In the fourth hour of Dutta’s ordeal the packing gland started to sweat ethanol drops at its edges. In the fifth hour came a dribbling stream whose fumes made him cling dizzily, and in the sixth the gland blasted out like a bullet and blew Muhandas Dutta with it, destroying him like a mutineer blown from the muzzle of a gun.
The ethanol roared down in a glassy column to the floor, and sped downgrade to the polyethelene cooker’s cherry-red base. The ethanol boomed into blue flame on contact, and the cherry-red of the cooker went into orange-red and then orange. The explosion ripped it an instant later, puffing out all flame with a gigantic breath. Distracted repair machines sprinkled the hot rubble and pawed at riven plates. When their fire-control fluid stopped sizzling on the tangled wreckage the human beings came out and climbed it, threading around fantastic spires and hummocks of polychome plastic extruded before its time and untimely chilled; from the top of the heap they could see the promised land: flat culture tanks of yeast indefatigably working away under arc lights, manufacturing proteins, handy, versatile long-chain molecules, and nutritious, too.
For the time being, their food problem was solved. To solve it they had done the binary planet a century’s-worth of damage in a matter of hours; they were being excellent mice.
Through the Snowflake quivered the realization that this was a problem beyond intellect: what ought one to think of entities-that-were-machines instead of entities-that-were-living? Logic alone could make no distinction. On a gross level there was oh, what difference between a lever and a poet! But logic did not stop with levers and poets. Logic went on to consider the difference between a self-programming computer and the microscopically-revealed network of electro-chemical feedback processes that could grossly be called “a poet,” and found the difference smaller. And logic could not be stopped from going on to machines unbuilt, the most complex machine imaginable, capable of choice, self-reproducing, versatile with limbs and transducers, and comparing it with a description unwritten, the most exhaustive description of “a poet” that could be produced, bearing in mind that there was really nothing in him but input, switching and output. On the nameplate of a machine and on the brow of a poet might be inscribed with equal justice Ex Nihil Nihil Fit; you get nothing from nothing. You get bombarded by the environment with sense-impressions and something happens, machine or man. You input a pound of force on the long end of a three-to-one lever; it outputs three pounds (over a shorter distance). You input travel books on Samuel Taylor Coleridge; he outputs Xanadu. So simple!
So wrong. The Snowflake fluttered in its tank knowing it was wrong, but not why or how. It decided (a rare decision) to dissociate into its eight personalities for a time.
It was harder than ever before for Glenn Tropile. It wrenched him and gave him the curious illusion that he had gone blind—even though his own two eyes could see the murk of the nutrient fluid, his own deformed toe-nail, the tangle of wires and the switches in his pink, wrinkled hands. Have to adjust the salt content of the nutrient, he thought. There whipped through his mind frighteningly the ion-exchange equations that explained the wrinkling—a hang-over of the endlessly analytical life within the Snowflake.
Django Tembo of course spoke first. “Children,” he said, “the last of my hesitation is gone. I have no more compassion for these invaders, the Pyramids; they were bad servants and rebels. This can never be tolerated. It must be war to the death.” For the Snowflake had considered a modus vivendi with the Pyramids as perhaps the most economical solution of the problem.
There was a soundless murmur of agreement.
“What place this?” Willy asked, and began to cry.
“Hush, Willy,” Mercedes van Dellen soothed him. “It’s all right. We’re your friends.” Willy put his thumb in his mouth, not letting go of his switch, and was at peace. Warm here. Good here.
It was, surprisingly, Kim Seong who spoke up next: “We should have a little talk with the fellow under the North Pole, the green boy with all the arms. He’s older than any of us.”
“He’s dead!” Tropile said, astonished.
“Must be nice to be so cocksure,” she said dryly. “I, of course, wouldn’t know, not being a man. All 7 know is that it’s smart to be ready for any dirty little trick that can be sprung on you.”
Alia Narova said: “I think they’re sorry they killed all their people. I think they’re trying to revive that one; that’s what all the puttering is about. I think they want to tell it they’re sorry.”
“No, no!” cried Corso Navarone. “You are too forgiving in your womanly heart. They are fiends; they are tormenting it. Death to the monsters, I say, and I shall say it forever!” If he could have folded his arms he would have, but the wire-trailing switches got in the way.
Spyros Gulbenkian said: “Let us consider the whole situation, my friends. We should hit them high and hit them low. Our hitting low proceeds successfully; our good people from Earth have provided the repair-machines with tasks of an order of magnitude beyond their programming or mechanical capacities. Soon several score of the women will come to term. The second generation, my dear friends! Let them only grow to sexual maturity in thirteen or fourteen clock-years and this planet is doomed! But I am overdramatic. The earth- people will multiply, I should say, and the pyramids and their machinery will fail to cope with them. Time is on our side—what a luxury for an old man to say that! Misunderstood, un-understood, they will proliferate through the planet in their innocent way. They will drain sedimentation pans to establish new yeast beds unmindful that sediment-laden coke pellets will produce quite inferior steel with which the Pyramids will order devices to be manufactured. They will notice that a chamber is quite livable as to temperature and humidity except that chlorine gas is blown through it. In their innocence they will jam the fan which drives the chlorine, not knowing or caring that this lack of chlorine will end for a time the production on this planet of polychloroprene without which oil-resistant gaskets cannot be manufactured. The weak flesh! The weak flesh, driven by hunger and progeny! What wreckage the weak flesh will do to iron-bound machines!”
“I won’t wait a century,” Tropile snarled.
“For what?” asked Gulbenkian, blandly.