at the South Pole had been left to be read by almost any eyes, any hands, or whatever unimaginable beings might read by electricity. There had to be a key, and there was: on the set of largest plates. A wearying, difficult, often-imagined program began. A single man of Earth could eventually have learned much of what was oh the largest plates; it began with arithmetic-of course, binary. A dot is a dot; a dot and a space are two dots. Two dots are three dots; their zero was really zero-nothing, a discontinuity in the flowing script. A gracious, subtly-curved eye-shape was the addition-operator; negative numbers were made not of dots but little sun-bursts, and so on. It was only mathematics; the Snowflake plowed deliberately through it all, kid-stuff geometry, the functions of the conic sections. It was not very elegant; the Snowflake felt that elegance had been foregone and crude old concepts resurrected from primitive days. But the Snowflake learned; this is “height” sign, this is “skill” sign, “big,” “bigger than,” “includes,” “logically implies”-and then on to the first reader, the second-largest of the sets of plates. Blue-green, tentacled monsters were the subjects; eating, sleeping, crawling (but say “walking”) were the verbs. Monsters (but say “men”) watch the stars. The great sun rises and warms men. The spermatiferous man impregnates (“loves?”) the ovipositing man-whom you might as well call a woman, for she is. For one hundred and sixty-six days the laid egg is-it certainly seemed to be worshipped. Then the child is born, and the second degree of worship is accorded to it. A small- Something-is assigned to the child, and the child is cleansed with the mouths of its-certainly not “impregnating” here; certainly “loving” -parents. The child eats good food under the guidance of its parents and its Something-again. The child sleeps too heavily and the Something-again wakes its parents who in loving concern do something about it, the Snowflake could not make out what. The child learns to count and to read books like this. The modified-loving Something-again helps. The child walks, the child runs in the sun, the child goes far and fast riding the Something-again, for the Something-again has grown with the child. Then the child is half-grown and the third degree of worship is accorded to it and it begins to master the Twelve Hundred and Eighteen Books of First Importance. When that is done the child is grown and is a child no longer but a man or woman, and its Something-again too is grown. The new-grown man is modified-loving to the full-grows Something-again, for there is a certain danger in Somethings-again, useful in everything though they are. Absent-mindedness in the treatment (“tentaculation”-“handling”) of a full-grown Something-again can be fatal- The Snowflake quivered in its nutrient bath when it realized that absent-mindedness had been fatal. The full-grown Pyramids, conve- nient things to have around, had risen immemorial ages ago and destroyed their masters who had built diem, gutted their pleasant planet and turned it into a bleak junkpile, a fit environment for the machines they were. 15 As Haendl had grimly foreseen, the human beings in the vast corridor of the machine shop next were deprived of their water. The taps simply stopped running. There was panic, as might have been predicted, and then there was the inevitable consequence: migration. Men with flesh on them do not lie down to die; women with babies in them do not despair. If they are ringed by fire they will break through where the flames seem thinnest, but they will break through. With hunger at their heels and nothing worse than hunger ahead, men go anywhere: from the ancestral home in the Indus Valley or the Euphrates or the Congo they eat their way across the old world, then cross a land bridge and eat their way down the new. These migrants spread out from the corridor through its two exits; they scouted the red-lit caverns of the binary, twenty, forty miles a day. They found water everywhere, for it is a useful solvent and took part in most of the mechanized planet’s chemical processing. They bashed many a pipe loose from its joints and drank their fill and spread on. Scent guided them one hundred miles before they looked again like sober Citizens, ribs countable and thighs dwindling into stringy shanks; but by then they were in the metabolic-products complex of the binary, a tangle of pipes, pumps and vats many of which held sugars, starches, proteins and fats. Epics should be written about Innison and how he scaled the hundred-foot fermentation tank where glucose was going over into alcohol, and how he shattered the glass input main so that food showered down upon the throng below. Nor should be forgotten The Tale of Muhandas Dutta, and How He Blew up the Polyethelene Cooker. The vast thing stood between them and an unmistakable meaty, yeasty odor. They were abounding with energy from the glucose but their bodies knew they were starving for replacement and repair molecules, that they could not live on energy alone. Princeton Wolves studied the stages of the polyethelene tower, a glum stainless-steel citadel from which protruded clear blisters filled with the successive polymers. Down at the bottom, swirling gas only; heat and pressure filled the next higher blister with thin fluid, and the blister above with viscous fluid, and up at the top great paddles churned a waxy paste through the output main to a storage facility or direct to presses and extrusion noz- zles which might be half a world away. A planetful of circuitry was always in need of some insulation, somewhere; shorts were spitting blue fire somewhere at any given moment, and machines crawling toward them laden with copper and polyethelene pellets to stop the bleeding and heal the wounds. And this source of dressings stood like a bastion between the men and the smell of yeast. There was no way around except through vats of fuming nitric acid, rooms whose air was death. Muhandas Dutta consulted with Wolves, warned all the others back around solid walls and onto high ground up ramps, and alone climbed a great, rugged weld that led half-way up the fermentation tank. There was the place where ethanol was drawn off, and there it was tasted by instruments whose wires led somehere to a Component. The end of the wires that mattered to Dutta went through a packing gland into the output main. The gland was strong, but it was not homogeneous with the rest of the tank and pipe. There were places where the gland and the pipe met, and there Dutta inserted his milling-machine sliver and pried. With one arm and both legs he clung to the meter-thick pipe; with the other he pried for an hour, two hours, three hours. When scouts came wandering from around the thick walls where he had sent them he screamed down at them to go back; it was giving way. So the scouts returned to the people, and the people waited, hungry and thirsty, smashing water pipes for their drink, getting out of the way of slow-moving pipe-repair machines when they came, and smashing the pipes again when they were gone. In the fourth hour of Dutta’s ordeal the packing gland started to sweat ethanol drops at its edges. In the fifth hour came a dribbling stream whose fumes made him cling dizzily, and in the sixth the gland blasted out like a bullet and blew Muhandas Dutta with it, destroying him like a mutineer blown from the muzzle of a gun. The ethanol roared down in a glassy column to the floor, and sped downgrade to the polyethelene cooker’s cherry-red base. The ethanol boomed into blue flame on contact, and the cherry-red of the cooker went into orange-red and then orange. The explosion ripped it an instant later, puffing out all flame with a gigantic breath. Distracted repair machines sprinkled the hot rubble and pawed at riven plates. When their fire-control fluid stopped sizzling on the tangled wreckage the human beings came out and climbed it, threading around fantastic spires and hummocks of poly-chome plastic extruded before its time and untimely chilled; from the top of the heap they could see the promised land: flat culture tanks of yeast indefatigably working away under arc lights, manufacturing proteins, handy, versatile long-chain molecules, and nutritious, too. For the time being, their food problem was solved. To solve it they had done the binary planet a century’s-worth of damage in a matter of hours; they were being excellent mice. Through the Snowflake quivered the realization that this was a problem beyond intellect: what ought one to think of entities-that-were-machines instead of entities-that-were-living? Logic alone could make no distinction. On a gross level there was oh, what difference between a lever and a poet! But logic did not stop with levers and poets. Logic went on to consider the difference between a self-programming computer and the microscopically-revealed network of electro-chemical feedback processes that could grossly be called “a poet,” and found the difference smaller. And logic could not be stopped from going on to machines unbuilt, the most complex machine imaginable, capable of choice, self-reproducing, versatile with limbs and transducers, and comparing it with a description unwritten, the most exhaustive description of “a poet” that could be produced, bearing in mind that there was really nothing in him but input, switching and output. On the nameplate of a machine and on the brow of a poet might be inscribed with equal justice Ex Nihil Nihil Fit; you get nothing from nothing. You get bombarded by the environment with sense-impressions and something happens, machine or man. You input a pound of force on the long end of a three-to-one lever; it outputs three pounds (over a shorter distance). You input travel books on Samuel Taylor Coleridge; he outputs Xan-adu. So simple! So wrong. The Snowflake fluttered in its tank knowing it was wrong, but not why or how. It decided (a rare decision) to dissociate into its eight personalities for a time. It was harder than ever before for Glenn Tropile. It wrenched him and gave him the curious illusion that he had gone blind-even though his own two eyes could see the murk of the nutrient fluid, his own deformed toe-nail, the tangle of wires and the switches in his pink, wrinkled hands. Have to adjust the salt content of the nutrient, he thought. There whipped through his mind frighteningly the ion-exchange equations that explained the wrinkling-a hang-over of the endlessly analytical life within the Snowflake. Django Tembo of course spoke first. “Children,” he said, “the last of my hesitation is gone. I have no more compassion for these invaders, the Pyramids; they were bad servants and rebels. This can never be tolerated. It must be war to the death.” For the Snow-flake had considered a modus vivendi with the Pyramids as perhaps the most economical solution of the problem. There was a soundless murmur of agreement. “What place this?” Willy asked, and began to cry. “Hush, Willy,” Mercedes van Dellen soothed him. “It’s all right. We’re your friends.” Willy put his thumb in his mouth, not letting go of his switch, and was at peace. Warm here. Good here. It was, surprisingly, Kim Seong who spoke up next: “We should have a little talk with the fellow under the North Pole, the green boy with all the arms. He’s older than any of us.” “He’s dead!” Tropile said, astonished. “Must be nice to be so cocksure,” she said dryly. “I, of course, wouldn’t know, not being a man. All 7 know is that it’s smart to be ready for any dirty little trick that can be sprung on you.” Alia Narova said: “I think they’re sorry they killed all their people. I think they’re trying to revive that one; that’s what all the puttering is about. I think they want to tell it they’re sorry.” “No, no!” cried Corso Navarone. “You are too forgiving in your womanly heart. They are fiends; they are tormenting it. Death to the monsters, I say, and I shall say it forever!” If he could have folded his arms he would have, but the wire-trailing switches got in the way. Spyros Gulbenkian said: “Let us consider the whole situation, my friends. We should hit them high and hit them low. Our hitting low proceeds successfully; our good people from Earth have provided the repair-machines with tasks of an order of magnitude beyond their programming or mechanical capacities. Soon several score of the women will come to term. The second generation, my dear friends! Let them only grow to sexual maturity in thirteen or fourteen clock-years and this planet is doomed! But I am overdramatic. The earth- people will multiply, I should say, and the pyramids and their machinery will fail to cope with them. Time is on our side-what a luxury for an old man to say that! Misunderstood, un-understood, they will proliferate through the planet in their innocent way. They will drain sedimentation pans to establish new yeast beds unmindful that sediment-laden coke pellets will produce quite inferior steel with which the Pyramids will order devices to be manufactured. They will notice that a chamber is quite livable as to temperature and humidity except that chlorine gas is blown through it. In their innocence they will jam the fan which drives the chlorine, not knowing or caring that this lack of chlorine will end for a time the production on this planet of polychloroprene without which oil-resistant gaskets cannot be manufactured. The weak flesh! The weak flesh, driven by hunger and progeny! What wreckage the weak flesh will do to iron-bound machines!” “I won’t wait a century,” Tropile snarled. “For what?” asked Gulbenkian, blandly. “For-for-” He did not know. He said almost as a question: “To be human again. Walk the Earth . . . my God, what are we doing?” Willy began to cry with fright. Mercedes van Dellen soothed him. “What are we doing?” Tropile asked again, trying to be calm. “We’ve ripped our friends out of the Earth and turned them loose to be vermin for our convenience. We weren’t a god; we were a devil!” Like the flip of a kaleidoscope events had suddenly changed while he watched them. The steady certainty of the Snowflake which knew nothing except tasks and their economical fulfillment had become the inhuman fixity of a machine. “We were a machine!” he cried. “We were as much a machine as the Pyramids. There was no soul in us, no pity.” “Yes,” said Alia Narova, suddenly awed. “How could we have done it? Django Tembo, how could you have let us?” The dung-bearer had the soul of a king- but an African king. Deeply troubled, he told them: “Look into my heart and you will see why I do not understand your objections.” They looked and saw. He had been fundamentally baffled by “not a god but a devil.” To him it had sounded like the crudest, most naked illogic. Devil and god were the same to his people after millenia in fatless, acid-soiled Africa. Men do not eat other men calmly except in Africa. Siberian shamans used to tear madly at the flesh of those who watched them dance, but every unspeakable mouthful later was vomited up so that the lawbreaking did not bring ruin on the tribe. Polynesians and Melanesians dined on long pig to dare fate and trembled when they did it. Only in starved Africa was a man the same as meat, no more and no less. So it was that when Tropile spoke, Django Tembo heard him say: “We weren’t a devil-god; we were a devil-god.” He could not understand that as a value-judgment; nobody could. Gulbenkian chuckled at the impasse. Django Tembo said, puzzled and simple: “Strength is better than weakness, friends. Together we are strong. What more is there to say? Who can guide every step so that no ant is ever crushed by him?” “You’ll never get me back in there,” said Tropile. “Or me,” said Alia Narova. “You cannot do this!” Corso Navarone cried. “Alia Narova whom I love, Glen Tropile, my trusted companion, deserters? Never!” “I think the same,” said Spyros Gulbenkian with interest. “I mean really think, with the brain and not with the gonads-no offense, Corso. Exactly how are you going to desert? I think we can, so to speak, pull you under if we wish.” “Try it!” Tropile snarled. “Try it!” Alia Narova echoed. “If it weren’t for Willy,” Mercedes van Dellen said apologetically. “He’d be lost without us-” Kim Seong said delightedly: “I’ll just watch. I love a good fight between a pair of fools. It breaks things up.” Tropile and Alia Narova felt the attack begin from Django Tembo; it came in the form of false memories insinuating themselves into their minds. Glaring deserts of rock and sand that merged into snowy steppes, the death of the last elephant, on Earth, Tembo’s totem, in the streets of Durban, the aged ivory-laden beast crashing to its arthritic knees and toppling on its side, grunting . . . Princeton and Gala dimmed in Tropile’s mind, Nice, and the old blind man in Alia Narova’s. The fierce, confused, inflated thoughts of Corso Navarone exhorted them to be brave, strong, united, gallant, dignified like him. Spyros Gulbenkian, never one to lead a cavalry charge, spattered them with this day in Paris six sun-cycles ago when he won the toll-gate franchise on the Ninth Bridge, the foundation of his fortune; that night in Frankfurt’s House of Regulations when he blew the wall and permitted his chief bookkeeper to escape-the charge was Wolf, of course; an afternoon between the paws of the Great Sphinx when he and a trader named Shalom bartered African grain for French sugarbeet. Mercedes van Dellen: Poor Willy. He doesn’t really understand but he feels better when we’re all together. He forgets that he doesn’t understand. Maybe he’s improving. Don’t you think so? Maybe the next time we come out he’ll be a little clearer. Wouldn’t that be good? Glen and Alia, won’t you let go for poor Willy? And Alia Narova broke the flashing exchange with an angry sob. “Willy’s upset!” she cried. “He won’t answer me.” With an effort, Tropile expelled the false memories and the pseudo-voices. “Stop a minute, everybody!” he shouted. “If you’re so worried about what Willy wants, let’s give him a chance to speak for himself.” The Snowflake-seven-eighths of it-fell si- lent. It was the turn of the remaining one-eighth to speak. It didn’t do so, however. Uncertainly, Alia Narova quavered, “Willy?” No answer. “He feels funny,” said Spyros Gulbenkian. Then everybody knew that Willy felt funny, because the motionless body jerked into violent motion. “What’s he doing?” Tropile cried. “Willy! Cut it out! The way you’re wriggling around you could hurt something!” The suddenly thrashing, sinuously writhing body of Willy became motionless again. Then, member by member, systematically it moved a finger at a time, a toe, an arm, like the owner of a new car trying out its controls. “My God,” breathed Mercedes van Dellen, “it’s not Willy, is it?” The voice of Willy said gently, “No. I have borrowed Willy to tell you that you must do something quite soon.” “Willy!” Mercedes screamed. Willy repeated, “No, not Willy. I’m sorry. I had to kill him, so to speak. He won’t be back. I’m what your friend called ‘the green boy with all the arms.’ ” “Told you so,” said Kim Seong. “Yes, madam,” said Willy. “We had your sort in my world, too. It was an interesting world and a pleasant one, at least until we started running it for the benefit of the machines, and then let the machines start running it for their own benefit.” “How can you talk our language?” Corso Navarone asked faintly. Wistfully Willy said, “We used to have more than two hundred languages, some good for one thing, some good for another. We were expected to know them all. One more-what does it matter? We were a clever race. Oh, yes, we were clever! I have thought for some time that you would be interested to know how clever, ever since I first noticed you observing us.” Mercedes whimpered. “You noticed? Did- did the Pyramids also notice?” “Wait one moment, please,” said Willy’s voice. There was a lengthy silence. Then Willy’s voice said regretfully, “That is something else I would like to talk to you about at some length: What, exactly, do Pyramids ‘notice?’ But there is something you may think more immediate. You made a mistake when you broke into the Polar Library. You weren’t strong enough to do that yet. Of course, you couldn’t have been expected to know.” Tropile, awe and shock to one side, had had more than enough of veiled hints and subtle warnings. “So?” he growled. “So you touched off trouble when you holed through to the Library,” Willy said apologetically. “The Pyramids, ah-” It broke off for a moment, then resumed with an almost audible equivalent of a shrug. “Let’s say, they ‘noticed,’ though that is quite inexact. At any rate, the Omniverters-excuse me, what you call the Pyramids-have been waiting to take action for the arrival of the one they keep on your planet. It has arrived. All eight of them are now headed for this tank of yours, with, I believe, the intention of doing a thorough job of destroying it. I wish you well. You are not an unattractive race.” Tropile gritted his teeth; there was nothing veiled or subtle about that; it was all too understandable. “Will you tell us what to do?” he demanded. “I can’t,” it said. “I’m dead.” 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 Snow-flake 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 Snow-flake 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. 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 drag-gingly 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 Snow-flake’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 Gulben-kian. “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 Omniver-ters. 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 set- ting 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. 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. Brut-ishly 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 plas-moids 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 dis- patch 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. 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 bi- nary. 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, re- versed 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 pene- trated 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. “Routine precaution,” Tropile said precisely. “They are First Alert against repair or trans- port 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