He was gently corrected. “We shall make the Donation of fluid, which is proper for Citizens who have grossly misbehaved. That is all,” Citizen Boyne said calmly. “Is not the difference intelligible to a Son of the Wolf?”
True culture demanded that that remark be accepted as a friendly joke, probably based on a truth—how else could an unpalatable truth be put in words? Otherwise the unthinkable might happen. They might quarrel. They might even come to blows! A person might be hurt that way!
The appropriate mild smile formed on Tropile’s lips, but harshly he wiped it off. They were going to stab him in the spine with a great catheter and kill him. He would not smile for them! And the effort was enormous. “I’m not a Son of the Wolf!” he howled, desperate, knowing he was protesting to the one man of all men in Wheeling who didn’t care, and who could do least about it if he did. “What’s this crazy talk about Wolves? I don’t know what a Son of the Wolf is, and I don’t think you or anybody does. All I know is that I was acting sensibly. And everybody began howling! You’re supposed to know a Son of the Wolf by his unculture, his ignorance, his violence. But you chopped down three people, and I only picked up a piece of bread! And I’m supposed to be the dangerous one!”
“Wolves never know they’re Wolves,” sighed Citizen Boyne. “Fish probably think they’re birds, and you evidently think you’re a Citizen. Would a Citizen speak as you are speaking!”
“But they’re going to kill us!”
“Then why aren’t you composing your death poem?”
Glenn Tropile took a deep breath. Something was biting him.
It was bad enough that he was about to die, bad enough that he had done nothing worth dying for. But what was gnawing at him now had nothing to do with dying.
The percentages were going the wrong way. This pale Citizen was getting an edge on him.
An engorged gland in Tropile’s adrenals—it was only a pinhead in Citizen Boyne’s—trickled subtle hormones into his bloodstream. He could die, yes—that was a skill everyone had to acquire, sooner or later. But while he was alive, he could not stand to be bested in an encounter, an argument, a relationship. It was not in Glenn Tropile’s makeup to allow anyone to defeat him, in anything, without a fight. Wolf? Call him Wolf. Call him Operator, or Percentage Player; call him Sharp Article; call him Gamesman.
If there was an advantage to be derived, he would derive it. It was the way he was put together.
He said, stalling for time to scheme, “You’re right. Stupid of me, I must have lost my head!”
He thought. Some men think by poking problems apart, some think by laying facts side-by-side to compare. Tropile’s thinking was neither of these, but a species of judo. He conceded to his opponent such things as Strength, Armor, Resource. He didn’t need these things for himself; to every contest the opponent brought enough of them to supply two. It was Tropile’s habit (and definitely a Wolfish one, he had to admit) to use the opponent’s strength against him, to break the opponent against his own steel walls.
He thought.
The first thing, he thought, was to make up his mind: He was Wolf. Then let him be Wolf—he wouldn’t stay around for the spinal tap, he would go from there. But how?
The second thing was to make a plan. There were obstacles. Citizen Boyne was one of the obstacles. Harmane, the Keeper of the House of the Five Regulations, was another.
Where was the pole which would permit him to vault over these hurdles? There was, he thought, always his wife, Gala. He owned her; she would do what he wished—provided he made her want to do it.
Yes, Gala. He walked to the door and shouted to Citizen Harmane: “Keeper! Keeper, I must see my wife. Have her brought to me!”
It was impossible for the Keeper to refuse; he didn’t. He called gently, “I will invite the Citizeness,” and toddled away.
The third thing was time.
Tropile turned to Citizen Boyne. “Citizen,” he said persuasively, “since your death poem is ready and mine is not, will you be gracious enough to go first when they—when they come?”
Citizen Boyne looked temperately at his cellmate and made the Quirked Smile.
“You see?” he said. “Wolf.” And that was true; but what was also true was that he couldn’t refuse.
4
Half a world away, the midnight-blue Pyramid sat on its planed-off peak as it had sat since the days when Earth had a real Sun of its own.
It was of no importance to the Pyramid that Glenn Tropile was about to receive a slim catheter into his spine, to drain his sap and his life. It didn’t matter to the Pyramid that the spinal fluid would then be swallowed by his fellows, or that the pretext for the execution was an act which human history used not to consider a capital crime. Ritual sacrifice in whatever guise made no difference to the Pyramid. The Pyramid saw them come and the Pyramid saw them go—if the Pyramid could be said to “see”. One human being more or less, what matter? Who bothers to take a census of the cells in a hangnail?
And yet, the Pyramid did have a kind of interest in Glenn Tropile, and in the human race of which he was a part.
Nobody knew much about the Pyramid, but everybody knew that much. They wanted something—else why would they have bothered to steal the Earth?
And that they had definitely done.
The year was 2027 A.D., a true date to live in infamy. There were other years that human beings had chosen to remember—1941; 1066; 1492—but nothing, ever, with consequences so vast as the year 2027, no, not since those earliest and forgotten dates when the first amphibian crawled out of the sea or the first hairy biped picked up a tool. Twenty twenty-seven topped them all. The Runaway Planet had slipped feloniously into the solar system, intent on burglary, and ever since it had been making off with its plunder.
Courageous human beings had blasted out into space to investigate. Three shiploads of them had actually landed on the Pyramid planet (they didn’t know that was what it was, then.) They didn’t even report, really. The first message back, right after touchdown, was, “It seems, ah, very barren.” There wasn’t any second.
Perhaps those landings were a mistake. Some thought so. Some thought that if the human race had cowered silent under its blanket of air the Pyramids might have run right through the ecliptic and away.
However, the triumphal “mistake” was made, and that may have been the first time a human eye saw a Pyramid.
Shortly after—though not before the radio message was sent—that human eye winked out forever; but by then the damage was done. What passed in a Pyramid for “attention” had been attracted. The next thing that happened set the wireless channels between Palomar and Pernambuco, between Greenwich and the Cape of Good Hope, buzzing and worrying, as astronomers all over the Earth reported and confirmed and reconfirmed the astonishing fact that our planet was on the move. Rejoice in Messias had come to take us away.
A world of ten billion people, some of them brilliant, many of them brave, built and flung the giant rockets of Operation Up at the invader: Nothing.
The two ships of the Interplanetary Expeditionary Force were boosted up to no-gravity and dropped onto the new planet to strike back: Nothing.
Earth moved spirally outward. If a battle could not be won, then perhaps a migration. New ships were built in haste. But they lay there rusting as the sun grew small ana the ice grew thick; because where was there to go? Not Mars; not the Moon which was trailing along; not choking Venus or crushing Jupiter.
The migration was defeated as surely as the war, there being no place to migrate to.
One Pyramid came to Earth, only one. It shaved the crest off the highest mountain there was, and squatted on it. An observer? A warden? Whatever it was, it stayed.