Well, more or less intact.
This planet was rich in assimilable things. These things had proven well suited to being incorporated right into the functions of the Pyramids’ elaborate devices, with hardly any processing at all bar the suppression of unnecessary needs or desires.
It was for this reason that the Pyramids had bothered to steal the planet in the first place.
So the Pyramid on Mount Everest sat and waited.
It was not lonely in its isolation—no Pyramid had ever learned how to be “lonely.” For that matter, it was not really alone, either, since its directives came from the binary planet, with which—with all of which, fellow-Pyramids and self-acting devices and all—the Pyramid on Mount Everest was continuously in contact. It sent its h-f pulses bouncing and scattering out. It scattered them additionally on their return. Deep inside, the more-than-anamorphically distorted picture was reintegrated. Deeper inside still, it was interpreted and evaluated for its part in survival, in the sense that the Pyramids had come to understand survival.
“Survival” included the need for the complex components—a human being might have thought of them as “servomechanisms”—which could be assimilated, and which grew wild here.
The planet was, in fact, very rich in these components, and they had a useful habit of “ripening”—which is to say, of becoming perfect for the Pyramids’ use—on their own. This occurred, however, at irregular and unpredictable intervals. Therefore the Pyramid on Mount Everest was obliged to maintain a constant surveillance, planet wide, for the perfect moment of plucking.
(Of course, the components being harvested did not know they were ripening to be plucked. A wrist-watch on a jeweler’s shelf doesn’t know it is waiting for a shopper to buy it. The shopper has no interest in the previous state of the wrist-watch, either. So it was with the Pyramids and the useful devices they harvested on Earth.)
So when its surveillance showed a component was ripe, the Pyramid plucked it. It used electrostatic charges. When the charges formed about a component about to be plucked, they distorted the refractive index of the air. Human beings called this an “Eye.”
The Pyramid now found that a component was ripe for plucking.
A world away from Mount Everest, in Wheeling, West Virginia, Citizen Boyne had attained the rapture of total emptying of the mind. The electrostatic charges over his head swirled into an Eye.
There was a sound like the clapping of two hands, or a small thunder-crash.
The Citizens of Wheeling knew that sound well. It was the miniature thunderclap of air slapping together, as it filled the space that had been occupied by the kneeling, meditating form of Citizen Boyne, raptly awaiting his Donation of Fluid.
The three hundred Citizens of Wheeling were jerked out of their own meditations by the sound. They gasped in envy and admiration (and perhaps, a little, in fear) as they saw that Citizen Boyne had been Translated.
Or, put in a different context, that Citizen Boyne had become ripe and therefore was harvested.
6
Glenn Tropile and his sobbing wife lay down for the night in the stubble of a cornfield. Gala Tropile ultimately fell asleep, still whimpering softly in her dreams. Her husband found sleep harder.
Numbed by contact with the iron chill of the field—it would be weeks before the new Sun warmed the earth enough for it to begin radiating in turn—Tropile tossed restlessly. He closed his eyes and tried meditation; it would not work; unwanted visions flashed across his mind. He opened them and tried to meditate that way. Sometimes the heavenly blankness came best when you simply chose to ignore the visual world. . . .
Not this time; when Tropile opened his eyes he saw a bright star just over the horizon. It had not been in the sky lately, but Tropile recognized it at once.
It was the binary planet. It was the home of the Pyramids.
Tropile shivered with more than cold. No one liked to see that planet in the sky. To look at it was to remind oneself of all the evils that it had brought. To speak of it was unpardonable. Even before the littlest children had learned that one didn’t ask for more food or point to another child’s genitals, they learned that one never mentioned the binary planet, however bright it might appear in the sky.
Its evil was lessened, microscopically, by the fact that it had no light of its own. Like any planet; like Mars or Jupiter or all the lost others, it shone only by reflection of the light from the nearest self-luminous body, in this case, Earth’s sunlet. So it was brightest when one could stand its hideous presence best—at the time of the Re-Creation of the Sun. And when the old and dying Sun was faint, and everyone was fearful and strained, it could hardly be picked out at all.
That was only a very small mercy, but the basic fact of human life was that there weren’t any large ones any more.
Tropile shut his eyes on the unwelcome sight and tried again to sleep. Even when it came it was fitful. He dreamed. He did not enjoy his dreams, because in them he was Wolf.
Half-waking, he knew it was true. Well, let it be so, he told himself again and again; I will be Wolf; I will strike back at the Citizens, I will—
Always the thought trailed off. He would exactly what? What could he do?
Migration was an answer—go to another city. With Gala, he supposed. Start a new life, where he was not known as Wolf.
And then what? Try to live a sheep’s life, as he had tried all his years? And there was the question of whether, in fact, he could manage to find a city where he was not known. The human race was migratory, in these years of subjection to the never-quite-understood rule of the Pyramids. It was a matter of insolation. When the new Sun was young, it was hot, and there was plenty of warmth; it was possible to spread norm and south, away from the final line of permafrost which, in North America, came just above the old Mason-Dixon line. When the Sun was dying, the cold spread down. The race followed the seasons. Soon all of Wheeling would be spreading north again, and how was he to be sure that none of Wheeling’s citizens might not turn up wherever he might go?
He was not to be sure, that was the answer to that.
All right, scratch migration. What remained?
He could—with Gala, he guessed—live a solitary life, on the fringes of cultivated land. They both had some skill at rummaging the old storehouses of the ancients.
It took skill. Plundering the old supermarkets was not only bad manners—terminally bad—it was also dangerous. You could die of poisoning if you didn’t know what you were doing. Over the centuries, nearly all of the most interesting canned goods had decayed themselves into lethal and repellent mixtures. However, that did not mean there was nothing there. For reasons known only to themselves, the ancients had seen fit to take some kinds of foodstuffs which kept well enough by themselves, and go on to seal them into vacuum-tight cans. Crackers. Pasta. Unleavened bread—yes, there were lots of things still there.
So it was possible.
But even a Wolf is gregarious by nature; and there were bleak hours in that night when Tropile found himself close to sobbing with his wife.
At the first break of dawn he was up. Gala had fallen into a light and restless sleep; he called her awake. “We have to move,” he said harshly. “Maybe they’ll get enough guts to follow us. I don’t want them to find us.”
Silently she got up. They rolled and tied the blankets she had brought; they ate quickly from the food she had brought; they made packs and put them on their shoulders, and started to walk. One thing in their favor: They were moving fast, faster than any Citizen was likely to follow. All the same, Tropile kept looking nervously behind him.