"Arbitrary turn-back command," Flattery reminded himself. That was the code signal he must listen for from UMB. That was the signal he must obey - unless he judged the ship had to be destroyed before receiving that signal.
A simple push on one of the hidden triggers would activate the master program in the ship's computer, open airlocks, set off explosive charges. Death and destruction for crew, ship, all the colonists and their supplies.
Colonists and their supplies! Flattery thought.
He was too good a psychiatrist not to recognize the guilt motives behind the careful provisioning of this ship.
"If you solve the Artificial Consciousness problem, you can plant a human colony somewhere in space. Not at Tau Ceti, of course, but..."
And he was too good a divine not to penetrate the religious hokum, not to see through to the essential rightness of his role in the project.
Given the known perils, there had to be a safety fuse. There had to be someone willing and able to blow up the ship.
Flattery knew the reasons. They were reality of the most brutal kind.
The first crude attempts at mechanical reproduction of consciousness had been made on an island in Puget Sound. The island no longer existed. "Rogue consciousness!" they had screamed. True enough. Something had defied natural laws, slaughtered lab personnel, destroyed sensors, sent slashing beams of pure destruction through the- surrounding countryside.
Finally, it had taken the island - God knew where.
Poof!
No island.
No lab personnel.
Nothing but gray water and a cold north wind whipping whitecaps across it and the fish and the seaweed invading the area where land and men and machinery had been.
Just thinking about it made Flattery shiver. He conjured up in his mind the image of the sacred graphic from his quarters, absorbed some of the peace from the field of serenity, the tranquility of the holy faces.
Even Moonbase didn't walk too close to this project now. It was all a sham to educate ship personnel, to frustrate the eager young men and women.
"Each project ship must maintain its coefficient of frustration," went the private admonition. "Frustration must come from both human and mechanical sources."
They thought of frustration as a threshold, a factor to heighten awareness.
It made a weird kind of sense.
Thus, there were crew members like Flattery... and Prudence Lon Weygand, and machinery that broke down, robox repair units that had to have a human monitor every second - and programmed emergencies to complicate real emergencies.
CHAPTER 9
The universe is derived from an ultimate principle of spiritual consciousness, the one and only existent from eternity. Accepting this, you become an affirmer of The Void, which is to be understood as the Primordial Nothingness: that is, the raw stuff out of which all is created as well as the background against which every creation can be discerned.
IT HAD BEEN a tiring watch and Flattery longed to return to his quarters. He wanted to bathe himself in the field generator there, to examine the mood of the computer complex. That was one of his prime duties: to be certain that the computer had settled back into pure mechanism after being deprived of its last Organic Mental Core. There was always the off chance that one of these attempts might achieve success by accident.
But there was no way he could leave early without arousing the wrong kinds of suspicions. Well, there was another duty for the psychiatrist-chaplain to perform. He looked at Bickel.
"You can't monitor every nuance of your machine's behavior," Flattery said. "You can't be certain of every way its circuits may interact."
"Yeah," Bickel said. "Adding all the parts doesn't give you the sum you want - or need. So why wouldn't those numbskulls at UMB build their circuits around Eng multipliers? Answer me that."
Timberlake glanced at Flattery, thought: Go ahead! Get Bickel started on that subject. He's Johnny One-Note on that one!
"There was some mention back at UMB," Flattery said, "that you were trying to get them to use -"
"Trying?" Bickel snarled. "I practically got down on my knees and begged. They acted like I was a moron, kept saying computers only add - even when they're multiplying it's only series addition. They kept this up until I -"
"You offered no logical circuit changes," Flattery said. "That's the way I heard it."
"Because I didn't get the chance," Bickel said. "Look! The Eng multiplier is solid-state and small enough to fit into any of our miniaturization requirements. It works something like a cathode follower; so the circuit requirements aren't too weird for us to follow. It's essentially a multiplier. Depending on the circuitry, it'll take several potentials of linear, semilinear or even nonlinear circuits and it'll yield a potential which is the product of the inputs. It multiplies them. But what's more important, when you reverse the circuitry, you get a device that taps a circuit - divides it, mind you - at a point which varies with the load. It works like a nerve cell!"
"The UM B team must've had good reason not to take you up on this," Prudence said. "If they -
"They said I hadn't proved this was an analogue of organic function," Bickel sneered. "Hadn't proved it! Kee-rist! They wouldn't even spare me computer time to work out test circuitry. Everything was tied up trying to define consciousness."
"You buy their definition, don't you?" Flattery asked. "If I did, I wouldn't've asked them to define it again," Bickel snorted. "I've had about all the label juggling I can stomach. Consciousness is pure awareness, they said. Then what about the objects of consciousness? I ask. Disregard them, they say. It's pure awareness. What's awareness without an object to focus on? I ask. Not important, they say. It's pure awareness. Then they turn right around and say this pure awareness is a pattern of three primary forces. What are these three primary forces? An 'I' entity plus the organism of this entity plus everything external which could act as a stimulus. Plus objects! But that's not it, they say. This merely means pure awareness juggles three factors and it's a senseless complication to try to multiply them two and two when you could add them and follow the circuits in a much more direct fashion."
"You're oversimplifying the argument," Prudence said.
"All right, I'm oversimplifying! But those are the essentials."
"And you had a ready answer, of course," she said.
"I've already told you I couldn't beg, borrow, or steal any computer time."
"But you insist you can prove your -"
"Look," Bickel said, "they told me I couldn't prove an organic analogue. But I know I can."
"You just know it," she said. "You can't find words to quite -"
"When you've worked with as many thoughtput instrumentation and computer designs as I have," he said, "you get a feeling for function. There are times when you can just look at the design of a circuit and you know immediately how it's supposed to function. You don't need the manufacturer's specifications."
"Do I understand you correctly?" Flattery asked. "You're referring to God as a manufacturer? If that's -"
"Go ahead!" Bickel snapped. "Look at the design of the human cerebellum. Don't try to pick a fight with me over who designed it. Just look at it. You're a doctor. What's it suggest to you?"
"What does it suggest to you?" Flattery countered.
"That some potential effect is mediated there," Bickel said. "This is a balancing system... very like the vestibular reflex that keeps us from falling on our asses when we walk."