A clicking-buzzing erupted from the master board above Flattery.
Bickel waited while Flattery fought out a manual temperature adjustment in an inner hold. Presently, Flattery wiped perspiration from his forehead, studied his gauges to be certain the balance was holding.
"Man, that board is murder," Timberlake muttered. "I don't wonder those OMCs caved in."
Flattery risked a glance away from the board. "You know better than that, Tim. This part of the job was child's play for a functioning OMC. They could handle most ship homeostasis problems by something akin to reflex action."
"Akin," Bickel said.
"All right!" Flattery barked, and pretended to be busy with the board to hide his confusion at allowing Bickel to get to him that way.
A long silence settled over Com-central, broken when Flattery regained his composure and said, "I was about to say that the end tapes on each brain show statements similar to schizophrenic writing. It makes a pretense of meaning... and sometimes stumbles onto a colorful phrase, but the essential..."
He broke off as the master board grew three diagonal stripes of flashing yellow. Flattery's hands darted to the controls as Bickel shouted, "Grav shift!" and dove for his couch.
Cocoons snapped closed around them and they felt the creeping, jerking weight shifts, the runaway fluctuation of the field-centering system - the unexplained gravity variance that had killed Maida.
CHAPTER 5
The thing about computers - it's like training a dog. You have to be smarter than the dog. If you make a computer smarter than you are, that has to be accident, synergy, or divine intervention.
BICKEL WATCHED FLATTERY'S hands fight the gravity system back into balance. It had taken several bruising minutes, but the tugging and jerking had begun to ease. The system centered slowly. Flattery waited it out. Presently, he made a fine adjustment in the controls.
"Where were we?" Timberlake asked.
"We were raking through our data, seeking anything useful," Bickel said. "It's a clumsy way to operate, but necessary."
"Guilt-sharing," Flattery said.
"What?" Bickel was outraged.
"Never mind," Flattery said. "Back to square one: You will recall that OMC/Myrtle said: 'I have no incarnation: That may have been the only accurate thing in her jabbering. After all, except for gray matter, she had no flesh. But then, remember, after a long silence she said: 'I'm counting my fingers.' She had no fingers, no conscious memory of fingers. And that final question: 'Why are you all so dead?' The best guess is that any meaning in these statements and questions was purely accidental."
"I think she was referring to us, to the crew," Bickel said. "It's nuts, yes, but it was a direct question over the vocoders and we were the only possible audience."
"Unless she was referring to the colonists in the hyb tanks," Flattery said. "They might appear dead under some -"
"Myrtle had direct contact with the hyb-tank sensors," Timberlake pointed out. "She'd have known if they were alive."
Bickel nodded. "What do you make of Little Joe roaring out over every vocoder in the ship: 'I'm awake! God help me, I'm awake!'"
"A cry for help, perhaps," Flattery said. "Most insane raving is a cry for help in one form or another."
"That leaves Harvey," Bickel said. "Harvey screamed: 'You're forcing me to be unhealthy.' And when we -"
"What could we do?" Timberlake asked, and Bickel heard the note of hysteria in his voice. "There was nothing wrong with any of their life systems. I know there wasn't!"
"Easy does it, Tim," Flattery said. "That was just another nonsense statement."
"We all knew what it meant, though," Bickel said. "I did not see anybody showing surprise when Harvey said: 'I've lost it!' and signed off... permanently. And there we were with three dead brains and no spares."
The callous way Bickel put it sent a shudder through Timberlake, and he could not explain it. He had never been deeply attached to the OMCs. There had always been something faintly accusing about the "ship creatures." Raja Lon Flattery had assured him this was strictly subjective, something from his own attitudes. Raj had always been so positive that the OMC-ship-computer entities were perfectly reconciled to their way of life, happy with their own compensations.
What compensations? Timberlake wondered. Expectancy of long life? But what is three or four thousand years of living if each year is hell?
Timberlake realized then that none of the pat answers from his training classes really touched the basic issue of OMC happiness.
What if it really is a hellish way to live? he wondered. It must be. They are harnessed like engines to all this metal and glass and plastic and time stretches out ahead of them... forever. Maybe death was preferable.
CHAPTER 6
Every symbol has hidden premises behind it. Every word carries unspoken assumptions buried in the history of the language and the conditioning experiences of the speakers. If you snatch those buried meanings out of your words, you spill a whole stream of new understanding into your awareness.
ALMOST HALF OF Prudence Weygand's recuperation time had passed and it had been marked by recurrent uncomfortable silences in Com-central.
Flattery did not like those silences. He felt that every one of them carried his companions farther away - perhaps beyond control. And he had to maintain that delicate contact, that means of control.
One of those silences gripped them now. It seemed to reach into them from the space beyond the ship's hull. Flattery knew he had to say something but he felt oppressed by the silence. He cleared his throat before speaking.
"I wish to say something about anger. I've seen several shows of anger since our emergency - my own anger included."
The formal tone, the set of his face - all signaled that Flattery was speaking officially as their chaplain. "Anger could destroy us," he said. "The Proverbs warn us: 'He that is soon angry dealeth foolishly: and a man of wicked devices is hated. He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding: but he that is hasty of spirit exalteth folly.' Let us practice the soft answer and not stir up wrath."
Bickel took a deep breath. Flattery was right, he knew, but Bickel resented the way the man retreated into religion to make his point. How much simpler just to say they were clouding their reason with excess emotion. That was the thing he resented about religion, Bickel thought - the way it appealed to emotion rather than intelligence.
"We've been floundering around, trying to do too much," Bickel said. "That master board is a jury-rigged monstrosity. We need a consistent, organized plan to meet our problems. When Moonbase answers, I want to be able to say we have -"
Sharp, heavy G force pressed him against the side of his couch cocoon. It struck without klaxon warning or alarm light. Cocoon safety locks sealed home. Now, red alarm lights flashed with the yellow in long webs across the master board.
Flattery slammed the gravity disconnect with the heel of his left hand. G force ebbed. Yellow alarm lights winked off as their pressure switches released. A line of red alarm lights remained.
"Damage to hull three, section six/fourteen," Flattery said. He began activating remote sensors to inspect the area.
Without conscious thought or discussion, Bickel took over ship command: "Tim, take the G repeaters. Leave gravity disconnected while you trace the relays and get the system back in balance."
Timberlake pulled his board close to obey.
Bickel swung the AAT board to his side, keyed for ship systems/computer control, began feeding coded demands into the core recorders. What had the ship encountered that might explain that brutal deflection? What had the automatic sensors recorded?
The responders began kicking out tape almost immediately - much too fast.
"Data error," Flattery said, reading the output over Bickel's shoulder.
In abrupt fury, Bickel pulled the master override stop from his core switch, jammed a set of jumper jacks across the AAT controls, opened the core system for standard reference comparison.
"You are into the core!" Flattery said, his voice sharp with fear. "You have no guide fuse or master reference. You could louse up the command routines."
"Unhook that!" Timberlake shouted, lifting his head from the cocoon clamps to glare across at Bickel.
"Shut up, both of you. Sure, the core is delicate, but something in there is already loused up - bad enough to kill us."
"You think you have time to check some eight hundred thousand routines?" Timberlake demanded. "Don't talk nuts!"
"There are specific injunctions against what you are doing," Flattery said, fighting to keep his voice reasonable. "And you know why."
"Don't try to tell me my job," Bickel said.
While he spoke, Bickel rolled over core memory responders, direct contact, doing it gently to avoid current backlash.
"You make one mistake," Timberlake said, "and it would take six or seven thousand technicians with a second master system and several thousand imprint relays to repair the damage. Are you ready to -"
"Stop distracting me!"
"What are you looking for?" Flattery asked, interested in spite of his fear. He had realized that Bickel, conditioned to deep inhibitions against turning back, was incapable of doing anything to deprive them of one of their basic tools.
"I'm checking availability of peripherals from the core memory," Bickel said. "There's got to be a bypass or pileup somewhere. It'll show in the acquisition and phase-control loops of the input." He nodded toward a diagnostic meter on his board. "And here we are!" The meter's needle slammed against its pin, fell back to zero, stayed there.
Slowly, Bickel ordered a master diagnostic routine into direct contact, put the core standard back on fused auxiliary, began rolling the troublesome core-memory section. Working with only occasional references to the core standard, he forced the routine through the data-reference channels as modified by new sensor input.
Error branchings began clicking from his responders. Bickel translated aloud as the code figures appeared on the screen above his board.
"Core memory/prediction region rendered inactive. Proton mass and scatter relative to ship course/mass/speed did not agree with prediction."
Aside, Bickel said, "We're hitting something other than hydrogen and hitting it in unexpected concentrations - partly because of our speed/mass figure."
"Solar winds," Timberlake whispered. "They said we -"
"Solar winds, hell!" Bickel said. "Look at that." He nodded at a code grouping as it worked its way across the screen.
"Twenty-six protons in the mass," Timberlake said.
"Iron," Bickel said. "Free atoms of iron out here. We're getting a plain old-fashioned magnetic deflection of the grav field."
"We'll have to slow the ship," Timberlake said.
"Nuts!" Bickel was emphatic. "We'll put a fused overload breaker in the G system. I don't see why the devil the designers didn't do that in the first place."
"Perhaps they couldn't conceive of any force large enough to deflect the system," Flattery said.
"No doubt," Bickel's voice was heavy with disgust. "But when I think a simple cage switch with a weight in it could have prevented Maida's death..."
"They depended on the OMC's reflexes, too," Flattery said. "You know that."
"What I know is they thought in straight lines when they should've been thinking in the round," Bickel said.
He unlocked his safety cocoon, shifted his suit to portable, launched himself diagonally across Com-central to the Tool and Repair hatch. The weightless drifting reminded him they had a time limit on returning to gravity conditions. Too long without gravity and the crew would suffer permanent physical damage.