Then came heat. The North wall began to glow—sooty red, brighter orange, lemon-yellow, blue, blue-white—and a thing like a not wire stretching the length of the room emerged from it and moved at a walking pace above their heads. The opposite wall blazed blue-white as the plasmoid vanished into it and then there was silence except for a diminishing rumble to the south. It soon dampened into nothingness.
The ceiling panels glowed down unchanged on yeast pans which had been boiled dry, on plastic which had melted and dribbled, and on three hundred sprawled, silent figures. One by one they began to stir and look up. Some were temporarily blinded; all suffered angry red first-degree burns, but no radiation sickness. Fusion is hot and clean. Dazedly they pulled themselves up on the edges of the yeast pans to look over into their dry charred depths. One by one they turned their backs on the vanishing planetary rumble and moved draggingly North. They were hungry and there was no food on the site or to the South, so they went North. They were life as the Pyramids did not know it, so they had passed through the Pyramids’ cordon sanitaire, as the Snowflake never could.
The Snowflake retreated. It had its escape tunnel to the surface, and it crawled up the slanting tunnel on caterpillar treads. It was by then the heart of an immense complex: armor, reserve nutrient, circulation pumps, power sources for the pumps and its far-reaching sense organs and manipulators. It was, in fact, the size of a Pyramid, though not as mobile. It emerged to the surface and continued its slow crawl southward, skirting junkpiles, circling crevasses. The two nerve trunks it maintained were: a feeder to a simple eye-and-ear up North which observed the progress of the octagonal cordon; and: the line to the South where manipulators dealt out crystal-and-gold plates in the polar library to be read by the Snowflake’s eyes.
The difficulty, of course, was that the Snowflake’s eyes had learned to read only one of the two hundred languages of the old green boys with all the arms. Worse than that, the plates were tumbled in random order.
Within the Snowflake, Glenn Tropile cursed. “What do we do now?” he demanded of no one in particular.
“We sort them out,” Alia Narova said strongly. “We can’t fight what we don’t understand.”
“It will take forever,” complained Gulbenkian. “We don’t have forever.”
Alia Narova flashed, “Let us consider. Why are the plates scattered? There must be a system. That first, then. We deduce the system, then—”
“Then,” said Tropile bitterly, “we still can’t read the damned things. Anyway, who says there has to be a system? Suppose the green people had some sort of precognitive ability?
Then whichever plate they reached for would be the right one—so why make card indexes?”
And Willy said admiringly, “You really are quite clever, you know. We did.”
“Willy!” cried Alia Narova. “What do we do
O” nowr
Willy said with regret, “I’m really sorry, but, as I am d—”
“Hell with your being dead!” said Tropile brutally. “Can you at least help us read these damn things?”
“Well, certainly I can do that,” said the voice, slightly miffed. “One moment. There.”
And the crystal and gold rearranged itself into texts, as two hundred languages flowed into the Snowflake net. “My God,” whispered Tropile, marveling. “Willy? Now can you tell us which of these—”
“But that wouldn’t be fair,” said Willy seriously, “under the circumstances.”
So the Snowflake began to devour the library. The first book it spun under the television eyes was promising: Treatise on Strategy for the Use of [Unintelligible]. Strategy! The Snowflake read the book in five minutes. Strategy turned out to be in the nature of a white cane and a Seeing Eye Dog—something to be used by unfortunate green people whom accident or illness had deprived of telepathy. The doctrine of gambits, planned withdrawals and encirclement was the very latest in prosthetic devices. Those crystal and gold plates went crashing into a corner of the chamber; the busy fingers plucked and burrowed into the pile again.
Mathematical Aesthetics of First-Stage Egg-Worship. Five minutes to read; nothing there except an old seven-based notation traditional to the rites, and: “—our inevitable human tendency to polarize which we have impressed even on our machines—”
Impregnation as an Art Form. (It ranked below Spacio-Temporal, Electromagnetic Constructs, and well above Precognition Capping—but only as an art form. It was Clearly understood that as a noncerebral experience it was second only to the supreme one, Willed Death.)
The Pre-Machine Culture of [some planet of some star]. Amusing little beggars; one envied their simplicity, to say nothing of their low accident rate.
Is Polarity an Artifact? Well, yes—which was a polar way of putting it. In the raw universe as distinguished from the universe ordered by the mind of man there was no
Eolarity. Yet the universe itself had given rise y evolution to the polar mind of man with its on-or-off nerve cells, man’s informing eyes which decided things were either light or dark rather than taking an accurate photon count. The universe suffered itself to be arranged into abstractions manipulable by dyadic notation with its implicit duality. In meta-language—The meta-language was almost unintelligble, and was only an introduction to a totally unintelligible treatment in meta-meta-language.
Architecture for People and their Omniverters. This golden (actually “palladian”—they loved the hard black-silvery sheen of Element 46 more than the fatty texture of gold) age of leisure and creativity . . . new and challenging . . . traditional and seven-based aesthetic of ovoids must either yield or graciously blend with the new demands of superbly versatile machinery . . . the Omniverter the flower of the mechanical genius of our race . . . some compromise essential for aesthetic unity . . . widening of roads beyond any degree hitherto contemplated lest traffic be choked . . . Omniverter shelter-feeding-booth for every impregnation-group . . . hoped that accommodations rationally and beautifully arranged for the almost-symbiotic life of man and his machinery will minimize the accident rate hitherto considered the inevitable consequence of progress . . .
Omniverter Safety Book. The Omniverter is non-reasoning despite its astonishing versatility. The Seventh Conference on Omniverter Safety has concluded that failure to recognize this fact and act appropriately is the basis of the high and rising accident rate. It has even been somewhat blasphemously suggested that Second-Stage Egg-Worship Ritual be altered to include basic techniques of Omniverter safety in order to emphasize the gravity of the problem ...
Omniverter Ideation: a Debate. Pro—the characteristic polar behavior of all Omniverters. They invariably lay out a job of work by setting the limits and filling in between them, whether it is to build a feeding-station factory or a road-widening machine. Con—this is merely a mechanical consequence of the binary concepts underlying their construction (Both very much elaborated.) Chairman’s humorous conclusion—unfortunately we cannot ask an Omniverter whether this characteristic is associated with the idea of polarity or is a mere reflex. Therefore we stand adjourned.
Rise and Fall of the Omniverter Movement: Omniverters—Pyramids—the definitive history! Ten minutes to read it. Simple solid-state physics devices with many advantages over fragile, hot-running electron tubes. Bigger and bigger, better and better. The inevitable dream of robots; make ‘em really big, one fine solid jam of transistors switching busily away, running factories, feeding themselves, healing themselves, tending the young—fellows and girls, we’ve got it made! This is living; we have leisure to make bigger and better Omniverters for everybody, to ride on Omniverters instead of walking, to tear up farmland for germanium and caesium to make bigger and better Omniverters. We never had it so good, except for the inevitable Omniverter accidents, which are merely the toll taken by progress; indeed there is a growing body of evidence that people accidentally injured want the accidents to happen to them so (somehow) we needn’t do anything about it.