“There is an advantage,” Haendl said aloud.
Tropile jumped, but then he remembered: Wolf against Wolf. Haendl went on: “What you get out of it is your life, in the first place. You understand you can’t get out now. We don’t want Sheep meddling around. And in the second place, there’s a considerable hope of gain.” He stared at Tropile with a dreamer’s eyes. “We don’t send parties up there for nothing, you know. We want to get something out of it. What we want is the earth.”
“The earth?” It reeked of madness; but this man wasn’t mad.
“Some day, Tropile, it’s going to be us against them. Never mind the Sheep, they don’t count. It’s going to be Pyramids and Wolves, and the Pyramids won’t win. And then—”
It was enough to curdle the blood. This man was proposing to fight, and against the invulnerable, the almost godlike Pyramids, at that!
But he was glowing, and the fever was contagious. Tropile felt his own blood begin to pound. Haendl hadn’t finished his “and then—”, but he didn’t have to. The “and then” was obvious: And then the world takes up again from the day the wandering planet first came into view. And then we, somehow, learn how to drive this old planet right back to its own solar system. And then we put an end to the five-year cycle of frost and hunger. And then—
And then the world would be worth living in again, and it would be Wolves who would rule it.
“By God, Haendl,” cried Glenn Tropile, “I believe it can happen!”
Haendl merely smiled and nodded.
“I’ll do it!” Tropile amplified. He raced on, “Let’s see, every new expedition to Mount Everest tries some new weapon against the Pyramid, right? Okay. What’s left? We know nukes won’t work. I suppose if that’s true then no chemical explosion could do any damage to it. What about acids? Subsonic vibrations? What about, I don’t know, some kind of germ warfare? I can see that I’ll want to talk to the people who have been on the previous expeditions right away—”
He stopped in midflight. The smile on Haendl’s face had taken on a disturbingly lacquered appearance, as though the man were trying to preserve it. The voice was overhearty, too: “I’ll get you all the transcripts of their radio reports, Tropile.”
Tropile studied him carefully for a moment. When he spoke his voice was quite calm. “Which means, I guess,” he said, “that none of those people got back alive to talk to, right?
But you said you’d actually seen the Pyramid yourself.
“Well, I did!” said Haendl, and then added lamely, “Through a telescope, from the five-thousand-foot base camp.”
“I see,” said Tropile mildly.
Then he laughed.
What difference did it make, anyway? If this whole enterprise was really all very silly, it was also, at least, a new kind of thing to think about. Its promises might be false. But they also might not be—or it might be possible to find something real amid all the dreamy hopes and self-deceptions. Glenn Tropile was Wolf. He would do his best to find a way of getting an advantage in any circumstances. If one thing failed he would try another, and this was something new to try.
Besides, it was the only game in town.
Tropile grinned at Haendl. “You can put away the gun, friend. You’ve signed me up.”
7
The year began again, a year that ran for one thousand, eight hundred and twenty-five days on the calendar, for forty-three thousand and eight hundred hours on the clock. First came some thirty days of spring, during which the renewed sunlet poured heat into the ice and oceans and rocks, which greedily absorbed it. Ice melted, oceans warmed, and rocks at last were no longer frozen to the touch but gently warm.
Ten million citizens stirred to spring; once more they had survived. Farmers scratched the ground again, charcoal burners ritually sealed their kilns and put their hands to carpentry or roadmending for a while, and fifteen hundred devotees of the Ice Cult started their pilgrimages from all over North America to see the breakup at Niagara.
Then after thirty days it was summer, long and sweltering. Plants burst forth for reaping and the farmers swiftly stirred their soil and planted again, and reaped again, and planted for the last time. The coastal cities as usual were inundated by the spreading floods from the polar caps, furnishing refined pleasure to those who fancied Submergence. A fine year, they told one another; a vintage year—the flat top of the Lever Building vanishing from sight under a sunset blaze!
And through the spring and summer Glenn Tropile learned how to be a Wolf.
The way, he glumly found, lay through supervising the colony’s nursery school. It wasn’t what he had expected, but it had the advantage that while his charges were learning, he was learning too.
One jump ahead of the three-year-olds, he found tnat the “wolves,” far from being predators on the “sheep,” existed with them in a far more complicated ecological relationship. There were Wolves all through sheepdom; they leavened the dough of society.
In barbarously simple prose a primer said: “The Sons of the Wolf are good at numbers and money. You and your friends play money games almost as soon as you can talk, and you can think in percentages and compound interest when you want to. Most people are not able to do this.”
True, thought Tropile sub-vocally, reading aloud to the tots. That was how it had been with him.
“Sheep are afraid of the Sons of the Wolf. Those of us who live among them are in constant danger of detection and death—although ordinarily a Wolf can take care of himself against any number of Sheep.” True, too.
“It is one of the most dangerous assignments a Wolf can be given to live among the Sheep. Yet it is essential. Without us, they would die—of stagnation, of rot, eventually of hunger.”
It didn’t have to be spelled out any further. Sheep can’t mend their own fences.
The prose was horrifyingly bald and the children were horrifyingly—he choked on the word, but managed to form it in his mind—competitive. The verbal taboos lingered, he found, after he had broken through the barriers of behavior.
But it was distressing, in a way. At an age when future Citizens would have been learning their Little Pitcher Ways, these children were learning to fight. The perennial argument about who would get to be Big Bill Zeckendorf when they played a strange game called “Zeckendorf and Hilton” sometimes ended in bloody noses.
And nobody—nobody at all—meditated on connectivity.
Tropile was warned not to do it himself. Haendl said grimly: “We don’t understand it, and we don’t like what we don’t understand. We’re suspicious animals, Tropile. As the children grow older we give them just enough practice so they can go into one meditation and get the feel of it—or pretend to, at any rate. If they have to pass as Citizens they’ll need that much. But more than that we do not allow.”
“Allow?” Somehow the word grated; somehow his sub-adrenals began to pulse.
“Allow! We have our suspicions, and we know for a fact that sometimes people disappear when they meditate. There’s that much truth in the sheep talk about Translation. We don’t want to disappear. We judge that it is not a good thing to disappear. Don’t meditate, Tropile. You hear?”
But later, he had to argue the point. He picked a time when Haendl was free, or as nearly free as that man ever was. The whole adult colony had been out on what they used as a parade ground—once it had been a “football field,” Haendl said. They had done their regular twice-a-week infantry drill, that being one of the prices one paid for living among the free, progressive Wolves instead of the dull and tepid Sheep. Tropile was mightily winded, but he cast himself on the ground near Haendl, caught his breath and said: “Haendl, about Meditation.”