There was sure to be an advantage in it for Glenn Tropile; there was an advantage in anything, if you looked for it. He watched and waited. He picked his spot with care, so that he could see Citizen Boyne inside the baker’s stall, making a dismal botch of slashing his quarter-kilo of bread from the Morning Loaf.
He waited for Boyne to come racing out. . .
Boyne did.
A yell—loud, piercing: It was Citizen Germyn, shrilling: “Amok, amok!” A scream. An enraged wordless cry from Boyne, and the baker’s knife glinting in the faint light as Boyne swung it. And then Citizens were scattering in every direction—all of the Citizens but one.
One citizen was under the knife—his own knife, as it happened; it was the baker himself. Boyne chopped and chopped again. And then Boyne came out, like a roaring flame, the bread knife whistling about his head. The gentle Citizens fled panicked before him. He struck at their retreating forms, and screamed and struck again. Amok!
It was the one particular circumstance when they forgot to be gracious—one of the two, Tropile corrected himself as he strolled across to the baker’s stall. His brow furrowed; because there was another circumstance when they lacked grace, and one which affected him more nearly.
He watched the maddened creature, Boyne, already far down the road, chasing a knot of Citizens around a corner. Tropile sighed and stepped into the baker’s stall to see what he might gain from this. Boyne would wear himself out; the surging rage would leave him as quickly as it came; he would be a sheep again, and the other sheep would close in and capture him. That was what happened when a Citizen ran amok. It was a measure of what pressures were on the Citizens that at any moment there might be one gram of pressure too much, and one of them would crack. It happened all the time. It had happened here in Wheeling twice within the past two months; Glenn Tropile had seen it happen in Pittsburgh, Altoona and Bronxville.
There is a limit to pressure.
Tropile walked into the baker’s stall and looked down without emotion at the slaughtered baker; Tropile had seen corpses before.
He looked around the stall, calculating. As a starter, he bent to pick up the quarter-kilo of bread Boyne had dropped, dusted it off and slipped it into his pocket. Food was always useful. Given enough food, perhaps Boyne would not have run amok. Was it simple hunger they cracked under? Or the knowledge of the thing on Mount Everest, or the hovering Eyes, or the sought-after-dreaded prospect of Translation, or merely the strain of keeping up their laboriously figured lives? Did it matter? They cracked and ran amok, and Tropile never would, and that was what mattered.
He leaned across the counter, reaching for what was left of the Morning Loaf—
And found himself staring into the terrified large eyes of Citizeness Germyn.
She screamed: “Wolf! Citizens, help me! Here is a Wolf!”
Tropile faltered. He hadn’t even seen the damned woman, but there she was, rising up from behind the counter, screaming her head off: “Wolf, Wolf!”
He said sharply: “Citizeness, I beg you—” But that was no good. The evidence was on him, and her screams would fetch others. Tropile panicked. He started toward her to silence her; but that was no good, either. He whirled. She was screaming, screaming, and there were people to hear. Tropile darted into the street, but they were popping out of every doorway now, they were appearing from each rat’s hole in which they had hid to escape Boyne. “Please!” he cried, angry and frightened. “Wait a minute!” But they weren’t waiting. They had heard the woman, and maybe some of them had seen him with the bread. They were all around him—no, they were all over him; they were clutching at him, tearing at his soft, warm furs. They pulled at his pockets, and the stolen twists of salt spilled accusingly out. They ripped at his sleeves, and even the stout, unweakened seams ripped open. He was fairly captured.
“Wolf!” they were shouting. “Wolf!” It drowned out the distant noise from where Boyne had finally been run to earth, a block and more away. It drowned out everything.
It was the other circumstance when they forgot to be gracious: When they had trapped a Son of the Wolf.
3
Engineering had long ago come to an end.
Engineering is possible under one condition of the equation:
Total Available Calories / Population = Artistic-Technological Style
When the ratio Calories-to-Population is large—say five thousand or more, five thousand daily calories for every living man—then the Artistic-Technological Style is big. People carve Mount Rushmore; they build great foundries; they manufacture an enormous automobile to carry one housewife half a mile for the purchase of one lipstick. Life is coarse and rich where C:P is large. At the other extreme, where C:P is too small, life does not exist at all. It has been starved out.
Experimentally, add little increments to C:P and it will be some time before the right-hand side of the equation becomes significant. But at last, in the 1,000-1,500 calorie range, Artistic-Technological Style firmly appears in self-perpetuating form. C:P in that range produces the small arts, the appreciations, the peaceful arrangements of necessities into subtle relationships of traditionally-agreed-upon virtue. Japan, locked into its Shogunate prison, picked scanty food from mountainsides and beauty out of arrangements of lichens and paper. The small, inexpensive sub-sub-arts are characteristic of the 1,000-1,500 calorie range.
And this was the range of Earth; the world of a hundred million men, after the planet was stolen by its new binary.
Some few persons inexpensively pursued the study of science with pencil and renewable paper, but the last research accelerator had long since been shut down; the juice from its hydropower dam was needed to supply meager light to a million homes and to cook the pablum for two million brand-new babies. In those days, one dedicated Byzantine wrote the definitive encyclopedia of engineering (though he was no engineer). Its four hundred and twenty tiny volumes exhausted the Gizeh pyramid and its unknown contractor, the Wall of Shih-Hwang Ti, the Gothic builders, Brunei who changed the face of England, the Roeblings of Brooklyn, Groves of the Pentagon, Duggan of the Anti-Ballistic-Missile System (before C:P dropped to the point where war became vanishingly implausible), Levern of Operation Up. But this encyclopedist could not use a slide rule without thinking, faltering, jotting down his decimals.
And then the magnitudes grew less.
Under the tectonic and climatic battering of the great abduction of Earth from its primary, under the sine-wave advances to and retreats from the equator of the ice sheath as the small successor Suns waxed, waned, died and were replaced, the ratio C:P remained stable. C had diminished enormously; so had P. As the calories to support life grew scarce, so the consuming mouths of mankind grew fewer in number.
The forty-fifth small Sun shone on no engineers.
Not even on the binary. The Pyramids, the things on the binary, the thing on Mount Everest, were not engineers. They employed a crude metaphysic based on dissection and shoving.
They had no elegant field theories. All they knew was that everything came apart and that if you pushed a thing it would move. If your biggest push would not move a thing, you took it apart and pushed the parts, and then it would move. Sometimes, for nuclear effects, they had to take things apart into as many as 3 X 109 pieces, and shove each piece very carefully.
By taking-apart and shoving, then, they landed their one space ship on the burnt-out sunlet that had once been Earth’s familiar Moon. You could not say that the Pyramids were late in the re-creation of the Sun. The Pyramids were never late. That was impossible to them, for they had no sense of time at all. They knew “when” things must be done, because they possessed a planet-sized network of instruments, actuators and ancillary devices of every sort. When the mean global temperature of the Earth dropped below a certain pre-set value, a sensor reported the need to rekindle the Moon. Then it was done. The pyramids did not concern themselves with fiddly little details such as the movement of Earth’s air masses. It happened that Australia and Africa were exceptionally balmy that year, so the global average was slow to drop . . . and the calculations of the Skywatchers therefore wrong.