So perhaps it had not been all that understandable after all.
16
There was, of course, no longer any question of personal wishes. Tropile and Alia Narova swiftly slid back into the Snowflake. If they allowed themselves any personal thoughts at that moment, it was only a poignant regret for what might have been. Not an unusual one, in the history of the human race. Their survival was at stake. As good men and women had all through the history of Earth, sometimes in a good cause and sometimes not (though seldom did anyone think it not), they sadly said good-by to reverence for all life, to freedom of speech, to habeas corpus and to the all-too-alienable right to wear striped socks when they chose.
They joined the Army.
They were not, perhaps, a very prepossessing Army, but that didn’t matter much; they were definitely at war. They were one significant item in the table of forces deployed on and in the binary planet. There were four altogether:
1. The Snowflake itself (somewhat below strength because one of its members was unavoidably handicapped, being dead.)
2. The other human beings at large somewhere within the planet—the “mice.” And, on the other side of the battle line:
3. The machines and systems of the Pyramids.
4. The Pyramids themselves.
Few human generals would willingly have sought battle when they were so outmatched. The Snowflake didn’t seek it either, but the battle was coming nearer to them all the time.
So the Snowflake began to fight. It had long since prepared for the battle—not now, though; not for a long, comfortable time; like most armies at war, it would have been much readier if it had had much more time. It was less ready than it had expected, in fact, because “Willy” was not pulling his weight. Willy was there, all right. They could feel his (or its) presence, observing, appreciating, even sometimes admiring. But the Snowflake was like an eight-engined aircraft with one propeller feathered; it spun uselessly where it should have joined to pull.
That, too, could not be helped, so the Snowflake did what it was able to do. Each member of the seven working ones performed his or her chores. Their hands clicked and rattled the switches, turning on leagues of wire, a dozen generators, a hundred microphones and eyes throughout the binary—the First Approximation Network that gave the Snowflake a quick, dim picture of any overall disturbance. Spy-boxes ranged around the equator told them the eight Pyramids were exactly there, on that imaginary line, equally spaced around the circumference of the planet. The spy boxes further reported that the Pyramids were on the naked jumbled surface of the planet, most unusually, and that from the apex of each there ran to the right and left an inexplicable line which joined all the apexes in a gigantic octagon.
The equatorial spy-boxes died at that moment, and there blasted down the cables from them into the nutrient tank an almost-lethal charge. But the cables vaporized near the equator before the Snowflake could die.
It took minutes to recover and activate a Second Approximation Network, localized now and of finer perception. The Snowflake saw the Pyramids then, moving slowly South, and the glaring line that tied them together. It was almost invisible where it streaked through the airless surface; it seared blue-hot where it cut through the curve of the planet before emerging again. Instruments reported to the Snowflake on the nature of the line before they died. The octagon was—or had been—a few pounds of deuterium. It had been heated into raw creation-stuff, hotter than any liquid, solid or gas could be. It was a plasma of raw electrons and deuterons, and the plasma had been shaped into a pencil-thin tubular plasmoid by magnetic fields which the Pyramids emitted. The temperature of the stuff was 100 million degrees and the pressure 22 million pounds per square inch; the particles battering for escape at the magnetic tube confining them were turned suavely aside in a spin at right angles to the field. The particles could not escape; some of their radiant energy could. At 100 million degrees continuous fusion went on within the plasmoid, releasing energy on a solar scale. As the octagonal girdle about the planet moved slowly southward, all the steel it met puddled and ran; all the copper it crossed puffed away, vaporized. The remote eyes of the Snowflake began to wink out in death. It was plain that the Pyramids were erasing half of their planet to keep the other half.
It was plain that the southern hemisphere was being made uninhabitable for everything that the Pyramids understood: wires, relays, generators, electron tubes, transistors, thermistors, spacistors, transformers and whatever depended utterly on them. Connections were being broken; networks were ceasing to function; life as they knew it—and that included Components and the Snowflake—would become extinct.
Life as they did not know it went on.
Roget Germyn toasted yeast cakes over a small fire-alcohol in a wrenched-off grease cup, wicked-up by insulating fiber from a hot
§ipe. Alcohol was abundant, but nobody ever rank it now. Drinking it one never knew whether it was ethanol or methanol until three days later. Then, if it had been methanol, one went blind and died. This confusion between the benign alcohol and its deadly cousin had taken off a dozen reckless men and women. His tribe had shrunk all told by fifty per cent; a few heroes like Muhandas Dutta were dead, and the rest had been weaklings of one kind or another, people who couldn’t go five days without food and water, people who stuffed themselves with dubious yeasts because they didn’t taste too wrong, people who couldn’t climb walls, jump gaps, keep from stumbling into naked bus bars, people who grieved to death for rice or wife or sunset clouds.
Roget Germyn was too busy to grieve, so he lived on, no theorist, not very cerebral, but glorying in a full gut, in taking a strong woman, in waking and lying extra minutes idly on a bed of polyurethane foam raped from its cushioning job in a stamping mill. He considered himself Third in Command, after Haendl and Innison, and so did everybody else.
Big Chief Haendl joined him at the fire, carrying a thermoplastic scrap heated and dented into a bucket. It was full of colorless fluid, and the fire was running low. Germyn automatically went through a routine of dipping thumb and forefinger into the fluid, rubbing them together, raising them to his nose to sniff, and touching them to his tongue. It took only a half-second and it was one of the things survival depended on. The subconscious decision was: It’s all right; it won’t put out the
I fire and also it won’t explode in our faces. He nodded to Haendl and Haendl poured the fluid carefully into the grease cup; the blue flame burned higher from the white tufted wicking and the hand-patted yeast cakes sizzled on their wire spit. Haendl was now entitled to one of them when they were done through.
Haendl said: “Maybe this is the last of the alcohol.”
“How?”
“I busted a pipe at the joint and caught my bucketful. A machine started to crawl over, then it began to spin.”
“I never saw one of them do that.”
“No. Then the machine stopped. Dead. The motor stopped turning. Then the alcohol stopped running from the pipe.”
The binary was not a quiet place. Usually within earshot there was heavy machinery doing things that produced a background rumble. As they sat and shared the cakes the rumble intensified. They did not leap up or even speak, but went on chewing. In the past months those who survived had learned not to waste energy on anything except survival. All through the yeast-pan chamber they occupied, three hundred or so ex-Citizens took minimum notice and continued to eat, sleep, harvest the pans, shape their cakes, build their fires, make their tools of scraps and broken parts.
The daylight lamps used by the yeast for photosynthesis went out abruptly and there were cries of fright until eyes accommodated to the dim light of chemically luminous ceiling panels.