One creature in particular seemed special. It was not exactly a Component, it seemed. What it exactly was became a source of considerable argument among the members of the Snowflake.
It was in a special place, to begin with: the North Pole. And it seemed to be the principal subject of in-person attention from the Pyramids. It was a creature with an elephantine, blue-green body with a chitinous armor and seven tentacles. This creature lay in state under a crystal dome at the North pole of the binary, in the largest compartment the planet could boast beneath its skin—the only one of a size to accommodate all seven Pyramids and presumably the eighth from Everest. The other peculiarity of this huge room and its surrounding complex was that no Components, human or non-human, none of the living Black Boxes, were wired into the circuits serving it. Instead, crude-looking hydraulic actuators opened valves and closed switches under the direct pressure of electron beams sprayed from the Pyramids’ apexes. The seven monsters puttered endlessly with the different eighth monster. They flooded its chamber of crystal with benign fluids in various proportions, with gases at different partial pressures. They set up worn old electrostatic generators and got them moving so that weak charges might be built up under the crystal dome. (Certainly, since they could themselves produce electrical charges directly, the generators must have been “tweezers”).
And nothing ever came of it. By and by it became clear that the experiments were being repeated. Perhaps the word was Ritual.
The Snowflake pondered over this for a long time. Finally Spyros Gulbenkian, the oldest of the eight, whose memories went back before the Pyramids came crashing and grabbing into the world of men, said doubtfully, “I saw a tellyfilm once. It was an old movie, American, but I think about a place in Germany, where a mad scientist tries to bring back to life a dead man. Its name was Frankenstein.”
Alia Narova laughed. “I know that story,” she said. “It can have nothing to do with us.”
“And why is that?” demanded Gulbenkian.
“Because Dr. Frankenstein was only trying to create a monster,” she explained. “Why would the Pyramids need to create a monster? When they already have us?”
But intellectual curiosity did not fully occupy the Snowflake. Under Glenn Tropile’s urging they kept industriously at the principal occupation of any Wolf, namely to keep on trying things until something worked.
They had long since succeeded in corrupting the Everest Pyramid. The Components programmed to Plug-in-or-Stockpile newly-arrived Components had been reached. Thereafter the
Everest Pyramid was bedevilled by the fact that all its shipped Components were stockpiled. There was need, crying need for new Components, but the ones it sent went into Stockpile! It stepped up its shipments, and at last by chance scythed down and fired off to the binary planet one of Tropile’s acquaintances and one of Django Tembo’s. These were not stockpiled; the next fifty arrivals were. Ahah! The pattern became clear on Everest. One shipped from Princeton and from Durban and possibly other places . . . yes, six other places, it appeared at length.
Once it had learned, there came to the Snowflake the job of deactivating existing components in circuit, faking a demand. At last six hundred and eighty-four folk known to branches of the Snowflake were on hand, and the Snowflake holed a transceiver through their corridor wall and told them: “Henceforth your directions will come from us . . .”
14
For a little while Gala Tropile was almost a queen of the mad and ragged little band. She had status enough for that as the wife (or was it the widow?) of the voice from the black cone. Having benefited from Tropile’s tutoring during their abrasive marriage, she was Wolf enough to take advantage of that fact. For nearly two days Gala Tropile waved others imperiously out of the way at the feeding pipes and chose the best places to sleep. Only for two days. The reason her reign didn’t last longer was that she was by no means the only Wolf around.
Besides, the voice from the black cone wasn’t always Tropile’s.
It was all very confusing.
Directions came now and then from the loudspeaker cone to the people in the corridor. Metallic spiders came and eyed them, and went away again. The people tried to question the voices from the loudspeaker, and they always got answers, but seldom the answers they wanted to hear. Or that even made sense:
^What do you want with us, damn you?”
“We want you to be mice,” said the black cone.
Mice? How mice? Why mice? But the cone had fallen into one of its silences again.
Then:
“Sometimes you say you’re Tropile, sometimes you say you’re this Django Tembo or somebody else. Who are you?”
“Yes.”
It was absolutely infuriating. Ragged-nerved, the corridor people squabbled among themselves. They did not dare outright violence, at least at first; it was not a good idea to end an argument by punching your opponent out, when you were starkly aware that next time you slept he might stay awake, waiting. So they took out their fury on their surroundings, smashing, damaging, ruining. (Very like mice.) And still tried to get sensible answers:
“What—exactly, please!—are you going to do with us?”
“We will tell you,” said the voice—Tropile’s this time, as it happened. And it added, “Soon we will begin to starve you.”
“Starve? Why? When? What for?”
“To make you mousier. Soon.” And when they could get no further answers from the black cone, the marooned band tried to prepare for this new, intolerable aggravation. They would have stored up Food and water if they could. They couldn’t. Their raw materials were only the chips from the giant machine tools, and they were good tools; they made minimum chips. The lathes pared off helices of metal and plastic which were pretty and next to useless. The milling machines shaved off long needles that fell in showers to be washed away by the periodic inundation of the shop. They tried bending the helices back and forth to snap off slightly-distorted squares of metal from them, and they did. They bundled the milling machine chips to make stakes and hammers, and tried to pound their metal squares into storage pots, and it just didn’t work. If the metal that peeled from the lathes happened to be brittle enough to snap into plates, it could not be ductile enough to draw into pots. Three attempts to anneal the plates in the adjoining foundry’s terrible heat ended fatally; the place was impossibly dangerous. One grew faint and vague in the heat and bad air; one stumbled into a naked high-tension cable, or a bubbling crucible, or onto the die of a champing automatic hammer. They were apprehensive, and bored, and nasty-tempered and well-fed—just what the Snowflake wanted them to be.
In its almost-final stage of evolution, the Snowflake could hardly have been seen in its tank by an outside observer, there were so many wires. It had long ago delegated its Pyramid-assigned task to an octet in a spare tank; there had been no difficulty in duplicating the input-board or the output-switches, but the programming of the octet at double-remote control had been insanely difficult, demanding total recall of the Snowflake’s own programming and its duplication, step by step, upon the spare. Once this had been done, however, and all sixteen hands were freed, the Snowflake had the freedom of the binary. Its wires and cables went everywhere; gradually its metal spider-spies were retired, for the Snowflake acquired direct-reporting eyes and transducers of its own. It diverted and armor-plated a supply of its nutrient fluid calculated to last out any emergency; it co-opted generators to stand by ready to be cut in upon any power failure of its pumps; it shielded itself in steel, soft iron, lead and cadmium against physical, magnetic and radiational attack; it mounted itself and its whole huge supply-complex in caterpillar treads.