Chalmers pulled up a chair, his face earnest, ‘Roger, give yourself time to reconsider everything. You may be more of a discordant element than you realize. Remember, nothing would be easier than getting you out — a child could cut his way through the rusty hull with a blunt can-opener.’
‘Don’t try it,’ Francis warned him quietly. ‘I’ll be moving down to C-Deck, so if you come in after me they’ll all know. Believe me, I won’t try to interfere with the withdrawal programmes. And I won’t arrange any teen-age marriages. But I think the people inside may need me now for more than eight hours a day.’
‘Francis!’ Chalmers shouted. ‘Once you go down there you’ll never come out! Don’t you realize you’re entombing yourself in a situation that’s totally unreal? You’re deliberately withdrawing into a nightmare, sending yourself off on a non-stop journey to nowhere!’
Curtly, before he switched the set off for the last time, Francis replied: ‘Not nowhere, Colonel: Alpha Centauri.’
Sitting down thankfully in the narrow bunk in his cabin, Francis rested briefly before setting off for the commissary. All day he had been busy coding the computer punch tapes for Abel, and his eyes ached with the strain of manually stamping each of the thousands of minuscule holes. For eight hours he had sat without a break in the small isolation cell, electrodes clamped to his chest, knees and elbows while Abel measured his cardiac and respiratory rhythms.
The tests bore no relation to the daily programmes Abel now worked out for his father, and Francis was finding it difficult to maintain his patience. Initially Abel had tested his ability to follow a prescribed set of instructions, producing an endless exponential function, then a digital representation of pi to a thousand places. Finally Abel had persuaded Francis to cooperate in a more difficult test — the task of producing a totally random sequence. Whenever he unconsciously repeated a simple progression, as he did if he was tired or bored, or a fragment of a larger possible progression, the computer scanning his progress sounded an alarm on the desk and he would have to start afresh. After a few hours the buzzer rasped out every ten seconds, snapping at him like a bad-tempered insect. Francis had finally hobbled over to the door that afternoon, entangling himself in the electrode leads, found to his annoyance that the door was locked (ostensibly to prevent any interruption by a fire patrol), then saw through the small porthole that the computer in the cubicle outside was running unattended.
But when Francis’ pounding roused Abel from the far end of the next laboratory he had been almost irritable with the doctor for wanting to discontinue the experiment.
‘Damn it, Abel, I’ve been punching away at these things for three weeks now.’ He winced as Abel disconnected him, brusquely tearing off the adhesive tape. ‘Trying to produce random sequences isn’t all that easy my sense of reality is beginning to fog.’ (Sometimes he wondered if Abel was secretly waiting for this.) ‘I think I’m entitled to a vote of thanks.’
‘But we arranged for the trial to last three days, Doctor,’ Abel pointed out. ‘It’s only later that the valuable results begin to appear. It’s the errors you make that are interesting. The whole experiment is pointless now.’
‘Well, it’s probably pointless anyway. Some mathematicians used to maintain that a random sequence was impossible to define.’
‘But we can assume that it is possible,’ Abel insisted. ‘I was just giving you some practice before we started on the trans-finite numbers.’
Francis baulked here. ‘I’m sorry, Abel. Maybe I’m not so fit as I used to be. Anyway, I’ve got other duties to attend to.’
‘But they don’t take long, Doctor. There’s really nothing for you to do now.’
He was right, as Francis was forced to admit. In the year he had spent in the dome Abel had remarkably streamlined the daily routines, provided himself and Francis with an excess of leisure time, particularly as the latter never went to conditioning (Francis was frightened of the sub-sonic voices — Chalmers and Short would be subtle in their attempts to extricate him, perhaps too subtle).
Life aboard the dome had been more of a drain on him than he anticipated. Chained to the routines of the ship, limited in his recreations and with few intellectual pastimes — there were no books aboard the ship — he found it increasingly difficult to sustain his former good humour, was beginning to sink into the deadening lethargy that had overcome most of the other crew members. Matthias Granger had retreated to his cabin, content to leave the programming to Abel, spent his time playing with a damaged clock, while the two Peters rarely strayed from Control. The three wives were almost completely inert, satisfied to knit and murmur to each other. The days passed indistinguishably. Sometimes Francis told himself wryly he nearly did believe that they were en route for Alpha Centauri. That would have been a joke for General Short!
