Tropile was “wired into circuit.”
The only literal wiring, at first, was a temporary one—a fine electrode aseptically introduced into the great nerve that leads to the rhinencephalon—the “small brain,” the area of the brain which contains the pleasure centers that motivate human behavior.
More than a thousand Components had been spoiled and discarded before the Pyramids had located the pleasure centers so exactly.
While the Component, Tropile, was being “programmed,” the wire rewarded him with minute pulses that made his body glow with animal satisfaction when he functioned correctly. That was all there was to it. After a time, the wire was withdrawn, but by then Tropile had “learned” his entire task. Conditioned reflexes had been established. They could be counted on for the long and useful life of the Component.
That life might be very long indeed; in the nutrient tank beside Tropile’s, as it happened, lay a Component with eight legs and a chitinous fringe around its eyes. It had lain in such a tank for more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand Terrestrial years.
The Component was placed in operation. It opened its eyes and saw things. The sensory nerves of its limbs felt things. The muscles of its hands and toes operated things.
Where was Glenn Tropile?
He was there, all of him, but a zombie-Tropile. Bereft of will, emptied of memories. He was a machine and part of a huger machine. His sex was the sex of a photoelectric cell; his politics were those of a transistor; his ambition that of a mercury switch. He didn’t know anything about sex, or fear, or hope. He only knew two things: Input and Output.
Input to him was a display of small lights on a board before his vacant face; and also the modulation of a loudspeaker’s liquid-borne hum in each ear.
Output from him was the dancing manipulation of certain buttons and keys, prompted by changes in Input and by nothing else.
Between Input and Output, he lay in the tank, a human Black Box which was capable of Rashevsky’s Number of switchings, and of nothing else.
He had been programmed to accomplish a specific task—to shepherd a chemical called 3, 7, 12-trihydroxycholanic acid, present in the catabolic product of the Pyramids, through a succession of more than five hundred separate operations until it emerged as the chemical, which the Pyramids were able to metabolize, called Protoporphin IX.
He was not the only Component operating in this task; there were several, each with its own program.
The acid accumulated in great tanks a mile from him. He knew its concentration, heat and pressure; he knew of all the impurities which would affect subsequent reactions. His fingers tapped, giving binary-coded signals to sluice gates to open for so many seconds and then to close; for such an amount of solvent at such a temperature to flow in; for the agitators to agitate for just so long at just such a force. And if a trouble signal disturbed any one of the 517 major and minor operations, he—it?—was set to decide among alternatives:
—scrap the batch in view of flow conditions along the line?
—isolate and bypass the batch through a standby loop?
—immediate action to correct the malfunction?
Without inhibiting intelligence, without the trammels of humanity on him, the intricate display board and the complex modulations of the two sound signals could be instantly taken in, evaluated and given their share in the decision.
Was it—he?—still alive?
The question has no meaning. It was working. It was an excellent machine, in fact, and the Pyramids cared for it well. Its only consciousness, apart from the reflexive responses that were its program, was—well, call it “the sound of one hand alone.” Which is to say zero, mindlessness, Samadhi, stupor.
It continued to function for some time—until the required supply of Protoporphin IX had been exceeded by a sufficient factor of safety to make further processing unnecessary—that is, for some minutes or months. During that time, it was Happy. (It had been programmed to be Happy when there were no uncorrected malfunctions of the process.) At the end of that time, it shut itself off, sent out a signal that the task was completed, then it was laid aside in the analogue of a deep-freeze, to be reprogrammed when another Component was needed.
It was totally immaterial to the Pyramids that this particular Component had not been stamped from Citizen but from Wolf.
IX
Roget Germyn, of Wheeling a Citizen, contemplated his wife with growing concern.
Possibly the events of the past few days had unhinged her reason, but he was nearly sure that she had eaten a portion of the evening meal secretly, in the serving room, before calling him to the table.
He felt positive that it was only a temporary aberration; she was, after all, a Citizeness, with all that that implied. A—a creature—like that Gala Tropile, for example—someone like that might steal extra portions with craft and guile. You couldn’t live with a Wolf for years and not have some of it rub off on you. But not Citizeness Germyn.
There was a light, thrice-repeated tap on the door.
Speak of the devil, thought Roget Germyn most appropriately; for it was that same Gala Tropile. She entered, her head downcast, looking worn and—well, pretty.
He began formally: “I give you greeting, Citi—”
“They’re here!” she interrupted in desperate haste. Germyn blinked. “Please,” she begged, “can’t you do something? They’re Wolves!”
Citizeness Germyn emitted a muted shriek.
“You may leave, Citizeness,” Germyn told her shortly, already forming in his mind the words of gentle reproof he would later use. “Now what is all this talk of Wolves?”
Gala Tropile distractedly sat in the chair her hostess had vacated. “We were running away,” she babbled. “Glenn—he was Wolf, you see, and he made me leave with him, after the House of the Five Regulations. We were a day’s long march from Wheeling and we stopped to rest. And there was an aircraft, Citizen!”
“An aircraft!” Citizen Germyn allowed himself a frown. “Citizeness, it is not well to invent things which are not
