He was playing the other side’s game, and he couldn’t afford a draw.
“What I’m getting at, bomb,” he continued, as calmly as possible, “is that the only experience available to you is your sensory data, and this data is merely a transcribed stream of electrical impulses that stimulate your computing-center circuitry.”
“In other words,” the bomb suggested with evident relish, “you are saying that all I know, really know, about the outside world is relayed to me through a series of electronic synapses?”
“Exactly.” Doolittle tried to keep any excitement from showing in his voice. The bomb was following his lead.
“But isn’t that the same procedure the human brain follows?”
“That’s true,” Doolittle admitted. “Only our synaptic connections are organic, whereas yours are inorganic.”
“I’m sorry,” the bomb objected, “I fail to see that that makes your observations any more valid than mine. The contrary, if it becomes a question of efficiency.”
“Yes, but you see, I have not only my own observations to go on, but the confirmation of those observations by others of my kind. Whereas you have only your own to rely on. You cannot offer unsubjective confirmation of your own observations.”
“Why, that would mean"—and a real note of uncertainty had at last crept into the bomb’s tone—"that would mean that I really don’t know what the outside universe is like at all… except in abstract, in unconfirmable abstract.”
“That’s it, that’s it!” Doolittle shouted excitedly.
“Intriguing,” the bomb confessed. “I wish I had more time to consider this matter.”
A horrible black swell had crept up under Doolittle’s heart, threatening to grab it and squeeze.
“Why… don’t you have more time to consider this matter?”
And the expected, damning reply: “Because I must detonate in two minutes and fifty-eight seconds. I must detonate. I must detonate…”
“Boiler, put it back,” Pinback pleaded. He grabbed desperately and caught the corporal’s leg as the latter was trying to retreat down the corridor. “Put the gun back… you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I’m going to save the ship, you goddamned yellow baby! Let go of me!” Boiler was trying to shake free. He couldn’t take another swing at his tormentor because he needed both hands to hold the bulky laser. And Pinback hung on tenaciously.
But Boiler was too strong for him. He had both arms around the corporal’s knees and he was still dragging him toward the access hatch to the bomb bay.
Having thus exhausted his total stock of semantic persuasion, Pinback leaned forward slightly and bit Boiler on the back of one leg. Boiler screamed, reached down, and grabbed a thick handful of Pinback’s shoulder-length hair.
He pulled him up slowly, meaning to use the gun-butt on him. But Pinback jerked free when Boiler tried to swing the rear of the laser around and grabbed it by the muzzle. He started tugging on it madly, trying to wrench it from Boiler’s grasp.
For his part, Boiler pulled on the back half of the weapon, and the two men did a little dance in the middle of the corridor, spinning each other around with the laser at the center.
“Don’t, don’t! Give me the gun!” Pinback kept blabbering, unaware that repetition wasn’t doing his argument any good. It was beginning to occur to him that he wasn’t going to be able to talk Boiler into giving up the gun.
Biting him seemed much more effective, but it was very undignified.
“You fool, I’m gonna shoot the pins out of the bomb,” Boiler screeched back, “and it’ll fall free and the ship’ll be saved. Don’t you see?”
“Give me the gun, Boiler. You’re crazy, you don’t know what you’re doing anymo—” There was a sharp, crystal-clear crack and both men froze.
Pinback looked over his right shoulder, following the path the thin red beam had taken. There was a neat little hole in the corridor wall with a tiny blob of extruded cooling metal slag at its base.
He turned slowly back to Boiler, who’d been startled into stillness. When he spoke, his voice had a quality in it Boiler had never heard before. It also had a quality in it Pinback had never heard before. Low and menacing and uncharacteristically assured.
“You… you could have killed me. You blew a hole in the wall.” He gestured over his shoulder. “See? Hole in the wall. Could have killed me.”
Whereupon, with his first aggressive gesture in twenty years of mission flight, he caught Boiler with a beautiful right cross.
“Now, bomb,” Doolittle went on, “consider this next question very carefully. What is your one purpose in life?”
“To explode, of course. Really, Lieutenant Doolittle, I would have thought that that was intuitively obvious even to you.”
“And you can only do it once, right?” pressed Doolittle, ignoring the mechanical sarcasm.
“That is correct.”
“And you wouldn’t want to explode on the basis of false data, would you?”
“Of course not.”
“Well then,” Doolittle began in his best professorial manner, desperately watching the seconds tick off on his suit chronometer. “You’ve already admitted that you have no real proof of the existence of the outside universe.”
“I didn’t exactly say—”
“So you have no absolute proof that Sergeant Pinback ordered you to initiate detonation-drop sequence.”
“I recall distinctly the bomb-run orders and all appropriate details,” the bomb objected a little huffily. “My memory is good on matters like these.”
Doolittle crossed mental fingers and hurried on. “Of course you ‘remember’ it. But all your ‘remembering,’ remember, is only a series of artificial sensory impulses, unconfirmable by independent means, which you now realize have no positive connection with outside reality.”
“True,” admitted the bomb, but before Doolittle could begin any mental dances of victory, it added, “but since this is so, I have no positive proof that you are really telling me all this.”
A glance at the suit chronometer again showed 0002:45.0, and the words DETONATION SEQUENCE IN PROGRESS now showed in small letters beneath it.
Somehow he had to crack the cycle of thought that kept the bomb-brain from recognizing the fact of its possible nonexistence. In less than three minutes…
Boiler was on top of Pinback, and Pinback was on top of Boiler. The two men grappled and rolled over and over in the corridor, the laser entwined dangerously between them, like a bone between two contending dogs.
Neither man could land a solid blow and both seemed oblivious to the continuing dialogue between Doolittle and the bomb, which now played continuously over the corridor speaker. They were so mad they couldn’t calm down enough to actually hurt each other. Instead they wasted their energy, each trying to pull the other off the laser, any sense of mission forgotten.
“That’s all beside the point,” Doolittle insisted frantically, waving his arms and trying not to turn himself upside down. “I mean, the concept is valid no matter where or with whom it originates.”
The bomb went “hmmm,” distinctly.
“So if you detonate…” Doolittle said wildly, gesturing at the mechanism.
“In twenty-nine seconds,” the bomb said easily.
“… you could be doing so on the basis of false data!”
“But as we have already agreed, I have no proof it was false data.”
Doolittle’s incredibly controlled emotions exploded in one final, frantic appeal. “You have no proof it was correct data!” He looked down at his chronometer and saw that it was ready to come up all goose-eggs. Then he turned his terrified gaze back on the bomb, and felt a strange peace.