‘Sometimes,’ said Dallas, ‘it’s hard to know where reality ends and where it begins.’
‘I’m taking hold of the fixed locking bar, now,’ reported Cavor. ‘Only, which way do I pull it?’
Dallas consulted the diagram of the vault locking mechanism on the screen of Cavor’s computer. He pressed a button and watched a little animated sequence unfold, illustrating how the door opened.
‘Pull it toward you, and then to the right,’ he said. ‘And be prepared for the emergency siren. There will probably be quite a din as the door starts to open.’
‘That’ll be me cheering,’ said Cavor. ‘Okay, here goes.’
He pulled the locking bar in the prescribed manner and felt a cold escape of gas against his hand. As Dallas had predicted, a loud electronic siren, generating over a hundred decibels, accompanied the breaching of the vault. He let go of the bar and allowed Dallas to steer him back from the door. Then there was a loud hiss of escaping cryogenic gas as, in the manner of the main facility’s outer entrance, the curved vault door opened like an enormous solid portcullis, to reveal a brilliant white light.
‘Use your sun visor,’ Dallas told Cavor. ‘There’s an ultraviolet light inside the vault. It helps to keep the cryoprecipitate irradiated against lymphocytes. Those are cells that can be responsible for graft-versus-host disease.’ And so saying, Dallas advanced boldly into the vault.
Cavor followed more slowly, and was surprised to find the ground sloping away beneath his feet: The vault was in a great circular hollow, the center of which was occupied by a cylindrical glass wall kept in plumb by an enveloping hyperbolic net of high-tension cables. Beneath these were the giant-sized, slice-shaped refrigerators where the blood was stored — each of them monitored by an elaborate system of filaments and thermometers linked to the Descartes computer, itself located inside the cylindrical glass wall. It was to this that Dallas now headed.
‘Being as powerful as it is, the Altemann Übermaschine computer kicks out a lot of heat,’ he explained. ‘So it has to operate from within this glass envelope, in order to strictly maintain the low temperatures of the cryoprecipitate tanks. By the way, don’t touch them. They’re so cold that your gloved hand would probably stick to them, maybe even your phantom hand as well. Fortunately there are droids to load the blood for us. Now it’s merely a question of telling the computer what type and how much.’
Dallas opened a door in the glass wall and entered the computer room.
The Altemann Übermaschine was a commanding-looking structure, very different from the simple plastic boxes most people had in their homes. It was shaped like a giant kettledrum, with a flat screen surface about six feet in diameter, on which a number of patterns were continually being generated. Dallas knew that although the shapes being generated were analogous to the quantum probability pattern for electrons in a box, they meant nothing more than that the computer was in operation. Nevertheless the speed at which these shapes were changing was not something he had observed when programming the same model of computer back at the headquarters of Terotechnology on Earth. It was curious, he thought, although hardly indicative of anything other than the emergency caused by an unscheduled and uncoded breach of the vault’s overall integrity. And something else attracted his attention. This was the power of the computer, which appeared in a floor-standing tubular display located next to the operating footplate. Inside the tube, a small magnet floated over a superconducting dish: the higher the magnet in the tube, the greater the forces repelling it and the greater the electromagnetic power of the quantum mechanical effects operating inside the machine’s information processing system. Dallas had never seen a superconducting levitation that was as high as this one. Instead of floating a couple of inches over the bottom of the tube, this magnet was floating a couple of inches below the top.
‘That’s strange,’ he commented.
‘What is?’ asked Cavor, joining him inside the glass wall.
‘This computer seems to be generating an unusually high quantum wave function, such as I’ve not seen before. According to what’s happening inside this tube, the computer looks as if it’s operating at a level a thousand times higher than normal. But I’m not sure where the extra superconducting circuit power is coming from. There’s some very fast switching going on inside this machine. It’s almost as if the computer has managed to create its own Josephson junctions — that’s a way in which pairs of electrons use ordinary superconductors to create a quantum effect.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means current could flow even if there was no exterior source of energy applied to the junction.’
‘But that’s impossible, isn’t it? Surely, that would mean the computer was capable of sustaining itself independently.’
‘Theoretically, it can be done. I mean it’s been done on paper. But no one’s ever achieved it in a practical way. And certainly not on the scale of something like the Altemann Übermaschine.’ Dallas placed his boot on the operating footplate, causing the pattern on the round screen to clear. A number of touch-sensitive choices presented themselves to his scrutiny. ‘If I wasn’t feeling like shit, I’d find it more fascinating, I guess.’
‘You too, huh?’
Dallas grunted and reached for the screen, but as he touched it, he quickly pulled his hand away.
‘Wow,’ he said, unnerved by what he had felt there. ‘It’s vibrating.’
‘All machinery vibrates,’ objected Cavor.
‘Not the Altemann Übermaschine. And not like this.’
Cavor touched the screen with his prosthetic. Even through his glove he could feel the vibration.
‘It can’t be seismic,’ Dallas observed. ‘Feels too rhythmic to be a moonquake.’ Gingerly, Dallas touched the screen to close down the siren and open the main facility outer door. This would effectively signal the Mariner that their object had been achieved.
‘It feels sort of pulselike,’ he admitted to himself.
As he next initiated the selection and loading process, refrigerated tanks began to open like so many tombs, delivering up their frozen contents for collection by a loading droid. It happened so quickly it was almost as if the quantity and type had been ordered in advance. Had the system of selection and loading always been so efficient? It was hard to recall, so nauseous did he now feel. Dallas let out a nervous sigh, and then added: ‘I suppose silicon is just as versatile an atom as carbon. It can bind with other atoms to make a whole array of minerals and rocks. I mean, that’s the way computers operate. From the point of view of a siliceous soul, as opposed to one that’s carbonaceous, like our own.’ He completed the transfer process and then walked as quickly as he was now able toward the door of the computer’s glass envelope.
‘What are you saying, Dallas?’
‘Come on. There’s no time to waste. We need to hitch a ride out of here.’
‘That the computer’s alive? Is that what you’re saying?’