The false clicks accumulated surprisingly. Sixteen hands delivered eighty clicks per second; by Earth-clock almost 700 thousand per day. So, five hundred times a day-margin for safety!—a cunningly-vectored error went out. The zinc toruses did not wobble except sometimes, and wrong information came in but seldom. Instead, machine-tools moved jerkily, like time-lapse photography of an opening flower. Bit by bit a queer electron tube was formed in a deserted shop. A reserve of errors was accumulated for five days and a bar was swiftly zone-refined in another; zone-melting cannot be done in time-lapse. From this were sawed and assembled transistors. In a month’s time the Snowflake, slave of the Pyramids, had a slave of its own, a Black Box of its own, programmed to drive a hair-fine copper wire from itself to the Snowflake’s tank, and this it did at a mile an hour for fifty hours.
When it arrived, the Revolt of the Thermostat had fairly begun. The Petal needed no longer to hoard its allowance of false pulses or calculate a thousand alternatives before determining which click would be most economical and strategic. The hair-fine wire homed on the switch in the left hand of Alia Narova’s petal. At the moment it made contact, the Snowflake convulsed and shifted the burden of output from her left hand to the fifteen hands remaining. Communication was now direct. “Errors” might move raw material to the idiot-box at the end of the wire which knew only how to make and move wire at present. Over that wire it would learn how to shape the raw materials into glass eyes and metal arms and rolling high-polymer feet.
It was tuckea away in a corridor adjoining a foundry. The Snowflake ordered it to scan the corridor and report. The Snowflake decided: “That corridor will do for our mice.” It commissioned the slave, growing every day in size and complexity, to tap the binary’s water system and install a row of faucets along the corridor wall, and then to make up a decent nutrient mix by stealing glucose and whatever minerals and amino acids were required from the millenially-ancient tangle of piping that overlayed and undermined the metabolic-products area of the planet, and to conduct the mix via another row of faucets to the same corridor.
The Snowflake decided: “We will now explore the planet.”
Not experimentally but by design they programmed their slavish Black Box, every hour less the idiot, to send out spies. They went forth like small spiders, their metallic shine dulled by lampblack. Their eightfold, eyes scanned corridors, tubes, wires, vats, reactors. Machines were built to build machines to build spies; spy-types modified rapidly by descent. There were long-range primary scouts, tarantula-like because they needed fair-sized power packs for speed and range, small-headed because they scanned only in a general way. A week later there were more thoughtful, analytic types, carried pick-a-back by tarantulas in pairs. These had egg-heads, crammed with eyes, ears, noses, thermocouples, ion counters, spectrophotometers. For coarse measurement of space some went out in tandem, each the eye of a rangefinder of variable base-line. For fine measurement there were the tiny ones who clicked off exactly a millimeter at each step and who had antennae exactly one micron in diameter.
The Snowflake learned how many Pyramids there were on the binary: seven.
The spies watched them continuously and the Snowflake learned to know one Pyramid from another. They were only approximately the same size; there was a largest and a smallest. There were appreciable differences of strength, pattern and rate of change in the electromagnetic fields that surrounded each of them. One of them was a glutton. It repaired much more often than the others to the metabolic-products complex, but it was a difference of degree and not of an order of magnitude. They all consumed many tons of chemicals each clockday, absorbing them from a pelting spray that surrounded them on their three non-propulsive sides.
So much the Snowflake learned about the Pyramids. After months of intensive study they had the answers to a thousand questions about them . . . though not, of course, to the questions that really mattered. Like:
Why did the Pyramids do what they did? And,
Where did they come from? And, most of all,
How could they be defeated?
It was always a great temptation to the Snowflake to try to awaken other human Components. They debated the question often among themselves. “We could use some help,” Alia Narova would say, and Spyros Gulbenkian would snap, “They would betray us to the Pyramids!” and Tropile would snarl, “We’ve already made our decision on this. Let’s stick to it!” And then on another day perhaps Glenn Tropile, dismayed by the immensity of their task and the slow rate at which it was going, might venture, “Well, maybe we could just trying awakening one other human.” And Alia Narova would flash, “No! Oh, no! You were right, it’s too dangerous,” and Willy would gently say, “Please. Please. Don’t fight, please.”
The non-human Components were less of a temptation, because that first terrifying experience had not been forgotten. All the same, they were interesting. There were so many of them! There were soft-bodied creatures and chitinous ones, things with legs, or fins, or feathers—one bunch had all three. The preponderant chemistry was Cz and f^O, like Earth’s, but there were also methane-breathers, and silicon-based organisms . . . well, no, “organisms” might be the wrong word, because the tiny, faceted, filamenterous beings made of tainted silicon ate not, neither did they breathe; light turned itself into electricity on their body surfaces; they seemed to grow by accreting silicon dust on their external areas, and reproduce by splitting along defined lines of cleavage.
How many separate races were involved?
Even with all its other preoccupations, the Snowflake’s curiosity drove it to try to estimate the number. It was impossible to be precise, because the discovery that the purplish banana-shaped wrigglers and the mosquitoid creatures the size of a roc were simply sexually dimorphic versions of the same being cast doubt on all calculations. Especially since a number of other species seemed to alter forms as they grew. Nevertheless the Snowflake achieved an estimate:
Not less that 480, nor probably more than 600, different species had been kidnapped as Components for the Pyramids.
The next calculation that occurred to the curiosity of the Snowflake was far easier to make, but far more disturbing.
From the Pyramids’ navigation systems they learned that the next planetfall was still over a thousand years away. Nor was that a particularly long voyage for the Pyramid planet. Under average, if anything.
So. . .
Assuming that an average trip lasted two thousand years. Assuming that at least half of the target planets did, in fact, fail to produce Components worth harvesting. Assuming that the Components already observed represented separate planets of origin. . . .
Then the Snowflake’s best guess was that the Pyramids had been busy wandering around the Galaxy and doing their thing for something like—
Two
Million
Years.
When the Snowflake attained that estimate they contemplated it in stark silence for a moment.
Then they began to laugh. What else was there to do?
Some of the races who did the Pyramids’ work were pretty thin on the ground—a dozen of this, only a handful of that. No doubt they were the oldest. No doubt most of the earliest
Components had finally worn out, as living things ultimately must. First In, First Out. When their error factors began to exceed permitted levels they would have been honorably retired from service. (That is, recycled to make soups for the survivors.)