Destination: Void

Bickel cleared his throat. "Use extreme care until I've removed the killer program. Anything in the ship could be a murder instrument, do you understand? The air we breathe, the reclamation systems, robox units, any sharp edge with poison on it... anything."

He depressed the first action switch, said: "Countdown for field buildup starts in thirty seconds. Wish me luck."

And Flattery thought: He's committing suicide... a useless gesture.

Bickel watched the curve of gauges overhead. They registered power in the circuits, vocoder on and pulsing. A faint hum issued from the vocoder. It gave a sudden static burp.

Needles slammed against pins on the monitor dials.

I am the Sorcerer's Apprentice, he thought.

A rasping came from the vocoder now. Slowly it resolved itself into a guttural, almost unintelligible voice.

"To kill," it said.

Bickel studied the meters, saw the demand drain in the computer, pulse action in the Ox circuits.

It was the computer speaking on its own.

"To kill," it repeated, speaking more clearly this time. "To negate energy, dissolution of systems using energy in any form... symbolic approximations... nonmathematical."

Bickel activated a diagnostic circuit, read the meters. No energy in the command communications circuits, a pulse in the Ox, low energy drain to the computer.

To kill.

He stared at his board, thinking.

Information conveyed out of a tape had an exact mathematical equivalent. The tape message was at least two messages - and probably many more. It was the functional message, the play of what it was supposed to do - supply information, add, subtract, multiply, solve for an unknown... But it also produced the mathematical base which identified the message precisely for a human operator according to how much information was conveyed.

Beyond this, Bickel wondered, what?

He knew he had not energized the system or imprinted his own brand of consciousness on it. Yet, the thing acted independently. He felt himself on the edge of aborting this step, calling in the others for consultation... but the deadliness of this monster remained. To kill.

CHAPTER 29

"The task of his destruction was mine, but I have failed."

A DEEP SENSE of stirring could be felt in the ship. Timberlake felt it, and Flattery - but especially Bickel. It was like a sleeper turning over in his hammock, the supportive lines twisting, stretching, molecules displaced.

To kill, Bickel thought.

Whatever had stirred within the ship, it already knew this verb. Did it feel guilt at how it had learned? Tim and Raj had not yet been subjected to this violent educational process.

To kill.

The red button was still there behind its wall panel.

Is Flattery's duty, my duty?

Was it already too late for such concerns?

The field generator which he had reworked for his purposes remained a magnet for Bickel's attention. He looked at the controls to the generator, the switch.

If I blow the ship, I'll never know whether it would've worked. Some other Bickel...lone of a clone of a clone - might have to sit here confronted by this same indecision.

It's my choice.

Before he could change his mind, Bickel depressed the action switch on the reworked field generator. He felt it building up around him, making his skin crawl. Every hair follicle tingled. His eyes watered and the backs of his hands trembled. He felt suspended in a basket of energy.

Something was fishing for him, casting out with a net, dangling hooked lines at him. He knew this for the symbol juggling it had to be - the mind trying to box a new experience within known symbols.

One of the nets caught him.

The shot-effect burst struck with an infinity of sparks.

It was like an electric shock, pungent with reality. He felt himself bound up in looped spirals, being towed with an undulating rhythm. His entire sensorium had become a worm being towed through a net... no: through holes and tubes and burrows. He felt that valves opened for him and closed behind him. It was like traveling through the ship's interior access tubes.

Except that he was a worm with every sense concentrated on his skin, seeing, breathing, hearing, feeling through every pore. And all the while he was being towed down that dizzy spiraling with an undulant rhythm.

Labels began flashing against that sensitized skin and he saw them with a billion eyes.

"aural sense data"

"linear accretion of information"

"latent addition adjustment"

"closed-system matching factor"

"16,000-year memory dropoff"

"total sense-quality approximation"

"internal counting mechanism"

Internal counting mechanism, he thought.

His worm-self grew a pseudopod, jacked the mobius energizer into a glowing, flickering board.

Immediately, he felt the beat of it like another heart and the labels began flashing past faster and faster.

"psychorelation form-chart"... "sense-modality interchange"... "form-outline analogue"... "infinite submatrix cha

The whole pattern of labels and valves began to make an odd kind of sense to him, a coherence within coherence... like a dream that had to be interpreted as a whole.

The probability of a sufficient number of cells in the computer failing at any given moment could be given as 16 X 10-15 [16 times 10 to the negative fifteenth power]: The fact, loomed in his awareness. 16,000-year memory dropoff.

The system in which he found himself was such that it had had a probability of losing one bit out of every 16,000 memories through system malfunction... but classification memory in this context meant a partial bit, not an entire incident.

Is this system the computer, or is it me? he wondered.

"YOU!"

The sound slammed against every pore of his sensitized skin and he momentarily blanked out.

As he floated back, something whispered: "Synergy."

It was a cool bath of sound against his worm-self.

Synergy, Bickel thought. Cooperation in work. Synergy. Coordination.

"Human consciousness," something whispered. "Definition too broad. Generalized body and specialized brain...elationship."

Past his skin-eyes there swept a pattern of interlaced lines, a lacing together. It writhed and knotted and locked, put out symbols and arrows.

A schematic!

It kept flowing past his awareness. Cell-net continuities arranged as equilateral triangles on their contact faces. Bundles of parallel circuits tripled, each functioning as a nerve net and each monitoring the other two nets in the tripled circuitry. They were grouped in afferent units at first. Each cell in a layer of a net had an excitatory linkage to each of the three synapses on the next layer.

The flow shifted to the efferent net, the feedback system, and he saw the one-third twist, the mobius twist that required each feedback monitor to be filtered through at least one other net before functioning as a control on the net of its origin.

"God, hear thy si

How could Flattery be in here? he asked himself.

The answer paraded before his awareness - Flattery's field generator had amplified voice resonances against the walls of the cubby and these had been cycled back into the total ship system. The gate circuits had been useless. Every sensor in this room was a unit of feedback.

"The eye hath not seen, nor ear heard," said the voice of Flattery. "Neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him."

What's this mean? Bickel asked himself.