Bruno, needs stimulation.”
Bruno frowned. 'And in an isolation tank, I won't get it?”
Colonel Early nodded, looking serious. 'That's right, son. But your brain will search for a way to get that stimulation, it has to have it, but you won't he able to see, hear, or feel inside the tank. Eventually, your brain will learn to link up with the computer interface circuitry.”
Bruno squinted, thinking. 'What will it be like?”
'People who connect up with higher-order computers via their brains are called – ' 'Linkers,' Bruno interrupted. 'That's right, son. Linkers. They say that a Linker can know everything.' 'Everything?' Bruno was suddenly fascinated. Colonel Early looked a little sad. 'I doubt it. Did you ever hear of Faust, son?' 'Fawst? Who's that?' The older man sighed. 'I guess you weren't on the approved list. Nobody is, anymore.' He brightened a bit. 'But we think that you will be better at interfacing with a computer than other Linkers.”
'Because I'm a chiphead.' Bruno grated, peeved. He made a face. Colonel Early put a hand on Bruno's shoulder, gentle. ' 'Chiphead' is a bad word, Bruno.' He stared directly into Bruno's eyes, held them. 'It is an ignorant term used by uneducated, prejudiced people.”
Bruno said nothing, his lips twisted in resentment. He had heard a lot of people call him a chiphead over the years, once they had learned about where he lived, and his history. The accident. What was inside his head. He hated being different.
'That's why the scientists look at me funny, isn't it?' Bruno asked. He couldn't look at the other man. Colonel Early persisted. He hooked two fingers under Bruno's chin and forced his eyes up toward his own.
'Bruno, it's a word used by little people who are afraid of new things. You should pity them.' 'If you say so.' He was unconvinced. At least Colonel Early liked him. Even if he was a chiphead. They waited together in the crowded room for a few moments. Colonel Early said nothing. He never was overbearing. 'Will it hurt?' he finally asked. 'No, son. It will be scary at first, and very lonely. Until your brain learns to Link, that is.' A bit of enthusiasm entered his voice. 'And then I'll know everything?' Colonel Early smiled in real amusement. 'Well, I wouldn't go quite that far, son. You will know a great deal more than anyone else, I can promise you.' Bruno thought a moment. 'Would I be able to help you with your work at the UN?' he asked. 'Son, that is why I am asking. My children are all grown now, as are my grandchildren. And I can't get a permit for more children.”
Bruno smiled. 'That's okay, Colonel Early. I don't have a father or mother. But I guess you know that already.”
He certainly did. Colonel Early's had been the first face Bruno had seen when he had awakened in the hospital after the accident and the first set of operations.
Again they waited together, silent. Colonel Early never pushed Bruno, and he appreciated it.
'I'll do it,' Bruno finally said, ignoring the mutters of the technicians around the isolation tank.
'Good.”
'When do we start?”
'How about now?' Colonel Early said, handing Bruno the helmet with all of the strange plugs and wires. It was heavier than it looked, and Bruno held it awkwardly. 'Let me help.' Early lowered the helmet onto Bruno's head slowly, reverently.
Like a crown.
11001010001111001010101011011111101010111011010011100
01011101110101111010010111010010011010101100110011110
Bruno Takagama moaned against the soft mask of the respirator in the autodoc tank. Mechanical fingers began to probe the burns around his neck socket. Small swimming robots cruised toward his wounds in the ocean of the autodoc's fluids, bearing tiny medical instruments poised at the ready. Noting his distress, the autodoc diagnostic circuitry administered a strong sedative. Soon he slept dreamlessly.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Carol Faulk touched a keypad and felt her crash couch shudder in response. Dolittle shot down the darkened escape tunnel toward the outer hull of Sun-Tzu.
Carol activated the escape bay doors. She goosed the fusion drive, already warmed and ready at the first sign of potential hostilities. Explosive bolts blew silently in vacuum, the hatch flew into fragments, and the long spindle shape of Dolittle was suddenly free in space.
Now. Yes! Her hands on the helm keypads of a spacecraft, Carol felt in command again. No longer helpless and unable to fight. The starscape was still relativistically squashed and distorted, but at least she had some control over her fate.
And Bruno's.
Dolittle flashed away from the dying Sun-Tzu. They had less than an hour before her quickly set booby trap activated, and antimatter containment gently and fatally shut down.
Dolittle had to be far away indeed from Sun-Tzu by then.
Carol called up the autodoc remote diagnostic on screen above her console. The autodoc sensors were already attached to Bruno in many places, and medical robots were swarming over and in his body, doing everything possible to heal his damage. Flashing red lights indicated his serious condition.
'C'mon, Tacky,' she whispered. 'You have to pull through.”
There had been little choice when she pulled his plug in the Sun-Tzu. Bruno's brain was certainly damaged by what she had done, and even more from the EMP induction. But had Bruno remained fully Linked and directly connected to the computer net by electrical conductors, the electromagnetic pulse would have burned his brain to ashes.
Bruno: sick or dead. Those had been her choices.
Carol kept the bulk of the Sun-Tzu between Dolittle and the kzin warship that was even now approaching the earth vessel, bent on boarding and conquest. The idea of ratcats leaping down the abandoned corridors of Sun- Tzu, finding the cryogenically suspended bodies of her crewmates, felt like a violation. But perhaps she would get her revenge after all.
She would give her doomed sleeping crewmates a real Viking funeral, a far piece indeed from Scandinavia.
Carol smiled grimly. The ratcats will get a surprise in fifty-eight minutes, she thought to herself. A caution worried her. How long will it take for the kzin to analyze the command programs, and begin diagnosing drive activity?
Dolittle's vector was straight and true. Carol was a good pilot, even by the seat of her jumpsuit, and Dolittle's basic fusion drive was familiar. You didn't need to be part computer to fly the little warship.
By now, the ratcat craft was close enough to Sun-Tzu to hide Dolittle's escape behind the bulk of the earth spacecraft. Every second would translate into merciful, shielding distance when the antimatter containment system failed.
When she was a thousand kilometers from the Sun-Tzu, still undetected and unchallenged, Carol unfurled the great superconductive wings of Dolittle.
Forty minutes left now.
The vast wings of Dolittle caught at the magnetic fields between the stars, like a fledgling bird in an updraft. A conductor moving rapidly through a magnetic field generated electrical current. The current, tapped, delivered deceleration force. Electromagnetic braking writ large.
The energy thus generated by deceleration at relativistic speeds was enormous, and useful for a variety of purposes.
It had originally been the plan of Dolittle and her crew to leap from the Sun-Tzu near Wunderlander space. Bruno was to pilot Dolittle in full Linkage, while Carol and her revived crewmates were all exposed to Tree-of-Life virus behind the now-useless hermetic doors of the cargo section of Dolittle.
Without the sealed doors, Bruno would have been killed by exposure to Tree-of-Life. The brain as well as the
