"What else could we do?" Bickel demanded. He held up the severed tube, glared at it.

Raja Lon Flattery, their psychiatrist-chaplain, cleared his throat, said: "Easy, John. We share the blame equally."

Bickel turned his glare on Flattery, noted the man's quizzical expression, calculated and penetrating, the narrow, haughty face that somehow focused a sense of terrible superiority within remote brown eyes and upraked black eyebrows.

"You know what you can do with your blame!" Bickel growled, but Flattery's 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.