They came to a vaulted wall beneath the rubble; oxyhydrogen blowpipes drilled at it, and the mining machinery inserted and tamped explosive charges. No danger of damaging what was within; sonar said it was a dozen HE blasts to the other side. The explosive blew, and sheared off slices; the catspaws of the machines swept them aside. Eleven times more the tamp-blast-and-sweep cycle, and then delicate drilling, and then the hole-through into a chamber the duplicate of that at the North Pole, but with no blue-green monster under a crystal dome.
Instead, there were books.
Circular crystal plates with gold symbols plated onto them, the plates not bound but merely stacked together with blessed inefficiency; the golden text was raised a little, so the stacked plates did not fit snugly together. The books were heaped and tumbled on shelves, tables and the floor. It was a warm sight absorbed by the image-orthicon eyes, pulsed back along the coaxial cable, displayed to the sixteen eyes of the Snowflake on a round television screen.
The Snowflake gazed, coldly understanding, on the warm sight and some of its hands clicked out messages to manipulating machines at the end of its seventy-six geographic degrees of coaxial arm. Metal fingers spread the crystal-and-gold pages, the largest set of pages logically first. The beautiful strange letters ran unbroken in a spiral from the rim of each plate to the center, with the logic of boustrophedon writing, the ancient first-to-the-right-then-to-the-left lines that somehow lost out to the system which demanded a break and wrench of the eyes at the end of each line. The Snow-flake noted the nature of the “ink and paper;” it was not accidental. They were chosen for the highest possible contrast. The color contrast was absolute; the plates were transparent and the text opaque. They contrasted in tactility; the plates were smooth and the gold was grainy, unburnished. Instruments told the Snowflake that the contrast in conductivity was as extreme; the plates were insulators and the symbols superconductive. The messages left there at the South Pole had been left to be read by almost any eyes, any hands, or whatever unimaginable beings might read by electricity. There had to be a key, and there was: on the set of largest plates.
A wearying, difficult, often-imagined program began. A single man of Earth could eventually have learned much of what was oh the largest plates; it began with arithmetic—of course, binary. A dot is a dot; a dot and a space are two dots. Two dots are three dots; their zero was really zero—nothing, a discontinuity in the flowing script. A gracious, subtly-curved eye-shape was the addition-operator; negative numbers were made not of dots but little sun-bursts, and so on. It was only mathematics; the Snowflake plowed deliberately through it all, kid-stuff geometry, the functions of the conic sections. It was not very elegant; the Snowflake felt that elegance had been foregone and crude old concepts resurrected from primitive days. But the Snowflake learned; this is “height” sign, this is “skill” sign, “big,” “bigger than,” “includes,” “logically implies”—and then on to the first reader, the second-largest of the sets of plates. Blue-green, tentacled monsters were the subjects; eating, sleeping, crawling (but say “walking”) were the verbs. Monsters (but say “men”) watch the stars. The great sun rises and warms men. The spermatiferous man impregnates (“loves?”) the ovipositing man—whom you might as well call a woman, for she is. For one hundred and sixty-six days the laid egg is—it certainly seemed to be worshipped. Then the child is born, and the second degree of worship is accorded to it. A small—Something—is assigned to the child, and the child is cleansed with the mouths of its—certainly not “impregnating” here; certainly “loving”—parents. The child eats good food under the guidance of its parents and its Something-again. The child sleeps too heavily and the Something-again wakes its parents who in loving concern do something about it, the Snowflake could not make out what. The child learns to count and to read books like this. The modified-loving Something-again helps. The child walks, the child runs in the sun, the child goes far and fast riding the Something-again, for the Something-again has grown with the child. Then the child is half-grown and the third degree of worship is accorded to it and it begins to master the Twelve Hundred and Eighteen Books of First Importance. When that is done the child is grown and is a child no longer but a man or woman, and its Something-again too is grown. The new-grown man is modified-loving to the full-grows Something-again, for there is a certain danger in Somethings-again, useful in everything though they are. Absent-mindedness in the treatment (“tentaculation”-”handling”) of a full-grown Something-again can be fatal—
The Snowflake quivered in its nutrient bath when it realized that absent-mindedness had been fatal. The full-grown Pyramids, convenient things to have around, had risen immemorial ages ago and destroyed their masters who had built diem, gutted their pleasant planet and turned it into a bleak junkpile, a fit environment for the machines they were.
15
As Haendl had grimly foreseen, the human beings in the vast corridor of the machine shop next were deprived of their water. The taps simply stopped running.
There was panic, as might have been predicted, and then there was the inevitable consequence: migration. Men with flesh on them do not lie down to die; women with babies in them do not despair. If they are ringed by fire they will break through where the flames seem thinnest, but they will break through. With hunger at their heels and nothing worse than hunger ahead, men go anywhere: from the ancestral home in the Indus Valley or the Euphrates or the Congo they eat their way across the old world, then cross a land bridge and eat their way down the new.
These migrants spread out from the corridor through its two exits; they scouted the red-lit caverns of the binary, twenty, forty miles a day. They found water everywhere, for it is a useful solvent and took part in most of the mechanized planet’s chemical processing. They bashed many a pipe loose from its joints and drank their fill and spread on. Scent guided them one hundred miles before they looked again like sober Citizens, ribs countable and thighs dwindling into stringy shanks; but by then they were in the metabolic-products complex of the binary, a tangle of pipes, pumps and vats many of which held sugars, starches, proteins and fats.
Epics should be written about Innison and how he scaled the hundred-foot fermentation tank where glucose was going over into alcohol, and how he shattered the glass input main so that food showered down upon the throng below. Nor should be forgotten The Tale of Muhandas Dutta, and How He Blew up the Polyethelene Cooker. The vast thing stood between them and an unmistakable meaty, yeasty odor. They were abounding with energy from the glucose but their bodies knew they were starving for replacement and repair molecules, that they could not live on energy alone. Princeton Wolves studied the stages of the polyethelene tower, a glum stainless-steel citadel from which protruded clear blisters filled with the successive polymers. Down at the bottom, swirling gas only; heat and pressure filled the next higher blister with thin fluid, and the blister above with viscous fluid, and up at the top great paddles churned a waxy paste through the output main to a storage facility or direct to presses and extrusion nozzles which might be half a world away. A planetful of circuitry was always in need of some insulation, somewhere; shorts were spitting blue fire somewhere at any given moment, and machines crawling toward them laden with copper and polyethelene pellets to stop the bleeding and heal the wounds. And this source of dressings stood like a bastion between the men and the smell of yeast. There was no way around except through vats of fuming nitric acid, rooms whose air was death. Muhandas Dutta consulted with Wolves, warned all the others back around solid walls and onto high ground up ramps, and alone climbed a great, rugged weld that led halfway up the fermentation tank. There was the place where ethanol was drawn off, and there it was tasted by instruments whose wires led somehere to a Component. The end of the wires that mattered to Dutta went through a packing gland into the output main. The gland was strong, but it was not homogeneous with the rest of the tank and pipe. There were places where the gland and the pipe met, and there Dutta inserted his milling-machine sliver and pried. With one arm and both legs he clung to the meter-thick pipe; with the other he pried for an hour, two hours, three hours. When scouts came wandering from around the thick walls where he had sent them he screamed down at them to go back; it was giving way. So the scouts returned to the people, and the people waited, hungry and thirsty, smashing water pipes for their drink, getting out of the way of slow-moving pipe-repair machines when they came, and smashing the pipes again when they were gone.