Fifteen-minute recess. Break for restrooms and the corridor and the hospitality table.
Mitch moved close enough to say, “They’re dithering, sir.”
Graff said, “Ease down. Not here.”
“They’re saying it can’t be flown. That’s a damn lie.”
“Ease down, Mitch. Nothing we can do out here.” He had Saito at his elbow. He could see Tanzer down the hall with Bonner, in hot and heavy discussion.
Demas came back from the phone in the office. Said: “A word in private.”
Graff said, “Mitch. Be good,” and took Saito with him, farther up the hall. “You get him?”
“Couldn’t get hold of Pollard. Talked to Higgins. The neurosurgeon wanted to run another brain scan. Higgins and Evans agreed. Dekker went off the edge, he’s under sedation. Higgins says he remembers the accident. Nothing further. He may never be able to remember how he got in that pod.”
“Damn.”
“You’ve got to tell it plain, Helm.”
“Break it wide open? We don’t know what the captain wants. We don’t know and if it were safe to use FleetCom he would.”
Saito said, “It can’t be worse. At this point I’d advise going past protocol. Worst we can do is alienate Bonner and a few handpicked legislators who came out here with him. This is a set-up. But it has records. The contractors are here defending their systems. And there may be a few line-straddlers in the senatorial party.”
That was a point. Bonner was already alienated. This was likely a breakaway group of legislators Bonner favored putting in here to hear what Tanzer put together—but the fact that they let him talk at all was either a try at getting something incriminating out of him; or maybe, maybe there were members of the group that wanted more than one view. “God only knows what we’re dealing with. No Pollard, no Dekker. It’s a small hand we’re playing. All right. I’ll tell Mitch. Wraps are off.”
Past lunch and beyond, and Ben paced the waiting room. He’d read all the damned articles available to the reader, he’d become grudgingly informed in the latest in microbiologic engineering, the pros and cons of seasonally adjusted light/ dark cycles and temperature in station environments, the ethics of psychological intervention, and the consequences of weather adjustment in the hurricane season to the North American continent, not to mention five posture checks for low-g workers. He’d occupied himself making changes in a program he had stored on his personal card, he’d been four times at least to Dekker’s room to see if he was out from under sedation—he’d lost count. You could hear the clangor and rattle of lunch trays being collected—they had a damned lot of hurt and sick: people in here, people that had let a welder slip or gotten in the way of a robot loader arm, one guy who’d taken a godawful number of volts closing a hydraulic switch—he heard the gossip in the corridors coming and going, he was saturated with hospital gossip on who was missing what and how the guy with peritonitis was doing today and what was the condition of the limb reattachment in 109?
While the orderlies were having lunch.
Another trip out to Dekker’s room. Can’t wake him, Higgins said. We’ve gotten the blood pressure down now. But he’s tired. He’s just tired—
“I’ve got a shuttle pulling out tonight—tell the lieutenant I’ve done everything I can do. I want to see him. I’ve got to get out of here.”
Higgins said, “He’s involved in a hearing this afternoon. I don’t know if I can reach him. I’ve left two messages with his office.”
“The hell! Doctor, my luggage is still lost, I’m out of money for the damn vending machines—I never got a cafeteria authorization and I’m sick of potato chips—I never asked to come here, Dekker and I never were friends, dammit, I don’t know why I’m his keeper!”
Higgins lent him five. Which wasn’t the answer he wanted, but it was lunch, at least, and he wasn’t going to offend Higgins by turning it down. Supper, he wasn’t even going to think about.
Tanzer’s turn with the mike. Nobody from the Fleet on the panel and no chance, Graff thought, of doing anything about that, except refusing to allow Fleet personnel to testify and trying to make an issue of it—but he was in a Position on that too, being one of the people on the list to testify; and he hoped the sweat didn’t show.
Demas’ advice, Saito’s, Armsmaster Thieu’s, for that matter, who might be called, was unanimous, and that it agreed with his only confirmed that if he was wrong and if he screwed this, the Fleet had to push him out the lock as a peace offering. That was one thing. He understood that kind of assignment.
But the thought that he could screw things beyond recall, offend the wrong senator, say something the media could get hold of and kill the riderships or bring the Fleet under UDC control—either of which would kill any hope of preventing the whole Beyond being sucked into Union’s widening influence—that was the possibility that had his bands sweating and his mind chasing random imaginations throughout Tanzer’s performance: he kept thinking, I’ve got to counter that; and, I’ve got to get that across to the committee, and, God, they’re not going to ask me the right questions.
No way Bonner’s going to let me answer those questions.
The general’s no fool. There’s something he’s got planned, some grenade planted and ticking, only where is it? With Tanzer?
Tanzer was saying: “It’s the task of this facility to evaluate prototype systems and to take them to the design limits. The essential step before we risk human life is advanced, exacting interactive assist simulation. The second step is automated performance testing. And again, the simulations are revised and refined, and procedures and checklists developed in hours of Control Integration Trials, a process with which many of our distinguished panel are intimately familiar. They are also aware that in the world of high-velocity craft we are exceeding human capacities to cope with the infostream. We’ve overrun human reaction time. We’ve long since overrun conventional radar. Hence the neural net AA, which adapts and shapes itself threefold, for the pilot’s past performance, enemy’s past, pilot’s current behaviors—and the longscan technique that extrapolates and displays an object’s probability. We’ve developed dopplered communications and communications techniques to receive information faster than human senses can sort it, computer assemblies to second-guess the pilot on multiple tasks. The faster we go, the more the pilot becomes an integral component of the systems that filter information via his senses and the Adaptive Assists into the ship’s controls. Right now the human is the highest vote in the Hellburner’s neural network; but we’ve long been asking the question at what point the sophistication of the computers to provide the information and the speed and power of the ship to react may finally exceed the engineering limits of the creator— that is, at what point of demand on human capacity to react to data, do we conceive a technically perfect and humanly unflyable machine?”
The questioner, Bonner, said, “Have we done that, in your opinion?”
Tanzer said, “Yes. In my opinion, yes.”
“Go on.”
“The EC militia came here with a design within the capabilities of the shipbuilding industry, and within the skills of its own pilots to operate. And the design for a companion ship they claimed could use off-the-shelf hardware and software—”
Damn him, Graff thought.
“—and serve as a high-velocity weapons platform. It was not, of course, operable as designed. The fleet insists that the unpredictability of human decisions without a tetralogic AI dominating the pilot-neural net interlink is essential to high-v combat. And we have six men in hospital and seventeen dead in the realworld discovery process.”
Hell.
“We’re putting crews into a ship that is in effect a high-v multilogic missile, with the sole advantage that the equipment is theoretically recoverable.”