Scratch one threat from the Pyramids—
And almost at once, there was another urgent call from Alia Narova: "Tropile, quickly!"
The Pyramids were the mightiest race of warriors the Universe had ever known. They were invulnerable and unconquerable, except from within. Like Alexander the Great, they had met every enemy and whipped them all. And, like dying Alexander, they writhed and raged against the tiny, unseen bacillus within themselves.
Blindly, almost suicidally, the Pyramids returned to their ancient principle of shove-and-haul.
The geography of the binary planet was like a hive of bees, nearly featureless on the surface, but internally a congeries of tunnels, chambers, warrens, rooms, tubes and amphitheaters. Machinery and metal Components were everywhere thick under the planet's crust. The more delicate and more useful Components of flesh and blood were, to a degree, concentrated in a few areas....
And one of those areas had disappeared.
Tropile, battering futilely with his mind at the periphery of the vanished area, cried sharply to Alla Narova and the others: "It looks as though they've broken a piece right out of the planet! Everything stops here—there's a physical gap which I can't cross. Hurry, one of you—what was this section for?"
"Propulsion."
"I see." Tropile hesitated, confused for the first time since his awakening. "Wait."
He retreated to the snowflake and communed with the other eight-branched members, now become something that resembled his general staff. He told them—most of them already knew, but the telling took so little time that it was simpler to go through it from beginning to end:
"The Pyramids attempted to cut the propulsion-pneuma out of circuit some seconds or days ago and were unsuccessful; we awakened additional Components and were able to maintain contact with it. They have now apparently cut it loose from the planet itself. I do not think it is far, but there is a physical space between."
"The importance of the propulsion-pneuma is this: It controls the master generators of electrostatic force, which are used both to move this planet and ours, and to perform the act of Translation. If the Pyramids control it, they may be able to take us out of circuit, perhaps back to Earth, perhaps throwing us into space, where we will die. The question for decision: How can we counteract this move?"
A rush of voices all spoke at once; it was no trick for Tropile and the others to sort them out and follow the arguments of each, but it cannot be reproduced.
At last, one said: "There is a way. I will do it."
It was Alla Narova.
"What is the way?" Tropile demanded, curiously alarmed.
"I shall go with them, trace the areas the Pyramids are attempting to isolate, place my entire self—" by this she meant her "concentration," her "psyche," that part of all of them which flashed along the neurone guides unhampered by flesh or distance—"in the most likely point they will next cut loose. And then I shall cause the propulsion units on the severed sections to force them back into circuit."
Tropile objected: "But you don't know what will happen! We have never been cut off from our physical bodies, Alla Narova. It may be death. It may not be possible at all. You don't know!"
Alla Narova thought a smile and a farewell. She said: "No, I do not." And then, "Good-by, Tropile."
She had gone.
Furiously, Tropile hurled himself after her, but she was quick as he, too quick to catch; she was gone.Foolishness, foolishness!he shouted silently. How could she do an insane, chancy thing like this?
And yet what else was there to do? They were all ignorant babes, temporarily successful because there had been no defense against them, for who expects babes to rise up in rebellion? They didn'tknow. For all they could guess or imagine, the Pyramids had an effective counter for any move they might make. Temporary success meant nothing. It was the final decision that counted, when either the Pyramids were vanquished or the men, and what steps were needed to make that decision favor the men were anyone's guess—Alla Narova's was as good as his.
Tropile could only watch and wait.
Through a great many viewpoints and observers, he was able to see roughly what happened.
There was a section of the planet next the severed chunk where the mind and senses of Alla Narova lay coiled for a moment—and were gone. For what it had accomplished, her purpose succeeded. She had been taken. She was out of circuit.
The overwhelming consciousness of loss that flooded through Glenn Tropile was something outside of all his experience.
Next to him in the snowflake, the body which he had learned to think of as the body of Alla Narova twisted sharply as though waking from a dream—and lay flaccid, floating in the fluid.
"Alla Narova!Alla Narova!"
There was no answer.
A voice came piercingly: "Tropile! Here now, quickly!"
Good-by, Alla Narova! He flashed away to see what the other voice had found. Great mindless boulders were chipping away from the crust of the binary planet and whirling like midges in the void around it.
"What is it?" cried one of the others.
Tropile had no answer. It was the Pyramids, clearly. Were they attempting to demolish their own planet? Were they digging away at the crust to uncover the maggot's-nest of awakened Components beneath?
"The air!" cried Tropile sharply, and knew it was true. What the Pyramids were up to was a simple delousing operation. If you could destroy their own machinery for maintaining air and pressure and temperature, they would destroy all living things within—including Haendl and Citizen Germyn and thus, in the final analysis, including the bodies of Tropile and his awakened fellows. For without the mobile troops to defend their helpless cocoons against the machines of the Pyramids, the limp bodies could be destroyed as easily as a larva under a farmer's heel.
So Alla Narova had failed.
Alone against the Pyramids, she had been unable to bring the recaptured sections back into the circuit that Tropile's Components now dominated. It was the end of hope; but it was not the fear of defeat and damnation for the Earth that paralyzed Tropile. It was Alla Narova, gone from him forever.
The Pyramids were too strong.
And yet, he thought, quickening, they had been too strong before and still a weak spot had been found!
"Think," he ordered himself desperately.
And then again: "Think!" Components stirred restlessly around him, questioning. "Think!" he cried mightily. "All of you, think! Think of your lives and hopes!
"Think!
"Hope!
"Worry!
"Dream!"
The Components were reaching toward him now, wonderingly. He commanded them violently: "Do it—concentrate, wish, think! Let your minds run free and think of Earth, pleasant grass and warm sun! Think of loving and sweat and heartbreak! Think of death and birth!Think, for the love of heaven,think!"
And the answer was not in sound, but it was deafening.
In the cut-off sections, Alla Narova's soaring mind lay trapped. It had not been enough; she could not force her will against the dull inflexibility of the Pyramids....
Until that inflexible will began to waver.
There was a leakage of thought.
It maddened and baffled the Pyramids. The whole neuronic network was resounding to a babble of thoughts and emotions that, to a Pyramid, were utterly demented! The rousing Component minds throbbed with urge and emotion that were new to Pyramid experience. What could a Pyramid make of a human's sex drive? Or of the ropy-armed aliens' passionate deification of the Egg? What of hunger and thirst and the blazing Wolf-need for odds and advantage that streamed out of such as Tropile?
They wavered, unsure. Their reactions were slow and very confused.
For Alla Narova succeeded in her purpose. She was able to reach out across the space and barrier to Tropile and the propulsion-pneuma was back in circuit. The section that controlled the master generators of the electronic scythe lay under his hands.
"Now!" he cried, and all of the Components reached out to grasp and move.
"Now!" And the central control was theirs; the full flood of power from the generators was at their command.
"Now! Now! Now!" And they reached out, with a fat pencil of electrostatic force and caught the sluggish, brooding Pyramid on Mount Everest.
It had squatted there without motion for more than two centuries. Now it quivered and seemed to draw back, but the probing pencil caught it, and whirled it, and hurled it up and out of Earth, into the tiny artificial sun.
It struck with a flare of blue-white light.
"One gone!" gloated Tropile. "Alla Narova, are you there?"
"Still here," she called from a great distance. "Again?"
"Again!"
They reached for the Pyramids and found them, wherever they were. Some lay close to the surface of the binary planet, and some were hundreds of miles within, and a few, more desperate than the others or merely assigned to the task, they discovered at the very portal of the single spaceship of the Pyramids.
But wherever they were and whatever they chose to do, each one of them was found and seized. They came wriggling and shaking, like trout on an angler's line. They came bursting through layer on layer of impenetrable metal that, nevertheless, they penetrated. They came by the dozens and scores, and at last by the thousands; but they came.
There were more and more flares of blue-white light on the tiny sun—so many that Tropile found himself scouring the planet in a desperate search for one surviving Pyramid—not to destroy as an enemy, but to keep for a specimen.
But he searched in vain.
The Pyramids were destroyed, gone. There was not one left. The Earth lay open and free under its tiny sun for the first time in centuries.
It had been a strange war, but a short one.
And it was over.
XIV
Tropile swam up out of hammering blackness into daylight and pain.
Ithurt. He was being born again—coming back to life—and it had all the agonies of parturition, except that they were visited upon the creature being born, himself. There were crushing blows at his temples that pounded and pained like no other ache he had ever felt. He moaned raspingly.
Someone moved blurrily over his shut eyes. He felt something sting sharply at the base of his brain. Then it tingled, warming his scalp, comforting it, numbing it. Pain went slowly away.
He opened his eyes.
Four masked torturers were leaning over him. He stared, not understanding; but the eyes were not torturers' eyes, and in a moment the masks came off. Surgical masks—and the faces beneath the masks were human faces.
Surgeons and nurses.
He blinked at them and said groggily: "Where am we?" And then he remembered.
He was back on Earth; he was merely human again.
Someone came bustling into the room and he knew without looking that it was Haendl.
"We beat them, Tropile!" Haendl cried. "No, cancel that.Youbeat them. We've destroyed every Pyramid there was, and a nice hot fire they're making up there on the sun, eh? Beautiful work, Tropile. Beautiful! You're a credit to the name of Wolf!"
The surgeons stirred uneasily, but apparently, Tropile thought, there had been changes, for they did no more than that.
Tropile touched his temples fretfully and his fingers rested on gauze bandages. It was true: he was out of circuit. The long reach of his awareness was cut short at his skull; there was no more of the infinite sweep and grasp he had known as part of the snowflake in the nutrient fluid.
"Too bad," he whispered hopelessly.
"What?" Haendl frowned. The nurse next to him whispered something and he nodded. "Oh, I see. You're still a little groggy, right? Well, that's not hard to understand—they tell me it was a tricky job of surgery, separating you from that gunk the Pyramids had wired into your head."
"Yes," said Tropile, and closed his ears, though Haendl went on talking. After a while, Tropile pushed himself up and swung his legs over the side of the operating table. He was naked. Once that would have bothered him enormously, but now it didn't seem to matter.
"Find me some clothes, will you?" he asked. "I'm back. I might as well start getting used to it."
Glenn Tropile found that he was a returning hero, attracting a curious sort of hero-worship wherever he went. It was not, he thought after careful analysis,exactlywhat he might have expected. For instance, a man who went out and killed a dragon in the old days was received with great gratitude and rejoicing, and if there was a prince's daughter around, he married her. Fair enough, after all. And Tropile had slain a foe more potent than any number of dragons.
But he tested the attention he received and found no gratitude in it. It was odd.
What it was like most of all, he thought, was the sort of attention a reigning baseball champion might get—in a country where cricket was the national game. He had done something which, everybody agreed, was an astonishing feat, but about which nobody seemed to care. Indeed, there was an area of accusation in some of the attention he got.
Item: nearly ninety thousand erstwhile Components had now been brought back to ambient life, most of them with their families long dead, all of them a certain drain on the limited resources of the planet. And what was Glenn Tropile going to do about it?
Item: the old distinctions between Citizen and Wolf no longer made much sense now that so many Componentized Citizens had fought shoulder to shoulder with Componentized Sons of the Wolf. But didn't Glenn Tropile think he had gone a little too farthere?
And item—looking pretty far ahead, of course, but still—well, just whatwasGlenn Tropile going to do about providing a new sun for Earth, when the old one wore out and there would be no Pyramids to tend the fire?
He sought refuge with someone who would understand him. That, he was pleased to realize, was easy. He had come to know several persons extremely well. Loneliness, the tortured loneliness of his youth, was permanently behind him,definitely.
For example, he could seek out Haendl, who would understand everything very well.
Haendl said: "It is a bit of a letdown, I suppose. Well, hell with it; that's life." He laughed grimly. "Now that we've got rid of the Pyramids, there's plenty of other work to be done. Man, we can breathe now! We can plan ahead! This planet has maundered along in its stupid, rutted, bogged-down course too many years already, eh? It's time we took over! And we'll be doing it, I promise you. You know, Tropile—" he sniggered—"I only regret one thing."
"What's that?" Tropile asked cautiously.
"All those weapons, out of reach! Oh, I'm notblamingyou. But you can see what a lot of trouble it's going to be now, stocking up all over again—and there isn't much we can do about bringing order to this tired old world, is there, until we've got the guns to do it with again?"
Tropile left him much sooner than he had planned.
Citizen Germyn, then? The man had fought well, if nothing else. Tropile went to find him and, for a moment at least, it was very good. Germyn said: "I've been doing a lot of thinking, Tropile. I'm glad you're here." He sent his wife for refreshments, and decorously she brought them in, waited for exactly one minute, and then absented herself.
Tropile burst into speech as soon as she left. "I'm beginning to realize what has happened to the human race, Germyn. I don't mean just now, when we licked the Pyramids and so on. No, I mean hundreds of years ago, what happened when the Pyramids arrived, and what has been happening since. Did you ever hear of Indians, Germyn?"
Germyn frowned minutely and shrugged.
"They were, oh, hundredsandhundreds of years ago. They were a different color and not very civilized—of course, nobody was then. But the Indians were nomads, herdsmen, hunters—like that. And the white people came from Europe and wanted this country for themselves. So they took it. And do you know something? I don't think the Indians ever knew what hit them."
"Theydidn't know about land grants and claiming territory for the crown and church missions and expanding populations. They didn't have those things. It's true that they learned pretty well, by and by—at least they learned things like guns and horses and firewater; they didn't have those things, either, but they could see some sense to them, you know. But I really don't think the Indians ever knew exactly what the Europeans were up to, until it was too late to matter.
"And it was the same with us and the Pyramids, only more so. What the devildidthey want? I mean, yes, we found out what they did with the Translated people. But what were theyupto? What did theythink?Didthey think? You know, I've got a kind of a crazy idea—maybe it's not crazy, maybe it's the truth. Anyway, I've been thinking. Suppose even thePyramidsweren't the Pyramids? We never talked to one of them. We never gave it a Rorschach or tested its knee jerks. We licked them, but we don't know anything about them. We don't even know if they were the guys that started the whole bloody thing, or if they were just sort of super-sized Components themselves. Do we?
"And meanwhile, here's the human race, up against something that it not only can't understand, same as the Indians couldn't the whites, but that it can't begin to make aguessabout. At least the Indians had a clue now and then, you know—I mean they'd see the sailors off the great white devil ship making a beeline for the Indian women and so on, and they'd begin to understand there wassomethingin common. But we didn't have that much.
"So what did we do? Why, we did like the reservation Indians. We turned inward. We got loaded on firewater—Meditation—and we closed our minds to the possibility of ever expanding again. And there we were, all tied up in our own knots. Most of the race rebelled against action, because it had proven useless—Citizens. A few of the race rebelled againstthat, because it was not only useless butdeliberatelyuseless—Wolves. But they're the same kind of people. You've seen that for yourself, right? And—"
Tropile stopped, suddenly aware that Citizen Germyn was looking tepidly pained.
"What's the matter?" Tropile demanded harshly.
Citizen Germyn gave him the faint deprecatory Quirked Smile. "I know you thought you were a Wolf, but—I told you I've been thinking a lot, and that's what I was thinking about.Truly, Citizen, you do yourself no good by pretending that you really thought you were Wolf. Clearly you were not; the rest of us might have been fooled, but certainly you couldn't fool yourself.
"Now here's what I think you ought to do. When I found you were coming, I asked several rather well-known Citizens to come here later this evening. There won't be any embarrassment. I only want you to talk to them and set the record straight, so that this terrible blemish will no longer be held against you. Times change and perhaps a certain latitude is advisable now, but certainly you don't want—"
Tropile also left Citizen Germyn sooner than he had expected to.
There remained Alla Narova, but, queerly, she was not to be found.
Instantly it became clear to Tropile that it was she above all whom he needed to talk to. He remembered the shared beauty of their plunging drive through the neurone-guides of the Pyramids, the linked and inextricable flow of their thoughts and of their most hidden feelings.
She could not be very far, he thought numbly, cursing the blindness of his human eyes, the narrowness of his human senses. Time was when two worlds could not have hidden her from him; but that time was gone. He walked from place to place with the angry resentful tread of one used to riding—no, to flying, or faster than flying. He asked after her. He searched.
And at last he found—not her. A note. At one of the stations where the re-awakened Components were funneled back into human affairs, there was a letter waiting for him:
I'm sure you will look for me. Please don't. You thought that there were no secrets between us, but there was one.When I was Translated, I was sixty-one years old. Two years before that, I was caught in a collapsing building; my legs are useless, and I had grown quite fat. I do not want you to see me fat and old.Alla Narova.
I'm sure you will look for me. Please don't. You thought that there were no secrets between us, but there was one.
When I was Translated, I was sixty-one years old. Two years before that, I was caught in a collapsing building; my legs are useless, and I had grown quite fat. I do not want you to see me fat and old.
Alla Narova.
And that was that, and at last Glenn Tropile turned to the last person of all those on his list who had known him well. Her name was Gala Tropile.
She had got thinner, he observed. They sat together quietly and there was considerable awkwardness, but then he noticed that she was weeping. Comforting her ended the awkwardness and he found that he was talking:
"It was like being a god, Gala! I swear, there's no feeling like it. I mean it's like—well, maybe if you'd just had a baby, and invented fire, and moved a mountain, and transmuted lead into gold—maybe if you'd done all of those things, then you might have some idea. But I was everywhere at once, Gala, and I could do anything! I fought a whole world of Pyramids, do you realize that? Me! And now I come back to—"
He stopped her in time; it seemed she was about to weep again.
He went on: "No, Gala, don't misunderstand, I don't hold anything against you. You were right to leave me in the field. What did I have to offer you? Or myself, for that matter? And I don't know that I have anything now, but—"
He slammed his fist against the table. "They talk about putting the Earth back in its orbit! Why? And how? My God, Gala, we don't knowwherewe are. Maybe we could tinker up the gadgets the Pyramids used and turn our course backward—but do you know what Old Sol looks like? I don't. I never saw it.
"And neither did you or anyone else alive.
"It was like being a god—
"And they talk about going back to things as they were—
"I'm sick of that kind of thinking! Wolves or Citizens, they're dead on their feet and don't know it. I suppose they'll snap out of it in time, but I can't wait. I won't live that long.
"Unless—"
He paused and looked at her, confused.
Gala Tropile met her husband's eyes.
"Unless what, Glenn?"
He shrugged and turned away.
"Unless you go back, you mean." He stared at her; she nodded. "You want to go back," she said, without stress. "You don't want to stay here with me, do you? You want to go back into that tub of soup again and float like a baby. You don't want tohavebabies—you want tobeone."
"Gala, you don't understand. We can own the Universe. I mean mankind can. And I can do it. Why not? There's nothing for me—"
"That's right, Glenn. There's nothing for you here. Not any more."
He opened his mouth to speak, looked at her, spread his hands helplessly. He didn't look back as he walked out the door, but he knew that his back was turned not only on the woman who happened to be his wife, but on mankind and all of the flesh.
It was night outside, and warm. Tropile stood in the old street surrounded by the low, battered houses—and he could make them new and grand! He looked up at the stars that swung in constellations too new and changeable to have names.Therewas the Universe.
Words were no good; there was no explaining things in words. Naturally he couldn't make Gala or anyone else understand, for flesh couldn't grasp the realities of mind and spirit that were liberated from flesh. Babies! A home! And the whole grubby animal business of eating and drinking and sleeping! How could anyone ask to stay in the mire when the stars challenged overhead?
He walked slowly down the street, alone in the night, an apprentice godling renouncing mortality. There was nothing here for him, so why this sense of loss?
Duty said (or was it Pride?): "Someone must give up the flesh to control Earth's orbit and weather—why not you?"
Flesh said (or was it his soul—whatever that was?): "But you will bealone."
He stopped, and for a moment he was poised between destiny and the dust....
Until he became aware of footsteps behind him, running, and Gala's voice: "Wait! Wait, Glenn! I want to go with you!"
And he turned and waited, but only until she caught up, and then he went on.
But not—forever and always again—not alone.