[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

toward the points where each booth was pene-
trated 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
Page 83
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
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 oft" 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.
Ana 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
Eatches on the pipe where it was strained. A uge 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 trans-
port 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
Page 84
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]