Frank Herbert - Destination: Void

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."

"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.