Free Destination: Void: Prequel to the Pandora Sequence by Frank Herbert Page A

the old familiar pain-of-wonder, asking herself what it might have been like to have been born into a normal family in the normal way, to have grown up in the noisy, intimate belonging of the unchosen.
    “You are the cream, the select few,” Morgan Hempstead and his cohorts had kept reminding them. But they all knew where the cream had originated. Normal biopsy tissue from a living human volunteer had been suspended in an axolotl tank, the genetic imprint triggered and the flesh allowed to grow. It produced an identical twin—an expendable twin.
    Select few! she thought. Something precious was taken from us and the compensations were inadequate.
    She tuned the small screen at the corner of her board to one of the tail eyes, looked back toward the center of the solar system, toward the planet that had spawned them.
    A stabbing pang of homesickness tightened her breast, made breathing difficult for a moment.
    They had been molded and motivated, twisted, trained and inhibited—wound up like mechanical toys and sent scooting off into the darkness with their laser “whistle” tooting to let UMB know where they were.
    And where are we? she asked herself as she blanked the screen.
    “Prue, you’d better take the big board,” Flattery said. “You’d normally follow John.”
    Sight of the big board’s dials and gauges filled her with an abrupt anger and fear. She felt the immediacy of the emotions in a dry throat, heat in her cheeks.
    “I … haven’t had enough time off the boards, to recuperate,” Flattery said, speaking hesitantly. “Or I’d—”
    “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll take it.”
    She took a deep breath, leaned back, signed to Timberlake to begin the count.
    The appeal to her nursing instinct did it, Flattery thought. She was ready to funk out. She had to take the board now or she might never be able to face it.
    Flattery glanced at Timberlake, saw the relief so apparent on the man’s face as he switched the green arrow to Prudence.
    Timberlake, dominated by intuition, was terrified by the responsibility of Com-central. Prudence, deep in sensation, shared that fear.
    And I , because I feel their fear, overcome my own repugnance, Flattery thought.
    Only Bickel, logical and with penetrating intelligence, seemed immune to these pressures. It was a flaw in Bickel’s character, Flattery thought, but he knew their lives could depend on that flaw.
    “Get the manifest and ship-loading plans, Tim,” Bickel said. “I’ll give you a list of what we need from colony stores. We can set up in the computer maintenance shop next door for easy—”
    “Don’t stay outside the shield area too long,” Prudence said. “You’d better key your dosimeters to repeaters in here; we’ll keep an eye on you that way.”
    “Right,” Bickel said.
    He slipped off his couch, looked back at Prudence, studying her profile, the intent way she watched the big board. He shifted his attention to Flattery, who lay back with eyes closed, resting for his shift at the controls; then to Timberlake, who was taking copies of the ship-loading plans from the computer memory-bank printers.
    None of them has really focused on what has to be done here, Bickel thought. They haven’t faced the fact that the simulator eventually has to be tied directly to the computer. We’ll just be building a set of frontal lobes — if we’re successful. And our “Ox” can have but one source of experience upon which to come alive and conscious — the computer and its memory banks.
    When they did face this fact, Bickel saw, he was going to have a fight on his hands. Too much of the ship was almost totally dependent on the master programs. Juggling those programs involved a kind of all-or-nothing danger. It was a flaw in the Tin Egg’s design, Bickel felt. He could see no logical reason for it. Why should everything on the ship depend on conscious control or intervention—even down to the robox repair units?
    Prudence sensed Bickel’s