Tropile flung himself on the better of the two chairs, one hairy leg protruding from under the wrapped blankets. His wife was on her best behavior—in his unique terms; she didn’t avert her eyes. “What’ve you got there?” he asked. “Coffee?”
“Yes, dear. I thought—”
“Where’d you get it?”
The haunted eyes looked away. Good again, thought Glenn Tropile, more satisfied even than usual; she’s been ransacking an old warehouse again. It was a trick he had taught her, and like all of the illicit tricks she had learned from him a handy weapon when he chose to use it. It was not prescribed that a Citizeness should rummage through Old Places. A Citizen did his work, whatever that work might be—banker, baker or furniture repairman. He received what rewards were his due for the work he did. A Citizen never took anything that was not his—no, not even if it lay abandoned and fated to spoil.
It was one of the differences between Glenn Tropile and the people he moved among.
I've got it now, he exulted; it was what he needed to clinch his victory over her. He spoke: “I need you more than I need coffee, Gala.”
She looked up, troubled. “What would I do,” he demanded, “if a beam fell on you one day while you were scrambling through the fancy groceries? How can you take such chances? Don’t you know what you mean to me?”
She sniffed a couple of times. She said brokenly: “Darling, about last night—I’m sorry—” and miserably held out the cup. He took it and swallowed the coffee thoughtfully. Then he set it down. He took her hand, looked up at her, and kissed the hand lingeringly.
He felt her tremble. Then she gave him a wild, adoring look and flung herself into his arms.
A new dominance cycle was begun at the moment he returned her frantic kisses.
Glenn knew, and Gala knew, that he had over her an edge—an advantage; the weather gauge; initiative of fire; percentage; the can’t-lose vigorish. Call it anything, but it was life itself to Glenn Tropile’s kind. He knew, and she knew, that having the advantage he would press it and she would yield—on and on, in a rising spiral. He did it because it was his life, the attaining of an advantage over whomever he might encounter; because he was a Son of the Wolf.
A world away a Pyramid squatted sullenly on the planed-off top of the highest peak of the Himalayas.
It had not been built there. It had not been carried there by man or man’s machines. It had come in its own time for its own reasons.
Did it wake on that day, the thing atop Mount Everest? For that matter, did it ever sleep? Nobody knew. It stood or sat, there, approximately a tetrahedron. Its appearance was known; constructed on a base line of some thirty-five yards, slaggy, midnight-blue in color. Human beings had toiled up Everest’s grim slopes to learn that much. Almost nothing else about it was known to mankind.
It was the only one of its kind on Earth; though men thought (without much sure knowledge) that there were more, perhaps many more, like it on the unfamiliar planet that was now Earth’s binary, swinging around the miniature Sun that now hung at their common center of gravity. But men knew very little about that planet itself, for that matter, only that it had come out of space, and was now there.
Time was when men had tried to give a name to that binary, more than two centuries before, when it first appeared. “Runaway Planet.” “The Invader.” “Rejoice in Messias, the Day Is at Hand.” The labels might as well have been belches; they were sensefree; they were x’s in an equation, signifying only that there was something there which was unknown.
“The Runaway Planet” stopped running when it closed on Earth.
“The Invader” didn’t invade; it merely sent down one slaggy, midnight-blue tetrahedron to Everest.
And “Rejoice in Messias” stole Earth from its sun—with Earth’s old moon, which it converted into a miniature sun of its own.
That was the time when men were plentiful and strong—or thought they were; with many huge cities and countless powerful machines. It didn’t matter. The new binary planet showed no interest in the cities or the machines. They didn’t show any interest in Earth’s weapons, either—no, not even when the worst and most deadly of them were deployed against the invaders. The invaders simply went about their business.
Whatever that was.
For four billion years and more the Earth had rolled decorously around the Sun, always in its proper place between the orbits of Venus and Mars, always with its captive Moon for a companion. There was no reason that should ever change.
It did change, though. Something reached out from the interloper planet and changed everything. That something, whatever it was, took hold of the Earth as it sailed around the Sun, and the Earth left its ancient round and followed after, Moon and all. At first the motion was very slow. Then it quickened.
In a week astronomers knew something was happening. In a month the old Sun was perceptibly farther away, tinier, less warming. There was panic about that—added to all the other panics that swept the globe.
Then the Moon sprang into flame.
That was a problem in nomenclature, too. What do you call a Moon when it becomes a Sun? It did, though. Just in time, for already the parent Sol was visibly more distant, and in a few years it was only one other star among many.
When the inferior little sun was burned to a clinker they—whoever “they” were, for men saw only the one Pyramid—would hang a new one in the sky; it happened every five clock-years, more or less. It was the same old moon-turned-sun; but it burned out, and the fires needed to be rekindled. The first of these suns had looked down on an Earthly population of ten billion. As the sequence of suns waxed and waned there were changes; climatic fluctuation; all but immeasurable differences in the quantity and kind of radiation from the new source.
The changes were such that the forty-fifth such sun looked down on a shrinking human race that could not muster up a hundred million.
A frustrated man drives inward; it is the same with a race. The hundred million that clung to existence were not the same as the bold, vital ten billion.
The thing on Everest had in its time received many labels, too: The Devil, The Friend,
The Beast, A Pseudo-living Entity of Quite Unknown Electrochemical Properties.
All these labels were also x’s.
If it did wake that morning it did not open its eyes, for it had no eyes—apart from the quivers of air that might or might not belong to it. Eyes might have been gouged; therefore it had none; so an illogical person might have argued—and yet it was tempting, to apply the “purpose, not function” fallacy to it. Limbs could be crushed; it had no limbs. Ears could be deafened; it had none. Through a mouth it might be poisoned; it had no mouth. Intentions and actions could be frustrated; apparently it had neither.
It was there; that was all.
It and others like it had stolen the Earth and the Earth did not know why. It was there. And the one thing on Earth you could not do was hurt it, influence it, or coerce it in any way whatever.
It was there—and it, or the masters it represented, owned the Earth by right of theft. Utterly. Beyond human hope of challenge or redress.
2
Citizen and Citizeness Roget Germyn walked down Pine Street in the chill and dusk of—one hoped—a Sun Re-creation Morning.
It was the convention to pretend that this was a morning like any other morning. It was not proper either to cast frequent hopeful glances at the sky, nor yet to seem disturbed or afraid because this was, after all, the forty-first such morning since those whose specialty was Sky-Viewing had come to believe the Recreation of the Sun was near.