There were times when Bowman, well aware how unnecessary this was – for the alarm would sound instantly if anything was wrong – would switch over to audio output. He would listen, half hypnotized, to the infinitely slow heartbeats of his sleeping colleagues, keeping his eyes fixed on the sluggish waves that marched in synchronism across the screen.
Most fascinating of all were the EEG displays – the electronic signatures of three personalities that had once existed, and would one day exist again. They were almost free from the spikes and valleys, the electrical explosions that marked the activity of the waking brain – or even of the brain in normal sleep. If there was any wisp of consciousness remaining, it was beyond the reach of instruments, and of memory.
This last fact Bowman knew from personal experience. Before he was chosen for this mission, his reactions to hibernation had been tested. He was not sure whether he had lost a week of his life – or whether he had postponed his eventual death by the same amount of time.
When the electrodes had been attached to his forehead, and the sleep-generator had started to pulse, he had seen a brief display of kaleidoscopic patterns and drifting stars. Then they had faded, and darkness had engulfed him. He had never felt the injections, still less the first touch of cold as his body temperature was reduced to only a few degrees above freezing.
He awoke, and it seemed that he had scarcely closed his eyes. But he knew that was an illusion; somehow, he was convinced that years had really passed.
Had the mission been completed? Had they already reached Saturn, carried out their survey, and gone into hibernation? Was Discovery II here, to take them back to Earth?
He lay in a dreamlike haze, utterly unable to distinguish between real and false memories. He opened his eyes, but there was little to see except a blurred constellation of lights which puzzled him for some minutes.
Then he realized that he was looking at the indicator lamps on a Ship Situation Board, but it was impossible to focus on them. He soon gave up the attempt.
Warm air was blowing across him, removing the chill from his limbs. There was quiet, but stimulating, music welling from a speaker behind his head. It was slowly growing louder and louder.
Then a relaxed, friendly – but he knew computer generated – voice spoke to him.
“You are becoming operational, Dave. Do not get up or attempt any violent movements. Do not try to speak.”
Do not get up! thought Bowman. That was funny. He doubted if he could wriggle a finger. Rather to his surprise, he found that he could.
He felt quite contented, in a dazed, stupid kind of way. He knew dimly that the rescue ship must have come, that the automatic revival sequence had been triggered, and that soon he would be seeing other human beings. That was fine, but he did not get excited about it.
Presently he felt hunger. The computer, of course, had anticipated this need.
“There is a signal button by your right hand, Dave.
If you are hungry, please press it.”
Bowman forced his fingers to hunt around, and presently discovered the pear-shaped bulb. He had forgotten all about it, though he must have known it was there. How much else had he forgotten: Did hibernation erase memory?
He pressed the button, and waited. Several minutes later, a metal arm moved out from the bunk, and a plastic nipple descended toward his lips. He sucked on it eagerly, and a warm, sweet fluid coursed down his throat, brining renewed strength with every drop.
Presently it went away, and he rested once more. He could move his arms and legs now; the thought of walking was no longer an impossible dream.
Though he felt his strength swiftly returning, he would have been content to lie here forever, if there had been no further stimulus from outside. But presently another voice spoke to him – and this time it was wholly human, not a construct of electrical pulses assembled by a more-than-human memory. It was also a familiar voice, though it was some time before he could recognize it
“Hello, Dave. You’re coming round fine. You can talk now. Do you know where you are?”
He worried about this for some time. If he was really orbiting Saturn, what had happened during all the months since he had left Earth? Again he began to wonder if he was suffering from amnesia, Paradoxically, that very thought reassured him, if he could remember the word “amnesia” his brain must be in fairly good shape.
But he still did not know where he was, and the speaker at the other end of the circuit must have understood his situation completely.
“Don’t worry, Dave. This is Frank Poole. I’m watching your heart and respiration-everything is perfectly normal. Just relax – take it easy. We’re going to open the door now and pull you out.”
Soft light flooded into the chamber; he saw moving shapes silhouetted against the widening entrance. And in that moment, all his memories came back to him, and be knew exactly where he was.
Though he had come back safely from the furthest borders of sleep, and the nearest borders of death, he had been gone only a week. When he left the Hibernaculum, he would not see the cold Saturnian sky; that was more than a year in the future and a billion miles away.
He was still in the trainer at the Houston Space Flight Center under the hot Texas sun.
16 – Hal
But now Texas was invisible, and even the United States was hard to see. Though the low-thrust plasma drive had long since been closed down, Discovery was still coasting with her slender arrowlike body pointed away from Earth, and all her high-powered optical gear was oriented toward the outer planets, where her destiny lay.
There was one telescope, however, that was permanently aimed at Earth. It was mounted like a gunsight on the rim of the ship’s long-range antenna, and checked that the great parabolic bowl was rigidly locked upon its distant target. While Earth remained centered in the crosswires, the vital communication link was intact, and messages could come and go along the invisible beam that lengthened more than two million miles with every day that passed.
At least once in every watch period Bowman would lock homeward through the antenna-alignment telescope. As Earth was now far back toward the sun, its darkened hemisphere faced Discovery, and on the central display screen the planet appeared as a dazzling silver crescent, like another Venus.
It was rare that any geographical features could be identified in that ever-shrinking arc of light, for cloud and haze concealed them, but even the darkened portion of the disk was endlessly fascinating. It was sprinkled with shining cities; sometimes they burned with a steady light, sometimes they twinkled like fireflies as atmospheric tremors passed over them.
There were also periods when, as the Moon swung back and forth in its orbit, it shone down like a great lamp upon the darkened seas and continents of Earth.
Then, with a thrill of recognition, Bowman could often glimpse familiar coastlines, shining in that spectral lunar light. And sometimes, when the Pacific was calm, he could even see the moonglow shimmering across its face; and he would remember nights beneath the palm trees of tropical lagoons.
Yet he had no regrets for these lost beauties. He had enjoyed them all, in his thirty-five years of life; and he was determined to enjoy them again, when he returned rich and famous. Meanwhile, distance made them all the more precious.
The sixth member of the crew cared for none of these things, for it was not human. It was the highly advanced HAL 9000 computer, the brain and nervous system of the ship.
Hal (for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer, no less) was a masterwork of the third computer breakthrough. These seemed to occur at intervals of twenty years, and the thought that another one was now imminent already worried a great many people.
The first had been in the 1940s, when the long-obsolete vacuum tube had made possible such clumsy, high-speed morons as ENIAC and its successors. Then, in the 1960s, solid-state microelectronics had been perfected. With its advent, it was clear that artificial intelligences at least as powerful as Man’s need be no larger than office desks – if one only knew how to construct them.
Probably no one would ever know this; it did not matter. In the 1980s, Minsky and Good had shown how neural networks could be generated automatically – self replicated – in accordance with any arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of a human brain. In any given case, the precise details would never be known, and even if they were, they would be millions of times too complex for human understanding. Whatever way it worked, the final result was a machine intelligence that could reproduce – some philosophers still preferred to use the word “mimic” – most of the activities of the human brain – and with far greater speed and reliability. It was extremely expensive, and only a few units of the HAL9000 series had yet been built; but the old jest that it would always be easier to make organic brains by unskilled labor was beginning to sound a little hollow.