“Routine precaution,” Tropile said precisely. “They are First Alert against repair or transport machines out of control. None of us must move at a greater speed than two miles per hour, or Second Alert will be activated, with hysteresis currents which would cause all our metal equipment to become red hot. Begin to apply your triton blocks.”
Moving slowly, slowly, seven pregnant women and eight men crept down the slag pile, bent almost double under oxygen tanks, respirators and thirty pounds of explosive each. An eighth woman, Gala Tropile, followed them. Her burden was a huge coil of cord carried over her shoulder like a bandolier. The woven jacket of the stuff was laced into the pattern of a diamond-back rattlesnake, with good reason. They worked their way down the pairs of legs that supported the overhead. At each pair one paused, pulled a sticky one-pound block from its neighbors and smacked it against a leg. It stayed, and Gala Tropile passing by inserted an end of the rattlesnake cord into a drilled, sticky hole, leaving a yard of diamondback tail to trail on the cold ground. Slowly, slowly, they mined thus a quarter-mile of the overhead tube. Slowly returning, they all helped Gala Tropile knot the diamondback tails onto one unbroken length of the rattlesnake cord.
Meanwhile, slowly, the fifteen left at the riser had been circling it as if it were a maypole, winding it and winding it with more of the cord. Over the cord at last they placed things like wax seals, but eight inches across. They were shaped charges, queer weapons that did most damage where they were not. A shaped charge applied to a surface touches it along a circular line; most of the charge does not touch the surface at all. When it is fired it does no damage along the line of contact, but at the center of the circle it drills a neat, deep hole through almost anything.
There was only one casualty. An African applied a charge overcarefully and stepped back to admire his work; there was nothing to step back onto. He tumbled down the slagpile at more than two miles per hour. The moronic machines watching decided; Transport device out of control; apply Second Alert. Another of the nondescript machines littering the desolate plateau awakened, drained power from accumulators, and blasted out hysteresis currents toward the rolling human being. Before he reached the bottom of the slag pile his oxygen tanks glowed red hot and exploded, the metal burning brightly for a second. The rest of the mining party, on the fringes of the field, felt shoe-eyelets and zippers sear them, and their tanks on their shoulders were suddenly hot coals for an instant. The instant passed; the agony remained but grew no worse. Stolidly they continued their winding and pasting until the second party returned, paying out its rattlesnake corcf.
Tropile was still tenuously mind-linked with the Snowflake through the green creature. He did not live the full life of the Snowflake, nor was he wholly out of it. It was the difference between coma and death—not too important to an observer, but the only thing in the world that matters to the patient.
There trickled into his comatose state a consciousness that the Pyramids had reformed their octagonal attack and were moving faster to grapple with the tread-mounted mystery before them. Rate of energy discharge increased; good, he noted. By now the lesser tasks of the eight subsidiary parties should be set up; his group was to trigger the detonations.
He led his thirty to the lee of a junked Solvay Process tower where they had cached their remaining weapons; the tail of the prima-cord fuse he embedded in a final yellow triton block fifty feet away. He steadied a rifle on a rusted plate and cracked a thirty-caliber misch-metal tracer bullet into the bright little target.
The block exploded and blew up the prima-cord, stuff that burned—exploded—at one thousand feet per second. The blast leaped to the riser first, and there was a rattlebang of shaped charges blowing their neat, white-hot holes around the fifty-foot pipe. It flared down the colonnade of spidery legs upholding the overhead tube, the explosions merging in a long roar, the flashes looking like a moving line of fire. Suddenly silence, and suddenly new, non-explosive noises—creaks and grumbles of metal. The overhead tube sagged minutely in the center of its undercut quarter mile, sagged farther and crashed, split clean. Where it struck against a hundred jagged rocks or piles of rubble the cold and brittle metal broke in fragments, huge curved plates and shards. The shattering noise travelled through rock and metal to their feet and through their bones to their ears.
A wild gush of viscous liquid poured from the splintered butt-end of the overhead, and spurted like a hundred-pointed star from the perforations that encircled the riser. The unsupported curve at the top of the riser complained, sighed metallically and gave up the ghost. It leaned deeper and deeper, and the riser tore along its perforations; those white-hot holes had not only pierced but annealed the metal. Heated and cooled again, its crystalline structure had changed; now it could be drawn, and when it would draw no longer it would tear. Crashes again when the riser, greatest of trees, was felled. The top of it splintered, the annealed bottom of it yielded and slumped into a lazy figure-eight cross section.
It was happening also a mile to the South. Crouching behind the Solvay tower they saw lights on the horizon and felt in their teeth more distant crashes and screams of metal.
“We have done well,” the Snowflake said to Tropile humorlessly. “We must now defend the oreaches.”
“Must we not?” the green person added sardonically on his own.
More of the quiescent machinery that littered the bleak planetscape stirred. From under a battery of dead, abandoned electrolysis cells crawled the primary food-main repair machines. They had not been in hiding. They were universal environment equipment; it did not matter where they waited until summoned by pressure drops in the main and the breaking of circuits built into the main’s fabric. They had done their last job an earth-century ago, the meteorite-hole repairs to the riser. They had waited nearby since then and when the lead cells of a chlorine-factory complex wore out, the repair machines had suffered the cells to be dumped on them by disposal machinery. They could dig out on signal, and the signal had come.
There were about one hundred of them. They resembled hugely oversized tank-dozers to which had been fitted a variety of material-handling accessories: extensible cranes, pairs of hands, lift forks. They were not fighting machines, but by the nature of their mission they were built to survive natural damage and bull their way through to the injured mains against any conceivable opposition by earthquake, meteor, flood or lashing broken electric cable.
But not by man.
The thirty humans waited silently for the ten machines that ground toward the shattered riser and the fallen overhead tube: ninety other monsters angled across the gaunt planet-scape towards the other enigmatic wounds reported to their deep-buried brains. With fascinated horror Roget Germyn unscrewed the lid from a box which bore an ancient stenciclass="underline" ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND. Inside, in honeycomb cells, nested a dozen slim tubes with egg-bulges at one end and fins at the other.
“You will load for us as you were shown,” Tropile said to Germyn. Tropile shouldered a bazooka, sighted along its barrel and caught the foremost of the repair machines in the cross-wires, three hundred yards away, coming fast.
The Snowflake died at that moment. In one burst of love, farewell and pain it transmitted through to Tropile the image of the searing blue fine of plasmoid, the nutrient tank boiling dry, boiling them with it.
Germyn slapped him hesitantly on the shoulder—the signal for “armed and loaded.” Glen Tropile collapsed under the trifling weight of the sheetmetal tube and missile and lay sobbing. He was dead; he had just died.
“Give me that damned thing,” Gala Tropile said, wrenched the rocket launcher from him and shouldered it inexpertly.