Germyn, trying not to tremble—when all his buried fears screamed Wolf!—said honestly: “I don’t know if I can. I’ll—I’ll have to sleep on it.”
Haendl looked at him for a moment. Then he shrugged. Almost to himself he said: “Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe we can’t do anything about it anyhow. All right. I’ll come back in the morning, and if you’ve made up your mind to help, we 11 start trying to make plans. And if you’ve made up your mind the other way—well, I’ll have to fight off a few Citizens. Not that I mind that.”
Germyn stood up and bowed. He began the ritual Four Urgings, but Haendl was having none of it. “Spare me that,” he growled. “Meanwhile, Germyn, if I were you I wouldn’t make any long-range plans. You may not be here to carry them out.’
Germyn said thoughtfully: “And if you were you?”
“I’m not making any, either,” Haendl said grimly.
Citizen Germyn, feeling utterly tainted with the scent of the Wolf in his home, tossed in his bed, sleepless. His eyes were wide open, staring at the dark ceiling. He could hear his wife’s decorous breathing from the foot of the bed—soft, regular, it should have been lulling him to sleep.
It was not. Sleep was very far away.
Germyn was a brave enough man, as courage is measured among Citizens. That is to say, he had never been afraid; though it was true that there had been very little occasion. But he was afraid now. He didn’t want to be Translated.
The Wolf, Haendl, had put his finger on it: Perhaps you still think Translation is a fulfillment. But he didn’t, of course; that was riduclous now. Translation—the reward of meditation, the gift bestowed on only a handful of gloriously transfigured persons. That was one thing. But the sort of Translation that was now involved was nothing like that; not if it happened to children; not if it happened to Gala Tropile; not if it happened to a machine.
And Glenn Tropile was involved in it.
Germyn tossed and turned.
There is an ancient and infallible recipe for curing warts. Take a blade of grass, boil it in a pot of water, cool the water, soak the wart in it for nine seconds. The wart will go away—provided that during those nine seconds you do not think of the word “rhinoceros.”
What was keeping Citizen Germyn awake was the attempt to not think of the word “rhinoceros”—or, in this case, “connectivity.” It had come to him that if (a) people who knew Glenn Tropile were likely to be Translated, and (b) people who meditated on connectivity were likely to be Translated, then, a plus b, people who knew Glenn Tropile and didn’t want to be Translated had better not meditate on connectivity.
It was very difficult to not think of connectivity.
Endlessly he calculated sums in arithmetic in his mind, recited the Five Regulations, composed Greeting Poems and Verses on Viewing. And endlessly he kept coming back to Tropile, to Translation, to connectivity. He didn’t want to be Translated. But still the thought had a certain lure. What was it like? he wondered. Did it hurt?
Well, probably not, he speculated. It was very fast, according to Haendl’s report—if you could believe what an admitted Son of the Wolf reported. But he had to, this time. Well, if it was fast—at that kind of speed, he thought, perhaps you would die instantly. Maybe Tropile was dead. Was that possible? But no, it didn’t seem so; after all, there was the fact of the connection between Tropile and so many of the recently Translated. What was the connection there? Or, generalizing, what connections were involved in—
He rescued himself and summoned up the first image that came to mind. It happened to be Tropile’s wife. Gala Tropile; who had disappeared herself, in this very room.
Gala Tropile. He stuck close to the thought of her, a little pleased with himself. That was the trick of not thinking of connectivity—to think so hard and fully of something else as to leave no room in the mind for the unwanted thought. He dwelt on the thought of Gala Tropile at enormous length and detail. He thought of the curve of her waist and her long, stringy hair, as well as her long, but not at all stringy, legs.
A lifetime’s habits could not easily be overcome, and so from time to time an unbidden thought said, Warning. Not your woman. Glenn Tropile’s woman. Beware. But, he reflected, where was Tropile, really? What possible harm could there be in thinking of his woman? Or, for that matter, of him?
It was really quite easy to think of that pretty and emotional woman, Gala Tropile, the Citizeness of Citizen Glenn Tropile, rather than connectivity. Citizen Germyn was pleased that he did it so well.
12
On Mount Everest, the sullen stream of off-and-on responses that was “mind” to the Pyramid had taken note of a new input signal from its ancillary systems on the home planet.
It was not a critical mind. Its only curiosity was a restless urge to shove-and-haul, and there was no shove-and-haul about what to it was perhaps the analogue of a man’s hunger pang. The input signal said: Do thus.
It obeyed.
Call it craving for a new flavor. Where once it had patiently waited for the state that Citizens knew as meditation on connectivity, and the Pyramid itself perhaps knew as a stage of ripeness in the fruits of its wrist-watch mine, now it wanted a different taste. Unripe? Overripe? At any rate, different.
Accordingly, the h-f wheep, wheep changed in tempo and in key, and the bouncing echoes changed, and . . . and there was a ripe one to be plucked! (Its name was Innison.) And there another. (Gala Tropile.) And another, another—oh, a hundred others; a babe from Tropile’s nursery school and the Wheeling jailer and a woman Tropile once had coveted on the street.
Once the ruddy starch-to-sugar mark of ripeness had been what human beings called Meditation on Connectivity and the Pyramids knew as a convenient blankness; now the sign was a sort of empathy with the Component named Tropile. Not just Tropile. The modulations of the input signal changed, and other signs of ripeness from other parts of the world were noted and acted upon, and so the Eyes swarmed over Cairo and Kiev and Khartoum. It didn’t matter to the Pyramid. When a Component signaled readiness, it swung its electrostatic scythe; it harvested.
It did not occur to the Pyramid on Mount Everest that a Component might be directing its actions. How could it?
Perhaps the Pyramid on Mount Everest wondered, if it knew how to wonder, when it noticed that different criteria were involved in selecting Components these days. (If it knew how to “notice.”) Surely even a Pyramid might wonder when, without warning or explanation, its orders were changed—not merely to harvest a different sort of Component, but to drag along with the flesh-and-blood needful parts a clanking assortment of machinery and metal, as began to happen. Machines? Why would the Pyramids need to Translate machines?
But why, on the other hand, would a Pyramid bother to question a directive, even if it were able to?
At any rate, it didn’t. It swung its scythe, and gathered in what it was caused to gather in.
Men sometimes eat green fruit and come to regret it; it is the same with Pyramids.
And Citizen Germyn fell into the unsuspected trap. Avoiding connectivity, he thought of Glenn Tropile; and the unfelt h-f pulses found him out.