It did not move, but something about it moved, or changed, or radiated.
The Pyramid surveyed its--cabbage patch? Wristwatch mine? As much
sense, it may be, to say wristwatch patch or cabbage mine. At any rate,
it surveyed what to it was a place where intricate mechanisms grew,
ripened and were dug up at the moment of usefulness, whereupon they
were quick-frozen and wired into circuits.
Through signals perceptible to it, the Pyramids had become "aware" that
one of its mechanisms was now ready to be plucked--harvested.
The Pyramid's blood was dielectric fluid. Its limbs were electrostatic
charges. Its philosophy was: Unscrew It and Push. Its motive was
survival.
Survival today was not what survival once had been, for a Pyramid.
Once survival had merely been gliding along on a cushion of repellent
charges, streaming electrons behind for the push, sending h-f pulses
out often enough to get a picture of their bounced return to integrate
deep inside.
If the picture showed something metabolizable, one metabolized it. One
broke it down into molecules by lashing it with the surplus protons
left over from the dispersed electrons; one adsorbed the molecules.
Sometimes the metabolizable object was an Immobile and sometimes a
Mobile--a vague, theoretical, frivolous classification to a philosophy
whose basis was that _everything_ unscrewed. If it was a Mobile, one
sometimes had to move after it.
That was the difference.
The essential was survival, not making idle distinctions. And one small
part of survival today was the Everest Pyramid's job.
It sat and waited. It sent out its h-f pulses bouncing and scattering,
and it bounced and scattered them additionally on their return.
Deep inside, the more-than-anamorphically distorted picture was
reintegrated. Deeper inside, it was interpreted and evaluated for its
part in survival.
* * * * *
There was a need for certain mechanisms which grew on this planet. At
irregular times, the Pyramid evaluated the picture to the effect that
a mechanism--a wristwatch, so to speak--was ripe for plucking; and
by electrostatic charges, it did so. The electrostatic charges, in
forming, produced what humans called an Eye. But the Pyramid had no use
for names.
It merely plucked, when a mechanism was ripe. It had found that a
mechanism was ripe now.
A world away, before the steps of Wheeling's Federal Building,
electrostatic charges gathered above a component whose name was Citizen
Boyne. There was a small sound like the clapping of two hands which
made the three hundred citizens of Wheeling jerk upright out of their
meditations.
The sound was air filling the gap that had once been occupied by
Citizen Boyne, who had instantly vanished--who had, in a word, been
ripe and therefore been plucked.