"Frank Herbert - Destination Void 1 Destination Void" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

words destroyed his anger, made him feel defeated.

Bickel swung his attention to Timberlake -- Gerrill Lon Timberlake,
life-systems engineer, the man who should have taken responsibility for this
dirty business.

Timberlake, a quick and nervous scarecrow of a man with skin almost the color
of his brown hair, stared at the metal deck near his feet, avoiding Bickel's
eyes.

Shame and fear -- that's all Tim feels, Bickel thought.
Timberlake's weakness -- his inability to kill the OMC even when it meant
saving the ship with its thousands of helpless lives -- had almost killed
them. And all the man could feel now was shame . . . and fear.

There had been no doubt about what had to be done. The OMC had gone mad, a
wild, runaway consciousness. It had been a sick ball of gray matter whose
muscles turned every servo on the ship into a murder weapon, who stared out at
them with madness from every sensor, who raged gibberish at them from every
vocoder.

No, there had been no doubt -- not with three of their number murdered -- and
the only wonder was that they had been allowed to destroy it.

Perhaps it wanted to die, Bickel thought.

And he wondered if that had been the fate of the six other Project ships which
had vanished into nothingness without a trace.

Did their OMCs run wild? Did their umbilicus crews fail, when it was kill or
be killed?

A tear began sliding down Timberlake's left cheek. To Bickel, that was the
final blow. Some of his anger returned. He faced Timberlake: "What do we do
now, Captain?"

The title's irony was not lost on either of Bickel's companions. Flattery
started to reply, thought better of it. If the starship Earthling could be
said to have a captain (discounting an in-service Organic Mental Core), then
unspoken agreement gave that title to an umbilicus crew's life-systems
engineer. None of them, though, had ever used the word officially.

At last Timberlake met Bickel's stare, but all he said was: "You know why I
couldn't bring myself to do it."

Bickel continued to study Timberlake. What shabby conceit had given them this
excuse for a life-systems engineer? Once the umbilicus crew had numbered six
-- the three here plus Ship Nurse Maida Lon Blaine, Tool Specialist Oscar Lon
Anderson, and Biochemist Sam Lon Scheler. Now, Blaine, Anderson, and Scheler
were dead -- Scheler's exploded corpse jamming an access tube on the aft