Read Online Destination: Void: Prequel to the Pandora Sequence by Frank Herbert - Free Book Online
Authors: Frank Herbert
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Prudence and back. He found it increasingly difficult to hide his resentment of Bickel.
Psychiatrist, heal thyself , he thought. Bickel has to take charge. I’m just the safety fuse.
Flattery glanced at the false plate on his personal repeater board, thinking of the trigger beneath that plate and the mate to it in his quarters concealed by the lines of the sacred graphic on the bulkhead.
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 themaster 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 diviner 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.
— The Education of a Chaplain/Psychiatrist (Moonbase Documents)
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 moodof 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
Psychiatrist, heal thyself , he thought. Bickel has to take charge. I’m just the safety fuse.
Flattery glanced at the false plate on his personal repeater board, thinking of the trigger beneath that plate and the mate to it in his quarters concealed by the lines of the sacred graphic on the bulkhead.
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 themaster 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 diviner 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.
— The Education of a Chaplain/Psychiatrist (Moonbase Documents)
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 moodof 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
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