20 assembly, stood up, and rubbed the small of his back. His hands trembled as he relaxed after the fierce concentration of the work he had just completed.

"Let's give it a run," he said. "Prue, you monitor the diagnostic board." He gestured to the panel of dials and gauges waiting like so many glistening eyes at his left. "I'll give each net of the roulette cycles a one-fifth-second burst from the shot generator." He moved around to the right of the piled blocks of the test setup, stepping over the leads with elaborate care. He flipped the row of switches to start the source program through the inputs.

"Mark," he said.

"Mark," she said as her dial needles snapped over to register the pulse.

"Give me the mean synapse threshold, mean endbulb threshold, and action time on each net." Bickel depressed three switches simultaneously. "Interchange activated."

He waited, feeling the suspense grow, a tightness in his stomach.

"Interchange now showing entrance pulse," she said.