But hate alone, even in such volcanic magnificence, would never stop the humanoids.
Calmer now, Forester recalled him to the details of that task, pointing out the overwhelming difficulties.
Chapter TWENTY
SUPPOSE THEY penetrated all the known and unknown defenses of the efficient humanoids, to reach Wing IV? Suppose they even gained free access, somehow, to the linked relays that made the brain of Warren Mansfield's ultimate machine?
Even granting all that, Forester knew, they still must almost surely fail.
"Such grids aren't exactly simple." He grinned wryly at White.
"Not even the primitive little gadgets I designed to pilot rhodomagnetic missiles." "I've seen relays like Mansfield made," White protested hopefully.
"They don't look so complicated.
And the same science should apply to your relays and his - he used to call it cybernetics."
"That's not quite simple, either. Not when you come to rhodomagnetic grids.
It's true the individual relays do look simple. There're no wires, no moving parts, no electron tubes - that compact simplicity is all that makes the humanoids possible at all.
But the functioning isn't as simple as the mechanism, because a rhodomagnetic grid thinks in a different way than anything electromagnetic."
White scowled through the red beard, impatiently.
"A common electromagnetic relay has only two positions," Forester explained. "Off and on.
Vacuum tubes work the same way - one electron tube may replace thousands of relays, but every response is either an off or an on.
Its memory, in other words, is limited to the digits of the binary system of notation - zero and one.
While I know any number can be written with the binary digits, and any word designated, and any possible thought expressed, it's still a clumsy system - even though it's doubtless the system used by the ten billion or so cells in the human brain, which is also electromagnetic."
"But rhodomagnetic grids aren't binary?"
"That's the difference," Forester said.
"Each relay - which is like an electromagnetic relay or a neuron cell only by analogy - each one functions through an almost infinite complex of variable fields and polarities.
Such complexes are set up by guided beams as the relays learn, and afterward resonate to scanning beams as they remember.
See the difference?
A common relay can be taught only one or zero.
Electron tubes can be built to hold several thousand ones or zeros.
But a rhodomagnetic relay - far simpler and smaller and faster - isn't limited to one and zero.
With the infinite number of possible combinations, of its nodes and their patterns of resonance, a single relay can remember a very large number of the most complex variables.
That vast range and flexibility adds a whole new dimension to its capacity."
"Good!" boomed White. "I see you're the expert we wanted."
"No expert." Forester shook his head.
"I'm just trying to tell you how little I know - and how difficult rhodomagnetic cybernetics is.
Thinking, you realize, is more than memory.
There must be complex mechanisms for purpose and decision and action.
Complex even in my own devices made to guide one missile.
Imagine the complexity in that brain built to operate some billions of units on each of many thousand planets!"
"But you'll do," the big man rumbled.
"We aren't rebuilding the whole grid, after all, but just making a minor modification in its purpose.
Let's get to work."
"How?" Forester blinked uneasily.
"This Mansfield lived and worked on a world cut off from mine by two light-centuries of space, remember, and thousands of years of independent evolution.
He spoke a different language.
He must have used different kinds of tools and systems of measurement. He probably calculated with a different mathematics.
The simplest relays in his grid would look completely strange to me - even if the humanoids themselves hadn't already rebuilt it into something too intricate for even Mansfield to understand!"
"I know it's going to be difficult." Mark White scowled soberly.
"But we can help you.
I know Mansfield's language, and I've been trying to understand that grid since the first time he tried to explain it.
I've had Overstreet watching the way it works, and Graystone trying to pick up its thoughts - though without success. And Jane Carter has been there."
Forester nodded doubtfully, watching the snapping crystals of frost still growing over that tiny mound of palladium nuggets, and the cold white vapor draining from the balance pan.
White's little group had remarkable abilities, he knew - but so did the humanoids.
"I sent her to the shop where Warren Mansfield built the first sections of the grid to operate his first hand-built mechanical units," White went on.
"She found it still intact - he evidently set some compulsion in the humanoids, to keep them out of it.