"Untouched by human hands." That had been their private joke. They had known their Earth-born teachers only as voices and doll-size images on cathode screens of the base intercom system - and only occasionally through the triple glass at the locks that sealed off the sterile creche. They had emerged from the axolotl tanks to the padded metal claws of nursemaids that were servo extensors of Moonbase personnel, forever barred from intimate contact with those they served.

Out of contact - that's the story of our lives, Bickel thought, and the thought softened his anger at Timberlake.

Timberlake had begun to fidget under Bickel's stare.

Flattery intervened. "Well... we'd better do something," he said.

He had to get them moving, Flattery knew. That was part of his job - keep them active, working, moving, even if they moved into open conflict. That could be solved when and if it happened.

Raj is right, Timberlake thought. We have to do something. He took a deep breath, trying to shake off his sense of shame and failure... and the resentment of Bickel - damned Bickel, superior Bickel, special Bickel, the man of countless talents, Bickel upon whom their lives depended.

Timberlake glanced around at the familiar Command Central room in the ship's core...pace twenty-seven meters long and twelve meters on the short axis. Like the ship, Com-central was vaguely egg-shaped. Four cocoonlike action couches with almost identical control boards lay roughly parallel in the curve of the room's wider end. Color-coded pipes and wires, dials and instrument controls, switch banks and warning telltales spread patterned confusion against the gray metal walls. Here were the necessities for monitoring the ship and its autonomous consciousness - an Organic Mental Core.

Organic Mental Core, Timberlake thought, and he felt the full return of his feelings of guilt and grief. Not human brain, oh no. An Organic Mental Core. Better yet, an OMC. The euphemism makes it easier to forget that the core once was a human brain in an infant monster - doomed to die. We take only terminal cases since that makes the morality of the act less questionable.