Frank Herbert - Destination Void 1 Destination Void

-> 1. Destination Void

2. The Jesus Incident

3. The Lazarus Effect

4. The Ascension Factor

Destination: Void

Frank Herbert

1965

Revised 1978

I SAW THE pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put

together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the

working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy,

half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the

effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator.

-Mary Shelley on the creation of Frankenstein

PROLOGUE

IT WAS THE fifth clone ship to go out from Moonbase on Project Consciousness

and he leaned forward to watch it carefully as his duty demanded. The view

showed it passing the Pluto orbit and he knew that by this time the crew had

encountered the usual programmed frustrations, even some deaths and serious

injuries, but that was the pattern.

Earthling, it was called. Earthling Number Five.

The ship was a giant egg, one-half of it a dark shadow lambent on a starry

background, the other half reflecting silver from the distant sun.

A nervous cough sounded from the darkness behind him and he suppressed a

sympathetic repetition of that sound. Others were not as self-controlled.

By the time the coughing spasms had subsided, the Earthling had begun to make

its turn. The movement was impossible, but there was no denying what they all

saw. The ship turned through one hundred and eighty degrees and reversed,

heading directly back down its outward track.

"Any clue at all on how they did that?" he asked.

"No, Sir. Nothing."

"I want you to go through the message capsule again," he said. "We're missing

something."

"Yes, Sir." It was a sigh of resignation.

Someone else spoke from the darkness: "Get ready for the capsule launching .

. ."

Yes, they'd all seen this enough to anticipate the sequence.

The capsule was a silver needle that looped from the Earthling's stern. It

held to the ship's blind spot (who knew what weapons such a ship might

produce?) until it was lost among the stars.

From beneath their view a flame darted -- the laser relay with its destruct

message. A purple glow touched the ship's bulbous nose. It held for no more

than three heartbeats before the ship exploded in a blinding orange blossom.

"That Flattery model is sure as hell reliable," someone said.

Nervous laughter went around the room, but he ignored it, concentrating on the

viewer. Why the hell did they always think it was the Flattery model? It

could be anyone on the crew.

Their view closed on the swollen blossom with the collapsing speed of

time-lapse which made the explosion's orange light wink out too rapidly.

Presently, the movement slowed and their view moved into the spreading

wreckage, probing with crystalline flares of light until it found what it

sought -- the recording box. That and the message capsule were the most

important elements remaining from this failure.

Claw retractors could be seen grabbing the recording box and pulling it back

beneath their view. The crystalline light continued to probe. Anything they

saw here could be valuable. But the light picked out nothing but twisted

metal, torn shreds of plastic and, here and there, limbs and other parts of

the crew. There was one particularly brutal glimpse of a head with part of a

shoulder and an arm that ended just below the elbow. Bloody frost globules

had formed around the head but they still recognized it.

"Tim!" someone said.

A woman's voice far to the rear of the room could be heard repeating: "Shit .

. . shit . . . shit . . ." until someone silenced her.

The view blanked out and he leaned back, feeling the ache between his

shoulders. He knew he would have to identify that woman and have her

transferred. No mistaking the near hysteria in her voice. Some harsh

catharsis was indicated. He shut down the holopack's controls, flicked the

switch for the room lights, then stood and turned in the blinking brilliance.

"They're clones," he said, keeping his voice cold. "They are not human; they

are clones, as is indicated by their uniform middle name of 'Lon.' They are

property! Anybody who forgets that is going off Moonbase in the next shuttle.

That sign on my door says 'Morgan Hempstead, Director.' There will be no more

emotional outbursts in this room as long as I am Director."

CHAPTER 1

We call it Project Consciousness and our basic tools are the carefully

selected clones, our Doppelgangers. The motivator is frustration; thus we

design into our system false goals and things which will go wrong. That's why

we chose Tau Ceti as the target: there is no livable planet at Tau Ceti.

-Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase

"IT'S DEAD," Bickel said.

He held up the severed end of a feeder tube, stared at the panel from which he

had cut it. His heart was beating too fast and he could feel his hands

trembling.

Fluorescent red letters eight centimeters high spelled out a warning on the

panel in front of him. The warning seemed a mockery after what he had just

done.

"ORGANIC MENTAL CORE -- TO BE REMOVED ONLY BY LIFE-SYSTEMS ENGINEER."

Bickel felt an extra sense of quiet in the ship. Something (not someone, he

thought) was gone. It was as though the molecular stillness of outer space

had invaded the Earthling's concentric hulls and spread through to the heart

of this egg-shaped chunk of metal hurtling toward Tau Ceti.

His two companions were wrapped in this silence, Bickel saw. They were afraid

to break the quiet moment of shame and guilt and anger . . . and relief.

"What else could we do?" Bickel demanded. He held up the severed tube, glared

at it.

Raja Lon Flattery, their psychiatrist-chaplain, cleared his throat, said:

"Easy, John. We share the blame equally."

Bickel turned his glare on Flattery, noted the man's quizzical expression,

calculated and penetrating, the narrow, haughty face that somehow focused a

sense of terrible superiority within remote brown eyes and upraked black

eyebrows.

"You know what you can do with your blame!" Bickel growled, but Flattery's

words destroyed his anger, made him feel defeated.

Bickel swung his attention to Timberlake -- Gerrill Lon Timberlake,

life-systems engineer, the man who should have taken responsibility for this

dirty business.

Timberlake, a quick and nervous scarecrow of a man with skin almost the color

of his brown hair, stared at the metal deck near his feet, avoiding Bickel's

eyes.

Shame and fear -- that's all Tim feels, Bickel thought.

Timberlake's weakness -- his inability to kill the OMC even when it meant

saving the ship with its thousands of helpless lives -- had almost killed

them. And all the man could feel now was shame . . . and fear.

There had been no doubt about what had to be done. The OMC had gone mad, a

wild, runaway consciousness. It had been a sick ball of gray matter whose

muscles turned every servo on the ship into a murder weapon, who stared out at

them with madness from every sensor, who raged gibberish at them from every

vocoder.

No, there had been no doubt -- not with three of their number murdered -- and

the only wonder was that they had been allowed to destroy it.

Perhaps it wanted to die, Bickel thought.

And he wondered if that had been the fate of the six other Project ships which

had vanished into nothingness without a trace.

Did their OMCs run wild? Did their umbilicus crews fail, when it was kill or

be killed?

A tear began sliding down Timberlake's left cheek. To Bickel, that was the

final blow. Some of his anger returned. He faced Timberlake: "What do we do

now, Captain?"

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 -- a space 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.

For just a moment, Timberlake allowed his mind to dwell on the sterile creche

and labs back on the moon -- the only home any of the Earthling's occupants

had ever known.

"Man's greatest adventure: the jump to the stars!"

They had lived with that awesome concept from their first moments of

awareness. Aboard the Earthling, they were a hand-picked lot, 3,006 survivors

of the toughest weeding-out process the Project directors could devise for

their Doppelganger charges. The final six had been the choicest of the choice

-- the umbilicus crew to monitor the ship until it left the solar system, then

tie off the few manual controls and turn the 200-year crossing to Tau Ceti

over to that one lonely consciousness, an Organic Mental Core.

And while the 3,006 lay dormant behind the hyb tanks' water shields in the

heart of the ship, their lives were to remain subject to the servos and

sensors surgically linked to the OMC.

But now we're 3,003, Timberlake thought with that sense of grief, of shame and

defeat. And our last OMC is dead.

Timberlake felt alone and vulnerable now, faced by their emergency controls.

He had been reasonably confident while the brains existed and with one of them

responsible for ultimate ship security. The existence of emergency controls

had only added to his confidence . . . then.

Now, staring at the banks of switches, the gauges and telltales and manuals,

the auxiliary computer board with its paired vocoder and tape-code inputs and

readouts -- now, Timberlake realized how inadequate were his poor human

reactions in the face of the millisecond demands for even ordinary emergencies

out here.

The ship's moving too fast, he thought.

Their speed was slow, he knew, compared to what they should have been doing at

this point . . . but still it was too fast. He activated a small sensor

screen on his left, permitted himself a brief look at the exterior cosmos,

staring out at the hard spots of brilliance that were stars against the energy

void of space.

As usual, the sight reduced him to the feeling that he was a tiny spark at the

mercy of unthinking chance. He blanked the screen.

Movement at his elbow drew Timberlake's attention. He turned to see Bickel

come up to lean against a guidepole beside the control console. There was

such a look of relief on his face that Timberlake had a sudden insight,

realizing that Bickel had sent his guilt winging back to Moonbase with that

message. Timberlake wondered then what it had felt like to kill -- even if

the killing had involved a creature whose humanity had become hidden behind an

aura of mechanistics long years back when it was removed from a dying body.

Bickel studied the drive board. They had disabled the drive-increment system

when the second OMC had started going sour. But the Earthling still would be

out of the solar system in ten months.

Ten months, Bickel thought. Too fast and too slow.

During those ten months, the computed possibility of a total ship emergency

remained at its highest. The umbilicus crew had not been prepared for that

kind of pressure.

Bickel shot a covert glance at Flattery, noting how silent and withdrawn the

psychiatrist-chaplain appeared. There were times when it rasped Bickel's

nerves to think how little could be hidden from Flattery, but this was not one

of those times. Out here, Bickel realized, each of them had to become a

specialist on his companions. Otherwise, ship pressures coupled to

psychological pressures might destroy them.

"How long do you suppose it'll take Moonbase to answer?" Bickel asked,

directing the question at Timberlake.

Flattery stiffened, studied the back of Bickel's head. The question . . .

such a nice balance of camaraderie and apology in the voice . . . Bickel had

done that deliberately, Flattery realized. Bickel went deeper than they had

suspected, but perhaps they should have suspected. He was, after all, the

Earthling's pivotal figure.

"It'll take 'em a while to digest it," Timberlake said. "I still think we

should've waited."

Wrong tack, Flattery thought. An overture should be accepted. He brushed a

finger along one of his heavy eyebrows, moved forward with a calculated

clumsiness, forcing them to be aware of him.

"Their first problem's public relations," Flattery said. "That'll cause some

delay."

"Their first question'll be, why'd the OMCs fail?" Timberlake said.

"There was no medical reason for it," Flattery put in. He realized he had

spoken too quickly, sensed his own defensiveness.

"It'll turn out to be something new, something nobody anticipated, wait and

see," Timberlake said.

Something nobody anticipated? Bickel wondered. And he doubted that, but held

his silence. For the first time since coming aboard, he felt the bulk of the

Earthling around him and thought of all the hopes and energies that had

launched this venture. It occurred to him then what a mountain of hard-headed

planning had gone into the project.

He sensed the sleepless nights, the skull sessions of engineers and

scientists, the pragmatic dreamers tossing their ideas back and forth across

coffee cups and buttmounded ashtrays.

Something nobody anticipated? Hardly.

Still, six other ships had vanished into silence out here -- six other ships

much like their Earthling.

He spoke then more to keep up his own courage than to argue: "This isn't the

kind of thing they'd let go by the board. Moonbase'll have a plan. Somebody,

somewhere along the line, thought of this possibility."

"Then why didn't they prepare us for it?" Timberlake asked.

Flattery watched Bickel carefully, aware of how that question had touched him.

He will begin to have doubts now, Flattery thought. Now, he will start asking

himself the really loaded questions.

CHAPTER 2

The holoscan you are watching at this moment is of our Bickel model, our most

successful "Organ of Analysis." He is charged to explore beyond the imprinted

patterns of consciousness which humankind inherits with its genes.

-Morgan Hempstead, Lectures at Moonbase

TIMBERLAKE ADJUSTED a dial on his console to correct a failure of automatic

temperature adjustment in quad three ring nine of the ship's second shell.

"We should've been buttoned down in our hyb tanks and on our way over the

solar hump to Tau Ceti long ago," he muttered.

"Tim, display the time log," Flattery said.

Timberlake hit the green key in the upper right corner of his board, glanced

at the overhead master screen's display from the laser-pulse time log.

Ten months -- plus.

The indefinite answer made it seem the Earthling's computer core shared their

doubts.

"How long to Tau Ceti?" Flattery asked.

"At this rate?" Timberlake asked. He risked a long glance away from his

board. The stare he aimed at Flattery betrayed the fact he had not thought of

that possibility, making the trip the hard way -- long and slow with a crew

active all the way.

"Say four hundred years, give or take a few," Bickel said. "It's the first

question I fed into the computer after we disabled the drive increment."

He is too crystal sharp, Flattery thought. He bears watching lest he shatter.

And Flattery chided himself then: But the job Bickel has to do requires a man

who can shatter.

"First thing we'd better do is bring up one replacement from the hyb tanks,"

Bickel said.

Flattery glanced to his left where Com-central's other three action couches

lay with their cocoon arms open, empty and waiting.

"Bring up only one replacement, eh?" Flattery asked. "Live in here?"

"We may need occasional sleep-rest periods in the cubby lockers," Bickel said

and he nodded toward the side hatch into their spartan living quarters. "But

Com-central is the safest spot on the ship."

"What if Project orders us to abort?" Timberlake asked.

"That won't be their first order," Bickel said. "Seven nations invested one

hell of a pile of money and effort and dreams in this business. They have a

purpose which they won't give up easily."

Too crystal sharp, Flattery thought. And he asked: "Who're you nominating

for dehyb?"

"Prudence Weygand, M.D.," Bickel said.

"You think we need another doctor, eh?" Flattery asked.

"I think we need Prudence Weygand. She's a doctor, sure, but she can also

function as a nurse to replace . . . Maida. She's a woman and we may need

female thinking. You have any objections to Weygand, Tim?"

"What's my opinion worth?" Timberlake muttered. "You two've decided it,

haven't you?"

Bickel already had turned toward his own action couch. He hesitated at the

petulance in Timberlake's voice, then went on to the couch, pulled the

full-vacuum suit from the rack beneath the couch, and began suiting up: He

spoke without turning: "I'll take over here while you and Raj bring her out

of hyb. You'd both better suit up, too, and stay suited. Without an OMC at

the controls --" He shrugged, finished sealing the suit, and stretched out in

his action couch. "I'll take the red switch on the count."

Timberlake was caught up then in the changeover. The master board swung

across on its travelers, stopped as it made junction with Bickel's console.

"What if Moonbase answers while we're in the tanks?" Flattery asked. "We

won't be able to stop the dehyb and come up for a --"

"What's to do except record the message?" Bickel asked.

He began adjusting hull-integrity sensors, finished that, checked the

Accept-And-Translate system, swung the AAT board close beside him where he

could see its telltale when Moonbase replied.

Flattery shrugged, got out his own full-vacuum suit. He noted that Timberlake

already was suiting up -- but with a fumbling reluctance.

Tim senses Bickel taking absolute command, Flattery thought, but he doesn't

know the necessity for it . . . and he cannot bring himself to like it. He

will, though.

Bickel satisfied himself the ship was functioning as well as it could without

the homeostatic control of an OMC. He sank back to watch the board as the

others left Comcentral. The hatch seals hissed and there came the metallic

slap of the magnetic locks as the hatch closed and resealed itself.

Now, Bickel felt the ship around him as though he had neural connections to

every sensor revealed on his board. The Earthling lay spread out for him -- a

monstrous juggernaut . . . yet fragile as an egg -- a tin egg.

Frank Herbert - Destination Void 1 Destination Void

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