He rescued himself from the dread word and summoned up the first image that came to mind. It happened to be Tropile's wife—Gala Tropile, who had disappeared herself, in this very room.
Gala Tropile. He stuck close to the thought of her, a little pleased with himself. That was the trick of not thinking of Connectivity—to think so hard and fully of something else as to leave no room in the mind for the unwanted thought. He pictured every line of her face, every wave of her stringy hair....
It was very easy that way. He was pleased.
XII
On Mount Everest, the sullen stream of off-and-on responses that was "mind" to the Pyramid had taken note of a new input signal.
It was not a critical mind. Its only curiosity was a restless urge to shove-and-haul, and there was no shove-and-haul about what to it was perhaps the analogue of a man's hunger pang. The input signal said: Do thus. It obeyed.
Call it craving for a new flavor. Where once it had patiently waited for the state that Citizens knew as Meditation on Connectivity, and the Pyramid itself perhaps knew as a stage of ripeness in the fruits of its wristwatch mine, now it wanted a different taste. Unripe? Overripe? At any rate, different.
Accordingly, the high-frequency wheep, wheep changed in tempo and in key, and the bouncing echoes changed and ... there was a ripe one to be plucked. (Its name was Innison.) And there another. (Gala Tropile.) And another, another—oh, many others—a babe from Tropile's nursery school and the Wheeling jailer and a woman Tropile once had coveted on the street.
Once the ruddy starch-to-sugar mark of ripeness had been what human beings called Meditation on Connectivity and the Pyramids knew as a convenient blankness. Now the sign was a sort of empathy with the Component named Tropile. It didn't matter to the Pyramid on Mount Everest. It swung its electrostatic scythe and the—call them Tropiletropes—were harvested.