it must belong to--another branch of the snowflake.

He turned his eyes down and tried to see which of the branches was his
old body. He found it quickly, with growing excitement. There was the
left great toe of his body. He had injured it in boyhood and there was
no mistaking the way it was bent. Good! It was reassuring.

He tried to feel the one particular body that led to that familiar toe.

He succeeded, though not easily. After a time, he became more aware
of _that_ body--somewhat as a neurotic may become "stomach conscious"
or "heart conscious." But this was no neurosis; it was an intentional
exploration.

Since that worked, with some uneasiness he transferred his attention to
another pair of feet and "thought" his way up from them.

It was embarrassing.

For the first time in his life, he knew what it felt like to have
breasts. For the first time in his life, he knew what it was like to
have one's internal organs quite differently shaped and arranged,
buttressed and stressed by different muscles. The very faint background
feel of man's internal arrangements, never questioned unless something
goes wrong with them and they start to hurt, was not at all like the
faint background feel that a woman has inside her.

And when he concentrated on that feel, it was no faint background to
him. It was surprising and upsetting.

He withdrew his attention--hoping that he would be able to. Gratefully,
he became conscious of his own body again. He was still _himself_ if he
chose to be.

Were the other seven still themselves?

He reached into his mind--all of it, all eight separate intelligences
that were combined within him.

"Is anybody there?" he demanded.

No answer--or nothing he could recognize as an answer. He drove harder
and there still was none. It was annoying. He resented it as bitterly,
he remembered, as in the old days when he had first been learning the
subtleties of Ruin Appreciation. There had been a Ruin Master, his name
forgotten, who had been sometimes less than courteous, had driven hard--

Another false memory!

He withdrew and weighed it. Perhaps, he thought, that was a part of
the answer. These people, these other seven, would not be driven. The
attempt to call them back to consciousness would have to be delicate.
When he drove hard, it was painful--he remembered the instant violent
agony of his own awakening--and they reacted with anguish.

More gently, alert for vagrant "memories," he combed the depths of
the eightfold mind within him, reaching into the sleeping portions,
touching, handling, sifting and associating, sorting. This memory of
an old knife wound from an Amok--that was not the Raincloud woman; it
was a man, very aged. This faint recollection of a childhood fear of
drowning--was that she? It was; it fitted with this other recollection,
the long detour on the road south toward the sun, around a river.

The Raincloud woman was the first to round out in his mind, and the
first he communicated with. He was not surprised to find that, early in
her life, she had feared that she might be Wolf.

He reached out for her. It was almost magic--knowing the "secret
name" of a person, so that then he was yours to command. But the
"secret name" was more than that. It was the gestalt of the person.
It was the sum of all data and experience, never available to another
person--until now.

With her memories arranged at last in his own mind, he thought
persuasively: "Citizeness Alla Narova, will you awaken and speak with
me?"

No answer--only a vague, troubled stirring.

Gently he persisted: "I know you well, Alla Narova. You sometimes
thought you might be a Daughter of the Wolf, but never really believed
it because you knew you loved your husband--and thought Wolves did not
love. You loved Rainclouds, too. It was when you stood at Beachy Head
and saw a great cumulus that you went into Meditation--"

And on and on, many times, coaxingly. Even so, it was not easy; but
at last he began to reach her. Slowly she began to surface. Thoughts
faintly sounded in his mind, like echoes at first, his own thoughts
bouncing back at him, a sort of mental nod of agreement: "Yes, that is
so." Then--terror. With a shaking fear, a hysterical rush, Citizeness
Alla Narova came violently up to full consciousness and to panic.

She was soundlessly screaming. The whole eight-branched figure quivered
and twisted in its nutrient bath.

The terrible storm raged in Tropile's own mind as fully as in hers--but
he had the advantage of knowing what it was. He helped her. He fought
it for the two of them ... soothing, explaining, calming.

At last her branch of the snowflake-body retreated, sobbing for a
spell. The storm was over.

He talked to her in his mind and she "listened." She was incredulous,
but there was no choice for her; she _had_ to believe.

Exhausted and passive, she asked finally: "What can we do? I wish I
were dead!"

He told her: "You were never a coward before. Remember, Alla Narova, I
_know_ you as nobody has ever known another human being before. That's
the way you will know me. As for what we can do--we must begin by
waking the others, if we can."

"If not?"

"If not," Tropile replied grimly, "then we will think of something
else."

She was of tough stuff, he thought admiringly. When she had rested and
absorbed things, her spirit was almost that of a Wolf; she had very
nearly been right about herself.

Together they explored their twinned members. They found through them
exactly what task was theirs to do. They found how the electrostatic
harvesting scythe of the Pyramids was controlled, by and through them.
They found what limitations there were and what freedoms they owned.
They reached into the other petals of the snowflake, reached past
the linked Components into the whole complex of electrostatic field
generators and propulsion machinery, reached even past that into--

Into the great single function of the Pyramids that lay beyond.

XI

Haendl was on the ragged edge of breakdown, which was something new in
his life.

It was full hot summer and the hidden colony of Wolves in Princeton
should have been full of energy and life. The crops were growing on all
the fields nearby; the drained storehouses were being replenished.

The aircraft that had been so painfully rebuilt and fitted for the
assault on Mount Everest were standing by, ready to be manned and to
take off.

And nothing, absolutely nothing, was going right.

It looked as though there would _be_ no expedition to Everest. Four
times now, Haendl had gathered his forces and been all ready. Four
times, a key man of the expedition had--vanished.

Wolves didn't vanish!

And yet more than a score of them had. First Tropile--then
Innison--then two dozen more, by ones and twos. No one was immune. Take
Innison, for example. There was a man who was Wolf through and through.
He was a doer, not a thinker; his skills were the skills of an artisan,
a tinkerer, a jackleg mechanic. How could a man like that succumb to
the pallid lure of Meditation?

But undeniably he had.

It had reached a point where Haendl himself was red-eyed and jumpy. He
had set curious alarms for himself--had enlisted the help of others of
the colony to avert the danger of Translation from himself.

When he went to bed at night, a lieutenant sat next to his bed,
watchfully alert lest Haendl, in that moment of reverie before sleep,
fell into Meditation and himself be Translated. There was no hour of
the day when Haendl permitted himself to be alone; and his companions,
or guards, were ordered to shake him awake, as violently as need be, at
the first hint of an abstracted look in the eyes or a reflective cast
of the features.

As time went on, Haendl's self-imposed regime of constant alertness
began to cost him heavily in lost rest and sleep. And the consequences
of that were--more and more occasions when the bodyguards shook him
awake; less and less rest.

He was very close to breakdown indeed.

On a hot, wet morning a few days after his useless expedition to see
Citizen Germyn in Wheeling, Haendl ate a tasteless breakfast and,
reeling with fatigue, set out on a tour of inspection of Princeton.
Warm rain dripped from low clouds, but that was merely one more
annoyance to Haendl. He hardly noticed it.

There were upward of a thousand Wolves in the Community and there
were signs of worry on the face of every one of them. Haendl was not
the only man in Princeton who had begun laying traps for himself as a
result of the unprecedented disappearances; he was not the only one who
was short of sleep. When one member in forty disappears, the morale of
the whole community receives a shattering blow.

To Haendl, it was clear, looking into the faces of his compatriots,
that not only was it going to be nearly impossible to mount the planned
assault on the Pyramid on Everest this year, it was going to be
unbearably difficult merely to keep the community going.

The whole Wolf pack was on the verge of panic.

There was a confused shouting behind Haendl. Groggily he turned and
looked; half a dozen Wolves were yelling and pointing at something in
the wet, muggy air.

It was an Eye, hanging silent and featureless over the center of the
street.

Haendl took a deep breath and mustered command of himself. "Frampton!"
he ordered one of his lieutenants. "Get the helicopter with the
instruments here. We'll take some more readings."

Frampton opened his mouth, then looked more closely at Haendl and,
instead, began to talk on his pocket radio. Haendl knew what was in the
man's mind--it was in his own, too.

What was the use of more readings? From the time of Tropile's
Translation on, they had had a superfluity of instrument readings on
the forces and auras that surrounded the Eyes--yes, and on Translations
themselves, too. Before Tropile, there had never been an Eye seen in
Princeton, much less an actual Translation. But things were different
now. Everything was different. Eyes roamed restlessly around day and
night.

Some of the men nearest the Eye were picking up rocks and throwing
them at the bobbing vortex in the air. Haendl started to yell at them
to stop, then changed his mind. The Eye didn't seem to be affected--as
he watched, one of the men scored a direct hit with a cobblestone. The
stone went right through the Eye, without sound or effect; why not let
them work off some of their fears in direct action?

There was a fluttering of vanes and the copter with the instruments
mounted on it came down in the middle of the street, between Haendl and
the Eye.

It was all very rapid from then on.

The Eye swooped toward Haendl. He couldn't help it; he ducked. That
was useless, but it was also unnecessary, for he saw in a second that
it was only partly the motion of the Eye toward him that made it loom
larger; it was also that the Eye itself was growing.

An Eye was perhaps the size of a football, as near as anyone could
judge. This one got bigger, bigger. It was the size of a roc's egg,
the size of a whale's blunt head. It stopped and hovered over the
helicopter, while the man inside frantically pointed lenses and meters--

Thundercrash.

Not a man this time--Translation had gone beyond men. The whole
helicopter vanished, man, instruments, spinning vanes and all.

Haendl picked himself up, sweating, shocked beyond sleepiness.

The young man named Frampton said fearfully: "Haendl, what do we do
now?"

"Do?" Haendl stared at him absently. "Why, kill ourselves, I guess."

He nodded soberly, as though he had at last attained the solution of a
difficult problem. Then he sighed.

"Well, one thing before that," he said. "I'm going to Wheeling. We
Wolves are licked; maybe the Citizens can help us now."

Roget Germyn, of Wheeling, a Citizen, received the message in the
chambers that served him as a place of business. He had a visitor
waiting for him at home.

Germyn was still Citizen and he could not quickly break off the
pleasant and interminable discussion he was having with a prospective
client over a potential business arrangement. He apologized for the
interruption caused by the message the conventional five times,
listened while his guest explained once more the plan he had come to
propose in full, then turned his cupped hands toward himself in the
gesture of Denial of Adequacy. It was the closest he could come to
saying no.

On the other side of the desk, the Citizen who had come to propose an
investment scheme immediately changed the subject by inviting Germyn
and his Citizeness to a Sirius Viewing, the invitation in the form of
rhymed couplets. He had wanted to transact his business very much, but
he couldn't _insist_.

Germyn got out of the invitation by a Conditional Acceptance in proper
form, and the man left, delayed only slightly by the Four Urgings to
Stay. Almost immediately, Germyn dismissed his clerk and closed his
office for the day by tying a triple knot in a length of red cord
across the open door.

When he got to his home, he found, as he had suspected, that the
visitor was Haendl.

There was much doubt in Citizen Germyn's mind about Haendl. The man had
nearly admitted to being Wolf, and how could a citizen overlook that?
But in the excitement of Gala Tropile's Translation, there had been no
hue and cry. Germyn had permitted the man to leave. And now?

He reserved judgment. He found Haendl distastefully sipping tea in
the living room and attempting to keep up a formal conversation with
Citizeness Germyn. He rescued him, took him aside, closed a door--and
waited.

He was astonished at the change in the man. Before, Haendl had been
bouncy, aggressive, quick-moving--the very qualities least desired in
a Citizen, the mark of the Son of the Wolf. Now he was none of these
things, but he looked no more like a Citizen for all that; he was
haggard, tense.

He said, with an absolute minimum of protocol: "Germyn, the last time I
saw you, there was a Translation. Gala Tropile, remember?"

"I remember," Citizen Germyn said. Remember! It had hardly left his
thoughts.

"And you told me there had been others. Are they still going on?"

Germyn said: "There have been others." He was trying to speak
directly, to match this man Haendl's speed and forcefulness. It
was hardly good manners, but it had occurred to Citizen Germyn
that there were times when manners, after all, were not the most
important thing in the world. "There were two in the past few days.
One was a woman--Citizeness Baird; her husband's a teacher. She was
Viewing Through Glass with four or five other women at the time. She
just--disappeared. She was looking through a green prism at the time,
if that helps."

"I don't know if it helps or not. Who was the other one?"

Germyn shrugged. "A man named Harmane. No one saw it. But they heard
the thunderclap, or something like a thunderclap, and he was missing."
He thought for a moment. "It is a little unusual, I suppose. Two in a
week--"

Haendl said roughly: "Listen, Germyn. It isn't just two. In the past
thirty days, within the area around here and in _one other place_,
there have been at least fifty. In _two_ places, do you understand?
Here and in Princeton. The rest of the world--nothing much; a few
Translations here and there. But just in these two communities, fifty.
Does that make sense?"

Citizen Germyn thought. "--No."

"No. And I'll tell you something else. Three of the--well, victims have
been children under the age of five. One was too young to walk. And the
most recent Translation wasn't a person at all. It was a helicopter.
Now figure that out, Germyn. What's the explanation for Translations?"

Germyn was gaping. "Why--you Meditate, you know. On Connectivity. The
idea is that once you've grasped the Essential Connectivity of All
Things, you become One with the Cosmic Whole. But I don't see how a
baby or a machine--"

"No, of course you don't. Remember Glenn Tropile?"

"Naturally."

"He's the link," Haendl said grimly. "When he got Translated, we
thought it was a big help, because he had the consideration to do it
right under our eyes. We got enough readings to give us a clue as to
what, physically speaking, Translation is all about. That was the first
real clue and we thought he'd done us a favor. Now I'm not so sure."

He leaned forward. "Every person I know of who was Translated was
someone Tropile knew. The three kids were in his class at the nursery
school--we put him there for a while to keep him busy, when he first
came to us. Two of the men he bunked with are gone; the mess boy who
served him is gone; his wife is gone. Meditation? No, Germyn. I know
most of those people. Not a damned one of them would have spent a
moment Meditating on Connectivity to save his life. And what do you
make of that?"

Swallowing hard, Germyn said: "I just remembered. That man Harmane--"

"What about him?"

"The one who was Translated last week. He also knew Tropile. He was the
Keeper of the House of the Five Regulations when Tropile was there."

"You see? And I'll bet the woman knew Tropile, too." Haendl got up
fretfully, pacing around. "Here's the thing, Germyn. I'm licked. You
know what I am, don't you?"

Germyn said levelly: "I believe you to be Wolf."

"You believe right. That doesn't matter any more. You don't like
Wolves. Well, I don't like you. But this thing is too big for me to
care about that any more. Tropile has started something happening,
and what the end of it is going to be, I can't tell. But I know this:
We're not safe, either of us. Maybe you still think Translation is
a fulfillment. I don't; it scares me. _But it's going to happen to
me_--and to you. It's going to happen to everybody who ever had
anything to do with Glenn Tropile, unless we can somehow stop it--and I
don't know how. Will you help me?"

Germyn, trying not to tremble when all his buried fears screamed
_Wolf!_, said honestly: "I'll have to sleep on it."

Haendl looked at him for a moment. Then he shrugged. Almost to himself,
he said: "Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe we can't do anything about it
anyhow. All right. I'll come back in the morning, and if you've made up
your mind to help, we'll start trying to make plans. And if you've made
up your mind the other way--well, I guess I'll have to fight off a few
Citizens. Not that I mind that."

Germyn stood up and bowed. He began the ritual Four Urgings.

"Spare me that," Haendl growled. "Meanwhile, Germyn, if I were you, I
wouldn't make any long-range plans. You may not be here to carry them
out."

Germyn asked thoughtfully: "And if you were _you_?"

"I'm not making any," Haendl said grimly.

Citizen Germyn, feeling utterly tainted with the scent of the Wolf
in his home, tossed in his bed, sleepless. His eyes were wide open,
staring at the dark ceiling. He could hear his wife's decorous
breathing from the foot of the bed--soft and regular, it should have
been lulling him to sleep.

It was not. Sleep was very far away.

Germyn was a brave enough man, as courage is measured among Citizens.
That is to say, he had never been afraid, though it was true that there
had been very little occasion. But he was afraid now. He didn't want to
be Translated.

The Wolf, Haendl, had put his finger on it: _Perhaps you still think
Translation is a fulfillment._ Translation--the reward of Meditation,
the gift bestowed on only a handful of gloriously transfigured persons.
That was one thing. But the sort of Translation that was now involved
was nothing like that--not if it happened to children; not if it
happened to Gala Tropile; not if it happened to a machine.

And Glenn Tropile was involved in it.

Germyn turned restlessly.

If people who knew Glenn Tropile were likely to be Translated, and
people who Meditated on Connectivity were likely to be Translated, then
people who knew Glenn Tropile and didn't want to be Translated had
better not Meditate on Connectivity.

It was very difficult to _not_ think of Connectivity.

Endlessly he calculated sums in arithmetic in his mind, recited the
Five Regulations, composed Greeting Poems and Verses on Viewing.
And endlessly he kept coming back to Tropile, to Translation, to
Connectivity. He didn't _want_ to be Translated. But still the thought
had a certain lure. What was it like? Did it hurt?

Well, probably not, he speculated. It was very fast, according to
Haendl's report--if you could believe what an admitted Son of the Wolf
reported. But Germyn had to.

Well, if it was fast--at that kind of speed, he thought, perhaps you
would die instantly. Maybe Tropile was dead. Was that possible? No, it
didn't seem so; after all, there was the fact of the connection between
Tropile and so many of the recently Translated. What was the connection
there? Or, generalizing, what connections were involved in--

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.

It did not occur to the Pyramid on Mount Everest that a Component might
be directing its actions. How could it?

Perhaps the Pyramid on Mount Everest wondered, if it knew how to
wonder, when it noticed that different criteria were involved in
selecting components these days. If it knew how to "notice." Surely
even a Pyramid might wonder when, without warning or explanation,
its orders were changed--not merely to harvest a different sort of
Component, but to drag along with the flesh-and-blood needful parts
a clanking assortment of machinery and metal, as began to happen.
Machines? Why would the Pyramids need to Translate machines?

But why, on the other hand, would a Pyramid bother to question a
directive, even if it were able to?

In any case, it didn't. It swung its scythe and gathered in what it was
caused to gather in.

Men sometimes eat green fruit and come to regret it. Was it the same
with Pyramids?

And Citizen Germyn fell into the unsuspected trap. Avoiding
Connectivity, he thought of Glenn Tropile--and the unfelt h-f pulses
found him out.

He didn't see the Eye that formed above him. He didn't feel the
gathering of forces that formed his trap. He didn't know that he was
seized, charged, catapulted through space, caught, halted and drained.
It happened too fast.

One moment he was in his bed; the next moment he was--elsewhere. There
wasn't anything in between.

It had happened to hundreds of thousands of Components before him, but,
for Citizen Germyn, what happened was in some ways different. He was
not embalmed in nutrient fluid, formed and programmed to take his part
in the Pyramid-structure, for he had not been selected by the Pyramid
but by that single wild Component, Tropile. He arrived conscious, awake
and able to move.

He stood up in a red-lit chamber. Vast thundering crashes of metal
buffeted his ears. Heat sprang little founts of perspiration on his
skin.

It was too much, too much to take in at once. Oily-skinned madmen,
naked, were capering and shouting at him. It took him a moment to
realize that they were not devils; this was not Hell; he was not dead.

"This way!" they were bawling at him. "Come on, hurry it up!"

He reeled, following their directions, across an unpleasantly warm
floor, staggering and falling--the binary planet was a quarter denser
than Earth--until he got his balance.

The capering madmen led him through a door--or sphincter or trap;
it was not like anything he had ever seen. But it was a portal of a
sort, and on the other side of it was something closer to sanity. It
was another room, and though the light was still red, it was a paler,
calmer red and the thundering ironmongery was a wall away. The madmen
were naked, yes, but they were not mad. The oil on their skins was only
the sheen of sweat.

"Where--where am I?" he gasped.

Two voices, perhaps three or four, were all talking at once. He could
make no sense of it. Citizen Germyn looked about him. He was in a sort
of chamber that formed a part of a machine that existed for the unknown
purposes of the Pyramids on the binary planet. And he was alive--and
not even alone.

He had crossed more than a million miles of space without feeling a
thing. But when what the naked men were saying began to penetrate, the
walls lurched around him.

It was true; he had been Translated.

He looked dazedly down at his own bare body, and around at the room,
and then he realized they were still talking: "--when you get your
bearings. Feel all right now? Come on, Citizen, snap out of it!"

Germyn blinked.

Another voice said peevishly: "Tropile's got to find some other place
to bring them in. That foundry isn't meant for human beings. Look at
the shape this one is in! Some time somebody's going to come in and we
won't spot him in time and--pfut!"

The first voice said: "Can't be helped. Hey! Are you all right?"

Citizen Germyn looked at the naked man in front of him and took a deep
breath of hot, sour air. "Of course I'm all right," he said.

The naked man was Haendl.

The Tropile-petal "said" to the Alla Narova-petal: "Got another one!
It's Citizen Germyn!" The petal fluttered feebly in soundless laughter.

The Alla Narova-petal "said": "Glenn, come back! The whole
propulsion-pneuma just went out of circuit!"

Tropile pulled his attention away from his human acquisitions in
the chamber off the foundry and allowed himself to fuse with the
woman-personality. Together they reached out and explored along the
pathways they had laboriously traced. The propulsion-pneuma was the
complex of navigation-computers, drive generators, course-vectoring
units that their own unit had been originally part of--until Glenn
Tropile, by waking its Components, had managed to divert it for
purposes of his own. The two of them reached out into it--

Dead end.

It was out of circuit, as Alla Narova had said. One whole limb of their
body--their new, jointly tenanted body, that spanned a whole planet and
reached across space to Earth--had been lopped off. Quick, quick, they
separated, traced separate paths. They came together again: Still dead
end.

The dyad that was Tropile and the woman reached out to touch the others
in the snowflake and communicated--not in words, not in anything as
slow and as opaque as words: _The Pyramids have lopped off another
circuit._ The compound personality of the snowflake considered its
course of action, reached its decision, acted. Quick, quick, three of
the other members of the snowflake darted out of the collective unit
and went about isolating and tracing the exact area that had been
affected.

Tropile: "We expected this. They couldn't help noticing sooner or
later that something was going wrong."

Alla Narova: "But, Glenn, suppose they cut _us_ out of circuit? We're
stuck here. We can't move. We can't get out of the tanks. If they know
that we are the source of their trouble--"

Tropile: "Let them know! That's what we've got the others here for!" He
was cocky now, self-assured, fighting. For the first time in his life,
he was free to fight--to let his Wolf blood strive to the utmost--and
he knew what he was fighting for. This wasn't a matter of Haendl's
pitiful tanks and carbines against the invulnerable Pyramids; this was
the invulnerability of the whole Pyramid system turned against the
Pyramids!

It was a warning, the fact that the Pyramids had become alert to
danger, had begun cutting sections of their planetary communications
system out of the main circuit. But as a warning, it didn't frighten
Tropile; it only spurred him to action.

Quick, quick, he and the woman-personality dissolved, sped away.
Figuratively they sought out the most restive Components they could
find, shook them by the shoulder, tried to wake them. Actually--well,
what is "actually?" The physical fact was surely that they didn't
move at all, for they were bound to their tank and to the surgical
joinings, each to each, at their temples. No crawling child in a
playpen was more helplessly confined than Tropile and Alla Narova and
the others.

And yet no human being had ever been more free.

Regard that imbecile servant of Everyman, the thermostat.

He runs the furnace in Everyman's house, he measures the doneness of
Everyman's breakfast toast, he valves the cooling fluid through the
radiator of Everyman's car. If Everyman's house stays too hot or too
cold, the man swears at the lackwit switch and maybe buys a new one
to plug in. But he never, never thinks that his thermostat might be
plotting against him.

Thermostat : Man = Man : Pyramid. Only that and nothing more. It was
not in the nature of a Pyramid to think that its Components, once
installed, could reprogram themselves. No Component ever had. (But
before Glenn Tropile, no Component had been Wolf.)

When Tropile found himself, he found others. They were men and women,
real persons with gonads and dreams. They had been caught at the moment
of blankness--yes; and frozen into that shape, true. But they were
palimpsest personalities on which the Pyramids had programmed their
duties. Underneath the Pyramids' cabalistic scrawl, the men and women
still remained. They had only to be reached.

Tropile and Alla Narova reached them--one at a time, then by scores.
The Pyramids made that possible. The network of communication that they
had created for their own purposes encompassed every cell of the race
and all its works. Tropile reached out from his floating snowflake
and went where he wished--anywhere within the binary planet; to the
brooding Pyramid on Earth; through the Eyes, wherever he chose on
Earth's surface.

Physically, he was scarcely able to move a muscle. But, oh, the soaring
range of his mind and vision!

Citizen Germyn was past shock, but just the same it was uncomfortable
to be in a room with several dozen other persons, all of them naked.
Uncomfortable. Once it would have been brain-shattering. For a Citizen
to see his own Citizeness unclothed was gross lechery. To be part of a
mixed and bare-skinned group was unthinkable. Or had been. Now it only
made him uneasy.

He said numbly to Haendl: "Citizen, I pray you tell me what sort of
place this is."

"Later," said Haendl gruffly, and led him out of the way. "Stay put,"
he advised. "We're busy."

And that was true. Something was going on, but Citizen Germyn couldn't
make out exactly what it was. The naked people were worrying out a
distribution of some sort of supplies. There were tools and there were
also what looked to Citizen Germyn's unsophisticated eyes very much
like guns. Guns? It was foolishness to think they were guns, Citizen
Germyn told himself strongly. _Nobody_ had guns. He touched the floor
with an exploratory hand. It was warm and it shook with a nameless
distant vibration. He shuddered.

Haendl came back; yes, they were guns. Haendl was carrying one.

"Ours!" he crowed. "That Tropile must've looted our armory at
Princeton. By the looks of what's here, I doubt if he left a single
round of ammunition. What the hell, they're more use here!"

"But what are we going to do with _guns_?"

Haendl looked at him with savage amusement. "Shoot."

Citizen Germyn said: "Please, Citizen. Tell me what this is all about."

Haendl sat down next to him on the warm, quivering floor and began
fitting cartridges into a clip.

"We're fighting," he explained gleefully. "Tropile did it all. You've
been shanghaied and so have all the rest of us. Tropile's alive! He's
part of the Pyramid communications network--don't ask me how. But he's
there and he has been hauling men and weapons and God knows what all up
from Earth--you're on the binary planet now, you know--and we're going
to bust things up so the Pyramids will _never_ be able to put them back
together again. Understand? Well, it doesn't matter if you don't. All
you have to understand is that when I tell you to shoot this gun, you
shoot."

Numbly, Citizen Germyn took the unfamiliar stock and barrel into his
hands. Muscles he had forgotten he owned straightened the limp curve of
his back, squared his shoulders and thrust out his chest.

It had been many generations since any of Citizen Germyn's people had
known the feeling of being an Armed Man.

A naked woman with wild hair and a full, soft figure came toward them,
jiggling in a way that agonized Citizen Germyn. He dropped his eyes to
his gun and kept them there.

She cried: "Orders from Tropile! We've got to form a party and blow
something up."

Haendl demanded: "Such as what?"

"I don't know what. I only know where. We've got a guide. And Tropile
particularly asked for you, Haendl. He said you'd enjoy it."

And enjoy it Haendl did--anticipation was all over his face.

They formed a party of a dozen. They armed themselves with the guns
Tropile had levitated from the bulging warehouse at Princeton. They
supplied themselves with gray metal cans of something that Haendl said
were explosives, and with fuses and detonators to match, and they set
off--with their guide.

A guide! It was a shambling, fearsome monster!

When Citizen Germyn saw it, he had to fight an almost irresistible
temptation to be ill. Even the bare skins about him no longer mattered;
this new horror canceled them out.

"What--What--" he strangled, pointing.

Haendl laughed raucously. "That's Joey."

"What's Joey?"

"He works for us," said Haendl, grinning.

Joey was neither human nor beast; it was not Pyramid; it was nothing
Citizen Germyn had ever seen or imagined before. It crouched on
many-jointed limbs, and even so was twice the height of a man. Its ropy
arms and legs were covered with fine chitinous spines, laid on as close
as hairs in a pelt, and sharp as thorns. There was a layer of chitin
around its reddish eyes. What was more horrible than all, it spoke.

It said squeakily: "You all ready? Come on, snap it up! The Pyramids
have got something big building up and we've got to squash it."

Citizen Germyn whispered feverishly to Haendl: "That voice! It sounds
odd, yes--but isn't it Tropile's voice?"

"Sure it is! That's what old Joey is good for," said Haendl. "Tropile
says he's telepathic, whatever that is. Makes it handy for us."

And it did. Telepathy was the alien's very special use to Glenn
Tropile, for what Joey was in fact was another Component, from a
previous wristwatch mine. Joey's planet had once circled a star never
visible from Earth; his home air was thin and his home sunlight was
weak, and in consequence his race had developed a species of telepathy
for communicating at long range. This was handy for the Pyramids,
because it simplified the wiring. And it was equally handy for Glenn
Tropile, once he managed to wake the creature--with its permission, he
could use its body as a sort of walkie-talkie in directing the tactics
of his shanghaied army.

That permission was very readily given. Joey remembered what the
Pyramids had done to its own planet.

"Come on!" ordered Joey in Tropile's filtered voice, and they hastened
through a straight and achingly cramped tunnel in single file, toward
what Tropile had said was their target.

They had nearly reached it when, abruptly, there was a thundering of
explosions ahead.

The party stopped, looked at each other, and got ready to move on more
slowly.

At last it had started. The Pyramids were beginning to fight back.

XIII

Citizeness Roget Germyn, widow, woke from sleep like a well-mannered
cat on the narrow lower third of the bed that her training had taught
her to occupy, though it had been some days since her husband's
Translation had emptied the Citizen's two-thirds permanently.

Someone had tapped gently on her door.

"I am awake," she called, in a voice just sufficient to carry.

A quiet voice said: "Citizeness, there is exceptional opportunity to
Appreciate this morning. Come see, if you will. And I ask forgiveness
for waking you."

She recognized the voice; it was the wife of one of her neighbors.
The Citizeness made the appropriate reply, combining forgiveness and
gratitude.

She dressed rapidly, but with appropriate pauses for reflection and
calm, and stepped out into the street.

It was not yet daylight. Overhead, great sheets of soundless lightnings
flared.

Inside Citizeness Germyn long-unfelt emotions stirred. There was
something that was very like terror, and something that was akin to
love. This was a generation that had never seen the aurora, for the
ricocheting electron beams that cause it could not span the increasing
distance between the orphaned Earth and its primary, Old Sol, and the
small rekindled suns the Pyramids made were far too puny.

Under the sleeting aurora, small knots of Citizens stood about the
streets, their faces turned up to the sky and illuminated by the
distant light. It was truly an exceptional opportunity to Appreciate
and they were all making the most of it.

Conscientiously, Citizeness Germyn sought out another viewer with whom
to exchange comments on the spectacle above. "It is more bright than
meteors," she said judiciously, "and lovelier than the freshly kindled
Sun."

"Sure," said the woman. Citizeness Germyn, jolted, looked more closely.
It was the Tropile woman--Gala? Was that her name? And what sort of
name was _that_? But it fitted her well; she was the one who had been
wife to Wolf and, more likely than not, part Wolf herself.

Still, the case was not proved. Citizeness Germyn said honestly: "I
have never seen a sight to compare with this in all my life."

Gala Tropile said indifferently: "Yeah. Funny things are happening all
the time these days, have you noticed? Ever since Glenn turned out to
be--" She stopped.

Citizeness Germyn rapidly diagnosed her embarrassment and acted to
cover it up. "That is so. I have seen Eyes a hundred times and yet
has there been a Translation with the Eyes? No. But there have been
Translations. It is queer."

"I suppose so," Gala Tropile said, looking upward at the display. She
sighed.

Over their heads, a formed Eye was drifting slowly about, but neither
of the women noticed it. The shifting lights in the sky obscured it.

"I wonder what causes that stuff," Gala Tropile said idly.

Citizeness Germyn made no attempt to answer. It was not the sort of
question that would normally have occurred to her and therefore not a
sort to which she could reply.

Moreover, it was not the question closest to Gala Tropile's heart at
that moment--nor, for that matter, the question closest to Citizeness
Germyn's. The question that underlay the thoughts of both was: _I
wonder what happened to my husband._

It was strange, but true, that the answers to all their questions were
very nearly the same.

The Alla-Narova mind said sharply: "Glenn, come back!"

Tropile withdrew from scanning the distant dark street. He laughed
soundlessly. "I was watching my wife. God, we're giving them fits down
there! The Pyramids must be churning things up, too--the sky is full of
auroral displays. Looks like there's plenty of h-f bouncing around the
atmosphere."

"Pay attention!" the Alla-Narova mind commanded.

"All right." Obediently, Tropile returned to the war he was waging.

It was a strange conflict, strangely fought. Tropile's mind searched
the abysses and tunnels of the Pyramid planet, and what he sensed or
saw was immediately communicated to all of the awakened Components who
were his allies.

It was a godlike position. Was he sane? There was no knowing. Sanity
no longer meant anything to Tropile. He was beyond such human affairs
as lunacy or its reverse. An insane man is one who is out of joint
with his environment. Tropile was himself his environment. His mind
encompassed two planets and the space between. He saw with a thousand
eyes. He worked with a thousand hands.

And he struck mighty blows.

The weakness of a network that reaches everywhere is that it is
everywhere vulnerable. If a teletype repeater in Omaha garbles a single
digit, printing units in Atlanta and Bangor will type out errors.
Tropile, by striking at the Pyramids' net at a thousand points, garbled
their communications and made them nearly useless. More, he took the
Pyramid network for his own. The Tropile-pulse sped through the neurone
guides of the Pyramid net, and what it encountered it mastered, and
what it mastered it changed.

The Pyramids discovered that they had been attacked.

Frantically (if they felt frenzy), the Pyramids replaced Components;
the Tropile-pulse woke the new ones. Unbelievingly (did they know
how to "believe"?), the Pyramids isolated contaminated circuits; the
Tropile-pulse bypassed them.

Desperately (or joyously or uffishly--one term fits exactly as well as
another), the Pyramids returned to shove-and-haul, and there was much
destruction, and some Components died.

But by then, the Components had reprogrammed themselves.

The first job had been the matter of finding hands for the
Tropile-brain to work with. Bring hands in, then! Tropile commanded
the Pyramids' network and obediently it was done. The Translation
mechanism, the electrostatic scythe that had harvested so many crops
from the wristwatch mines, suffered a change and went to work not for
the pickers but for the fruit.

The essential change in the operation of that particular pneuma had
been simple; first, to "harvest" or "Translate" the men and women
Tropile wanted as fighters instead of the meditative Citizen kind.
Second, to divert the new arrivals to where they would not go straight
to deep-freeze. It happened that the only alternate space Tropile could
find was a sort of foundry that was nearly Hell, but that was only a
detail. The important thing was that new helpers were arriving, with
minds of their own and the capacity to move and act.

Then Tropile needed to communicate with them. He found the alien,
ropy-limbed Component whose name vaguely approached "Joey." Joey's
limited sense of telepathy was needed and so, with enormous difficulty,
Tropile and Alla Narova, combined, managed to reach and wake it.

And so he had an army, captured humans for troops, an awakened Joey
for liaison.

Tropile was lord of two worlds. Not only the Pyramids were under his
thumb, but his own fellow humans whom he had drafted into his service.
They ate when a captured circuit he controlled fed synthetic mush into
troughs for them. They breathed because a captured circuit he directed
created air. They would return to Earth when--and only when--a captured
circuit he operated sent them home.

Sane?

By what standards?

And what difference did it make?

XIV

With a series of grinding shocks, like an enormous earthquake-fault
relieving a strain, the Pyramids began to fight back.

"Tropile!" the Alla-Narova mind called urgently.

Tropile flashed to the trouble spot. Through eyes that were not his
own, Tropile scanned the honeycombed world of the Pyramids. There was
an area where huge and ancient vehicles lay covered with the slow dust
of centuries, and the vehicles were beginning to move.

Caterpillar-treaded hauling machines were loading themselves with what
Tropile judged were quickly synthesized explosives. Almost forgotten
wheeled vehicles were creeping mindlessly out of nearly abandoned
storage sections and lumbering painfully along the tunnels of the
planet.

"Coming toward us," Tropile diagnosed dispassionately.

Alla Narova queried: "They mean to fight?"

"Of course. You see if you can penetrate the circuit that controls
them. I--" already he was flashing away--"I'll get to the boys through
Joey."

It was queer, looking through the eyes of the alien they called Joey;
colors were all wrong, perspective was flat. But he could see, though
cloudily. He saw Haendl joyously fitting a bayonet--_a bayonet!_--to
a rifle; he saw Citizen Germyn, naked but square-shouldered, puffing
valiantly along in the rear.

Tropile said through the strange vocal cords that belonged to the
alien: "You'll have to hurry." (Strange to speak in words again!) "The
Pyramids are heading toward the chambers where the Components are kept.
I think they mean to kill us."

He flashed away, located the area, flashed back. "You'll have to go
without me--I mean without Joey-me. The only way I see to get there is
through a narrow little ventilation tunnel--I guess ventilation is what
it was for."

Quickly (but against the familiar race of thought, it seemed
agonizingly slow) he laid out the route for them and left; it was up
to them. Watching from a dozen viewpoints at once, he saw the slow
creep of the Pyramids' machines and the slower intersecting march of
his little army. He studied the alternate cross routes and contrived
to block some of them by interfering with the control-circuits of the
emergency doors and portals.

But there were some circuits he could not control. The Pyramids
had withdrawn whole sections of their net and areas of the
planet were now hidden from him entirely. Sections of the vast
maintenance-propulsion-manufacturing complex were no longer subject to
his interference or control.

It would be, Tropile thought dispassionately, a rather close thing.
The chances were perhaps six out of ten that his hastily assembled
task force would be able to intercept the convoy of automatic machines
before it could reach the racks of nutrient tanks.

And if they were not in time?

Tropile almost laughed out loud, if that had been possible. Why, then,
his body would be destroyed! How trivial a thing to worry about! He
began to forget he owned a body; surely it was someone else's bone and
tissue that lay floating in the eight-branched snowflake. He knew that
this was not so. He knew that if his body were killed, he would die.
And yet there was no sense of fear, no personal involvement. It was an
interesting problem in scheduling and nothing more.

Would the human fighters get there in time?

Perhaps the automatic machines had senses, for as the first of the
humans burst into the tunnel they were using, a few hundred yards ahead
of the lead load-carrier, the machines shuddered to a stop. Pause for
a second; then, laboriously, they began to back toward the nearest of
the side passages that Tropile had been unable to block. He scanned it
hurriedly. Good, good! The circuits surrounding the passage proper were
out of his reach, but it led to another passage, an abandoned pipeline
of sorts, it seemed to be. And _that_ he could reach....

Patiently (how slowly the machines crept along!) he waited until one of
the Pyramids' machines bearing explosives passed through an enormous
valve in the line--and then the valve was thrown.

The explosion triggered every vehicle in the line. The damage was
complete.

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't _know_.
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.

It _hurt_. 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. _You_ beat
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, _exactly_ what 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 far _there_?

And item--looking pretty far ahead, of course, but still--well, just
what _was_ Glenn 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 not _blaming_ you. 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, hundreds _and_ hundreds 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."

"_They_ didn'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 devil _did_ they want? I mean, yes, we found out what they did
with the Translated people. But what were they _up_ to? What did
they _think_? _Did_ they 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 the _Pyramids_ weren'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 a _guess_ about. 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 was _something_ in 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
against _that_, because it was not only useless but _deliberately_
useless--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._

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 know
_where_ we 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 to _have_ babies--you want to _be_
one."

"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. _There_ was 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 be
_alone_."

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.

End of Project Gutenberg's Wolfbane, by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth