Frederik Pohl & Cecil Kornbluth Wolfbane

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Mice? How mice? Why mice? But the cone had fallen into one of its silences
again.
Then:
"Sometimes you say you're Tropile, sometimes you say you're this Django Tembo
or somebody else. Who are you?"
"Yes."
It was absolutely infuriating. Ragged-nerved, the corridor people squabbled
among themselves. They did not dare outright violence, at least at first; it
was not a good idea to end an argument by punching your opponent out, when you
were starkly aware that next time you slept he might stay awake, waiting. So
they took out their fury on their surroundings, smashing, damaging, ruining.
(Very like mice.) And still tried to get sensible answers:
"What exactly, please! are you going to do with us?"
"We will tell you," said the voice Tropile's this time, as it happened. And it
added, "Soon we will begin to starve you."
"Starve? Why? When? What for?"
"To make you mousier. Soon." And when they could get no further answers from
the black cone, the marooned band tried to prepare for this new, intolerable
ag-
gravation. They would have stored up Food and water if they could. They
couldn't. Their raw materials were only the chips from the giant machine
tools, and they were good tools;
they made minimum chips. The lathes pared off helices of metal and plastic
which were pretty and next to useless. The milling machines shaved off long
needles that fell in showers to be washed away by the periodic inundation of
the shop. They tried bending the helices back and forth to snap off
slightly-distorted squares of metal from them, and they did. They bundled the
milling machine chips to make stakes and hammers, and tried to pound their
metal squares into storage pots, and it just didn't work. If the metal that
peeled from the lathes happened to be brittle enough to snap into plates, it
could not be ductile enough to draw into pots. Three attempts to anneal the
plates in the adjoining foundry's terrible heat ended fatally; the place was
impossibly dangerous. One grew faint and vague in the heat and bad air; one
stumbled into a naked high-tension cable, or a bubbling crucible, or onto the
die of a champing automatic hammer. They were apprehensive, and bored, and
nasty-tempered and well-fed just what the Snow-flake wanted them to be.
Page 66
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
In its almost-final stage of evolution, the Snowflake could hardly have been
seen in its tank by an outside observer, there were so many wires. It had long
ago delegated its
Pyramid-assigned task to an octet in a spare tank; there had been no
difficulty in duplicat-
ing the input-board or the output-switches, but the programming of the octet
at double-
remote control had been insanely difficult, demanding total recall of the
Snowflake's own programming and its duplication, step by step, upon the spare.
Once this had been done, however, and all sixteen hands were freed, the
Snowflake had the freedom of the binary.
Its wires and cables went everywhere; gradually its metal spider-spies were
retired, for the
Snowflake acquired direct-reporting eyes and transducers of its own. It
diverted and armor-plated a supply of its nutrient fluid calculated to last
out any emergency; it co-
opted generators to stand by ready to be cut in upon any power failure of its
pumps; it shielded itself in steel, soft iron, lead and cadmium against
physical, magnetic and radiational attack; it mounted itself and its whole
huge supply-complex in caterpillar treads.
The spider-spies continued to serve it only in one area: the chamber under the
North Pole.
It was felt that the deliberate archaism of the great room's equipment argued
against insinuating its scanners there. If a cable crawled down a conduit of
the nutrients area it was of no concern to a Pyramid going by. That was what
Componets were for to lay cables in the right places at the right time. Under
general directives they did so. No quantity of transducers turning up
throughout the binary could be a cause for alarm;
doubtless it was some quality- or traffic-control system going into effect to
ensure the continuance of the
Pyramid's environment without cost or care to them while they did what?
While they performed their interminable round of experiments on the tentacled
creature under the crystal dome. Performed them in slow and stately tempo,
slower than their normal motions down corridors, or their flares of electrons
to manipulate relays, damping rods or pinch fields.
"I wish " said Glenn Tropile fretfully. He didn't have to finish the sentence.
Alia Narova finished it for him.
"I, too, wish we knew what that was all about," she said, "but we don't."
When the Snowflake tired of wondering about the North Pole, it could get a
little variety in its collective life by wondering about the South.
The most interesting thing about the South Pole was that it was so
uninteresting. Nothing ever went there, neither Pyramid nor Component-driven
mechanism. Nothing seemed to take place inside it. There were no Eyes there,
no instruments to detect. The best guess of the Snowflake (actually, the only
one it had) was that it was a junk heap.
"Archeologists," declared Corso Navarone, "find all sorts of interesting
things in junk heaps. Let us look at this one." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Tematy