Their leader never hesitated; they reeled off a steady forty miles per day. When he took them into a chamber that was 140 degrees of desiccated heat, it turned out to be exactly
Eossible to cross it without collapsing. When e nerved them for a dash through a spectro-photometry room chilled to space-cold for the desired superconductivity effect the weakest of them could just live through the two dozen terrible steps.
It was from one of those cold rooms that they burst into the bottom of a huge well, open to the black star-studded sky except for a glass roof to contain the thin air. It had been a photo-observatory, but now the mirror, photon multipliers, spectroscope gratings ana interferometers were crushed under sudden new arrivals of equipment. This was an arsenal now, the Princeton arsenal transferred to the binary. Guns, explosives, a tank, the war helicopter, rations, body armor, respirators, tank after tank of oxygen for the aborted attack on Everest.
Haendl and Innison inventoried the weapons happily, crooned over demolition bombs, land mines and four-point-two mortars. Tropile stood like a television camera on “pan,’’ his head moving slowly back and forth, scanning the scene. He said at last: “Paper and pencil. His hand went out like a hydraulic actuator and waited, without fatigue, until the paper and pencil were brought. He flicked his hand over the paper and it was a smoothly-drawn map; the lines were drafted, as if he had paused after each to twist the pencil point against a sanding block, and as if they had been guided by T-square, triangles and french curves. In a second pass down the paper he lettered in designations, instructions and routes, and handed the sheet to Haendl. He reached for another. Two passes and the second map was ready for Innison. And then the third for Germyn. And a dozen more for platoon leaders, and three dozen more for squad leaders.
He did not make a Plutarchian before-the-battle address to his gallant troops; he just waited, looking turned-off, while his commanders studied the maps.
At length it was time. The Snowflake, crawling South on its caterpillar treads, flashed the thought to what lay under the crystal dome, and from there it was relayed to Tropile. The Snowflake, receiving its acknowledgement, reversed its left-hand tread, rotated 180 degrees, and began crawling north towards the girdle of fire. The cordon was then a pentagon; reliefs for feeding had become very frequent as the Pyramids steadily drained their energy out in maintaining the colossal magnetic field needed to hold the plasmoid. Signals from the five on the firing line to the three at the feeding booths-signals without agitation or emotion. The three broke off feeding and began to glide across the tumbled planetary surface southward to join the cordon, maximize its intensity.
“The feeding stations are abandoned,” Tropile said dryly. “We will move to them following our maps. Explosives will be detonated as shown. All breaches in primary food lines will be defended against repair machinery.”
The primary food lines. The ragged tribe from Earth could not now be likened to mice which nibbled at the superficies of a building; they had become wolves, going for the throat of the dweller.
They moved out, guided by the man who was guided by the Snowflake and the green, tentacled, suffering thing under the crystal dome up North. The arms cache was located one mile from the feeding booths which stood like basalt cliffs along the equator. In full Everest gear they ascended to the surface through a slanting tunnel and fanned out in nine groups for a mile of hard mountaineering across the junkpile world. Eight of the groups worked their way toward the booths, specifically toward the points where each booth was penetrated by a pipe twenty-five feet in diameter, made of extruded half-inch steel. The ninth group under Germyn and Tropile made for the huger pipe which emerged from the heart of the metabolics-complex, surfaced, and then subdivided into the eight booth mains.
They did their usual rodent damage as they went.
One stepped on a low-tension wire strung inches from the floor of the slanting tunnel; the wire broke. A low-priority message went out: wire broken. A repair machine on routine patrol noted the fact, and checked its magazine to see whether it had voltage and amperage enough to patch in the break, enough polyethelene pellets to squeeze an insulating jacket over the patch. Then the machine either headed for a supply station or to the break, and fixed it. Average time for such a repair, about an hour.
One of the tribe was thirsty and performed what had become a reflex action to thirst. She identified a water pipe by a hundred subtle signs that made it different from all other pipes—temperature, material, finish, gradient, position. She broke it at a joint and trudged on, leaving it running from the break. A higher-priority message went out: pressure-drop; water pipe broken. A quicker machine came to weld it; water on the loose caused shorts, rotting, snowballing trouble. It was not much of a machine; if it came while you drank and stupidly tried to push you aside and weld the pipe you could hold it off at arm’s length while its treads spun and it reached foolishly for the pipe. Time for arrival averaged fifteen minutes.
There was a rule: when a pipe obviously contained the products of several pipes, when it was a Y or a psi or a nameless figure of many more branches and only a single outlet, you were careful. If you broke the stem of a fixture like that, special repair machines came fast, and big. The more branches, the faster they came, and the bigger they were, and the more determined. You could barely hold oft” with both hands the squat little tri-wheeled plumber that came to repair a broken Y joint. Two men could not restrain the half-ton thing that came rushing to restore a broken psi.
More than once the tribe had seen machines booming down the corridors with which they did not care to tangle—high-speed, tread-mounted things weighing up to two tons, equipped with dozer blades and eighteen-inch augers for boring through rubble. It was theorized that they were to service pipes containing something near the end-product of the planet’s whole activity, major components of the Pyramid-food.
Ana they were moving on the food itself.
The Germyn-Tropile group of thirty-odd arrived at their objective. It was a column fifty feet in diameter rising vertically from the summit of a conical slagpile. It soared three times its own diameter into the black sky of the binary and then curved south in a soaring ninety-degree turn. Spidery steel legs supported it every three yards, in pairs. They could not see its terminus, but knew it ended in an impregnable sphere from which issued the eight distribution mains that led directly into the feeding booths.
Planetary stresses, the bunglings of motile machines out of control, and fatigue of materials had not spared the riser pipe or the overhead tube. Inevitably, over the aeons, there had been failures and breakage; their rubble lay about where the repair-machines had shoved it. Now and then a pair of legs had crystallized and snapped, or flowed a little and sagged. The repair machines had come charging, had buttressed them, had slapped and welded
Eatches on the pipe where it was strained. A uge patch on the riser itself and another exactly opposite it must represent meteor damage repaired. One whole section of fifty-foot pipe overhead was shinier than the rest. That must have been a collapse in a rare earthquake, perhaps the last spasm of tectonic life remaining in the ancient planet.
The thirty of them were to do what meteorites and earthquakes had not been able to do.
Germyn touched the huge steel riser—merely touched it, wonderingly. The instant sequel was a clanking of machinery from East and West; two unregarded devices at the foot of the slag pile which you might have taken for abandoned junk stirred themselves. Their gears groaned and elevated purple quartz eyes at Germyn.