Destination: Void

"Net one," he said, introducing the timed burst from the shot generator.

"There's a jam-up at the fifth-layer nodes," she said. She concentrated on the gauges for the fifth layer as though her thoughts could activate them, but they remained at zero. "No impulses are getting through," she said.

"I'll try sweeping the roulette cycles," Bickel said. He twisted a dial.

"Nothing," she said.

Bickel kicked off his row of switches, moved the jacks to the left. "Here, let's try a trigonometrically oscillating potential in the loops. Give me the new readings for each layer of the nets. Mark one."

"You're getting a nonlinear reaction across all the nets now," she said. "It's close to zero linearity."

"That can't be!" Bickel said. "These things are still open circuits no matter what we call them." He depressed another switch. "Read the other nets."

Prudence suppressed a sense of frustration, swept her gaze across the dials.

"Nonlinear," she said.

Bickel stepped back, glared at the input panel. "This is nuts! What we have here is essentially a transducer. The outputs should match!"

Again, Prudence read her dials. "Your products are still zero."

"Any heat?" Bickel asked.

"Nothing significant," she said.

Bickel pursed his lips, thinking. "Somehow, we've produced a unitary orthogonal system for each net and the total assembly," he said. "And that's a contradiction. It could mean we have more than one system in each of these separate nets."

"You have an unknown that's swallowing energy," Prudence said, her excitement kindling. "Isn't that our definition of -"

"It isn't conscious," Bickel said. "Whatever the unknown system is, it can't be conscious... not yet. This setup is too simple, doesn't have enough source data..."

"Then it's some error in the hookup," Prudence said.

Bickel's shoulders sagged. He took a deep, tired breath. "Yeah. Has to be."

"Where's your record of assembly and circuit tests?" Prudence asked.

"I isolated an auxiliary storage tank," Bickel said. He gestured vaguely to his left. "It's the red-flagged one. Everything's in there... including all this." He waved at the diagnostic panel.

"You get something to eat and take a rest break," she said. "I'll start tracing circuits."

"We got a jam-up on the direct test," Bickel said. "It wasn't an open-circuit reaction. And the net-interchange test produces zero at the output without flagging the point of loss. The thing's a goddamn sponge!"

"It'll be some simple error," she said. "Wake Tim and send him in while you're at it. He's had more than his four hours off."

"I am tired," Bickel admitted. He thought back, asking himself how long it had been since he had rested. Three full watches anyway.

I let myself get too tired, he thought. I know better. This is exacting work. Going too long without a break is the surest way to make mistakes.

"It'll be some simple thing," he said, but he knew as he said it that this was wrong. Sleep. He needed sleep.

Bickel headed toward quarters, pawing at the problem in his mind, rolling it over. The setup produced a contradictory reaction. Nothing simple was going to produce that complex a contradiction.

Behind him, Prudence activated the readouts at the red-flagged portion of the panel, started getting the feel of the setup. Sometimes with these computer problems, she knew, you could move intuitively into the area of difficulty, save yourself hours of hunting. Certain parts of a setup would feel wrong.

Presently, Timberlake joined her, yawning. "Bick told me. Trouble."

"Odd trouble."

"So I gathered." He cleared his throat. "Exactly what happened?"

She told him about the tests, the jam-up at the fifth-layer nodes and the subsequent disagreement between input and output.

"Zero linearity?" he asked.

"Almost."

"And no heat?"

"Nothing showed on the sensors."

Timberlake looked at the readout, the panel on both sides. "This is the storage tank we isolated. Have you examined the whole procedure?"

"I was just getting acquainted with the setup when you came in."

"That thing should've worked," Timberlake said. "It was a clean, straightforward construction all the way. I could've sworn it was going to give us that integrated readout, remove the nonsignificant digits, and we could just go on from..."

He paused, then said, "Unexpected feedback would... might cause the thing to react the way it did."

"I don't follow you."

"An oscillation. A flyback pulse that we didn't take into account."

"That might jam up the direct test," she said, "but it wouldn't account for the other reaction. If you were into the computer, of course... but that's one-way... isn't it?"

"Gated all the way. Our setup could receive selected data from the computer, but nothing went back in. No... I was thinking of this storage bank here." He nodded toward the panel in front of Prudence.

She turned toward the panel, puzzled. "But this is just......omplicated recorder. All it does is keep track of our work, step by step. It is isolated from the rest of the computer, isn't it?"

"What if it isn't isolated from the rest of the computer?" Timberlake asked.

"But Bickel assured me..."

"Yeah," Timberlake said, "and he probably believed it. I checked the work, too. If the schematics are correct, it's isolated. But what if the schematics are off?"

"Why would they be?"

"I don't know, but what if they are?"

Timberlake moved down the panel to the left, searching. He stopped at a translator output head. "Easy enough to find out. I'll just sort to find out if any of that test setup got into the master banks."

"If it did get in, there's no telling what it loused up," she said.

"Not necessarily," Timberlake said. He began cutting a program tape, referring to the computer banks themselves for the necessary data. Presently, he said, "That should do it."

Within seconds the load-and-go signal flashed at the readout in front of Timberlake. He switched it for an online printout and began reading the automatic translation.

"That was awfully fast," Prudence said.

Timberlake ignored her, sca

"For Chrissakes!" he said.

"What is it?" she asked, suppressing an irrational surge of fear.

"Get Bickel," Timberlake said. "This damn thing is giving us the truncated readout right here."

"What?"

"The answer we expected to get back at that setup if it worked," Timberlake said. "We're getting it here right now!"

"That's impossible," she said.

"Sure it is," Timberlake said. "You helped program this thing; look for yourself."

He whirled, brushed past her and headed for quarters. Prudence bent over the printout, sca

With a breath-stopping sense of awe, she realized that the printout was devoid of insignificant digits. It had been weeded down to essentials.