“My God, be careful!” Germyn screamed. “They’re atomics!”
“I know,” she said shortly. She steadied the fore-end of the tube on a hummock, got her sight-picture, and put her finger on the button. A woman who had stood foolishly in line behind her and caught the rocket’s exhaust blast clapped her hands to her burnt-away shoulder and collapsed, writhing. Nobody paid the slightest attention to her; their eyes were only for the little fireball that streaked into the leading repair machine and turned it into a big fireball. A red-purple mushroom cloud leaped into being above it, but before the cap formed Gala Tropile was snapping at Germyn: “Load! Load!”
That sector of the dark planet’s equator was bright for the next hour with the death-throes of the hundred machines. Some men and women died with them. One box of the hot-wire rockets consisted of duds that had slipped through inspection down in Princeton. That group fought off the repair machines with rifle fire to pock and dimple their gears, and shaped charges hurled at a suicidal short range. Two were left of the thirty human beings in that group by the time their neighbors could turn their own rocket launchers to the flank.
18
After all was silent and the dead were numbered, the Pyramids came, gliding silently and slowly on their cushions of electrostatic force. They fitted themselves into the black, cliff-high booths and waited . . .
They would wait thus until the end of time for food to absorb so they could go about their business of making more food to absorb, so they could . . .
The human beings, at first scared and angry and unable to turn their backs on the monsters, were at last surprised to find that they could pity the great dead stupid things.
19
If, a lifetime of labor later, one of those skinny and starving Ellis Island immigrants had returned, plump and secure, to his shtetl or Mediterranean fishing village, he would have been hopelessly out of place. No subways! No elevators! No all-night supermarkets! No friends, even, because the ones he had once known had changed so—or he had—that there was nothing to talk about. Such a person would have been an alien among his own people.
No more so than Glen Tropile, when he returned to life.
The naked, sweating, pugnacious members of the mouse pack tried at first to welcome him. He would have none of it. Not even from Gala Tropile—especially not from Gala Tropile, because the woman made the unforgivable mistake of throwing her arms around him. Sweat-stained, shaggy-haired, smelly—she was lucky her husband didn’t throw up on her. He might have, if there had been anything in his stomach to void. That came later, when he realized that he would once again have to contend with the disgusting business of eating food, not to mention the even more disgusting business of getting rid of what the food turned into. (He mourned for the sweet, clean nutrient fluid of his tank—and its occupants, his more-than-siblings, his very self.)
Fortunately there was a war to be won. His task was to lead his army into battle.
But then that was done . . . and he was, tragically, still alive.
He closed himself off as best he could. His hands went often to the places at his temples where he had once been joined to the rest of the Snowflake. His eyes looked at infinity. He offered no speech, though he would answer questions:
Haendclass="underline" “How can we get back to Earth?”
Tropile: “The ship used for Sun kindling will be found at Latitude North 32.08, Longitude West 16.53. It will accommodate 114 persons and make the passage in six hours and forty-five minutes.”
Innison: “How can we disconnect all our people from these damned machines? How do we wake them up?”
Tropile: “Neurosurgery machines used for disconnection of Components will be found against the North wall of the Reception and Reprocessing Complex and may be programmed manually to administer electro-shock through the forebrain which will have the effeet of scrambling the pleasure-reflex you refer to by implication as ‘sleep’: after some hours of disorientation and mania the primary personality will assert itself. Notice should be taken that there will be a mortality rate of about seven per cent for this operation.”
Germyn: “Can I get you anything, Citizen Tropile, for your comfort? Are you all right? Do you wish to see your wife?”
Tropile: “No. No. No.”
The reclamation of the Components proceeded exponentially. At the start there was only the ragged tribe, reduced to two hundred by its war, tentatively recognizing a friend or a husband here and there wired into the network of the planet. With trepidation the neurosurgery machines, the first ones programmed by the hands of Tropile, were brought to the Components and they were awakened. Then there were a hundred and ten, and the ten had useful shadow-memories. They “guessed” that you worked this machine so—and that’s the way it was. Then there were four hundred and ten, and the tribe was outnumbered and a little resentful of these well-fed come-latelies who had not been in the battle at all and who knew so much about this damned planet. Then there was a regular assembly line set up to process Components out, and the Sun ship, on a ferry run to return them to an astounded Earth.
Tropile was among those returned, sitting relaxed but unmoving, his eyes dead. He sat thus for three months before it occurred to somebody that “electro-shock through the fore-brain” might be what he needed. It was.
Tropile was Tropile again, living, aching, looking up at masked faces.
Surgeons and nurses.
He blinked at them and said groggily: “Where am we?” And then he remembered.
He was back on Earth; he was merely human again.
Someone came bustling into the room and he knew without looking that it was Haendl. “We beat them, TropileP’ he cried. “No, cancel that. You beat them. Beautiful work, Tropile. Beautiful! You’re a credit to the name of Wolf!”
The surgeons stirred uneasily, but apparently, Tropile thought, there had been changes, for they did no more than that.
Tropile touched his temples fretfully, and his fingers rested on gauze bandages. It was true. He was out of circuit. The long reach of his awareness was cut short at his skull; there was no more of the infinite sweep and grasp he had known as part of the Snowflake in the nutrient fluid.
“Too bad,” he whispered hopelessly.
“What?” Haendl frowned. The nurse next to him whispered something and he nodded. “Oh, I see. You’re still a little groggy, right? Well, that’s not hard to understand.”
“Yes,” said Tropile, and closed his ears, though Haendl went on talking. After a while Tropile pushed himself up and swung his legs over the side of the operating table. He was stark naked, and once that would have bothered him enormously; but now it didn’t seem to matter.
“Find me some clothes, will you?” he asked. “I’m back. I might as well start getting used to it.”
Glenn Tropile found that he was a returning hero, attracting a curious sort of worship wherever he went. It was not, he thought after careful analysis, exactly what he might have expected. For instance, a man who went out and killed a dragon in the old days, why, he was received with great gratitude and rejoicing, and if there was a prince’s daughter around, he married her. Fair enough, after all. And Tropile had slain what was undoubtedly a foe more potent than any number of dragons.
But he tested the attention he received, and there was no gratitude in it. It was odd.
What it was like most of all, he thought, was the sort of attention a reigning baseball champion might get—in a country where cricket was the national game. He had done something which, everybody agreed, was an astonishing feat; but about which nobody seemed to care. Indeed, there was an area of accusation in some of the attention he got. Item, nearly ninety thousand erstwhile Components had now been brought back to ambient life, most of them with their families long dead, all of them a certain drain on the limited resources of the planet. And what was Glenn Tropile going to do about it? Item, the old distinctions between Citizen and Wolf no longer made too much sense now that so many Citizens fought shoulder to shoulder with Sons of the Wolf. But didn’t Glenn Tropile think he had gone a little too far there? And item—well, looking pretty far ahead, of course, but still—Well, just what was Glenn Tropile going to do about providing a new sun for Earth, when the old one wore out and there would be no Pyramids to tend the fire?