The one thing he did take seriously was his work. On the way up from Earth, he had been a passenger. Now he was crew.
21
Resurrection
We are, Floyd told himself, about to awaken a sleeping giant. How will Hal react to our presence, after all these years? What will he remember of the past – and will he be friendly, or hostile?
As he floated just behind Dr Chandra in the zero-gravity environment of Discovery’s flight deck, Floyd’s mind was seldom far from the cut-off switch, installed and tested only a few hours earlier. The radio control was mere centimetres from his hand, and he felt somewhat foolish to have brought it with him. At this stage, Hal was still disconnected from all the ship’s operational circuits. Even if he was reactivated, he would be a brain without limbs though not without sense organs. He would be able to communicate, but not to act. As Curnow had put it, ‘The worst he can do is swear at us.’
‘I’m ready for the first test, Captain,’ said Chandra. ‘All the missing modules have been replaced, and I’ve run diagnostic programs on all circuits. Everything appears normal, at least on this level.’
Captain Orlova glanced at Floyd, who gave a nod. At Chandra’s insistence, only the three of them were present for this critical first run, and it was quite obvious that even this small audience was unwelcome.
‘Very well, Dr Chandra.’ Ever conscious of protocol, the captain added quickly: ‘Dr Floyd has given his approval, and I have no objections myself.’
‘I should explain,’ said Chandra, in a tone that clearly conveyed disapproval, ‘that his voice-recognition and speech-synthesis centres have been damaged. We’ll have to teach him to speak all over again. Luckily, he learns several million times faster than a human being.’
The scientist’s fingers danced over the keyboard as he typed out a dozen words, apparently at random, carefully pronouncing each one as it appeared on the screen. Like a distorted echo, the words came back from the speaker grille – lifeless, indeed mechanical, with no sense of any intelligence behind them. This isn’t the old Hal, thought Floyd. It’s no better than the primitive speaking toys that were such a novelty when I was a kid.
Chandra pressed the REPEAT button, and the series of words sounded once again. Already, there was a noticeable improvement, though no one could have mistaken the speaker for a human being.
‘The words I gave him contain the basic English phonemes; about ten iterations, and he’ll be acceptable. But I don’t have the equipment to do a really good job of therapy.’
‘Therapy?’ asked Floyd. ‘You mean that ‘he’s – well, brain-damaged?’
‘No,’ snapped Chandra. ‘The logic circuits are in perfect condition. Only the voice output may be defective, though it will improve steadily. So check everything against the visual display, to avoid misinterpretations. And when you do speak, enunciate carefully.’
Floyd gave Captain Orlova a wry smile, and asked the obvious question.
‘What about all the Russian accents around here?’
‘I’m sure that won’t be a problem with Captain Orlova and Dr Kovalev. But with the others – well, we’ll have to run individual tests. Anyone who can’t pass will have to use the keyboard.’
‘That’s still looking a long way ahead. For the present, you’re the only person who should attempt communication. Agreed, Captain?’
‘Absolutely.’
Only the briefest of nods revealed that Dr Chandra had heard them. His fingers continued to fly over the keyboard, and columns of words and symbols flashed across the display screen at such a rate that no human being could possibly assimilate them. Presumably Chandra had an eidetic memory, for he appeared to recognize whole pages of information at a glance.
Floyd and Orlova were just about to leave the scientist to his arcane devotions when he suddenly acknowledged their presence again, holding up his hand in warning or anticipation. With an almost hesitant movement, in marked contrast with his previous swift actions, he slid back a locking bar and pressed a single, isolated key.
Instantly, with no perceptible pause, a voice came from the console, no longer in a mechanical parody of human speech. There was intelligence – consciousness – self-awareness here, though as yet only on a rudimentary level.
‘Good morning, Dr Chandra, This is Hal. I am ready for my first lesson.’
There was a moment of shocked silence; then, acting on the same impulse, the two observers left the deck.
Heywood Floyd would never have believed it. Dr Chandra was crying.
Iv
LAGRANGE
22
Big Brother
‘… What delightful news about the baby dolphin! I can just imagine how excited Chris was when the proud parents brought it into the house. You should have heard the ohs and ahs of my shipmates when they saw the videos of them swimming together, and Chris riding on its back. They suggest we call it Sputnik, which means companion as well as satellite.
‘Sorry it’s been quite a while since my last message, but the newscasts will have given you an idea of the huge job we’ve had to do. Even Captain Tanya’s given up all pretence of a regular schedule; each problem has to be fixed as it comes along, by whoever is on the spot. We sleep when we can’t stay awake any longer.
‘I think we can all be proud of what we’ve done. Both ships are operational and we’ve nearly finished our first round of tests on Hal. In a couple of days we’ll know if we can trust him to fly Discovery when we leave here to make our final rendezvous with Big Brother.
‘I don’t know who first gave it that name – the Russians, understandably, aren’t keen on it. And they’ve waxed quite sarcastic about our official designation TMA-2, pointing out to me – several times – that it’s the best part of a billion kilometres from Tycho. Also that Bowman reported no magnetic anomaly, and that the only resemblance to TMA-1 is the shape. When I asked them what name they preferred, they came up with Zagadka, which means enigma. It’s certainly an excellent name; but everyone smiles when I try to pronounce it, so I’ll stick to Big Brother.
‘Whatever you call the thing, it’s only ten thousand kilometres away now, and the trip won’t take more than a few hours. But that last lap has us all nervous, I don’t mind telling you.
‘We’d hoped that we might find some new information aboard Discovery. That’s been our only disappointment, though we should have expected it. Hal, of course, was disconnected long before the encounter, and so has no memories of what happened; Bowman has taken all his secrets with him. There’s nothing in the ship’s log and automatic recording systems that we didn’t already know.
‘The only new item we discovered was purely personal – a message that Bowman had left for his mother. I wonder why he never sent it; obviously, he did expect – or hope – to return to the ship after that last EVA. Of course, we’ve had it forwarded to Mrs Bowman – she’s in a nursing home, somewhere in Florida, and her mental condition is poor, so it may not mean anything to her.
‘Well, that’s all the news this time. I can’t tell you how much I miss you… and the blue skies and green seas of Earth. All the colours here are reds and oranges and yellows – often as beautiful as the most fantastic sunset, but after a while one grows sick for the cool, pure rays at the other end of the spectrum.
‘My love to you both – I’ll call again just as soon as I can.’
23
Rendezvous
Nikolai Temovsky, Leonov’s control and cybernetics expert, was the only man aboard who could talk to Dr Chandra on something like his own terms. Although Hal’s principal creator and mentor was reluctant to admit anyone into his full confidence, sheer physical exhaustion had forced him to accept help. Russian and Indo-American had formed a temporary alliance, which functioned surprisingly well. Most of the credit for this went to the good-natured Nikolai, who was somehow able to sense when Chandra really needed him, and when he preferred to be alone. The fact that Nikolai’s English was much the worst on the ship was totally unimportant, since most of the time both men spoke a computerese wholly unintelligible to anyone else.
After a week’s slow and careful reintegration, all of Hal’s routine, supervisory functions were operating reliably. He was like a man who could walk, carry out simple orders, do unskilled jobs, and engage in low-level conversation. In human terms, he had an Intelligence Quotient of perhaps 50; only the faintest outlines of his original personality had yet emerged.
He was still sleepwalking; nevertheless, in Chandra’s expert opinion, he was now quite capable of flying Discovery from its close orbit around Io up to the rendezvous with Big Brother.