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Fred Hayes, calling from one of the consoles in the Crystal Ball Room.
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"I know you're off duty, Kim, but I thought you might want to come in,"
he said. "Things are getting interesting." The atmosphere in the cabin of the
bug at once became tense.
"What's happened?" Kim asked.
"There's a big flap going on in the middle of the floor here," Fred informed
her. His voice was brittle with suppressed excitement. "We've shut down SP
Three via the substation, but Spartacus is still running at one-
hundred-percent capacity, just as if it wasn't missing a super-primary node at
all! It's functioning normally even after it's had a full lobotomy. Nobody
here can figure out how."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
"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
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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
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