kindergarten pencils

"Fishing once more? "kindergarten pencils kindergarten pencilstkindergarten pencilse 128 .In using this system, absentee voters werekindergarten pencils instructed to mark their ballots with number two pencils. The optical scanner rejected ballots which were marked withkindergarten pencils instruments other than number two pencil. 2006, Barbara Slater Stern, curriculum and teaching dialogue: V. 8, page 33."Mrs. Landry, I forgot to bring my number two pencils! Does that mean I flu
20

Guillotine

 

'What is it?' asked Curnow with mild distaste, hefting the little mechanism in hikindergarten pencilss hand. 'A guillotine for mice?'

'Not a bad descripkindergarten pencilstion - but I'm after bigger game.' Floyd pointed to a flashing arrow on the display screen, which was now showing a complicated circuit diagram.

'You see this line?'

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'Yes - the main power supply. So?'

'This is the point where it enters Hal's central processing unit. I'd like you to install this gadget here. Inside the cable trunking, where it can't be found without a deliberate search.'

'I see. A remote control, so you can pull the plug on Hal whenekindergarten pencilsver you want to. Very neat - and a non-conducting blade, too, so there won't be any embarrassing shorts when it's triggered. Who makes toys like this? The CIA?'

'Never mind. The control's in my room - that little red calculator I always keep on my desk. Put in nine nines, take the square root, and press TNT. That's all. I'm not sure of its range - we'll have to test that - but as long as Leonov and Discovery are within a couple of kilometres of each other, there'll be no danger of Hal running amok again.'

'Who are you going to tell about this... thing?'

'Well, the only person I'm really hiding it from is Chandra.'

'I guessed as much.'

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'But the fewer who know, the less likely it is to be talked about. I'll tell Tanya that it exists, and if there's an emergency you can show her how to operate it.'

'What kind of emergency?'

'That's not a very bright question, Walter. If I knew, I wouldn't need the damn thing.'

'Guess you're right. When do you want me to install your patented Hal-zapper?'

'As soon as you can. Preferably tonight. When Chandra's sleeping.'

'Are you kidding? I don't think he ever sleeps. He's like a mother nursing a sick baby.'

'Well, he's got to come back to Leonov to eat, occasionally.'

'I've news for you. The last time he went across, he tied a little sack of rice to his suit. Thakindergarten pencilst will keep him going for weeks.'

'Then we'll have to use one of Katerina's famous knockout drops. They did a pretty good job on you, didn't they?'

Curnow was joking about Chandra - at least, Floyd assumed that he was, though one could never be quite sure: he was fond of making outrageous statements with a perfectly straight face. It had been some time before the Russians had fully realized that; soon, in self-defence, they were prone to pre-emptive laughs even when Curnow was being perfectly serious.

Curnow's own laugh, mercifully, had much abated since Floyd had first heard it in the upward-bound shuttle; on that occasion, it had obviously been primed by alcohol. He had fully expected to cringe from it again at the end-of-orbit party, when Leonov had finally made rendezvous with Discovery. But even on that occasion, though Curnow had drunk a good deal, he had remained as much under control as Captain Orlova herself.

The one thing he did take seriously was his work. On the way up from Earth, hekindergarten pencils had been a passenger. Now he was crew.

 

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21

Resurrection

 

We are, Floyd told himself, about to awaken a sleeping giant. How will Hal react to our presence, after all these years? What will he remember of the past - and will he be friendly, or hostile?

As he floated just behind Dr Chandra in the zero-gravity environment of Discovery's flight deck, Floyd's mind was seldom far from the cut-off switch, installed and tested only a few hours earlier. The radio control was mere centimetres from his hand, and he felt somewhat foolish to have brought it with him. At this stage, Hal was still disconnected from all the ship's operational circuits. Even if he was reactivated, he would be a brain without limbs though not without sense organs. He would be able to communicate, but not to act. As Curnow had put it, 'The worst he can do is swear at us.'

'I'm ready for the first test, Captain,' said Chandra. 'All the missing modules have been replaced, and I've run diagnostic programs on all circuits. Everything appears normal, at least on this level.'

Captain Orlova glanced at Floyd, who gave a nod. At Chandra's insistence, only the three of them were present for this critical first run, and it was quite obvious that even this small audience was unwelcome.

'Very well, Dr Chandra.' Ever conscious of protocol, the captain added quickly: 'Dr Floyd hakindergarten pencilss given his approval, and I have no objections myself.'

'I should explain,' said Chandra, in a tone that clearly conveyed disapproval, 'that his voice-recognition and speech-synthesis centres have been damaged. We'll have to teach him to speak all over again. Luckily, he learns several million times faster than a human being.'

The scientist's fingers danced over the keyboard as he typed out a dozen words, apparently at random, carefully pronouncing each one as it appeared on the screen. Like a distorted echo, the words came back from the speaker grille - lifeless, indeed mechanical, with no sense of any intelligence behind them. This isn't the old Hal, thought Floyd. It's no better than the primitive speaking toys that were such a novelty when I was a kid.

Chandra pressed the REPEAT button, and the series of words sounded once again. Already, there was a noticeable improvement, though no one could have mistaken the speaker for a human being.

'The words I gave him contain the basic English phonemes; about ten iterations, and he'll be acceptable. But I don't hakindergarten pencilsve the equipment to do a really good job of therapy.'

'Therapy?' asked Floyd. 'You mean that 'he's - well, brain-damaged?'

'No,' snapped Chandra. 'The logic circuits are in perfect condition. Only the voice output may be defective, though it will improve steadily. So check everything against the visual display, to avoid misinterpretations. And when you do speak, enunciate carefully.'

Floyd gave Captain Orlova a wry smile, and asked the obvious question.

'What about all the Russian accents around here?'

'I'm sure that won't be a problem with Captain Orlova and Dr Kovalev. But with the others - well, we'll have to run individual tests. Anyone who can't pass will have to use the keyboard.'

'That's still looking a long way ahead. For the present, you're the only pkindergarten pencilserson who should attempt communication. Agreed, Captain?'

'Absolutely.'

Only the briefest of nods revealed that Dr Chandra had heard them. His fingers continued to fly over the keyboard, and columns of words and symbols flashed across the display screen at such a rate that no human being could possibly assimilate them. Presumably Chandra had an eidetic memory, for he appeared to recognize whole pages of information at a glance.

Floyd and Orlova were just about to leave the scientist to his arcane devotions when he suddenly acknkindergarten pencilsowledged their presence again, holding up his hand in warning or anticipation. With an almost hesitant movement, in marked contrast with his previous swift actions, he slid back a locking bar and pressed a single, isolated key.

Instantly, with no perceptible pause, a voice came from the console, no longer in a mechanical parody of human speech. There was intelligence - consciousness - self-awareness here, though as yet only on a rudimentary level.

'Good morning, Dr Chandra, This is Hal. I am ready for my first lesson.'

There was a moment of shocked silence; then, acting on the same impulse, the two observers left the deck.

Heywood Floyd would never have believed it. Dr Chandra was crying.

 

Iv

LAGRANGE

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22

Big Brother

 

'... What delightful news about the baby dolphin! I can just imagine how excited Chris was when the proud parents brought it into the house. You should have heard the ohs and ahs of my shipmates when they saw the videos of them swimming together, and Chris riding on its back. They suggest we call it Sputnik, which means companion as well as satellite.

'Sorry it's been quite a while since my last message, but the newscasts will have given you an idea of the huge job we've had to do. Even Captain Tanya's given up all pretence of a regular schedule; each problem has to be fixed as it comes along, by whoever is on the spot. We sleep when we can't stay awake any longer.

'I think we can all be proud of what we've done. Both ships are operational and we've nearly finished our first round of tests on Hal. In a couple of days we'll know if we can trust him to fly Discovery when we leave here to make our final rendezvous with Big Brother.

'I don't know who first gave it that name - the Russians, understandably, aren't keen on it. And they've waxed quite sarcastic about our official designation TMA-2, pointing out to me - several times - that it's the best part of a billion kilometres from Tycho. Also that Bowman reported no magnetic anomaly, and that the only resemblance to TMA-1 is the shape. When I asked them what name they preferred, they came up with Zagadka, which means enigma. It's certainly an excellent name; but everyone smiles when I try to pronounce it, so I'll stick to Big Brother.

'Whatever you call the thing, it's only ten thousand kilometres away now, and the trip won't take more than a few hours. But that last lap has us all nervous, I don't mind telling you.

'We'd hoped that we might find some new information aboard Discovery. That's been our only disappointment, though we should have expected it. Hal, of course, was disconnected long before the encounter, and so has no memories of what happened; Bowman has taken all his secrets with him. There's nothing in the ship's log and automatic recording systems that we didn't already know.

'The only new item we discovered was purely personal - a message that Bowman had left for his mother. I wonder why he never sent it; obviously, he did expect - or hope - to return to the ship after that last EVA. Of course, we've had it forwarded to Mrs Bowman - she's in a nursing home, somewhere in Florida, and her mental condition is poor, so it may not mean anything to her.

'Well, that's all the news this time. I can't tell you how much I miss you... and the blue skies and green seas of Earth. All the colours here are reds and oranges and yellows - often as beautiful as the most fantastic sunset, but after a while one grows sick for the cool, pure rays at the other end of the spectrum.

'My love to you both - I'll call again just as soon as I can.'

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23

Rendezvous

 

Nikolai Temovsky, Leonov's control and cybernetics expert, was the only man aboard who could talk to Dr Chandra on something like his own terms. Although Hal's principal creator and mentor was reluctant to admit anyone into his full confidence, sheer physical exhaustion had forced him to accept help. Russian and Indo-American had formed a temporary alliance, which functioned surprisingly well. Most of the credit for this went to the good-natured Nikolai, who was somehow able to sense when Chandra really needed him, and when he preferred to be alone. The fact that Nikolai's English was much the worst on the ship was totally unimportant, since most of the time both men spoke a computerese wholly unintelligible to anyone else.

After a week's slow and careful reintegration, all of Hal's routine, supervisory functions were operating reliably. He was like a man who could walk, carry out simple orders, do unskilled jobs, and engage in low-level conversation. In human terms, he had an Intelligence Quotient of perhaps 50; only the faintest outlines of his original personality had yet emerged.

He was still sleepwalking; nevertheless, in Chandra's expert opinion, he was now quite capable of flying Discovery from its close orbit around Io up to the rendezvous with Big Brother.

The prospect of getting an extra seven thousand kilometres away from the burning hell beneath them was welcomed by everyone. Trivial though that distance was in astronomical terms, it meant that the sky would no longet be dominated by a landscape that might have been imagined by Dante or Hieronymus Bosch. And although not even the most violent eruptions had blasted any material up to the ships, there was always the fear that Io might attempt to set a new record. As it was, visibility from Leonov's observation deck was steadily degraded by a thin film of sulphur, and sooner or later someone would have to go out and clean it off.

Only Curnow and Chandra were aboard Discovery when Hal was given the first control of the ship. It was a very limited form of control; he was merely repeating the program that had been fed into his memory, and monitoring its execution. And the human crew was monitoring him: if any malfunction occurred, they would take over immediately.

The first burn lasted for ten minutes; then Hal reported that Discovery had entered the transfekindergarten pencilsr orbit. As soon as Leonov's radar and optical tracking confirmed that, the other ship injected itself into the same trajectory. Two minor in-course corrections were made; then, three hours and fifteen minutes later, both arrived uneventfully at the first Lagrange point, L. 1 - 10,500 kilometres up, on the invisible line connecting the centres of Io and Jupiter.

Hal had behaved impeccably, and Chandra showed unmistakable traces of such purely human emotions as satisfaction and even joy. But by that time, everyone's thoughts were elsewhere; Big Brother, alias Zagadka, was only a hundred kilometres away.

Even from that distance, it already appeared larger than the Moon as seen from Earth, and shockingly unnatural in its straight-edged, geometrical perfection. Against the background of space it would have been completely invisible, but the scudding Jovian clouds 350,000 kilometres below showed it up in dramatic relief. They also produced an illusion that, once experienced, the mind found almost impossible to refute. Because there was no way in which its real location could be judged by the eye, Big Brother often looked like a yawning trapdoor set in the face of Jupiter.

There was no reason to suppose that a hundred kilometres would be 'safer than ten, or more dangerous than a thousand; it merely seemed psychologically right for a first reconnaissance. From that distance, the ship's telescopes could have revealed details only centimetres across -but there were none to be seen. Big Brother appeared completely featureless; which, for an object that had, presumably, survived millions of years of bombardment by space debris, was incredible.

When Floyd stared through the binocular eyepiece, it seemed to him that he could reach out and touch those smooth, ebon surfaces - just as he had done on the Moon, years ago. That first time, it had been with the gloved hand of his spacesuit. Not until the Tycho monolith had been enclosed in a pressurized dome had he been able to use his naked hand.

That had made no difference; he did not feel that he had ever really touched TMA-1. The tips of his fingers had seemed to skitter over an invisible barrier, and the harder he pushed, the greater the repulsion grew. He wondered if Big Brother would produce the same effect.

Yet before they came that close, they had to make every test they could devise and report their observations to Earth. They were in much the same position as explosives experts trying to defuse a new type of bomb, which might be detonated by the slightest false move. For all that they could tell, even the most delicate of radar probes might trigger some unimaginable catastrophe.

For the first twenty-four hours, they did nothing except observe with passive instruments - telescopes, cameras, sensors on every wavelength. Vasili Orlov also took the opportunity of measuring the slab's dimensions with the greatest possible precision, and confirmed the famous 1:4:9 ratio to six decimal places. Big Brother was exactly the same shape as TMA-1 - but as it was more than two kilometres long, it was 718 times larger than its small sibling.

And there was a second mathematical mystery. Men had been arguing kindergarten pencilsfor years over that 1:4:9 ratio - the squares of the first three integers. That could not possibly be a coincidence; now here was another number to conjure with.

Back on Earth, statisticians and mathematical physicists were soon playing happily with their computers, trying to relate the ratio to the fundamental constants of nature - the velocity of light, the proton/electron mass ratio, the fine-structure constant. They were quickly joined by a gaggle of numerologists, astrologers, and mystics, who threw in the height of the Great Pyramid, the diameter of Stonehenge, the azimuth bearings of the Nazca lines, the latitude of Easter Island, and a host of other factors from which they were able to draw the most amazing conclusions about the future. They were not in the least deterred when a celebrated Washington humorist claimed that his calculations proved that the world ended on 31 December 1999 - but that everyone had had too much of a hangover to notice.

Nor did Big Brother appear to notice the two ships that had arrived in its vicinity - even when they cautiously probed it with radar beams and bombarded it with strings of radio pulses which, it was hoped, would encourage any intelligent listener to answer in the same fashion.

After two frustrating days, with the approval of Mission Control, the ships halved their distance. From fifty kilometres, the largest face of the slab appeared about four times the width of the Moon in Earth's sky - impressive, but not so large as to be psychologically overwhelming. It could not yet compete with Jupiter, ten times larger still; and already the mood of the expedition was changing from awed alertness to a certain impatience.

Walter Curnow spoke for almost everyone: 'Big Brother may be willing to wait a few million yearkindergarten pencilss - we'd like to get away a little sooner.'

 

24

Reconnaissance

 

Discovery had left Earth with three of the little space pods that allowed an astronaut to perform extravehicular activities in shirt-sleeve comfort. One had been lost in the accident - if it was an accident - that had killed Frank Poole. Another had carried Dave Bowman to his final appointment with Big Brother, and shared whatever fate befell him, A third was still in the ship's garage, the Pod Bay.

It lacked one important component - the hatch, blown off by Commander Bowman when he had made his hazardous vacuum-crossing and entered the ship through the emergency airlock, after Hal had refused to open the Pod Bay door. The resulting blast of air had rocketed the pod several hundred kilometres away before Bowman, busy with more important matters, had brought it back under radio control. It was not surprising that he had never bothered to replace the missing hatch.

Now Pod Number 3 (on which Max, refusing all explanations, had stencilled the name Nina) was being prepared for another EVA. It still lacked a hatch, but that was unimportant. No one would be riding inside.

Bowman's devotion to duty was a piece of unexpected luck, and it wkindergarten pencilsould have been folly not to take advantage of it. By using Nina as a robot probe, Big Brother could be examined at close quarters without risking human lives. That at least was the theory; no one could rule out the possibility of a backlash that might engulf the ship. After all, fifty kilometres was not even a hair's breadth, as cosmic distances went.

After years of neglect, Nina looked distinctly shabby. The dust that was always flkindergarten pencilsoating around in zero gee had settled over the outer surface, so that the once immaculately white hull had become a dingy grey. As it slowly accelerated away from the ship, its external manipulators folded neatly back and its oval viewport staring spaceward like a huge, dead eye, it did not seem a very impressive ambassador of Mankind. But that was a distinct advantage; so humble an emissary might be tolerated, and its small size and low velocity should emphasize its peaceful intentions. There had been a suggestion that it should approach Big Brother with open hands; the idea was quickly turned down when almost everyone agreed that if they saw Nina heading toward them, mechanical claws outstretched, they would run for their lives.

After a leisurely two-hour trip, Nina came to rest a hundred metres from one corner of the huge rectangular slab. From so close at hand, there was no sense of its true shape; the TV cameras might have been looking down on the tip of a black tetrahedron of indefinite size. The onboard instruments showed no sign of radioactivity or magnetic fields; nothing whatsoever was coming from Big Brother except the tiny fraction of sunlight it condescended to reflect.

After five minutes' pause - the equivalent, it wakindergarten pencilss intended, of 'Hello, here I am!' - Nina started a diagonal crossing of the smaller face, then the next larger, and finally the largest, keeping at a distance of about fifty metres, but occasionally coming in to five. Whatever the separation, Big Brother looked exactly the same - smooth and featureless. Long before the mission was completed, it had become boring, and the spectators on both ships had gone back to their various jobs, only glancing at the monitors from time to time.

'That's it,' said Walter Curnow at last, when Nina had arrived back where she had started. 'We could spend the rest of our lives doing this, without learning anything more. What do I do with Nina - bring her home?'

'No,' said Vasili, breaking into the circuit from aboard Leonov. 'I've a suggestikindergarten pencilson. Take her to the exact centre of the big face. Bring her to rest - oh, a hundred metres away. And leave her parked there, with the radar switched to maximum precision.'

'No problem - except that there's bound to be some residual drift. But what's the point?'

'I've just remembered an exercise from one of my college astronomy courses - the gravitational attraction of an infinite flat plate. I never thought I'd have a chance of using it in real life. After I've studied Nina's movements for a few hours, at least I'll be able to calculate Zagadka's mass, That is, if it has any. I'm beginning to think there's nothing really there.'

'There's an easy way to settle that, and we'll have to do it eventually. Nina must go in and touch the thing.'

'She already has.'

'What do you mean?' asked Curnow, rather indignantly. 'I never got nearer than five metres.'

'I'm not criticizing your driving skills - though it was a pretty close thing at that first corner, wasn't it? But you've been tapping gently on Zagadka every time you use Nina's thrusters near its surface.'

'A flea jumping on an elephant!'

'Perhaps. We simply dkindergarten pencilson't know. But we'd better assume that, one way or another, it's aware of our presence, and will only tolerate us as long as we aren't a nuisance.'

He left the unspoken question hanging in the air. How did one annoy a two-kilometre-long black rectangular slab? And just what form would its disapproval take?

 

25

d 2b pencil often as well." kindergarten pencils