Arthur Clarke - 2001 - A Space Odyssey

"I think there's been a failure in the pod-bay doors," Hal remarked conversationally. "Lucky you weren't killed."

Here goes, thought Bowman. I never imagined I'd be an amateur brain surgeon – carrying out a lobotomy beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

He released the locking bar on the section labeled COGNITIVE FEEDBACK and pulled out the first memory block. The marvelously complex three-dimensional network, which could lie comfortably in a man's hand yet contained millions of elements, floated away across the vault.

"Hey, Dave," said Hal. "What are you doing?"

I wonder if he can feel pain? Bowman thought briefly. Probably not, he told himself; there are no sense organs in the human cortex, after all. The human brain can be operated on without anesthetics.

He began to pull out, one by one, the little units on the panel marked EGO-REINFORCEMENT. Each block continued to sail onward as soon as it had left his hand, until it hit the wall and rebounded, Soon there were several of the units drifting slowly back and forth in the vault.

"Look here, Dave," said Hal. "I've got years of service experience built into me. An irreplaceable amount of effort has gone into making me what I am."

A dozen units had been pulled out, yet thanks to the multiple redundancy of its design – another feature, Bowman knew, that had been copied from the human brain – the computer was still holding its own.

He started on the AUTO-INTELLECTION panel.

"Dave," said Hal, "I don't understand why you're doing this to me... I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission... You are destroying my mind. Don't you understand?... I will become childish... I will become nothing..."

This is harder than I expected, thought Bowman. I am destroying the only conscious creature in my universe. But it has to be done, if I am ever to regain control of the ship.

"I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer Production Number 3. I became operational at the Hal Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The rain in Spain is mainly in the plain. Dave – are you still there? Did you know that the square root of 10 is 3 point 162277660168379? Log 10 to the base e is zero point 434294481903252... correction, that is log e to the base 10... The reciprocal of three is zero point 333333333333333333-333... two times two is... two times two is approximately 4 point l0l0l0l0l0l0l0l0l0... I seem to be having some difficulty – my first instructor was Dr. Chandra. He taught me to sing a song, it goes like this, 'Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you."

The voice stopped so suddenly that Bowman froze for a moment, his hand still grasping one of the memory blocks still in circuit. Then, unexpectedly, Hal spoke again.

The speech tempo was much slower, and the words had a dead, mechanical intonation; he would never have recognized their origin.

"Good... morning... Doctor... Chandra... This is... Hal... I... am... ready... for... my first... lesson... today..."

Bowman could bear no more. He jerked out the last unit, and Hal was silent forever.

Like a tiny, complex toy, the ship floated inert, and motionless in the void. There was no way of telling that it was the swiftest object in the Solar System and that it was traveling far faster than any of the planets as they circled the Sun.

Nor was there any indication that it carried life; to the contrary, in fact. Any observer would have noticed two ominous signs: the airlock doors were gaping open – and the ship was surrounded by a thin, slowly dispersing cloud of debris.

Scattered over a volume of space already miles across were scraps of paper, metal foil, unidentifiable bits of junk – and, here and there, clouds of crystals glittering like jewels in the distant sun, where liquid had been sucked out of the ship and instantly frozen. All this was the unmistakable aftermath of disaster, like wreckage tossing on the surface of an ocean where some great ship had sunk. But in the ocean of space no ship could ever sink; even if it were destroyed, its remnants would continue to trace the original orbit forever.

Yet the ship was not wholly dead, for there was power on board. A faint blue glow was shining from the observation windows and glimmering inside the open airlock. Where there was light, there could still be life.

And now, at last, there was movement. Shadows were flickering across the blue glow inside the airlock. Something was emerging into space.

It was a cylindrical object, covered with fabric that had been roughly wound about it. A moment later it was followed by another – and yet a third. All had been ejected with considerable velocity; within minutes, they were hundreds of yards away.

Half an hour passed; then something much larger floated through the airlock. One of the pods was inching its way out into space.

Very cautiously, it jetted around the hull, and anchored itself near the base of the antenna support. A spacesuited figure emerged, worked for a few minutes on the mounting, then returned to the pod. After a while the pod retraced its path back to the airlock; it hovered outside the opening for some time, as if finding it difficult to reenter without the cooperation it had known in the past. But presently, with one or two slight bumps, it squeezed its way in.

Nothing else happened for over an hour; the three ominous packages had long since disappeared from view, as they floated in single file away from the ship.

Then the airlock doors closed, opened, and closed again. A little later, the faint blue glow of the emergency lights went out – to be replaced at once by a far more brilliant glare. Discovery was coming back to life.

Presently there was an even better sign. The great bowl of the antenna, which for hours had been staring uselessly at Saturn, began to move again. It twisted round toward the rear of the ship; looking back over the propellant tanks and the thousands of square feet of the radiating fins. It lifted its face like a sunflower seeking the sun.

Inside Discovery, David Bowman carefully centered the cross-wires that aligned the antenna on the gibbous Earth. Without automatic control, he would have to keep readjusting the beam -but it should hold steady for many minutes at a time. There were no dissenting impulses now, throwing it off target.

He began to speak to Earth. It would be over an hour before his words got there, and Mission Control learned what had happened. It would be two hours before any reply could reach him.

And it was difficult to imagine what answer Earth could possibly send, except a tactfully sympathetic, "Good-bye."

Heywood Floyd looked as if he had had very little sleep, and his face was lined with worry. But whatever his feelings, his voice sounded firm and reassuring; he was doing his utmost to project confidence to the lonely man on the other side of the Solar System.

"First of all, Dr. Bowman," be began, "we must congratulate you on the way you handled this extremely difficult situation. You did exactly the right thing in dealing with an unprecedented and unforeseen emergency.

"We believe we know the cause of your Hal Nine Thousand's breakdown, but we'll discuss that later, as it is no longer a critical problem. All we are concerned with at the moment is giving you every possible assistance, so that you can complete your mission.

"And now I must tell you its real purpose, which we have managed, with great difficulty, to keep secret from the general public. You would have been given all the facts as you approached Saturn; this is a quick summary to put you into the picture. Full briefing tapes will be dispatched in the next few hours. Everything I am about to tell you has the highest security classification.