Chapter 15 Discovery

The ship was still only thirty days from Earth, but sometimes David Bowman could hardly believe that he had ever really lived there. His life now was in the closed little world of Discovery. When he spoke to Frank Poole about this, he found that Frank had the same feelings. But this sense of separation was easy enough to understand. In the fifty years since men had first gone into space, there had never been a mission quite like this. Discovery was going past Mars and Jupiter, all the way to Saturn. And she would never return.

For Discovery it would be a one-way trip — but her crew had no intention of dying. If all went well, they would be back on Earth within seven years. For five of these years they would be in hibernation, while they waited for rescue by Discovery II — which had not yet been built.

It was a calculated risk, like all voyages into the unknown. But experiments had proved that human hibernation was perfectly safe, and it had opened up new possibilities in space travel.

The three other members of the crew, all scientists who would not be needed until the ship reached Saturn, would sleep through the whole flight there. In this way, a lot of food and other materials would be saved. Also, they would be fresh and rested after the ten-month voyage.

Then the ship would orbit Saturn, giving them a hundred days to map and study a world eighty times the area of Earth, and surrounded by fifteen known moons - one of them as large as the planet Mercury. They would radio their discoveries back to Earth, so even if the explorers never returned, these would not be lost.

Sometimes Bowman envied Whitehead, Kaminski and Hunter, his three unconscious colleagues. They were free from all problems and all responsibility. Until they reached Saturn, the outside world did not exist.

But that world was watching them while they slept. In the Control Room there were five small screens. The last two, marked POOLE and BOWMAN, were plain and lifeless. Their time would not come until a year from now. The others were covered with small green lights which showed that everything was well with the three sleepers. They also had a set of moving lines showing heartbeat, breathing and brain activity. This last line hardly moved at all. If any consciousness remained, it was beyond the reach of instruments.

Bowman knew this from personal experience. Before he was chosen for this mission, his reactions to hibernation had been tested. When all the instruments were in place on his body, he had seen a pattern of moving lights for a few seconds.

Then they had disappeared, and darkness had come.He never felt the drugs take effect, or the first touch of cold as his body temperature was reduced to a few degrees above freezing.

When he woke up, it seemed that he had hardly closed his eyes. But he knew that was wrong. Somehow he was sure that years had passed.

Had the mission been completed? Had they already reached Saturn, finished their work and gone into hibernation? Was Discovery II here to take them home?

He opened his eyes, but there was little to see. Warm air was blowing across him, and quiet music came from a speaker behind his head. It was slowly growing louder and louder

Then a relaxed, friendly voice — he knew it came from a computer — spoke to him.

' Hello, Dave. Do not get up or attempt any violent movements. Do not try to speak.'

He did not want to get up. He was happy knowing that the rescue ship had come and that soon he would be seeing other human beings.

Some time later, another voice spoke to him. This time it was human. It was also familiar.

‘Hello, Dave. You're fine. You can talk now. Do you know where you are?

He thought about this, and had to admit to himself that he was not really sure. He shook his head.

'Don't worry, Dave. This is Frank Poole. Everything's fine. We're going to open the door now and pull you out.'

Soft lights came on, and then all his memories returned to him, and he knew exactly where he was.

Though he had come back from the furthest borders of sleep, and the nearest borders of death, he had been gone only a week. The mission was still more than a year in the future. He was still in the crew trainer at the Houston Space Flight Center.

Chapter 16 Hal

But now Texas was a tiny spot, and even the United States was hard to see. Most of Discovery's many telescopes were pointed at other planets, in the direction she was traveling. There was one, however, that looked back at Earth. It was fixed to the edge of the great dish that sent the ship's radio messages. It made sure that the dish pointed in the right direction. Messages could then come and go along a path that became more than three million kilometres longer every day.

At least once every watch period, Bowman went to the screen that showed the view from that telescope and looked back towards his home. Sometimes he saw a familiar shape, like the Pacific. And he remembered days and nights spent on its islands.

The sixth member of the crew cared for none of these things, as it was not human. It was the HAL 9000 computer, the brain and nervous system of the ship. In the 1980s, Minsky and Good had shown how it was possible to build a computer simply by designing a learning programme. In this way, an artificial brain could be grown in a very similar way to the growth of a human brain. The result was a machine that could do most things that a human brain could do, but with much greater speed and certainty.

Hal had been trained for this mission as thoroughly as his human colleagues, but in a much shorter time. His main job was to check, repeatedly, all the systems on the ship — oxygen pressure, temperature, conditions in the hibernators, and everything else that the crew depended on to stay alive. The first computers had received commandsthrough keyboards, and had replied through printers and screens.Hal could do this if necessary, but most of his communicationwas through the spoken word. Poole and Bowman could t.ilk to Hal as they would to a human being; he replied in the perfect English learned during the short weeks of his electronic childhood.

The question of whether Hal could actually think had been answered by the British mathematician Alan Turing back in the 1940s. Turing had explained that if you had a long conversation with a machine, and you could not tell if it was a machine or a man, then the machine was thinking. Hal could easily pass the Turing test.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 394