"These suspicions are... crazy," Timberlake said.

"Yeah," Bickel said. "We're really on our way to Tau Ceti. Our lives are totally dependent on an all-or-nothing computer system - quite by the merest oversight. We've aimed ships like ours all over the sky - at Dubhe, at Schedar, at Hamal, at -"

"There was always the off chance those other six ships made it. You know that. They disappeared, sure, but -"

"Ahhhh, now we get down to the meat. Maybe they weren't failures, eh? Maybe they -"

"It wouldn't make sense to send two seeding ships to the same destination," Timberlake pointed out. "Not if you weren't sure what was happening to -"

"You really believe that, Tim?"

"Well..."

"I have a better suggestion, Tim. If some crazy bastard tossed you into a lake when you couldn't swim, and you learned to swim like that" - Bickel snapped his fingers - "and you found then you could just keep on going, wouldn't you swim like hell to get away from the crazy bastard?"

IN COM-CENTRAL, the sounds were those the umbilicus crew had come to accept as normal - the creak of action couches in their gimbals, the click of an occasional relay as it called attention to a telltale on the big board.

"Has Bickel unburdened himself at all about the artificial consciousness project back at UMB?" Prudence asked.

She removed her attention momentarily from the master console, glanced at Flattery, her sole companion on the lonely watch. Flattery appeared a bit pale, his mouth drawn downward in a frown. She returned her attention to the console, noting on the time log that her shipwatch had a little more than an hour yet to run. The strain was beginning to drag at her energy reserves. Flattery was taking a hell of a long time to answer, she thought... but he was famous for the ponderous reply.

"He's said a little," Flattery said, and he glanced at the hatch to the computer maintenance shop where Bickel and Timberlake were working. "Prue, shouldn't we be listening in on them, making sure they -"

"Not yet," she said.

"They wouldn't have to know we were listening."

"You underestimate Bickel," she said. "That's about the worst mistake you can make. He's fully capable of throwing a trace meter onto the communications - as I have just on the off chance something interesting'll turn up... like finding us listening."

"D'you think he's started... building?"

"Mostly preparation at this stage," she said. "They're collecting material. You can pretty well follow their movements by watching the power drain here on the board, the shifts in temperature sensors and the dosimeter repeaters and the drain on the robox cargo handlers."

"They've been out into the cargo sections?"

"One of them has... probably Tim."

"You know what Bickel said about the UMB attempt?" Flattery asked. He paused to scratch an itch under his chin. "Said the biggest failure was in attention - the experts wandering away, doing everything but keeping their attention on the main line."

"That's a little too warm for comfort," she said.

"He may suspect," Flattery said, "but he can't be certain."

"There you go underestimating him again."

"Well, at least he's going to need our help," Flattery said, "and we'll be able to tell what's going on from how he needs us."

"Are you sure he needs us?"

"He'll have to use you for his deeper math analysis," Flattery said. "And me... well, he's going to be plowing through the von Neumann problem before he gets much beyond the first steps. He may not've faced that yet, but he'll have to when he realizes he has to get deterministic results from unreliable hardware."

She turned to stare at him, noting the faraway look in his eyes. "How's that again?"

"He has to build with nonliving matter."

"So what?" She returned her attention to the board. "Nature makes do with the same stuff. Living systems aren't living below the molecular level."

"And you underestimate... life," Flattery said. "The basic elements Bickel has to use are from our robot stores - reels of quasibiological neurons and solid-state devices, nerex wire and things like that - all of it nonliving at a stage far above the molecular."

"But their fine structure's as relevant to their function as any living matter's is."

"Perhaps you're beginning to see the essential hubris in even approaching this problem," Flattery said.

"Oh, come off that, Chaplain. We're not back in the eighteenth century making Vaucanson's wonderful duck."

"We're tackling something much more complex than primitive automata, but our intention's the same as Vaucanson's."

"That's absolutely not true," Prudence said. "If we succeeded and took our machine back to Vaucanson's time and showed it to him, he'd just marvel at our mechanical ability."

"You miss the mark. Poor Vaucanson would run for the nearest priest and volunteer for the lynch mob to do away with us. You see, he never intended to make anything that was really alive."

"It's only a matter of degree, not basic difference," she protested.

"He was like Aladdin rubbing the lamp compared to us," Flattery said. "And even if his intentions were the same as ours, he wasn't aware of it."

"You're talking in circles."

"Am I, really? This is the thing that writers and philosophers have skirted for centuries with their eyes half averted. This is the monster out of folklore, Prue. This is Frankenstein's poor monster and the sorcerer's apprentice. The very idea of building a conscious robot can be faced only if we recognize the implicit danger - that we may be building a Golem that'll destroy us."

"In your off hours you tell ghost stories."

"Laughter's as good a way as any of facing this fear," he said.

"You're really serious!" she accused.

"Never more serious. Why d'you suppose Project's so happy to send us far out into space to do our work?"

She tried to swallow in a dry throat, realized she was afraid. Flattery had touched a nerve. He had produced a powerful truth from somewhere. She forced herself to face this as a fact when she felt an urge to call the computer shop and beg Bickel and Tim to stop whatever they were doing. The urge sent a chill along her spine.

"Where do we draw the line between what's living and what's inanimate?" Flattery asked. He studied her, seeing the fatigue shadows under her eyes, the trembling of a nerve at her temple. "Will our... creature be alive?"

She cleared her throat. "Wouldn't it be more to the point to ask if our creature will be able to reproduce itself? If there's any danger... any real danger to -"

"Then, indeed, we may be on forbidden ground." And he wondered why this thought always brought such an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"Oh, for God's sake, Raj!" Prudence was vehement. "Have you completely forgotten that you're a scientist?"

"For God's sake, I can never forget it," he said quietly.

"Stop that!" She realized her voice unconsciously had assumed the peremptory tone of her dormitory mother back in the UMB creche. Dormitory mother! A gray-haired image whose touch was never more than the padded flexor of a robot which she directed from some remote sanctuary in Project Central. Such a sad woman she'd been, so cynical and... remote.

"Religion makes demands that can't be denied unless you're willing to pay a terrible price," Flattery said.

"Religion's just a fact like any other," Prue countered. "We investigate primitive religions. Why can't we investigate our own? Didn't God make us curious? Aren't we as scientists supposed to put ourselves beyond the reach of prejudice?"