Destination: Void

CHAPTER 15

Computers are just systems with a great amount of unconsciousness: everything held in immediate memory and subject to programs which the operator initiates. The operator, therefore, is the consciousness of the computer.

IT WAS AT least five minutes before Timberlake returned with Bickel. While she waited, Prudence ran through the experiment a second and a third time. Both tests produced the truncated readout.

She felt a constricting sensation in her chest. Every sound in the room pressed in on her - each tiny metallic click, the low humming of a timer, the faint breathing of a ventilator. She felt that this thing in front of her was something profoundly dangerous. It required her to act with delicate care. Something new had come awake on the Earthling.

The hatch slammed open behind her. Bickel pushed her aside, bent over the terminal. "Let me see!" His fingers flew over the keys. He sca

Timberlake moved up behind him, peered over Bickel's shoulder.

"How?" Timberlake asked.

"Tim," Bickel directed, "take the panel off that storage bank. Check it with everything we have. There has to be a line from it into the main computer somehow... a line that doesn't show on the master plan."

"But why would this thing start feeding us the right answer now?" Prudence demanded.

"That?" Bickel dismissed it with a wave of the hand. "The program went in with a key showing what was expected. Every part of the program was worked out on the main computer. We never cleared our work. It's still in there... acting as a filter. It filtered out everything except the answer that was keyed for optimum. Hell, anybody can make a computer act like that kind of filter. It doesn't mean a thing."

"Not so fast," she said, excited by a sudden inspiration. "What do you really have over there in that test setup?" She looked at the construction which Bickel so irreverently referred to as "The Ox." It still stood there like a surrealistic extrusion from the flat expanse of panel.

"You call it a transducer... of sorts," she said. "What's that really mean? The thing you have there is composed of blocks of nerve-net simulators arranged to integrate three lines of energy. The operational term is nerve-net simulators."

She gets too excited and she talks too much, Bickel thought. He knew this was partly his fatigue thinking for him, but he felt keyed up, buoyed by the quick discovery of what had gone wrong. He wanted to cut the link with the computer and rerun the test.

Timberlake already was removing the panel to get at the storage bank. The panel cover grated on the deck as he pushed it aside.

"Yeah, nerve-net simulators," Bickel said. He kept his attention on Timberlake, admiring the direct, purposeful way the man went at it. Timberlake was good at this work.

Prudence misread Bickel's answer, said: "And what's a nerve-net but an imbedding space? It catches energy... the way a spiderweb might catch ink you threw at it. The net makes a record in four dimensions of the energy you throw at it."

"Nice analogy," Bickel said. "You finding anything, Tim?"

"Not yet," Timberlake said. He was on his back now, his head, arms, and shoulders into the crawl space beneath the first wiring layer of the panel-to-storage system.

Noting where Timberlake had concentrated his attention, Bickel said: "I think you're right, Tim. It's most likely to be down there with the primary sheafs."

Prudence, concentrating on following her own train of thought, said: "So we have a multiple imbedding space, an energy catcher in four dimensions. The test program passes through this space as flux impulses in four dimensions and filters past the inhibitory roulette cycles in -"

"How's that again?" Bickel interrupted.

She looked up to find him staring at her.

"How's what again?" she asked.

"That about flux impulses."

"I said the test program passes through the imbedding space as flux impulses in four dimensions and filters past the inhibitory roulette..."

"By God, you're right," Bickel said. "The roulette cycles would be a filter. I never thought of it that way. You'd get a pileup of nodal pulses at random points in the net layers.. Your test program would have to find its own path through that, canceling out at some points, but passing on wherever it had a higher potential."

"And this filter screens the program through a system of random errors," Prudence said. "So you have to be wrong about the way it produced your truncated answers. The program that got through to the computer couldn't have been anything at all, like what you previously punched into the banks. Yet it produced the right answers."

"Lets play this over slowly," Bickel said. "We have circuitry here - the Ox plus computer - that should co

"Right. That's your imbedding space in four dimensions."

"So we sent energy pulses through it. And those -"

"Yoh!" Timberlake called, his voice echoing with a hollow resonance from the crawl space.

Bickel looked down, saw that only Timberlake's feet protruded into the shop now.

"Found it," Timberlake said. "It's a fifty-line sheaf, single plug. Shall I pull it?"

"Where does it lead?" Bickel asked.

"According to the color code it leads right down into the accessory storage banks," Timberlake said. His feet disappeared into the crawl space. "All these banks are linked that way! Why the hell doesn't it appear on the schematics?"

Bickel got down on his hands and knees at the mouth of the crawl hole. "Is there any kind of buffer or gating system in those lines?"

A hand light wavered back and forth in the crawl space. "Yeah, by God!" Timberlake said. "How'd you know?"

"Had to be," Bickel said. "That's a computer fail-safe system... and something else. Don't mess with it."

"Why... what do you mean?" Prudence asked.

"It's a recording system," Bickel said. And he had his answer to an earlier question. Would Moonbase install hidden elements in the ship-plus-computer system? Yes, and here was one of those hidden elements.

"Recording?" Prudence was puzzled.

"Yes!" He was angry. "Everything the computer does, everything we do - all recorded."

"Why?"

"So they can recover it and analyze it even if we're not around to help."

"But why wouldn't they tell us about -"

"They didn't want us questioning the purpose of this... this voyage until it was too late for us to change course."

She was defensive. "We could still go back to -"

"Don't be dense, Prue. A one-way trip. They don't want us back. We could be very dangerous. The only useful thing we have to offer is information... discovery."

Bickel rocked back on his heels, fighting a lost, sinking sensation.

Those bastards! he thought. They knew we'd find this the first time we went looking into the computer's i

Timberlake came scooting out of the crawl space, stood up. "There's a cover plate down there with a red-letter warning: 'Extreme Danger! To be opened by Moonbase perso

"I wish it didn't," Bickel said. He peered into the hole.

Timberlake was as puzzled as Prudence had been. "But a recorder and fail-safe system with such -"

"That has 'don't touch' written all over it," Bickel said. "I guarantee you - mess with it and something really destructive happens. Don't change a damn thing." He stood up, removed the blocking plugs they had installed to isolate their test system. His movements were wooden and poorly coordinated.

Isolate! He pushed past Prudence who still appeared puzzled. Did any of the others understand what was really happening here? The test leads clattered as he threw them onto the bench.