Wolfbane

by C. M. Kornbluth

The Snowflake’s television eye to the North reported that the octagon had snapped off briefly and been replaced by an irregular heptagon—a Pyramid was feeding.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 dispatch 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 Alla 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 people 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 re-established 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 Haendl’s 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 possible to cross it without collapsing. When he nerved them for a dash through a spectrophotometry 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 and 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 off 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.

  And 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 patches on the pipe where it was strained. A huge 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 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 cord.

  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 primacord 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 mischmetal tracer bullet into the bright little target.

  The block exploded and blew up the primacord, 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 breaches.”

  “Must we not?” the green person added sardonically on his own.