Wolfbane

by C. M. Kornbluth

  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 Alla 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 Snowflake 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 Snowflake 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 pipe. Alcohol was abundant, but nobody ever drank 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, p
eople 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 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 hot 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 draggingly 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 Snowflake’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,” Alla Narova said strongly. “We can’t fight what we don’t understand.”

  “It will take forever,” complained Gulbenkian. “We don’t have forever.”

  Alla 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?

  Architecture for People and their Omniverters. 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 setting 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 Omnivert
ers 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.