The identity that was the ship - their Tin Egg - it lacked a certain integrating ability at the moment. Instead of an efficient self-regulating force, the ship was making do with the inadequate feedback system represented by four humans loosely connected to its "nervous system."

  That was one way of looking at it.

  But there was a point in the ship's future where damage passed beyond their ability to recover. The humans were failing.

  Flattery felt then a deep bitterness toward the society that had sent this frail cargo into nowhere. He knew the reasons but reasons had never prevented bitterness.

  "Think of society as a human construction, a very sophisticated defense mechanism," Hempstead and his cohorts had said. "Society's restrictions get bred into the cells themselves by a process of selection. And these restrictions become part of the self-regulating feedback in society's governing systems. There's a serious question whether humans actually can break out of their self-regulated pattern. It takes audacious methods indeed to explore beyond that pattern.

  The law was stated, Flattery knew, thusly: "Individual human experience is not the overriding control factor in human behavior. The cellular social pattern dominates."

  Flattery deliberately rapped his knuckles against the edge of his action couch to shock himself out of this reverie. He focused on the console, saw he had the usual temperature adjustments to make. The automatics could never quite hold the line.

  Bickel: "Watch those lengths in the time-delay circuits. You'll confuse the Ox's psychological present."

  Prudence: "Its what?"

  Bickel: "Its psychological present - its 'specious present' - what you experience in any given instant: that short interval you call now. Prof. Ferrel - remember old Prof. Ferrel-barrel?"

  Prudence: "Who could forget Hempstead's son-in-law?"

  Bickel: "Yeah, but he wasn't stupid. We were on the satellite tracker once - him on his side of the sterile wall and me on ours. And he said: 'Look at that thing move!' It was a shuttle ship coming in from earth. And he said: 'You know for a fact it's changing position fast as hell. But you seem to see all those position changes right now - in the present. No sharp edges; just a flow. That's the "specious present," boy. Don't you ever forget it.' And I never did."

  Prudence: "Will the... Ox really experience time?"

  Bickel: "It has to. Our time-delay circuits have to give it a way of internal measurement. It has to feel its own time. Otherwise, it'll be a big package of confusion."

  Prudence: "The... now."

  Bickel: "You think about it and you realize we don't interpret the immediate experience of time. We take big gulps of time. But real time, now, that has to be something gradual and progressive, a smooth change against a background of some measurement constant."

  Prudence: "So we line up the Ox's physical time and set it going like some mechanical toy - in one direction."

  Bickel: "The more remote parts of its 'specious present' have to fade the way they do with us. The past has to be less intense than what's just appearing on its horizon. It needs a constant 'serial fadeout'; otherwise, it won't be able to distinguish points near in time from points remote in time."

  Flattery looked up into the screen, saw Bickel hook an oscilloscope to the Ox, run a pulse check.

  Entropy, Flattery thought. One direction in time.

  He projected a picture in his mind: jets of water - one labeled entropy and the other that thrusting probabilism they called Life. Balanced between the two like a ball on a fountain danced consciousness.

  It's so simple, Flattery thought. But how do you reproduce it... unless you're God?

  Bickel: "Hold on there! Don't hook in that layer without running your stepdown test."

  Prudence: "You and your damn caution!"

  Bickel: "Life is a very cautious proposition. An error in those stepdown circuits could screw us up royally. Remember this, Ox has to take complicated inputs and filter them down through simpler and simpler integrating systems until it finally displays the results as symbols on which to act. Think of your own sense of vision. How many receptor neurons in your retina?"

  Prudence: "About a hundred and twenty million?"

  Bickel: "But when the system gets back to the ganglion layer, how many cells there?"

  Prudence: "Only about one and a quarter million."

  Bickel: "Stepped down, see? The system takes hordes of sense impressions and combines them into fewer and fewer discrete signals. In the end, we get a sense datum called an image. But we interpret that image out of an enormous file of topological comparisons, all of them out of previously translated experience."

  Prudence: "And you think our computer has enough... experiences for that kind of comparison?"

  Bickel: "It will have when we're through with it."

  And Flattery thought: Black box - white box.

  Prudence: "Aren't you likely to overload the computer, bog it down?"

  Bickel: "For Chrissakes, woman! You personally receive all kinds of information constantly. Doesn't your own system sort through all that information, queue it up, program it, and evaluate the data?"

  Prudence: "But the Tin Egg's very existence depends on the computer. If we blunder with..."

  Bickel: "There's no other way. You should've realized that the instant you saw this whole ship was a set piece."

  Prudence (angrily): "What do you mean? Why?"

  Bickel: "Because the computer's the only place where that amount of information can be stored. You see, woman, we don't have time to train a completely uneducated infant."

  Before she could answer, the transmission horn blared its warning. The AAT stood on manual bypass to keep its circuits from interfering with the work in the shop. The horn's trigger fired both Bickel and Flattery into action. Bickel threw the action switch in the shop. Flattery slapped the AAT master control switch on his console, realizing with a sense of detachment that the UMB message would pour through the Ox circuits before being displayed for them.

  CHAPTER 23

  I feel the duties of a creator toward this Artificial Consciousness. It seems to me that my primary goal must be to render this creature happy, to provide it whatever joy I can. Else this entire project seems pointless. There already are enough unhappy creatures in this universe.

  - Raja Lon Flattery, Private Communion with the Ox

  IT TOOK SEVERAL minutes for the incoming message to search its way through the AAT and the Ox-accretions which Bickel had added to the system. They were tense minutes in Com-central. Flattery's gaze swept back and forth across the telltales of his board. There were big unknowns about the system now and any input might elicit strange behavior from dangerous quarters.

  Behavior! Flattery thought, catching the word in his own mind.

  There were anthropomorphic assumptions in that word.

  Why should it play by our rules?

  In the shop, Bickel felt his own waiting tensions. Was the incoming message going to be more garbage?

  Prudence, standing near him, sensed the unwashed musks of his body, all the evidences of his concentration on their mutual problem.

  Why not? He wants to live as much as I do.

  Bickel swept his gaze across the repeater telltales in the shop, watched the needles kick over and come to rest in the normal range. There came the characteristic sharp AAT hum, felt now in the shop because the Ox was part of the circuitry. The sound raised a tingling sensation along Bickel's sides and arms.

  The gauges registered the usual AAT pause. The multiple bursts of the message were being sorted, compared, translated, and fed into the output net.

  Bickel glanced at the screen, saw that Flattery had the system on audio.

  Morgan Hempstead's voice began rolling from the vocoders:

  "This is Project calling UMB ship Earthling. This is Project calling. We are unable to give an exact determination of the force that damaged the ship. We suggest an error in transmission or insufficient data. The possibility of an encounter with a neutrino field of theoretical type A-G is suggested by one analysis. Why have you failed to acknowledge our directive on return procedure?"

  Bickel watched his gauges. The message was coming in with remarkable clarity, no garbling at all apparent now that it was routed through the Ox circuits.

  There came the distinct sound of Hempstead clearing his throat.

  It gave Prudence a peculiar feeling to hear this ordinary sound...an clearing his throat. The inconsequential thing had been transmitted millions of miles to no effect other than to inform them Hempstead had been troubled by a bit of phlegm.

  Again, Hempstead's voice rolled from the vocoders: "UMB is being subjected to heavy, repeat heavy political pressures as regards the abort order. You will acknowledge this transmission immediately. The ship is to be returned to orbit around UMB while disposition is made of yourselves and cargo."

  "That's an awful word - disposition," Prudence said. She glanced at Bickel. He seemed to be taking it calmly.

  Flattery could feel the heavy beating of his heart. He wondered if the next few words would bring that deadly "kill ship" code signal from Hempstead.

  Bickel stared at the vocoder with a puzzled frown. How clear Hempstead's voice sounded - even to the throat-clearing which the AAT should have filtered from the message. He shifted his attention to the Ox's surrealistic growth on the computer wall.

  Again, Hempstead's voice intruded: "We expect from this transmission a more complete analysis of your damage. The nature and extent of the damage of paramount importance. Acknowledge at once. Project over and out."

  Bickel kept his voice low, casual. "Prue, how'd old Big Daddy sound to you?"

  "Worried," Prudence said. And she wondered why Bickel, with his inhibitions against return, could take this so calmly.

  "If you wanted to convey the emotions in someone's message how would you do it, Prue?" Bickel asked.

  She looked at him, puzzled. "I'd label the emotion or imitate the tone of the original. Why?"

  "The AAT isn't supposed to be able to do that," Bickel said. He looked up, meeting Flattery's eyes in the screen. "Don't acknowledge that transmission, Raj."

  "The AAT's working better than ever?" Prudence asked.

  "No," Bickel said. "It's working in a way it shouldn't be able to. The laser-burst message is stripped to bare essentials. The original voice modulations are there, theoretically, and often strong enough to recognize certain mannerisms, but subtleties are supposed to be beyond it. That last message was high fidelity."

  "The Ox circuits make the system more sensitive," she said.

  "Maybe," Bickel said.

  "Was there nerve-net activity accompanying that?" Flattery asked.

  "A fish has nerve-net activity," Bickel said. "Nerve-net activity doesn't mean the thing's conscious."

  "But sensitized the way consciousness is," Flattery said.

  Bickel nodded.

  "Selective raising and lowering of thresholds," Flattery said. "Threshold control."

  Again Bickel nodded.

  "What's this?" Prudence asked.

  "This thing" - Bickel pointed to the Ox - "has just demonstrated threshold control... the way we do when we recognize something." He looked at her. "When you lower your reception threshold you spread the spatio-temporal message and project it across an internal 'recognition aura' for mental comparison. The message is a spatio-temporal configuration which you superimpose on a recognition region. That recognition region can discriminate quite broadly between 'just right,' which is maximum similarity, and a kind of 'blurring off' you could call 'somewhat alike.' Threshold control does the tuning for this kind of comparison."

  With precisely controlled motions, Bickel returned to the circuitry he had been working on when the UMB message interrupted him. He picked up a sheaf of fibers, noting the neuron tag on them and slid the sheaf into a micro-manipulator where he finished the connection to a multijack.

  In Com-central, Flattery stretched out his left hand, gripped the stanchion beside his action couch until his knuckles went white.

  They were disobeying Hempstead in an outright, flagrant way. The chaplain-psychiatrist had precise instructions about such a contingency. Obey! If others try to stop you, blow the ship. But he could feel how Bickel was closing in on the solution to the Project's overriding problem. They were near success. That certainly allowed a bit of latitude.

  Who can tell me what to do, O my soul? Who can tell me where my soul might be?

  The words of the 139th Psalm slithered through his mind: "I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made."

  Do we betray God by making something fearful and wonderful? he wondered.

  "Our Father which art in Heaven," he whispered.

  But I am in the heavens, he thought. And the heavens expose me still to spiritual risk!

  The sound of Bickel and Prudence working in the shop was almost a carrier wave for his thoughts.

  Faith and knowledge, he thought. And he sensed the eternal clash that now had taken his body as its arena - knowledge thrusting at the boundaries of faith. And he felt the constructive emotions his faith was engineered to contain.

  I could end this nonsense, he thought. But we're all in the same bind and violence betrays us.

  "Religion and psychiatry are but two branches of the healing art." He remembered the words clearly. The lecturer in "Uses of Faith," the second-year course preparing him for this role. "Religion and psychiatry share the same stem."

  Heal thyself, he thought. Tears started from his eyes. Where were the faith, the hope and the laughter - the love and creativeness he had been enjoined to employ?

  Flattery looked up through his tears, saw in the screen both Bickel and Prudence ignoring him, so intent were they on the project.

  See how their hands touch; Flattery thought.

  He felt guilt at the sight and remembered Brooks' admonition: "Keep clear of concealment; keep clear of the need of concealment."

  "What an awful hour when we first meet the necessity of hiding something," he whispered. "Please God, have I forgotten how to pray?"

  Flattery ignored the vital console in front of him, closed his eyes, and gripped the stanchion fiercely. "The Lord is my shepherd," he whispered. "I shall not want."

  But the words had lost their power over him.

  There are no still waters here... or green pastures, he thought.

  There never had been these things for him - or for any of them out of the axlotl tanks and the UMB's sterile creches. There had only been the valley of the shadow of death.

  "DO NOT BROACH THIS HATCH WITHOUT READING AIR PRESSURE IN THE NEXT PASSAGE."

  Every morning on his way to classes - eleven years - he had passed through the hatch with that warning.

  "NO TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT WITHOUT FULL SPACESUIT."

  That omnipresent sign had set the boundaries on their untrammeled activity. It still did.

  The suit was like another social inhibition setting its own limits of behavior. It restricted your contact with other humans, reduced you to code tappings and depersonalized vuphones where every person became like a dancing doll on an oscilloscope screen.The omnipresent enemy was the outside - that total absence of the things to support life that emptiness called space. It was evil and they feared it - constantly. A rod and staff might comfort in the presence of space, but what you dreamed about was washed air and a womblike enclosed cell where you could divest yourself of the damnable suit. This was the true source of comfort no matter if it came from the Devil himself.

  The only table you could count on in the presence of this enemy was a squeeze bottle slid from its rack. Oil on the head could only fog a faceplate. You had to crop your hair short and keep down the natural oils with detergent.

  Goodness and mercy? That was anything which preserved the hope that you could one day walk unsuited beneath an open sky.

  I've lost my faith, Flattery thought. God, why have You taken my faith from me?

  "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God," he whispered.

  You were a fool, Matthew, he thought. A harlot can't regain her virginity.

  "The whole universe is a matter of chemistry and mechanics, of matter and energy," he whispered.

  But only God was supposed to have complete control of manipulating the matter and energy.

  We aren't gods, Flattery thought. We're blaspheming by trying to make a machine that thinks of itself by itself. That is why I was set to watch over this mission. We blaspheme by trying to put a soul into a machine. I should go down there now and smash the whole thing!

  "Raj!"

  It was Bickel's voice booming from the intercom.

  Flattery looked up at the screen, his mouth suddenly dry.

  "I'm getting independent action on the photosensory loops of the computer's record-and-store circuits," Bickel said. "Prue, check the current drain."

  "Normal," she said. "It's no short circuit."

  "It... isn't conscious," Flattery said, his voice wooden.

  "Agreed," Bickel said. "But what the hell is it? The computer's programming itself in every..." There came a charged moment of silence then: "Damn!"

  "What happened?" Prue demanded.

  "It stopped," Bickel said.

  "What... set it off?" Flattery asked.

  "I tied an inhibitor block into one arm of a single nerve-net simulator and sent a test pattern through it. The test evidently set up a resonant pattern that searched right through the Ox and into the computer net via the monitor connections. That's when I started getting the self-programming reaction."

  Prudence sighted along her finger, moving it to trace a thick color-coded connection that looped down from the Ox. "The monitor linkage goes only one way into record-and-store. It's buffered right there."

  Bickel pulled the connection she indicated.

  "What're you doing?" she asked.

  "Disconnecting. I'm going to get the pattern of the experiment out of the memory banks and analyze it before proceeding."

  Silence.

  Flattery stared up at the screen with a deep sense of repugnance which he knew was grounded in his religious training.