Ten thousand.
“You understand, Tropile. We survive. I don’t care what you call us. The Sheep call us Wolves, and me, I kind of like to call us Supermen. But we survive.”
Tropile nodded, beginning to understand. “The way I survived the House of the Five Regulations.”
Haendl gave him a pitying look. “The way you survived thirty years of Sheephood before that. Come on.”
It was a tour of inspection. They went into a building, big, looking like any other big and useless building of the ancients, gray stone walls, windows with ragged shards of glass. Only inside it wasn’t like die others. Two sub-basements down, Tropile winced and turned away from the flood of violet light that poured out of a quartz bulls-eye on top of a squat steel cone. “Perfectly harmless, Tropile, you don’t have to worry,’ Haendl boomed. “Know what you’re looking at? There’s a fusion reactor down there. Heat. Power. All the power we need. Do you know what that means?” He stared somberly down at the flaring violet light of the inspection port. “Come on,” he said abruptly. Another building, also big, also gray stone. A cracked inscription over the entrance read: “—ORIAL HALL OF HUMANITIES.” The sense-shock this time was not light, it was sound. Hammering, screeching, rattling, rumbling. Men were doing noisy things with metal and machines. “Repair shop!” Haendl yelled. “See those machines? They belong to our man Innison. We’ve salvaged them from every big factory ruin we could find. Give Innison a piece of metal—any alloy, any shape—and one of those machines will change it into any other shape and damned near any other alloy. Drill it, cut it, plane it, weld it, smelt it, zone-melt it, bond it—you tell him what to do and he’ll do it. We got the parts to make six tractors and forty-one cars out of this shop. And we’ve got other shops—aircraft in Farmingdale and Wichita, armaments in Wilmington. Not that we can’t make some armaments here. Innison could build you a tank if he had to, complete with one-oh-five millimeter gun.”
Tropile said: “What’s a tank?”
Haendl only looked at him and said: “Come on!”
Tropile’s head spun dizzily and all the spectacles merged and danced in his mind. They were incredible. All of them.
Fusion pile, machine shop, vehicular garage, aircraft hangar. There was a storeroom under the seats of a football stadium, and Tropile’s head spun on his shoulders again as he tried to count the cases of coffee and canned soups and whisky and beans. There was another storeroom, only this one was called an armory. It was filled with . . . guns. Guns that could be loaded with cartridges, of which they had very many; guns which, when you loaded them and pulled the trigger, would fire.
Tropile said, remembering: “I saw a gun once that still had its firing pin. But it was rusted solid.”
“These work, Tropile. You can kill a man with them. Some of us have.”
“Kill—”
“Get that Sheep look out of your eyes, Tropile! What’s the difference how you execute a criminal? And what’s a criminal but someone who represents a danger to your world? We prefer a gun instead of the Donation of the Spinal Tap, because it’s quicker, because it’s less messy—and because we don’t like to drink spinal fluid, no matter what imaginary therapeutic or symbolic value it has. You’ll learn.”
But he didn’t add “come on.” They had arrived where they were going.
It was a small room in the building that housed the armory, and it held, among other things, a rack of guns.
“Sit down,” said Haendl, taking one of the guns out of the rack thoughtfully and caressing it as the doomed Boyne had his watch-case. It was the latest pre-Pyramid model rifle, antipersonnel, short-range. It would not bunch a cluster of shots in a coifee can at much more than two and a half miles.
“All right,” said Haendl, stroking the stock. “You’ve seen the works, Tropile. You’ve lived thirty years with Sheep; you’ve seen what they have and what we have; I don’t have to ask you to make a choice. I know what you choose. The only thing left is to tell you what we want from you.”
A feint pulsing began inside of Glenn Tropile. “I expected we’d be getting to that.”
“Why not? We’re not Sheep. We don’t act that way. Quid pro quo. Remember that, it saves time. You’ve seen the quid. Now we come to the quo.” He leaned forward. “Tropile, what do you know about the Pyramids?”
“Nothing,” Tropile said promptly.
Haendl nodded. “Right. They’re all around us and our lives are beggared because of them. And we don’t even know why. We don’t know what they are. Did you know that one of the
Sheep was Translated in Wheeling when you leftr
“Translated?” Tropile listened with his mouth open while Haendl told him about what had happened to Citizen Boyne. “So he didn’t make the Donation after all,” he said.
“Might have been better if he had,” said Haendl. “We don’t know. Still, it gave you a chance to get away. We had heard—never mind how just yet—that Wheeling’d caught itself a Wolf, so we came after you. But you were already gone.”
Tropile said, faintly annoyed: “You were damn near too late.”
“Oh, no, Tropile. We’re never too late. If you don’t have enough gumption to get away from Sheep, you’re no Wolf; simple as that. But there’s this Translation; we know it happens; but we don’t even know what it is. All we know, people disappear. There’s a new sun in the sky every five years or so. Who makes it? The Pyramids. How? We don’t know that. Sometimes something floats around in the air, and we call it an Eye. It has something to do with Translation, something to do with the Pyramids. What? We don’t know that.”
“We don’t know much of anything,” interrupted Tropile, trying to hurry him along.
“Not about the Pyramids, no.” Haendl shook his head. “Hardly anyone has ever seen one, for that matter.”
“Hardly—You mean, you have?”
“Oh, yes. There’s a Pyramid on Mount Everest, you know. That’s not just a story, it’s true. I’ve been there, and it’s there. At least, it was there five years ago, right after the last Sun Re-creation. I guess it hasn’t moved. It just sits there.”
Tropile listened, marveling. To have seen a real Pyramid! Almost he had thought of them as legends, contrived to account for such established physical facts as the Eyes and Translations, as children account for gifts at Ecksmass with Kringle-San. But this incredible man had seen it!
“Somebody dropped a H-bomb on it, way back,” Haendl went on, “and the only thing that happened is that now the North Col is a crater. You can’t move it. You can’t hurt it. But it’s alive. It has been there, alive, for a couple of hundred years; and that’s about all we know about the Pyramids. Right?”
“Right.”
Haendl stood up. “Tropile, that’s what all of this is all about!’ He gestured around him. “Guns, tanks, airplanes—we want to know more! We’re going to find out more, and then we’re going to fight.”
There was a jarring note, and Tropile caught at it, sniffing the air. Somehow—perhaps it was his sub-adrenals that told him—this very positive, very self-willed man was just the slightest bit unsure of himself. But Haendl swept on and Tropile for a moment forgot to be alert.
“We had a party up Mount Everest five years ago,” he was saying. “We didn’t find out a thing. Five years before that, and five years before that—every time there’s a new sun, while it is still warm enough to give a party a chance to climb up the sides, we send a team up there. It’s a rough job. We give it to the new boys, Tropile. Like you.”
There it was. He was being invited to attack a Pyramid.
Tropile hesitated, delicately balanced, trying to get the feel of this negotiation. This was Wolf against Wolf; it was hard. There had to be an advantage—