"I know, I know, I know!" Dyer shouted in response to the remonstrations from the two CIM scientists standing next to Krantz in the center of the Command Floor. "I know it's impossible but it happens to be fact. Look at the goddam screens for yourselves."
"But the screens also confirm that SP Three is dead," one of them insisted. "How can the system be running to full capacity if a tenth of the SP net is dead?"
"That's what we're trying to find out," Dyer told him. He called across to where Jassic was scuttling backward and forward between groups of operators working frantically at several monitor consoles. "Eric, have you tracked any of those links through yet?"
"We're working on it, Ray," Jassic called back. "It's manufactured itself a whole new set of channels and we're having to trace at the circuit level. It's a slow job." Dyer ground his teeth in impatience but said nothing. He turned his head back to scan the data summaries once again.
What had happened some thirty minutes earlier was certainly a puzzle. While everybody else was preoccupied with the status indicators of SP Three, waiting to see what Spartacus would do to bring it up again, Frank Wescott had drifted away on his own and used one of the master consoles to carry out a systematic investigation into how the System as a whole was faring. After frowning at the displays for a long time and rechecking his results, he had walked over to Dyer and told him quietly: "Ray, I'm not sure if I believe this, but you could find yourselves waiting a long time for SP Three to do something. Spartacus doesn't need it anymore."
The whole of the Command Room had been bedlam ever since. The immediate series of tests that Dyer ordered had revealed that the loss of the SP wasn't making any difference; the system was performing to full capacity, just as if it were one-hundred-percent intact.
When they tried shutting down two of the SPs at once and then three, the effects had begun to show. Whatever Spartacus was doing, the system was evidently unable to compensate for effects as drastic as that. But the anomaly remained in evidence even then; the measured reductions in system capacity were far less than should have been the case with several SPs out of action. Somehow Spartacus was managing partly to offset the loss, and it shouldn't have been able to.
The time had come to abandon the carefully planned schedule of tests and resort to improvisation. After a protracted discussion with Krantz and the other members of the team who had remained in the Command Room, Dyer decided on the direct approach to finding out what was going on: shut down all the SPs and then track down whatever was left running that shouldn't have been running. With the SPs all inactive, the vital functions necessary to keep Janus habitable would have to be taken over by the backup stations and some time went by while they were alerted and brought to a state of readiness. Just as these preliminaries were finishing, Kim, Chris and Ron appeared in the main doorway and walked over to Fred Hayes to find out what had been going on.
By the time Fred had brought them up to date, the operator in the last substation on the list was just in the process of advising that the shutdown procedure had been completed without complications. The full complement of super-primary nodes was now dead; the "cerebral cortex" that supervised and coordinated the millions of functions handled by machines all over Janus had been anesthetized and Spartacus had been reduced to something akin to a starfish—a comatose community of reflexes.
Or at least, it should have been. The incoming data reports over the next few minutes showed beyond doubt that a measure of higher-level coordination was still being performed somewhere. The power of whatever was doing it was far below that of ten SPs working in concert, to be sure, but the point was it was happening; functions that should have been handled only by the SPs were still active and there weren't any SPs left to be handling them.
"So it's played its first card that we didn't bargain for," Krantz said to Dyer. "Where do we go from here?"
"It'll take some time to figure that out," Dyer replied. "But at least this experiment is proving its worth already. Can you imagine the problems we'd be having right now if this had just happened somewhere inside a system that covered a whole planet?"
After a few minutes Dyer went down to talk to Eric Jassic, who was running tests on the communications traffic associated with the phantom SPs in an attempt to help pinpoint their locations. A little while later Laura came over to join them.
"Everybody's looking at screens full of numbers again," she said in a disappointed voice. "Is that all that's going to happen? I thought we were going to see something exciting at last. How am I going to write interesting things about scientists if you won't do anything exciting?"
"Sorry." Dyer shrugged. "That's the way it is—all donkeywork and double-checking. You've been with us long enough now to know that."
"You mean you really don't have guys without any clothes on running down the street screaming Eureka!?"
"Haven't seen many lately."
"What a shame."
At that moment Frank Wescott came over and drew Dyer to one side. Frank had been spending the last hour studying the entries in the log left by the night shift and interrogating data files at one of the consoles. He showed Dyer the log and pointed to a number of entries circled prominently in red ink.
"Try taking a closer look at some of the ordinary primary nodes," he suggested. "Specifically these. They're running job-assignment lists that ought to be too big for an ordinary primary to handle. And I think I know how they're managing to do it."
Dyer said nothing and took the log from Frank's outstretched hand. He studied it intently and then examined the pages of summary data that Frank had appended to the back. Damn! he thought to himself. He still hadn't gotten around to going through the night log as he'd intended. The day hadn't really been a hectic one for most of the time and there was no excuse. Like weeds, bad habits were always ready to take root the moment you turned your eyes the other way.
The log told him that the drones had been inordinately active all through the night around a number of the primary nodes, of which there were hundreds scattered all over Janus. Today some of the primaries were doing things that only the super-primaries should be doing. Frank's figures showed that the primaries that were starting to show symptoms of thinking they were super-primaries were the same ones that the drones had been fussing over. The implications didn't need any spelling out.
"The system's realized that its SPs are vulnerable," Wescott said, nodding in response to Dyer's incredulous stare. "So it's doing something about it that we didn't allow for. It's upgrading its primaries and turning them into extra SPs. There's more drone activity going on at other primaries right now. It's building itself a whole new super-primary net. If it finishes the job, it'll have a duplicate cortex that the substations can't touch!"
Together they strode back to the dais and gave the information to Krantz. Then they ordered a remote inventory check to be made of the hardware items contained in a primary node selected from Frank's list—Primary 46, which was located in one of the electronics assembly plants in Detroit, The results didn't make complete sense. Performance parameters were showing up relating to unidentifiable pieces of hardware that weren't supposed to be there. Dyer called the local Operations Supervisor in that sector of Detroit, who dispatched an engineer to conduct a visual inspection of Primary 46. In the Command Room, the scientists clustered round the Crystal Ball and watched the image of the engineer as he probed the intricate honeycomb of molecular-circuit cartridges, micromemories and programmable interconnect matrix blocks. There was a lot more of everything than there had been when Janus was constructed. Primary 46 had begun to turn into an SP.
And then a new series of reports began coming in from the monitor stations. The remnant SP-power that was still functioning had, in the last thirty minutes, increased significantly over the amount that had been measured when the SPs were shut down. Spartacus was not merely managing to hold on; it was rallying itself and growing stronger.
"Before we cut the SPs, it must already have figured out where it was vulnerable," Dyer said to Krantz as they discussed developments. "It increased the capacity of some of the primaries and programmed them with the instructions necessary to construct more SPs by upgrading more primaries. That's what they're doing right now. It's bootstrapping itself back. If my guess is right, every bit of information that was held in the SPs has already been distributed around the rest of the primary net and it's being activated as fast as the new hardware comes on-line. It means that a full recovery is possible, even if we never switch the SPs back on again at all."
"You mean that we cut its brain out too late," Krantz said. "It had already told its nervous system how to grow its solar plexus into a new one."
"Exactly."
Krantz considered the statement silently for a while.
"So the only way we can retain overall control now is by cutting off the solar plant," he commented. "It's the only way to depower the whole primary-level net. The substations only control the SPs. That worries me, Ray. I never expected we would reach full shutdown of the primary net anywhere as soon as this. To be honest, I never expected that we would reach full primary shutdown at all."
"There's another side to it as well." Frank Wescott, who was standing with them, pointed across at the summary data displays on the wall opposite. Two inquiring faces turned toward him. "Spartacus is in the process of coming up to full capacity even without the SPs," he said. "That extra capability it's adding won't just go away, If we do add the SPs back in again, we'll end up with a system that's a lot bigger than the one we started out with. I'm not sure there's any way of even guessing how fast a thing like that might evolve further. It could be capable of anything."
"Obviously there can be no question of reactivating the SPs until we've got the situation fully under control again," Krantz said.
"It's not quite that simple, Mel," Dyer said after a few seconds. "The System is growing itself all the time. It could end up bigger than it was originally, whether we switch the SPs back in or not. The whole primary net could turn itself into a complex of hundreds of SPs. The only way to stop that would be to knock out the whole net at source by cutting off the solar plant."
"That's what I was getting at," Wescott told them.
The unvoiced fear that had been lurking at the back of Dyer's mind came true less than thirty minutes later.
A gasp of disbelief caused him to turn around sharply toward where Frank was standing staring at one of the indicator screens. Frank's voice was hoarse as he pointed at the data being displayed.
"SP Three status! It's changed this second. SP Three has just reactivated!"
Dyer promptly called up the duty operator in Substation Three.
"What's the status there?" he demanded curtly.
The operator waved his hands helplessly in front of his face. "The circuit breakers are still all out. We haven't changed anything down here. We must have been bypassed."
Ten minutes later SP Six reactived itself.
"It's bypassing all of them," Krantz said. "We're about to lose control completely. We have to shut the whole system down before things get out of hand. We have to do it now!"
"Why not let it ride," Dyer said. "We're supposed to be simulating a worldwide system. With a worldwide system you mightn't have a single-source cutout to fall back on."
"Then let's make damn sure we've still got one here," Krantz said shakily.
Dyer thought about it and agreed. Alerts went out to the backup stations to prepare for a total shutdown of Spartacus. Krantz made a general announcement to all sectors of Janus. He stated that there was no cause for alarm and that the action was being taken as a precaution, purely to test the solar-plant shutdown procedures.
Minutes later the supervisor in the control room of the solar plant in Detroit was on one of Dyer's screens, waiting for the word to cut Spartacus's supply of lifeblood. The final reports from around the Command Floor confirmed that the backup stations around Janus were ready and standing by to take over.
"Okay," Dyer said. "Carry on. Drop out the main power bus."
"Main power bus down," the supervisor replied. "It looks okay. All readings confirm zero load on the solar-plant grid."
Dyer sat back and wiped his brow with the side of his hand. He turned and made a thumbs-up sign to Krantz.
"That's it," he said. "Spartacus is dead. The solar plant's delivering zero."
"Thank God for that," Krantz replied in a relieved voice. "Maybe I was overreacting earlier, but I confess I was really worried for a while. I want to be absolutely certain nothing can interfere with that cutout before we even talk about switching anything on again. I'd like to call a meeting this evening to go through all the safety interlocks connected with the solar plant and double-check every one of them. Things today have moved too fast for comfort—my comfort anyway."
"I think maybe you're talking too soon," Frank Wescott said, stepping forward from where he had been standing a few paces behind. He pointed up at the master data displays. At that same moment Dyer became aware of the disbelieving murmurs that were breaking out all around the Command Floor.
"Spartacus is still running!" Wescott said. "It might not be taking any power from the solar plant, but it looks like it doesn't care about the solar plant anymore. The solar plant hasn't made a damn bit of difference! The bloody thing is still as alive as it ever was. It's getting power from somewhere else!"
Through the confused images that came pouring into his reeling brain, Dyer saw Kim sinking down onto a chair in front of one of the displays. Her lists were clenched white and her face was stretched into a mask of suddenly unconcealed hatred as she took in the story unfolding in front of her. For her, he realized, this had already become a personal war.