Fiasco (39 page)

Meanwhile Tempe felt, instead of pride in the adoption of his idea, an overwhelming uneasiness. To shake this off, he set out on an excursion. The
Hermes
was really an unoccupied giant; the living quarters, with the control rooms and laboratories, constituted a core no larger than a six-story building. Besides the power rooms, this core included an unused hospital section, a small conference room, a mess hall beneath that—with an automatic kitchen—then recreational facilities, a simulation trainer, a pool that was filled only when the ship allowed it (under sufficient thrust so that the water would not fly up into the air in drops the size of balloons), and a half-oval amphitheater that also served for entertainment and movies and which never had a living soul in it. These comforts, thoughtfully provided for the crew by the builders, turned out to be totally superfluous. It entered no one's head to go view some ingenious holographic performance. It was as if that part of the middle deck did not exist for the crew—going to the movies seemed silly in the light of the events of the past few months. The theater, pool, and gym had been designed—with snack bars and pavilions, as at a small-town carnival—to help create the illusion of Earth. But the architects, Gerbert said, had forgotten to consult the psychologists. The illusion, not maintainable, was received as a lie. This was not where Tempe headed for his excursion.

Between the living quarters and the ship's outer hull stretched a space in all directions, crisscrossed with girders, beams, bulkheads, and containing a legion of robots at rest or at work. One entered this space through hermetically sealed hatches at either end of the deck: at the stern, behind the sanitation area, and from the bow, in a corridor off the upper control room. Entry at the stern was blocked by a gate double-locked and cross-bolted, with a warning sign in glowing red that was never turned off. There, in chambers off limits to personnel, lay sidereal converters, seemingly inert colossi suspended in vacuum, like the legendary tomb of Mohammed, on invisible magnetic cushions. But it was possible to pass the forward barrier—and that was where the pilot directed his escape.

He had to go through the control room, and there he found Harrach in an activity that in other circumstances would have made him laugh. Harrach, on duty, wanting something to drink, had opened the container too forcefully and was now chasing a yellow sphere of orange juice. He darted at an angle toward the ceiling as the sphere bobbed gently, like a large soap bubble—with a straw in his mouth, to catch it and suck it up before it got all over his face. Opening the door, Tempe stopped lest a puff of air break the liquid ball into a thousand droplets. He waited until Harrach's hunt was successful, then kicked off vigorously in the chosen direction.

Ordinary coordination wasn't worth a damn in weightlessness, but the old training had by now come back to him. He did not need to stop and think how to push out with his legs like a mountain climber in a rock chimney, while turning both wheel locks of the hatch. Someone uninitiated would in his place have gone head over heels trying to unscrew the spoked wheels that were like the ones used in bank vaults. Quickly he closed the hatch behind him, because although the bow section was filled with air, the air was stale, acrid with the fumes of chemicals, as in a factory. Before him was a space that narrowed into the distance, dimly lit by long rows of tubes and having double-lattice struts on the port and starboard walls. Unhurriedly, he launched himself.

He passed—becoming accustomed to the bitterness in his mouth and throat—the oxidized hulks of turbines, compressors, thermogravistors, with their galleries, platforms, and ladders, and skillfully swam around giant, thick-walled pipes that arched between tanks of water, helium, oxygen, having wide flanges encircled with bolts. He alighted on one of these, like a fly. He was indeed a fly, in the bowels of a steel whale. Every tank loomed higher than a church steeple. One of the fluorescent tubes, half-burned, flickered steadily, and in that changing light the oxidized shapes of the tanks now darkened, now shone as if sprinkled with silver. He got his bearings. From the area of the reserve tanks he drifted forward to where, in the massive insulation of the central level, nucleospin units gleamed under their own lights. The units were attached to bridge gantries, their mouths plugged. Then a sharp cold reached him, and he saw the frost-covered helium pipes of the cryotron systems. The chill was such that he prudently used the nearest handgrip to keep from touching the pipes, because he would have frozen fast to them in an instant, like a fly caught in a web.

There was nothing for him to do here, and he had come precisely for that reason, as if on vacation. He could not explain the satisfaction he derived from these shadowy, deserted regions of the ship, which testified to its power. In the bottom loading bays, automatic excavators were anchored, plus heavier and lighter landers, and farther on, in rows, were green containers, white, blue—tool kits for repair automata—and at the prow lay two striders with enormous swivel hoods in place of heads. By chance—or, perhaps, intentionally—he moved into a strong draft that rushed from a ventilation register and was borne toward the port ribs of the inner hull, which were the size of bridge arches, but deftly took advantage of the motion to push off. Like a jumper on a trampoline he went headfirst, turning slowly at an angle, toward the handrails of the prow gallery. A favorite spot.

With both hands he pulled himself onto a railing and had before him a million cubic meters of loading bays. High in the distance shone the three green lights above the hatch that he had entered. Beneath him—that is, beyond his legs (which, as always in weightlessness, became inconvenient, superfluous things)—were robot hovercraft on platforms fastened to ramps that were folded for the present, and the tunnel of a rocket launcher gaping in the giant shield of a side wall: the mouth of a cannon of awesome caliber. But no sooner did he come to a stop than the same uneasiness fell upon him again, an incomprehensible emptiness within, like a feeling—for no reason—of what? Futility? Indecision? Fear? But what could it be that he feared? Today, at this moment, even here, it seemed, he could not rid himself of his mysterious malaise.

Farther on, he saw the mighty engine that carried him—with a small fraction of its power—through the eternal abyss. Full of force that throbbed in the reactors with greater-than-solar heat, the thing meant Earth to him, the Earth that had sent him to the stars. The Earth was here, its intelligence contained in the energy drawn from the stars—and not in those parlorlike quarters with their stupid coziness and comforts arranged as if for frightened boys. At his back he felt the fourfold sheathed armor plate that had interstitial cells, energy-absorbing, filled with a substance hard as diamond when struck but fusible in a special way, since it possessed self-sealing properties. The ship, like an organism living yet nonliving, had been given the capacity for regeneration. Then suddenly, as in an illumination, he found the word for what was taking place within him: despair.

About an hour later he dropped in on Gerbert. Gerbert's cabin, separated from the others, was located at the end of the second deck of the middle section. The physician had probably chosen it because it was spacious and had a whole wall of window overlooking a greenhouse. In the greenhouse grew only mosses, grass, a privet hedge; on both sides of the hydroponic pool stood the hairy gray-green spheres of cacti; there were no trees, only hazel shrubs, whose flexible branches could withstand tremendous weight during flight. Gerbert valued this vegetation in the window and called it his "garden." One could also enter it from the corridor and walk on paths among flower beds—if, of course, there was gravitation. But the recent blow, brought on by the night attack, had produced no little havoc there. Gerbert, Tempe, and Harrach had later salvaged what they could from the broken bushes.

In accordance with the decision made by the experts of SETI in the course of preparing for the expedition, DEUS watched the behavior of all the people on the
Hermes,
assessing their psychiatric condition. This was no secret to anyone.

Under the kind of long-term stress to which those who had to rely entirely on themselves would be subjected, deviations from the mental norm might occur, taking forms typical of the psychodynamics of groups cut off for years from ordinary social and familial ties. In such isolation even a personality in perfect balance and resistant to psychic trauma could suffer derangement. Frustration could become depression or aggression without the individual's ever realizing what was happening to him.

Having a physician on board who was also expert in psychology and its disorders did not guarantee the recognition of pathological symptoms, since he himself was subject to stresses that undermined the most stalwart character. Physicians were people, too. A computer program, on the other hand, was unbending and therefore effective as an objective diagnostician and impassive observer, even in the face of catastrophe, with the whole ship hanging in the balance.

Granted, this safeguarding of the reconnoiterers against any collective warp of the psyche carried with it one ominous, insurmountable problem. DEUS, after all, was at one and the same time subordinate and superior to the crew; it was to execute orders, yet supervise the mental condition of those who gave the orders. Thus, it held the rank both of tool and overseer. Nor was the captain excluded from its continuous supervision. The problem was that the crew's awareness of the supervision, which was to catch mental instabilities in time, was itself a source of instability. But for this no one knew any remedy. Were DEUS to have fulfilled its psychiatric function without the knowledge of the men, it would have had to reveal the secret to inform them of a discovered aberration, and that announcement would have been not psychotherapy but a blow. The vicious circle could be broken only by a hybridization of responsibility between men and computer. DEUS would first present its diagnoses to the captain and Gerbert—when it judged this step to be necessary—and then resume the role of adviser with no further initiative. No one, obviously, was enthusiastic about this compromise, but, then, no one, including the psychology machines, had found any better solution to the dilemma.

A computer of the last generation, DEUS could not experience emotions, being an extract of rational operations taken to the highest power, with no admixture of desires or instinct of self-preservation. It was not an electronically magnified human brain, for it had no so-called personality traits, no drives—unless one considered a drive its endeavor to acquire the maximum of information. Of information, however—not of control.

The first inventors of machines that augmented not the power of muscle but the power of thought fell victim to a delusion that attracted some and frightened others: that they were entering upon a path of such amplification of intelligence in nonliving automata that the automata would become similar to man and then, still in a human way, surpass him. About a hundred and fifty years were needed for their successors to realize that the fathers of information science and cybernetics had been misled by an anthropocentric fiction—because the human brain was the ghost in a machine that was no machine.

Creating an inseparable system with the body, the brain both served the body and was served by it. If, then, someone were to humanize an automaton to the degree that it would be in no way different, mentally, from a man, that accomplishment would—in its very perfection—turn out to be an absurdity. The successive prototypes, as the necessary alterations and improvements were made, would become more and more human, but at the same time would be of less and less use—compared with the gigabit-terabit computers of the higher generations.

The only real difference between a man born of a mother and father and a perfectly humanized machine would be the building material: living, nonliving. The humanized automaton would be just as clever—but also just as unreliable, fallible, just as much a slave to emotional biases—as a man. A virtuoso imitation of the fruits of natural evolution crowned by anthropogenesis, the machine would represent a miracle of engineering, but also an oddity one would not know what to do with. It would be a brilliant forgery, done in a nonbiological medium, of a living creature, subphylum Vertebrata, class Mammalia, order Primates, viviparous, bipedal, and having a bicameral brain—for that was the path of symmetry in the formation of vertebrates taken by evolution on Earth. But one could not say what humanity would stand to gain by this plagiarism.

As one of the historians of science observed, it would be like finally building, after colossal expenditures and theoretical work, a factory for making spinach or artichokes that were capable of photosynthesis—like any plant—and which in no way differed from real spinach and artichokes except that they were inedible. Such spinach could be put on display and its synthesis boasted of, but one would not be able to eat it. The whole effort that went into its production, the sanity of that effort, would therefore come into question.

The first designers and advocates of "artificial intelligence" themselves did not fully know where they were heading and what hopes they entertained. Did they want to be able to converse with a machine as with an ordinary man? Or as with an extremely wise man? This was possible to do, and had been done—when the human race numbered fourteen billion and the last thing needed was the manufacturing of mentally humanoid machines. In a word, computer intelligence more and more clearly parted company with human intelligence; it assisted the human, complemented it, extended it, helped in the solving of problems beyond man's ability—and precisely for that reason did not imitate or repeat it. The two roads went their separate ways.

A machine, programmed so that no one in verbal contact with it, including its creator, could tell it from a housewife or a professor of international law, was a simulator indistinguishable from them—as long as one did not try to run off with the woman and have children by her, or invite the professor out to lunch. But if one
were
able to have children with her and consume soufflés with him, one would then be dealing with the ultimate erasure of the difference between natural and artificial—and what of that? Was it possible to use sidereal engineering to produce synthetic stars, stars absolutely identical to those in space? It was. Yet what would be the point of creating them?