Destination: Void

"Isn't that a rather devious suggestion for our cleric?" Bickel asked.

"That was the psychiatrist speaking," Prudence said. "Go on, get your sleep."

"And I can sit here and twiddle my thumbs," Timberlake said.

Bickel looked at Timberlake, recalling the man's bitter anger over Hempstead's suggestion. For the first time in many hours, Bickel focused his full attention on Timberlake, seeing the pride the man had swallowed in relinquishing command of the ship, seeing Timberlake's primary concern - for the human lives around him.

There was no easing Timberlake's tensions right now, Bickel realized. The lives were in danger... every life on the Tin Egg from the lowliest chick embryo in the hyb tanks right up to Timberlake himself.

Timberlake sometimes saw through things intuitively, Bickel realized. And Timberlake was an engineer. It might help him if he were kept occupied... and this crew could use any available edge.

"Tim," Bickel said, "we have to solve for consciousness the way you solve for a specific effect in a transceiver or a tuner or an amplifier. You might be chewing that over while I get some rest. I need specific answers that can be translated into working schematics."

"But we're stuck with that thing in the shop," Timberlake protested.

"Only as a begi

"Except we're two days closer to our deadline and no closer to a solution," Timberlake growled.

Bickel put down a surge of anger. "Suit yourself." He turned away, crossed to the hatch into quarters, let himself through, sealed the hatch behind him.

The sound of the hatch expanders hissed through him like a sigh and he found himself standing in the galley-round wondering if he had enough energy left to eat and get into a sleeping cubicle.

"I have to eat," he whispered. "Got to keep my strength up."

He pushed himself across to the quick-bar, sent half a heat charge through a squeeze tube of soup, gulped it. Chicken. He could feel the broth pouring energy back into him, took a tube of hot chocolate after the soup.

He crossed to his padded tank, checked the cubicle's life-systems repeaters. Every gauge was normal. He let himself into the tank, closed its hatch, pulled the pneumopin. Slowly, gently, the tank enclosed him, buoyed him. He felt the flow of oxygen-rich air across his face, the air filtered and refiltered so many times that it had lost most of its ship stink.

His muscles began to unwind and, as usual when he prepared for sleep in the cubicle, he wondered at the soothing effect. It was like a return to the womb.

What womb bore the original me? he wondered. Somewhere, there was a mother... and a father. Even if I was grown in a gestation chamber, somewhere flesh and blood conceived me. Who were they? I'll never know. Useless even to think about it.

He forced his attention instead onto the "cube" around him, the artificial womb with its deep sense of security to insure sound sleep.

Why do we get more and better rest in a "cube"? A quick nap on an action couch is nowhere near as restful. Why? Is it something atavistic, a phylogenetic return to the sea? Or is it something else, something we have yet to recognize?

Bickel focused his awareness on the billowing softness of the enclosure, the rich moist air. Sleep was sending its tendrils through him and he sensed how slow and even his breathing had become.

How rhythmic.

The set rhythms, he thought, holding back sleep. There's an oscillation factor in our problem. Oscillation is present in hypnotic captivation, in sleep-breathing, in the heartbeat... in sex...

And living cells possess north and south magnetic poles, he thought.

He recalled the biologist-designer, Vincent Frame, expounding on that theme in a lecture for Biological Engineering back at UMB.

I am a structure composed of many different cells, Bickel reminded himself. Coordinated.

Frame had hammered at this theme, pointing to vital clues in the oscillations and pulses of human activities - cell energies.

In that remembered lecture, Frame had been explaining the design of a low-gravity lounge chair.

Rhythms... characteristic rhythms of living.

Frame had returned to that concept time and again.

Oscillation.

Despite his fatigue and the sleep lurking at the edge of his awareness, Bickel felt the urgency of this "hot track" onto which his mind had stumbled. He thumbed his intercom alive, looked up to the tiny monitor screen.

Timberlake's face peered back at him.

"Remember Dr. Frame's lectures. Oscillation. Discuss it later." Bickel released the intercom switch before Timberlake could answer.

As he sank back, Bickel felt sleep come up from some dark place underneath to engulf him.

CHAPTER 18

Is consciousness merely a special form of hallucination?

FLATTERY HAD JUST shifted the Com-central board to Prudence. He looked across at Timberlake, who sat on the edge of his action couch staring at a memo pad of ship paper. The thin paper rustled faintly as Timberlake folded back a page, scribbled something on a clean surface.

The monitor screen beside Timberlake showed that Bickel had sunk into sleep almost immediately after that strange call.

"Tim, did Bick's message make sense to you?" Flattery asked.

"Maybe." Timberlake looked up from his notepad. "Let's assume that consciousness involves an organic receptor of some kind which produces a field structure."

"And this field structure expands and collapses under different stresses," Prudence said.

Timberlake nodded. "And that field structure itself would be the phenomenon we call consciousness."

"Are you two agreeing with him?" Flattery asked.

"For the moment," Timberlake said. "Now, let's follow this assumption. The organic receptor would be subjected to a constant storm of impressions."

"And most researchers think the cerebellum is the focus of that storm of impressions," Prudence said.

"But it's certainly not the seat of consciousness," Flattery objected.

"There may be no seat of consciousness," Prudence said. "We're talking about a motile phenomenon. It can move by itself."

"Okay," Timberlake said. "What's the impression input? What does the cerebellum receive?"

"Electrical inputs of some form," Prudence said.

"Yes.... but how is that input sorted into its receiver?"

Flattery inhaled a deep breath, caught at last by the feeling of the hunt with the quarry near. Was it possible that this crew would succeed? He grew conscious that Prudence had asked him a question.

"What?"

"Do you understand this concept? We're talking about electroform inputs of nerve-impulse groups and each group would be of extremely short duration."

"But the groups wouldn't be absolutely discrete," Flattery said.

"Of course not," she said. "It's like the ambiguity of light. Sometimes the physicist has to think of light as waves and sometimes as particles."

"Wavicles," Flattery said, his tone musing.

"Right. So sometimes we think of these nerve-impulse groups as discrete units, particles, and sometimes we think of them as a continuous flow... waves."

"Track that discrete flow for me," Timberlake said.

She glanced away from the big console, studied Timberlake. There was no avoiding the excitement in him. With that intuitive sense of his, Timberlake had leaped ahead somewhere and the others were supposed to follow.

"The track's pretty well plotted," Flattery said: "Action currents are conducted over the cortico-ponto-cerebellar tract. What're you driving at?"