Destination: Void

"Are you saying a killer instinct is a necessary preliminary to consciousness?"

"Bickel's saying that! I'm not."

"Why're you so sure of this?"

"His actions leave no doubt of it!"

"Ahhh... you're making this up."

"Give me that torch," Flattery said.

"No," Timberlake shook his head.

"I'm going to take that torch if I have to kill you to get it," Flattery said. He inched toward Timberlake.

"Prue, did you hear this madman?" Timberlake asked, backing one step.

The command net remained silent.

"Prue?"

Flattery drew himself up straight, his own words replaying in his mind. "....f I have to kill you to get it." He felt suddenly that he had been herded into a completely vulnerable corner.

Killer instinct? he wondered.

"Prue!" Timberlake called. Then: "Raj, snap out of it! Prue isn't answering!"

Flattery had stepped backward. He felt nausea, extreme chill, a shaking in the calves of his legs and in his shoulders. Half-screened thoughts flitted about on the edge of his awareness.

I'm avoiding something, he thought. Hiding my awareness from something... that... frightens...

"What's wrong with you, Raj?" Timberlake demanded; there was sudden concern in his voice.

Flattery put out a hand, grasped a stanchion to keep himself from collapsing. He closed his eyes, conjured up the image of the sacred graphic imprinted on his cell in quarters - picturing against his eyelids the field of serenity with its suggestion of holy faces and the dynamics of the overprinting that combined the religious symbols on which men had spent their faith and yearning throughout evolutionary eons.

They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength, Flattery told himself. Lord, let this strength be transformed in the renewal of our minds. Let us share the light.

The litany hung suspended in his consciousness, focused on the word "mind," and Flattery's mental image of the sacred graphic took on motion. The field of serenity and sacred symbols dissolved into writhing atoms, drew a new pattern like the outline of a great river with its watershed.

Flattery opened his eyes to find the interior of this metal trap were he stood with Timberlake washed in golden light - glaring, yet soft.

Timberlake seemed unaware of the light, frozen in some private instant.

And Flattery found himself caught by the wonder of that revelation...reat river and its watershed.

All men are parts of the total stream, he thought. We are tributaries - and our minds are tributaries, and our most private thoughts. Every pattern in the universe contributes to the whole - some gushing like a freshet and some no more than a single touch of dew. All structure is an expression of the same law.

It was holographic - he saw that. The essential elements of the whole were carried in the smallest part. From the grain of sand you could project the universe. It could very well be the most elemental law of this universe.

The law was like a pulsing thread that he could experience but not express - simplicity becoming new complexity and again a greater simplicity that fragmented into a greater complexity that produced a greater simplicity...

He felt it in the touch of the suit's fabric against his skin, in the awareness of the washed air entering his lungs, in every sensory impression.

How clean and unique was this shower of molecules upon his person and upon this place he occupied in the dancing pattern!

"I thank Thee, Lord, for this enlightenment," he whispered.

And Flattery held himself in this supraliminal awareness, staring now at Timberlake. Timberlake appeared to him... somehow dead. He moved, but his eyes behind the faceplate were like holes in skull sockets. Each movement was the sticklike articulation of a skeleton.

Remembering Prudence and Bickel, Flattery felt that they shared this deadness: eyes empty of life. Their breasts moved with breathing, but the labored irregularity of that motion contained the same pattern (differing only in degree) as the breathing of a terminal sickness, the breathing of a dying person preserved beyond his time by artificial means.

We're doomed, Flattery thought. Lord, why didst Thou enlighten me only to show me this?

The skeletonlike Timberlake and dead-alive images in his memory filled Flattery with rage. He pulled himself upright against the stanchion, screamed: "You're dead! Zombies! You're already dead! Zombies!"

As quickly as the rage had come it fled him, and he felt himself crying softly. The feeling of enlightenment drained away. It had come in the space of ten heartbeats and left in the space of a single pulse. The golden light faded and the plasteel lock that trapped him with Timberlake was only that...oom of too solid walls, too small, its light too cold, and the air his suit provided was too charged with the omnipresent stinks of recycling.

"Raj, you've got to control yourself," Timberlake was saying.

But God controls us, Flattery thought. And God has told me what I must do. He permitted me a religious experience that I might see our doom and - encompassing it - fulfill it.

Timberlake took a deep breath, feeling the tightness in his chest. He felt faintly ill, his fear at their helplessness compounded by Flattery's near panic. He and Flattery were as trapped here as that cow embryo had been.

He thought of that helpless embryo in the Holstein section of the farm-stock hyb tanks...it of protoplasm attached to the life-system tubes with its own special code. It had been a unique identity, and Timberlake felt he had known that particular animal - could project its lost potential forward in his mind to see it grazing and fulfilling its natural functions as a producer of energy.

All that natural potential had been sacrificed, becoming merely units of cerebral excitation in the development of a mechanical consciousness. Any other function of possibility had been lost in the instant of its deliberate destruction. It had become a thing of the senses - unreal, receding into the past, its atoms dissipated in the time void. There could be nothing private or individual or unique about it from that instant of death onward.

Timberlake swallowed. His throat felt sore as though from remembered anguish. He knew this feeling was rooted in his training as a life-systems engineer - his inhibitions as a preserver of life. He shook his head, trying to drive out the sense of confusion.It was an unborn creature, an animal, he told himself. It wasn't really a being the way we are beings. The physical complexity of that dead creature was enormous, yet it never could have been conscious the way we are... even if it had lived out its normal life.

How empty the argument sounded even as it echoed silently in his mind.

Flattery wasn't screaming anymore. He stood there clutching a stanchion, glaring out of the faceplate.

"Take it easy, Raj." Timberlake said. He spoke softly, as though soothing a child who had been hurt. Then, louder: "Prue?"

Still no answer.

She could be too busy to answer, Timberlake thought.

He listened to the gentle burbling and whirring of his suit, assessing their position. Prue wasn't answering - reason unknown. Bickel had taken off for his quarters - obviously intent on completing the white box - black box step in his theory, transferring his own pattern of consciousness onto the white box that was the Ox-cum-computer. Would the Ox be like Bickel then? No... it couldn't be.

Timberlake felt suddenly that he had passed beyond some major obstacle in understanding his own personal mind-brain-body relationship. He sensed that he had entered a new, but as yet unidentified territory.

He saw that Flattery was almost drained of energy...esult of having been emotionally and physically overtaxed. The man had been through one hell of an experience up there in the tube. As Timberlake watched him, Flattery swayed against the stanchion, said: "Sorry... I threatened you."