They hurried north and east, and that was a mistake; because by noon they found themselves blocked by water. It was impassable. They would have to skirt it westward until they found a bridge or a boat.
“We can stop and eat,” Tropile said grudgingly, trying not to despair.
They slumped to the ground. It was warmer now; Tropile found himself getting drowsier, drowsier—He jerked erect and stared around belligerently. Beside him his wife was lying motionless, though her eyes were open, gazing at the sky. Tropile sighed and stretched out. A moment’s rest, he promised himself. And then a quick bite to eat, and then onward. ... He was sound asleep when they came for him.
There was a flutter of iron bird’s wings from overhead.
Tropile jumped up out of sleep, awakening to panic. It was outside the possibility of belief, but there it was: In the sky over him, etched black against a cloud, a helicopter. And men staring out of it, staring down at him.
A helicopter!
But there were no helicopters, or none that flew—if there had been fuel to fly them with—if any man had had the skill to make them fly. It was impossible! And yet there it was, and the men were looking at him, and the impossible great whirling thing was coming down, nearer.
He began to run in the downward wash of air from the vanes. But it was no use. There were three men, and they were fresh, and he wasn’t. He stopped, dropping into the fighter’s crouch that is pre-set into the human body, ready to do battle. They didn’t want to fight. They laughed. One of them said amiably, “Long past your bedtime, boy. Get in. We’ll take you home.”
Tropile stood poised, hands half-clenched and half-clawed. ‘ Take—”
“Take you home. Yeah.” The man nodded. “Where you belong, Tropile, you know? Not back to Wheeling, if that’s what is worrying you.”
^’Where I—”
“Where you belong.” Then he understood.
He got into the helicopter wonderingly. Home. Then there was a home for such as he. He wasn’t alone, he needn’t keep his solitary self apart; he could be with his own kind. “How,” he began, rummaging through the long list of questions he needed to put, and settling for, “How did you know my name?”
The man laughed. “Did you think you were the only Wolf in Wheeling? We keep our eyes open, Tropile. We have to; that’s what Wolves are like.” And then, as Tropile opened his mouth for another question, “If you’re wondering about your wife, I think she must have heard us coming before you did. I think we saw her about half a mile from here, back along your track. Heading back to Wheeling as fast as she could go.”
Tropile nodded. That was better, after all; Gala was no Wolf, though he had tried his best to make her one.
One of the men closed the door; another did something with levers and wheels; the vanes whooshed around overhead; the helicopter bounced on its stiff-sprung landing legs and then rocked up and away.
For the first time in his life Glenn Tropile looked down on the land.
They didn’t fly high—but Glenn Tropile had never flown at all, and the two or three hundred feet of air beneath him made him faint and queasy. They danced through the passes in the West Virginia hills, crossed icy streams and rivers, swung past old empty towns which no longer had even names of their own. They saw no one.
It was something over four hundred miles to where they were going, so one of the men told him. They made it easily before dark.
Tropile walked through the town in the evening fight. Electricity flared white and violet in the buildings around him. Imagine! Electricity was calories, and calories were to be hoarded.
There were other walkers in the street. Their gait was not the economical shuffle with pendant arms. They burned energy visibly. They swung. They strode. It had been painted on his brain in earliest childhood that such walking was wrong, reprehensible, silly, debilitating. It wasted calories. These people did not look debilitated, and they didn’t seem to mind wasting calories.
It was an ordinary sort of town, apparently named Princeton. It did not have the transient look to it of, say, Wheeling, or Altoona, or Gary, in Tropile’s experience. It looked like—well, it looked permanent. Tropile had heard of a town called Princeton but it happened that he had never passed through it south-warding or northbound. There was no reason why he or anybody should have or should not have. Still, there was a possibility, once he thought of it, that things were somehow so arranged that they should not; perhaps it was all on purpose. Like every town it was underpopulated, but not as much so as most. Perhaps one living space in five was used. A high ratio.
The man beside him was named Haendl, one of the men from the helicopter. They hadn’t talked much on the flight and they didn’t talk much now. “Eat first,” Haendl said, and took Tropile to a bright and busy sort of food stall. Only it wasnt a stall, it was a restaurant.
This Haendl, what to make of him? He should have been disgusting, nasty, an abomination. He had no manners whatever. He didn’t know, or at least didn’t use, the Seventeen Conventional Gestures. He wouldn’t let Tropile walk behind him and to his left, though he was easily five years Tropile’s senior. When he ate, he ate; the Sip of Appreciation, the Pause of First Surfeit, the Thrice Proffered Share meant nothing to him; he laughed when Tropile tried to give him the Elder’s Portion.
Cheerfully patronizing, this man Haendl said to Tropile: “That stuffs all right when you don’t have anything better to do with your time. You poor mutts don’t. You’d die of boredom without your inky-pinky cults, and you don’t have the resources to do anything bigger. Yes, I do know the Gestures. Seventeen delicate ways of communicating emotions too refined for words to express—or too dangerous! The hell with all of that, Tropile. I’ve got words, and I’m not afraid to use them. Saves time. You’ll learn; we all did.”
“But,” said Tropile, trying frantically to rebalance the budget of behavior in his mind, “what about waste? What about the need to economize on food? Where does it all come from?”
“We steal it from the sheep,” the man said brutally. “You’ll do it too. Now why don’t you just shut up and eat?”
Tropile ate silently, trying to think.
A man arrived, threw himself in a chair, glanced curiously at Tropile and said: “Haendl, die Somerville Road. The creek backed up when it froze. Flooded, bad. Ruined everything.”
Tropile ventured: “The flood ruined the road?”
“The road? No. Say, you must be the fellow Haendl went after? Tropile, that’s the name?” He leaned across the table, pumped Tropile’s hand. “We had the road nicely blocked,” he explained. “The flood washed it clean. Now we have to block it again.”
Haendl said: “Take the tractor if you need it.” The man nodded and left. Haendl said, “Eat up, we’re wasting time. About that road.
We keep them blocked up, see? Why let a lot of Sheep in and out?”
“Sheep?”
“The opposite,” said Haendl, “of Wolves.”
Haendl explained. Take ten billion people, and say that out of every million of them, one—just one—is different. He has a talent for survival; call him Wolf. Ten thousand of him, in a world of ten billion.
Squeeze them, freeze them, cut them down. Let old Rejoice-in-Messias loom in the terrifying sky and so abduct the earth that the human race is decimated, fractionated, reduced to what is in comparison a bare handful of chilled, stunned survivors. There aren’t ten billion people in the world any more. No, not by a factor of a thousand. Maybe there are as many as ten million, more or less, rattling around in the space their enormous Elder Generations made for them.
And of these ten million, how many are Wolf?