"Of course. You see if you can penetrate the circuit that controls
them. I--" already he was flashing away--"I'll get to the boys through
Joey."
It was queer, looking through the eyes of the alien they called Joey;
colors were all wrong, perspective was flat. But he could see, though
cloudily. He saw Haendl joyously fitting a bayonet--_a bayonet!_--to
a rifle; he saw Citizen Germyn, naked but square-shouldered, puffing
valiantly along in the rear.
Tropile said through the strange vocal cords that belonged to the
alien: "You'll have to hurry." (Strange to speak in words again!) "The
Pyramids are heading toward the chambers where the Components are kept.
I think they mean to kill us."
He flashed away, located the area, flashed back. "You'll have to go
without me--I mean without Joey-me. The only way I see to get there is
through a narrow little ventilation tunnel--I guess ventilation is what
it was for."
Quickly (but against the familiar race of thought, it seemed
agonizingly slow) he laid out the route for them and left; it was up
to them. Watching from a dozen viewpoints at once, he saw the slow
creep of the Pyramids' machines and the slower intersecting march of
his little army. He studied the alternate cross routes and contrived
to block some of them by interfering with the control-circuits of the
emergency doors and portals.
But there were some circuits he could not control. The Pyramids
had withdrawn whole sections of their net and areas of the
planet were now hidden from him entirely. Sections of the vast
maintenance-propulsion-manufacturing complex were no longer subject to
his interference or control.
* * * * *
It would be, Tropile thought dispassionately, a rather close thing.
The chances were perhaps six out of ten that his hastily assembled
task force would be able to intercept the convoy of automatic machines
before it could reach the racks of nutrient tanks.
And if they were not in time?
Tropile almost laughed out loud, if that had been possible. Why, then,
his body would be destroyed! How trivial a thing to worry about! He
began to forget he owned a body; surely it was someone else's bone and
tissue that lay floating in the eight-branched snowflake. He knew that
this was not so. He knew that if his body were killed, he would die.
And yet there was no sense of fear, no personal involvement. It was an
interesting problem in scheduling and nothing more.
Would the human fighters get there in time?
Perhaps the automatic machines had senses, for as the first of the
humans burst into the tunnel they were using, a few hundred yards ahead
of the lead load-carrier, the machines shuddered to a stop. Pause for
a second; then, laboriously, they began to back toward the nearest of
the side passages that Tropile had been unable to block. He scanned it
hurriedly. Good, good! The circuits surrounding the passage proper were
out of his reach, but it led to another passage, an abandoned pipeline
of sorts, it seemed to be. And _that_ he could reach....
Patiently (how slowly the machines crept along!) he waited until one of
the Pyramids' machines bearing explosives passed through an enormous
valve in the line--and then the valve was thrown.
The explosion triggered every vehicle in the line. The damage was
complete.