8
Haendl plodded angrily through the high grass toward the dull throb of the Diesel.
Maybe it had been a mistake to take this Glenn Tropile into the colony. He was more Citizen than Wolf—no, cancel that, Haendl thought; he was more Wolf than Citizen. But the Wolf in him was tainted with sheep’s blood. He competed like a Wolf; but in spite of everything he refused to give up some of his sheep’s ways. Meditation. He nad been cautioned against meditation. But had he given it up?
He had not.
If it had been entirely up to Haendl, Glenn Tropile would have found himself out on his ear, back among the Sheep, or else dead. Fortunately for Tropile, it was not entirely up to Haendl. The community of Wolves was by no means a democracy, but the leader had a certain responsibility to his constituents, and the responsibility was this: He couldn’t afford to be wrong. Like the Old Gray Wolf who protected Mowgli, he had to defend his actions against attack; if he failed to defend, the pack would pull him down.
And Innison thought they needed Tropile—not in spite of the taint of the Citizen, that he bore, but because of it.
Haendl bawled: “Tropile! Tropile, where are you?” There was only the wind and the thrum of the Diesel. It was enormously irritating. Haendl had other things to do than to chase after Glenn Tropile. And where was he? There was the Diesel, idling wastefully; there the end of the patterned furrows Tropile had plowed. There a small fire, burning—
And there was Tropile.
Haendl stopped, frozen, his mouth opened to yell Tropile’s name.
It was Tropile, all right, staring with concentrated, oyster-eyed gaze at the fire and the little pot of water it boiled. Staring. Meditating. And over his head, like flawed glass in a pane, was the thing Haendl feared most of all things on Earth. It was an Eye.
Tropile was on the very verge of being Translated . . . whatever that was.
Maybe at last this was the time to find out what that was! Haendl ducked back into the shelter of the high grass, knelt, plucked his radio communicator from his pocket, urgently called. “Innison! Innison, will somebody for God’s sake put Innison on!” Seconds passed, voices answered; then there was Innison.
“Innison, listen! You wanted to catch Tropile in the act of meditation? All right, you’ve got him. The old wheat field, south end, under the elms around the creek. Got it? Get here fast, Innison—there’s an Eye forming above him!”
Luck! Lucky that they were ready for this, and only by luck, because it was the helicopter that Innison had patiently assembled for the attack on Everest that was ready now, loaded with instruments, planned to weigh and measure the aura around the Pyramid—now at hand when they needed it. That was luck, but there was driving hurry involved too; it was only a matter of minutes before Tropile heard the wobbling drone of the copter, saw the vanes fluttering low over the hedges, dropping to earth behind the elms. Haendl raised himself cautiously and peered. Yes, Tropile was still there, and the Eye still above him! But the noise of the helicopter had frayed the spell; Tropile stirred; the Eye wavered and shook—
But did not vanish.
Thanking what passed for his God, Haendl scuttled circuitously around the elms and joined Innison, furiously closing switches and pointing lenses, at the copter. . . .
They saw Tropile sitting there, the Eye growing larger and closer over his head. They had time—plenty of time; oh, nearly a minute of time. They brought to bear on the silent and unknowing form of Glenn Tropile every instrument that the copter carried. They were waiting for Tropile to disappear—He did.
Innison and Haendl ducked at the thunderclap as air rushed in to replace him.
‘We’ve got what you wanted,” Haendl said harshly. “Let’s read some instruments.’
Throughout the Translation high-tensile magnetic tape on a madly spinning drum had been hurtling under twenty-four recording heads at a hundred feet a second. Output to the recording heads had been from every kind of measuring device they had been able to conceive and build, all loaded on the helicopter for use on Mount Everest—all now pointed directly at Glenn Tropile. They had, for the instant of Translation, readings from one microsecond to the next on the varying electric, gravitational, magnetic, radiant and molecular-state conditions in his vicinity.
They got back to Innison’s workshop and the laboratory inside it in less than a minute; but it took hours of playing back the magnetic pulses into machines that turned them into scribed curves on coordinate paper before Innison had anything resembling an answer.
He said: “No mystery. I mean, no mystery except the speed. Want to know what happened to Tropile?”
“I do,” said Haendl.
“A pencil of electrostatic force maintained by a pinch effect bounced down from the approximate azimuth of Everest—God knows how they handled the elevation—and charged him and the area positive. A big charge; clear off the scale. They parted company. He was bounced straight up; a meter off the ground, a correcting vector was applied; when last seen he was headed fast in the direction of the Pyramids’ binary. Fast, I say. So fast that I would guess he’ll get there alive. It takes an appreciable time, a good part of a second, for his protein to coagulate enough to make him sick and then kill him. If they strip the charges off him immediately on arrival, as I should imagine they will, he’ll live.”
“Friction—”
“Be damned to friction,” Innison said calmly. “He carried a packet of air with him and there was no friction. How? I don’t know. How are they going to keep him alive in space, without the charges that hold the air? I don’t know. If they don’t maintain the charges, can they beat light speed? I don’t know. I tell you what happened, I can’t tell you how.”
Haendl stood up thoughtfully. “It’s something,” he said grudgingly.
“It’s more than we’ve ever had—a complete reading at the instant of Translation!”
“We’ll get more,” Haendl promised. “Innison, now you know what to look for. Keep looking for it. Keep every possible detection device monitored twenty-four hours a day. Turn on everything you’ve got that’ll find a sign of imposed modulation. At any sign—or at anybody’s hunch that there might be a sign—I’m to be called. If I’m eating. If I’m sleeping. If
I’m enjoying the pangs of love. Call me, you hear? Maybe you were right about Tropile; maybe he did have some use. Maybe he’ll give the Pyramids a bellyache.”
Innison, flipping the magnetic-tape drum to rewind, said thoughtfully: “It’s too bad they’ve got him. We could have used some more readings.”
“Too bad?” Haendl laughed sharply. “Maybe not, Innison. This time they’ve got themselves a Wolf.”
The Pyramids did have a Wolf—a datum which did not matter in the least to them.
It is not possible to know what “mattered” to a Pyramid except by inference. But it is possible to know that they had no way of telling Wolf from Citizen.
The planet which was their home—Earth’s binary—was small, dark, atmosphereless and waterless. It was honeycombed and packed with a myriad of devices.
In the old days, when technology had followed war, luxury, government and leisure, their sun had run out of steam; and at about the same time the Pyramids had run out of the Components they imported from a neighboring planet. They used the last of their Components to implement their stolid metaphysic of dissection and pushing. They pushed their planet.
They knew where to push it.
Each Pyramid as it stood was a radio-astronomy observatory powerful and accurate beyond the wildest dreams of Earthly radio-astronomers. From this start, they built instruments to aid their naked senses. They went into a kind of hibernation, reducing their activity to a bare trickle except for a small “crew,” and headed for the star. They had every reason to believe they would find more Components there, and they did.