Tropile withdrew from scanning the distant dark street. He laughed
soundlessly. "I was watching my wife. God, we're giving them fits down
there! The Pyramids must be churning things up, too--the sky is full of
auroral displays. Looks like there's plenty of h-f bouncing around the
atmosphere."
"Pay attention!" the Alla-Narova mind commanded.
"All right." Obediently, Tropile returned to the war he was waging.
It was a strange conflict, strangely fought. Tropile's mind searched
the abysses and tunnels of the Pyramid planet, and what he sensed or
saw was immediately communicated to all of the awakened Components who
were his allies.
It was a godlike position. Was he sane? There was no knowing. Sanity
no longer meant anything to Tropile. He was beyond such human affairs
as lunacy or its reverse. An insane man is one who is out of joint
with his environment. Tropile was himself his environment. His mind
encompassed two planets and the space between. He saw with a thousand
eyes. He worked with a thousand hands.
And he struck mighty blows.
The weakness of a network that reaches everywhere is that it is
everywhere vulnerable. If a teletype repeater in Omaha garbles a single
digit, printing units in Atlanta and Bangor will type out errors.
Tropile, by striking at the Pyramids' net at a thousand points, garbled
their communications and made them nearly useless. More, he took the
Pyramid network for his own. The Tropile-pulse sped through the neurone
guides of the Pyramid net, and what it encountered it mastered, and
what it mastered it changed.
The Pyramids discovered that they had been attacked.
Frantically (if they felt frenzy), the Pyramids replaced Components;
the Tropile-pulse woke the new ones. Unbelievingly (did they know
how to "believe"?), the Pyramids isolated contaminated circuits; the
Tropile-pulse bypassed them.
Desperately (or joyously or uffishly--one term fits exactly as well as
another), the Pyramids returned to shove-and-haul, and there was much
destruction, and some Components died.
But by then, the Components had reprogrammed themselves.
* * * * *
The first job had been the matter of finding hands for the
Tropile-brain to work with. Bring hands in, then! Tropile commanded
the Pyramids' network and obediently it was done. The Translation
mechanism, the electrostatic scythe that had harvested so many crops
from the wristwatch mines, suffered a change and went to work not for
the pickers but for the fruit.
The essential change in the operation of that particular pneuma had
been simple; first, to "harvest" or "Translate" the men and women
Tropile wanted as fighters instead of the meditative Citizen kind.
Second, to divert the new arrivals to where they would not go straight
to deep-freeze. It happened that the only alternate space Tropile could
find was a sort of foundry that was nearly Hell, but that was only a
detail. The important thing was that new helpers were arriving, with
minds of their own and the capacity to move and act.
Then Tropile needed to communicate with them. He found the alien,
ropy-limbed Component whose name vaguely approached "Joey." Joey's
limited sense of telepathy was needed and so, with enormous difficulty,
Tropile and Alla Narova, combined, managed to reach and wake it.
And so he had an army, captured humans for troops, an awakened Joey
for liaison.
Tropile was lord of two worlds. Not only the Pyramids were under his
thumb, but his own fellow humans whom he had drafted into his service.
They ate when a captured circuit he controlled fed synthetic mush into
troughs for them. They breathed because a captured circuit he directed
created air. They would return to Earth when--and only when--a captured
circuit he operated sent them home.
Sane?
By what standards?
And what difference did it make?