The title's irony was not lost on either of Bickel's companions. Flattery started to reply, thought better of it. If the starship Earthling could be said to have a captain (discounting an in-service Organic Mental Core), then unspoken agreement gave that title to an umbilicus crew's life-systems engineer. None of them, though, had ever used the word officially.
At last Timberlake met Bickel's stare, but all he said was: "You know why I couldn't bring myself to do it."
Bickel continued to study Timberlake. What shabby conceit had given them this excuse for a life-systems engineer? Once the umbilicus crew had numbered six - the three here plus Ship Nurse Maida Lon Blaine, Tool Specialist Oscar Lon Anderson, and Biochemist Sam Lon Scheler. Now, Blaine, Anderson, and Scheler were dead - Scheler's exploded corpse jamming an access tube on the aft perimeter, Anderson strangled by a rogue sphincter lock, and lovely Maida mangled by runaway cargo.
Bickel blamed most of the tragedy on Timberlake. If the damn fool had only taken the ruthless but obvious step at the first sign of trouble! There had been plenty of warning - with the first two of the ship's three OMCs going catatonic. The seat of trouble had been obvious. And the symptoms - exactly the same symptoms that had preceded the breakdown of the old Artificial Consciousness project back on earth - insane destruction of people and materiel. But Tim had refused to see it. Tim had blathered about the sanctity of all life.
Life, hah! Bickel thought. They were all of them - even the colonists down in the hyb tanks - expendable biopsy material, Doppelgangers grown in gnotobiotic sterility in the Moonbase. "Untouched by human hands." That had been their private joke. They had known their Earth-born teachers only as voices and doll-size images on cathode screens of the base intercom system - and only occasionally through the triple glass at the locks that sealed off the sterile creche. They had emerged from the axolotl tanks to the padded metal claws of nursemaids that were servo extensors of Moonbase personnel, forever barred from intimate contact with those they served.
Out of contact - that's the story of our lives, Bickel thought, and the thought softened his anger at Timberlake.
Timberlake had begun to fidget under Bickel's stare.
Flattery intervened. "Well... we'd better do something," he said.
He had to get them moving, Flattery knew. That was part of his job - keep them active, working, moving, even if they moved into open conflict. That could be solved when and if it happened.
Raj is right, Timberlake thought. We have to do something. He took a deep breath, trying to shake off his sense of shame and failure... and the resentment of Bickel - damned Bickel, superior Bickel, special Bickel, the man of countless talents, Bickel upon whom their lives depended.
Timberlake glanced around at the familiar Command Central room in the ship's core...pace twenty-seven meters long and twelve meters on the short axis. Like the ship, Com-central was vaguely egg-shaped. Four cocoonlike action couches with almost identical control boards lay roughly parallel in the curve of the room's wider end. Color-coded pipes and wires, dials and instrument controls, switch banks and warning telltales spread patterned confusion against the gray metal walls. Here were the necessities for monitoring the ship and its autonomous consciousness - an Organic Mental Core.
Organic Mental Core, Timberlake thought, and he felt the full return of his feelings of guilt and grief. Not human brain, oh no. An Organic Mental Core. Better yet, an OMC. The euphemism makes it easier to forget that the core once was a human brain in an infant monster - doomed to die. We take only terminal cases since that makes the morality of the act less questionable.
And now we've killed it.
"I'll tell you what I'm going to do," Bickel said. He looked at the Accept-And-Translate board auxiliary to the transmitter on his personal control console. "I'm going to report back to Moonbase what's happened." He turned from the raped panel, dropped the severed feeder tube to the deck without looking at it. The tube drifted downward slowly in the ship's quarter gravity.
"We've no code for this... this kind of emergency." Timberlake confronted Bickel, stared angrily at the man's square face, disliking every feature of it from the close-cropped blond hair to the wide mouth and pugnacious jaw.
"I know," Bickel said, and he stepped around Timberlake. "I'm sending it clear speech."
"You can't do that!" Timberlake protested, turning to glare at Bickel's back.
"Every second's delay adds to the time lag," Bickel said. "As it is, it has to go more than a fourth of the way across the solar system." He dropped into his couch, set the cocoon to half enclose him, swung the transmitter into position.
"You'll be blatting it to everyone on Earth, including you-know-who!" Timberlake said.
Because he half agreed with Timberlake and wanted to gain time, Flattery moved to a position looking down on Bickel in the couch: "What specifically are you going to tell them?"
"I'm not about to mince words," Bickel retorted. He threw the transmitter warmup switches, began checking the sequence tape. "I'm going to tell 'em we had to unhook the last brain from the ship's controls... and kill it in the process."
"They'll tell us to abort," Timberlake said.
The merest hesitation of his hands on the tape-punch keyboard told that Bickel had heard.
"And what'll you say happened to the brains?" Flattery asked.
"They went nuts," Bickel said. "I'm just going to report our casualties."
"That's not precisely what happened," Flattery said.
"We'd better talk this over," Timberlake said, and he felt the beginnings of desperation.
"Look, you," Bickel said, shifting his attention to Timberlake, "you're supposed to be crew captain on this chunk of tin and here we are drifting without any hands on the controls at all." He returned his attention to the keyboard. "You think you're qualified to tell me what to do?"
Timberlake went pale with anger. Bickel defeats me so easily, he thought. He muttered: "The whole world'll be listening." But he turned away to his own couch, jacked in the temporary controls they had rigged shortly after the first ship brain had begun acting up. Presently, he sank onto the couch, tested the computer circuits, and asked for course data:
"The Organic Mental Cores did not go nuts," Flattery said. "You can't..."
"As far as we're concerned they did." Bickel threw the master switch. A skin-creeping hum filled Com-central as the laser amplifiers built up to full potential.
I could stop him, Flattery thought as Bickel fed the vocotape into the transmitter. But we have to get the message out and clear speech is the only way.
There came the click-click-click as the message was compressed and multiplied for its laser jump across the solar system.
With a chopping motion that carried its own subtle betrayal of self-doubt, Bickel slapped the orange transmitter key. He sank back as the transmit-command sequence took over. The sound of relays snapping closed dominated the ovoid room.
Do something even if it's wrong, Flattery reminded himself. The rule books don't work out here. And now it's too late to stop Bickel.
It came to Flattery then that it had been too late to stop Bickel from the moment their ship left its moon orbit. This direct-authoritarian-violent man (or one of his backups in the hyb tanks) held the key to the Earthling's real purpose. The rest of them were just along for the ride.
At the sound of the relays snapping, Timberlake reached up to a handgrip, squeezed it fiercely in frustration. He knew he could not blame Bickel for feeling angry. The dirty job of killing their last Organic Mental Core should have fallen to the life-systems engineer. But surely Bickel must know the inhibitions that had been droned into the life-systems specialist.