Like deep-burrowing, mythological worms, power lines, pipelines, and pneumatic tubes stretch themselves across the continent. Pulsing, peristalsis-like, they drink of the Earth and the thunderbolt. They take oil and electricity and water and coal-wash and small parcels and large packages and letters into themselves. Passing through them, beneath the Earth, these things are excreted at their proper destinations, and the machines who work in these places take over from there.
Blind, they sprawl far away from the sun; without taste, the Earth and the thunderbolt go undigested; without smell or hearing, the Earth is their rock-filled prison. They only know what they touch; and touching is their constant function.
Such is the deep-buried joy of the worm.
-Roger Zelazny, The Dream Master (1966), pg. 98
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