Somebody whose name was spelled with a sunburst, a teapot spout, a pineapple shape and an H shape proved that the accidents weren’t accidents but murders. Everybody thought he was crazy until three Omniverters hewed their way through his elaborate defenses to get him.
The green people were not fools. There was an instant, planetwide embargo against Omniverters at great cost in convenience and even hunger. All Omniverter feeding-stations were thoroughly wrecked; one by one the sullen machines slowed down, stopped and were dismantled. The world reconverted with aching muscles; all was well; every recorded Omniverter was accounted for except the eight Specials built for interplanetary exploration and long, long gone, presumed lost by a plunge into the sun—
“Willy!” Tropile cried. “Those eight missing Pyramids—?”
Mournfully Willy’s voice said, “Yes. That is right. They came back.”
And because they came back, the next chapter of that book was never written. The eight Specials had returned without warning. Brutishly they perceived that there were no feeding stations, that they were under attack, that there were no other Omniverters on the planet but them. They then proceeded to wipe out the people with beams of electrons, hot plasmoids and direct pressure. When this was done they built their own feeding stations in plenty of time, and then built devices to serve the feeding stations, and devices to serve those devices until the final irony was achieved of men wired together to serve machines. The Pyramids were human enough never to leave well enough alone, and human enough to preserve a place which was fas, lucky, lawful, all good things, at the North Pole, and a place which was nefas, dangerous, feared, at the South. And the dangerous place was truly dangerous; it had concealed the clue of the feeding stations.
These great three-sided booths on the equator then were the be-all and end-all of the planetful of junk. On them focused the pipes of the metabolic-products area. On them focused the propulsion machinery that moved the planet. On them focused the impedimenta surrounding the fleet of space ships which renewed the Sun. On them focused the planning and programming machinery and Components that assessed and allocated demands for power and materials from the competing systems.
The Snowflake’s television eye to the North reported that the octagon had snapped off briefly and been replaced by an irregular heptagon—a Pyramid was feeding. In their delousing operation, how could a split second matter? But it did; one of the spiderspies, almost mindlessly waiting, programmed not to destroy itself, scuttled South during the moment between octagon and heptagon when blue flame did not bar its path. Gratefully it made for the television cable, plugged itself in and discharged its magnetic memory. Its dispatch was: the human beings have survived; I saw them live through the heat and go North.
“So there it is,” said Spyros Gulbenkian, his voice shaking.
“There it is,” agreed Alia Narova. The problem and the solution, they were all there.
Said Django Tembo, “Which one of us shall go?” It was a shorthand kind of question. What it stood for was, The only way for us to fight now is for one of us to physically separate from the Snowflake and make the trip in his physical person. And what that meant by “physically separate” was Give up our indissoluble, ineluctable, indispensable unity forever. Nor would the separation be any physically easier than the surgical joining had been in the first place.
“It’s my job,” said Tropile bitterly. “There are more of my ipeople than anyone else’s, the Princeton bunch being what they were. It’s time to let them at the ‘copter and the explosives. It’s time they had a leader who knew what he was doing. Call in the sawbones machine.”
The words cost him what it would cost an ordinary mind to pull the trigger of a pistol fatally aimed, or to let go of a mountain ledge. They did not dispute with him, though one-seventh of them was dying.
The neurosurgery machine, all glittering metal hands, which had united them was part of their massive complex of equipment. A tube from it slipped into his nostrils, bubbling gas that dosed him against pain. He mumbled an agonized farewell before sleep closed down on him, the first sleep he had known since his awakening six months ago.
What was left of Willy told what was left of the Snowflake: “I can’t do much, but I can keep him in contact with you until—”
“We thank you,” the Snowflake said. “Do not be embarrassed for us.”
The mind of the green and tentacled monster rippled uneasily. “You’re inhuman,” it complained. “Still, to settle the old grudge ...”
“We understand.”
17
The tribe was patched and blistered, and greased its wounds with glycerine. Before stumbling into the northern sector of the metabolic-products area they had resorted to a horrible expedient for survival. Starving, they came to a computer center that was hundreds of human bodies in individual tanks of fluid; wires came from the temples. Some of the bodies they recognized—a cousin here, a Rice Master there. One of the few surviving born fools among them cracked a tank and sipped fluid from his cupped hands, and they let him. He did not die, so like the savages they were, they fell to and drained the tanks. The nutrient fluid fed them and rebuilt their seared tissues astonishingly. It was gone in a clock-day, but they moved on refreshed, not choosing to think of what they had left in the dry tanks. And a clock-day later they were reestablished in another yeast bay, had identified water and alcohol mains, and were living again.
The stranger who lurched into the big arc-lit room a day later was not at once identifiable. He was burned as badly as any of them; women screamed when they saw him, thinking that he must be a—a Something from one of the violated nutrient tanks.
But he kept mumbling through cracked lips: “Tropile. Want Haendl. Innison. Germyn.” They brought Haendl to him.
“Tropile,” the Wolf said, studying him. “Do you want me to send for your wife?”
“Wife?” the burnt man muttered. “We have no wife. Follow me. Us. Me.”
“You’re raving. We can’t follow a delirious man,” Haendl said soothingly. “Rest a few days; we have, ah, some stuff to help you heal—”
“Fetch it. We’ll use it on the march. We propose to lead you to your weapons.” He looked straight into HaenoTs eyes.
The man from Princeton passed his hand in front of his face. “Tropile! You are Tropile? I thought—I don’t know what I thought.” He said harshly over his shoulder to Innison and Germyn: “Well? You heard him, didn’t you? Get the people together.”
Afterwards, long afterwards, he tried to explain: “It was like six people challenging you to a fist fight—six of them to one of you. Of course you don’t take them up on it; you’d be crazy if you did. I wasn’t crazy, so I didn’t challenge Tropile’s right to take over.”
They strung yeast-cakes to themselves, wincing where they touched burns, and followed their sick, crazy-sounding messiah out of the warm, bright yeast bay into cold, or sweltering-hot, tunnels where the air was too thin, or too thick, or acrid with fumes. Gala Tropile was one of the marchers; she refused for days to believe that the man was Glen. He looked something like Glen but he did not know her; the most she would finally concede was that he was Glen Tropile in a way. What had happened to him was unguessable. She thought vaguely that he might be made well if she could comfort him and kiss the queer scars, not burns, on his forehead.