Tropile was one of the newest of them, and the only thing which set him apart from the others was that he was the most recent to be stockpiled.
The religion, or vice, or philosophy he practiced made it possible for him to be a Component. Meditation derived from Zen Buddhism was a windfall for the Pyramids, though of course they had no idea at all of what lay^ behind it, and of course they did not “care.” They knew only that at certain times certain potential Components became Components which were no longer merely potential—which were, in fact, ripe for harvesting. It was useful to them that the minds they cropped be utterly blank—it saved the step of blanking them.
Tropile had been harvested at the moment his inhibiting conscious mind had been cleared, for the Pyramids were not interested in him as an entity capable of will and conception. They used only the raw capacity of the human brain and its perceptors. They used Rashevsky’s Number, the gigantic, far more than astronomical, expression that denoted the number of switching operations performable within the human brain. They used “subception,” the phenomenon by which the human mind, uninhibited by consciousness, reacts directly to stimuli—shortcutting the cerebral censor, avoiding the weighing of shall-I-or-shan’t-I that precedes every conscious act.
They were—Components. It is not desirable that your bedroom wall switch have a mind of its own; if you turn the lights on, you want them on. So it was with the Pyramids.
A Component was needed in the industrial complex which transforms catabolism products into anabohsm products.
With long experience gained since their planetfall, Pyramids received the tabula rasa that was Glenn Tropile. He arrived in one piece, wearing a blanket of air. Quick-frozen mentally at the moment of inert blankness his meditation had granted him—the psychic drunkard’s coma—he was cushioned on repellent charges as he plummeted down, and instantly stripped of surplus electrostatic charge.
At this point he was still human; only asleep.
He remained “asleep.” Annular fields they used for lifting and lowering seized him and moved him into a snug tank of nutrient fluid. There were many such tanks, ready and waiting.
The tanks themselves could be moved, and the one containing Glenn Tropile did move, to a metabolism complex where there were many other tanks, all occupied. This was a warm room—the Pyramids had wasted no energy on such foppish comforts in the receiving center. In this room Glenn Tropile gradually resumed the appearance of life. His heart once again began to beat. Faint stirrings were visible in his chest as his habit-numbed lungs attempted to breathe. Gradually the stirrings slowed and stopped; there was no need for that foppish comfort, either; the nutrient fluid supplied all. Tropile was “wired into circuit.” The only literal wiring, at first, was a temporary one—a fine electrode aseptically introduced into the great nerve that leads to the rhinencephalon—the “smell brain,” the area of the brain containing the pleasure centers which motivate human behavior. (More than a thousand Earthly Components had been spoiled and discarded before the Pyramids had located the pleasure centers so exactly.) While the Component Tropile was being “programmed” the wire rewarded him with minute pulses that made his body glow with animal satisfaction when he functioned correctly. That was all there was to it. After a time the wire was withdrawn, but by then Tropile had “learned” his entire task. Conditioned reflexes had been established. They could be counted on for the long and useful life of the Component.
That life might be very long indeed; in the nutrient tank beside Tropile’s, as it happened, lay a Component with eight legs and a chitinous fringe around its eyes. It had lain in such a tank for more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand Terrestrial years.
The Component was then placed in operation. It opened its eyes and saw things; the sensory nerves of its limbs felt things; the muscles of its hands and toes operated things.
Where was Glenn Tropile?
He was there, all of him; but a zombie-Tropile. Bereft of will, emptied of memories. He was a machine and part of a huger machine. His sex was the sex of a photoelectric cell; his politics were those of a transistor; his ambition that of a mercury switch. He didn’t know anything about sex, or fear, or hope. He only knew two things: Input and Output.
Input to him was a display of small lights on a board before his vacant face; and also the modulation of a loudspeaker’s liquid-born hum in each ear, certain flavors, many twinges of pressure, heat or pain.
Output from him was the dancing manipulation of certain buttons and keys, prompted by changes in Input and by nothing else.
Between Input and Output he lay in the tank, Glenn Tropile, a human Black Box which was capable of Rashevsky’s Number of switchings, and of nothing else.
He had been programmed to accomplish a specific task—to shepherd a chemical called 3, 7, 12-trihydroxychofanic acid, present in the catabolic product of the Pyramids, through a succession of more than five hundred separate operations until it emerged as the chemical, which the Pyramids were able to metabolize, called Protoporphin IX.
He was not the only Component operating in this task; there were several, each with its own program. The acid accumulated in great tanks a mile from him. He knew its concentration, heat and pressure; he knew of all the impurities which would affect subsequent reactions. His fingers tapped, giving binary-coded signals to sluice gates to open for so many seconds and then to close; for such an amount of solvent at such a temperature to flow in; for the agitators to agitate for just so long at just such a force. And if a trouble signal disturbed any one of the 517 major and minor operations, he—it?—was set to decide among alternatives:
—scrap the batch in view of flow conditions along the line?
—isolate and bypass the batch through a standby loop?
—immediate action to correct the malfunction?
Without inhibiting intelligence, without the trammels of humanity on him, the intricate display board and the complex modulations of the input signals could be instantly taken in, evaluated and given their share in the decision.
Was it—he?—still alive?
The question has no meaning. It was working. It was an excellent machine, in fact, and the Pyramids cared for it well. Its only consciousness, apart from the reflexive responses that were its program, was “the sound of one hand alone”: zero, mindlessness, Samadhi, stupor.
It continued to function for some time—until the required supply of Protoporphin IX had been exceeded by a sufficient factor of safety to make further processing unnecessary—that is, for some minutes or months. During that time it was Happy. (It had been programmed to be Happy when there were no uncorrected malfunctions of the process.) At the end of that time it shut itself off, sent out a signal that the task was completed; and was then laid aside in the analogue of a deep-freeze, to be reprogrammed when another Component was needed.
No. It was of utterly no importance to the Pyramids that this particular Component had not been stamped from Citizen but from Wolf.
9
Roget Germyn, of Wheeling a Citizen, found himself thinking of Glenn Tropile much more than he would have liked.
It was not seemly for a Citizen’s thoughts to keep flashing back to a cried-upon Wolf. It wasn’t even sense. At this time of all times he should have devoted a seemly proportion of his thoughts—actually, nearly all of them—to his work, for this was the time when Germyn’s occupation of banker was both very demanding and very enjoyable.