The spider-spies continued to serve it only in one area: the chamber under the North Pole. It was felt that the deliberate archaism of the great room’s equipment argued against insinuating its scanners there. If a cable crawled down a conduit of the nutrients area it was of no concern to a Pyramid going by. That was what Componets were for—to lay cables in the right places at the right time. Under general directives they did so. No quantity of transducers turning up throughout the binary could be a cause for alarm; doubtless it was some quality—or traffic-control system going into effect to ensure the continuance of the
Pyramid’s environment without cost or care to them while they—did what?
While they performed their interminable round of experiments on the tentacled creature under the crystal dome. Performed them in slow and stately tempo, slower than their normal motions down corridors, or their flares of electrons to manipulate relays, damping rods or pinch fields.
“I wish—” said Glenn Tropile fretfully. He didn’t have to finish the sentence. Alia Narova finished it for him.
“I, too, wish we knew what that was all about,” she said, “but we don’t.”
When the Snowflake tired of wondering about the North Pole, it could get a little variety in its collective life by wondering about the South.
The most interesting thing about the South Pole was that it was so uninteresting. Nothing ever went there, neither Pyramid nor Component-driven mechanism. Nothing seemed to take place inside it. There were no Eyes there, no instruments to detect. The best guess of the Snowflake (actually, the only one it had) was that it was a junk heap.
“Archeologists,” declared Corso Navarone, “find all sorts of interesting things in junk heaps. Let us look at this one.”
So, from its locus at South Latitude 12, the Snowflake began to manufacture and drive southward a special cable, coaxial and filled with inert gas, a marvelous nerve trunk over which the most complex messages could be sent and received. The intuition was that this would be the case. Through the lowest levels of the undermined planet crawled a caterpillar-tread device, heaving the cable behind it. It extended a teflon snout into chambers of corrosive atmosphere and skirted them; it shunned the red-lit storage and access spaces for the lower, darker tubes bored through bedrock, not yet crammed with pipes and wires, not yet visited incessantly by scuttling repair-machines. Its outriders, tapped into the cable, rolled inertly along, waiting with machine patience for their tasks. One squad of them was an excavation group-derricks, angledozers, mining machines that undercut, blasted and wiped up debris with scything paws onto an endless belt that shunted it away from the field of operation. Another group, echeloned behind the excavators, consisted of transducers—artificial sense organs of every kind, very cold and scientific, reporting themselves coldly in scribed curves, needles jogging on scales, counter-readings, whining modulations of whining carrier waves. And behind them, almost apologetically, rolled self-propelled color-image orthicon tubes, mere television, which reported only pictures, surfaces—not even X-ray deep.
The voice of ex-Citizen Roget Germyn was ragged with nerves. He snarled at Muhandas Dutta of Durban: “Get away from the tap. You saw me headed for it. Then you got up and started to it.”
Muhandas Dutta, formerly a leading exponent of the Rice Tasting Cult, well on his way toward a Grand Mastership in it, snarled back: “I’ve better things to do with my time than notice who’s wandering across the floor. I was here first, flat-belly.”
The epithet was foolish; the belly of Muhandas Dutta was quite as free from honorable hunger-bloat as that of Roget Germyn. But old things mixed with the new. “Muscle boy!” Germyn sneered. “Gobbler! Shouter! Strider!” Schoolyard epithets, and he was shouting them. The tap bubbled quietly between them as they stood with veins distended, fists clenched and eyes bulging; its sticky glucose solution bore the precious iron, iodine, sulfur, phosphorus, potassium along in an unending runnel down the slightly-slanting floor to the eight-inch drain. Glutamic acid, without which ammonia accumulates in the brain and kills, dribbled along the floor while they glared, and D-ribose, and D-2-deoxyribose, adenine, guanine, uracil, cytosine, thymine and 5-methyl cytosine without which no thing higher than a trilobite can pass on its shape and meaning to its next generation. Over the rivulet of life they glared, ignoring the long row of bubbling taps they might have resorted to at their right and their left; this one is mine, mine! Be damned to sense, be damned to abundance; kindness be damned to hell; it’s mine!
A Wolf, now red-eyed not with feral lust but with fatigue from his endless job of keeping the peace, ambled over. “Break it up,” said Haendl. Muhandas Dutta was nervously clutching the dagger-like milling machine chip thrust through his loin cloth, all that remained of a Citizen’s decent robes. Haendl turned his back on him and the dagger, stooped and took a long swig at the bubbling tap. There was some stir of action behind him; at his leisure he straightened up and turned around. Dutta had drawn his weapon and aimed it; before the plunge Germyn had seized his wrist. They stood now locked and straining silently. Haendl wrenched the dragger from Dutta’s weakening grasp and tossed it along the floor, clattering. The strained tableau collapsed; the men panted and glared, Dutta rubbing his wrist.
“Everybody’s nerves are on edge,” Haendl lectured them. “The fact that everybody’s nerves are apparently supposed to be on edge doesn’t matter. We’ve got to be a little more gracious, or we’ll all wind up in a mutual massacre. Dutta and Germyn, suppose you pretend that I’m very old and wise and take my advice. There’s a perfectly good food tap over there for you, Dutta, and a perfectly good one for you, Germyn, as soon as that Russian fellow’s through with it. I suggest each of you go to his own tap and fill up.”
“Flatbelly!” Dutta sneered, but he went, looking over his shoulder at Germyn.
“Muscle boy!” Germyn sneered, and he went to his tap, not turning his back on the African.
Then they bent to drink, but then there was nothing to drink.
With a final bubble the taps ceased to run, and did not start again.
Pandemonium spread through the acre of corridors. People came stumbling and sobbing to the taps. The door guards and the relay of runners deserted their posts and raced to the food taps. Some licked at the floor where the last of the sticky stuff was drying, awaiting the glycerine inundation. A few lucky ones battered their way to the eight-inch drains and thrust their arms down them as far as they could go, smearing and coating their arms and hands with what clung to the sides of the drainpipes; then they licked at themselves like cats.
Haendl, who had only a few minutes ago been savagely amused that his role was to keep ex-Citizens from tearing one another apart, to urge them towards graciousness and consideration, was now not amused. He said to Innison, the two apart from the churning mob: “Next the water goes off. Next, of course, we start spreading out and, I suppose, dying—most of us.’ They walked to the black cone of the loudspeaker-microphone; the guards who should be there to shield whatever was at the other end from vain importunings were away. The black cone was humming, which meant that it might be addressed. But Haendl backed away, drew Innison with him and said: “I’m damned if I will. I’m damned if I’ll give it a chance to tell us to be good mice.”
The phalanx of machinery at the end of the coaxial cable had reached the South Pole of the binary. Capsules on tank-treads split along their lateral axes and their tops reared back like clamshells; some extended derricks before and counterweights behind; some blossomed with petals that were tungsten-carbide iiozer blades. They attacked an immemorial junk pile, gently prying or fiercely ramming as need was. They burrowed through holed and oxidized piping, tangled old convection plates from ancient heat-exchanger apparatus, the lead jacket of an obsolete thorium reactor, the cans of thorium themselves, the scrapped cylinder of a relatively small fusion reactor and the tumbled heaps of cer-met bricks which once had jacketed it.