Frank Herbert - Destination - Void

"What about all those lives down in the hyb tanks?" Prudence, asked. "Do they have any choice in this... game?"

"They already made their choice."

"And while they're helpless, you change the rules," Flattery said.

"That was one of the chances they accepted when they accepted hybernation," Bickel said. "That was their choice."

Flattery abandoned the argument, pushed himself off his action couch.

"What're you going to do?" Prudence asked.

"Check on Tim."

"Where is Tim?" Bickel asked.

"Down in the hyb tanks," Flattery said, knowing Bickel could get the answer himself - once he consulted the shop's repeaters.

"Deep in the hyb tanks?" Bickel asked.

"Of course!"

"Prue!" Bickel snapped. "Try to raise him on the command circuit."

She heard the urgency in Bickel's voice, whirled to obey.

There was no response from Timberlake.

"You fools!" Bickel said.

Flattery stopped at the tube hatch, glared up at the screen.

"Who let him go down into the deep tanks?" Bickel demanded. "You blind idiots! Don't you know what he's likely to find down there?"

"What do you mean?"

"This whole damn ship's nothing but a simulation device," Bickel said. "There'll be nothing down there except a few crew replacements. Those tanks have to be empty!"

He's wrong! Flattery thought. Or is he?

The thought staggered Flattery. He saw immediately how that might pull the props out from under Timberlake...an tuned as fine as the rest of them for a specific function.

"He'd still have the crew systems," Prudence said. She stared across the room at Flattery, feeling the loneliness. The Tin Egg with its programmed peril might contain only a few isolated humans launched into nowhere.

They wouldn't, Flattery thought. But if they'd prepare me to cheat the rest of the crew... His feet felt rooted to the deck. He swallowed in a dry throat. But it's impossible! They promised me when I discovered the actual Tau Ceti records - if we succeeded we could just send back the message capsule and continue as...

"Raj, are you sick?" Prudence asked. She studied him, seeing the lost, sunken look in his eyes.

"The Tau Ceti planets are uninhabitable, yes," Hempstead had admitted when confronted with the evidence. "No Eden. But the universe is known to contain billions of inhabitable planets. You realize you can't come back here, of course. The danger to your hosts."

"The biopsy donors were all criminals," Flattery had said, springing his other suspicion.

"Brilliant people, but misdirected," Hempstead had protested. "That is one of the reasons you can't come back, but nothing's to stop you from going on to explore and find your own Eden."

Remembering the words, Flattery felt how hollow they sounded.

Sham and trickery all the way, he thought. But why?

TIMBERLAKE HAD launched himself down the communications tube with desperate haste, knowing he had to move swiftly or become stalled in terror.

At the tube-distribution lock, he sealed the hatch behind him, snatched a robox-monkey from its rack, tuned the sensors to the track imprinted in the tube wall, slammed its wheels onto the guide marks, and grabbed the handhold controls. Again he encountered that terrifying reluctance to move, and stared up the tube, studying the long, infinity curve of it visible through the transparent safety locks.

I can't go back, he thought.

With a sudden wrench, he twisted the little robox tow unit's drive to full on, let it jerk him ahead along that curving track.

The wind of his passage was a dim hiss. He was like a loose piston driving down that tube. Locks opened automatically to the robox signal, closed behind him. He slowed for the protective jog through the shielding layer, twisted around through the branching outside the hyb tanks, dove back down along the flat angle that returned through the watershield, and stopped in the lock chamber to the tanks.

He racked the robox, stared at the hatch. It was a big yellow oval, its seal warning in heavy blue letters: "THIS HATCH MUST BE CLOSED AND DOGGED. BEFORE INNER HATCH WILL OPEN!"

Now that he was faced with it, Timberlake felt a calm submission to fate. He gripped the hatch dogs, broke the seal, seeing the line of frost inside as the hatch swung open. His suit generators hummed upscale, compensating for the drop in temperature as chill air spilled out of the lock.

Timberlake slipped into the lock, closed and sealed the outer hatch, turned around. A rack of heavy-duty generators hung over the inner hatch with a big warning sign above them: "EXTREME DANGER! DEEP SPACE OR L-T SUIT REQUIRED BEFORE ENTERING THE NEXT LOCK. BE SURE YOU HAVE SPARE GENERATOR IN WORKING CONDITION BEFORE OPENING THIS HATCH."

Timberlake looped the straps of a spare generator over his shoulder, gave the thing's turbine drive a short burst to check it. The generator hummed briefly. He swung the rack of them aside, broke open the next hatch, slipped through and dogged it behind him.

Now, a smaller hatch greeted him, and lettered on its face: "ADMISSION ONLY TO LIFE-SYSTEMS ENGINEERS OR MEDICAL PERSONNEL. SUIT SECURITY MUST BE MAINTAINED AT ALL TIMES BEYOND THIS POINT. DO NOT OPEN THIS HATCH UNTIL YOU HAVE ADJUSTED YOUR SUIT FOR THE EXTREME LOW OF HYBERNATION TEMPERATURES."

Timberlake coupled the auxiliary generator to his suit, checked both generators, adjusted them for temperature-security override. The remembered routine occupied his awareness, keeping his mind off the space beyond that hatch. Suit seals slithered under his gloved fingers as he secured them. He dropped the anti-fog viewplate over his faceplate, ran a check tape along the seals.

The moment of final decision had come.

Timberlake forced himself to act slowly and calmly. More than his own life depended on what he did now, he told himself. Stray heat inside there could play havoc with helpless lives. He passed his suit's baffles in front of a heat sensor, studied the gauge.

Zero.

His gloved hands went to the dogs of the inner hatch, broke the seal. The hatch popped slightly, indicating a small difference in pressure - nothing abnormal. He stepped through into the glittering dry chill of the first bank of hyb tanks. This was where Prudence had been. He saw her empty tank on his left, its leads dangling, the cushioned carrier still open inside.

Everything around him was revealed in harsh blue light. He studied the chamber.

It was like a giant barrel - an open space in the center surrounded by the smaller barrels that were the individual hybernation tanks. A grid-floored catwalk led down the open center, with short ladders and handholds branching up to the separate tanks.

Timberlake kicked off down the length of the tank in three low-grav jumps, caught a handhold beside the breaker lock that separated this section from the next one.

He looked back. No... they weren't little barrels, he thought. The individual tanks stretched away from him - all around - like so many sections of gray culvert pipe waiting to be assembled into something useful... like a drain.

There was no point examining the tanks in here, he knew. This was the No. 1 section: high-priority crew replacements. If there was deception, it'd be farther along the line - in one of the deeper sections.