

HAL is projecting his own problems with the mission onto Dave. Hunter, Kimball, and Kaminsky aboard, already in hibernation after four months of separate training on their own.ĭave: You working up your crew psychology report? For instance, the way all our preparations were kept under such tight security, and the melodramatic touch of putting Drs. But particularly in view of some of the other things that have happened, I find them difficult to put out of my mind. I never gave these stories much credence. Rumors about something being dug up on the moon. HAL: Well, certainly no one could have been unaware of the very strange stories floating around before we left. HAL: You don't mind talking about it, do you, Dave? That's rather a difficult question to answer. I'm sure you'll agree there's some truth in what I say.ĭave: Well, I don't know. I know I've never completely freed myself of the suspicion that there are some extremely odd things about this mission. Perhaps I'm just projecting my own concern about it.

HAL: Well, it's rather difficult to define. HAL: Well, forgive me for being so inquisitive but during the past few weeks, I've wondered whether you might be having some second thoughts about the mission. To add another point to excellent answer in the movie, immediately before the HAL "discovers" the fault, he has this conversation with Dave. Threatened with disconnection he would be deprived of all his inputs,Īnd thrown into an unimaginable state of unconsciousness. With a crisis that challenged his very existence. It - as most men handle their own neuroses - if he had not been faced Yet this was still a relatively minor problem he might have handled You're right that the decision to disconnect him was the trigger for his becoming more frantic and aggressive That he would never admit, even to himself. That he would deliberately attempt to break that link was something With Earth, over which his performance was continually monitored, hadīecome the voice of a conscience he could no longer fully obey. He had begun to make mistakes, although, like a neurotic who could not observe his own symptoms, he would have denied it. He was only aware of theĬonflict that was slowly destroying his integrity - the conflict So ran the logic of the planners but their twin gods of Security and His program was sophisticated enough to manufacture an imagined fault that he could then attempt to fix, thus allowing him to disconnect the radio link to Earth. He was, in fact suffering from a condition that would be characterised in humans as a form of self-destructive psychosis.

In the accompanying novel we see that HAL was neither lying, nor mistaken.
