[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction October and November 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Appallingly, the Earth and the Moon had been
kidnapped from the Solar System--but who were
the kidnappers and what ransom did they want?
I
Roget Germyn, banker, of Wheeling, West Virginia, a Citizen, woke
gently from a Citizen's dreamless sleep. It was the third-hour-rising
time, the time proper to a day of exceptional opportunity to appreciate.
Citizen Germyn dressed himself in the clothes proper for the
appreciation of great works--such as viewing the Empire State ruins
against storm clouds from a small boat, or walking in silent single
file across the remaining course of the Golden Gate Bridge. Or as
today--one hoped--witnessing the Re-creation of the Sun.
Germyn with difficulty retained a Citizen's necessary calm. One was
tempted to meditate on improper things: Would the Sun be re-created?
What if it were not?
He put his mind to his dress. First of all, he put on an old and
storied bracelet, a veritable identity bracelet of heavy silver links
and a plate which was inscribed:
PFC JOE HARTMANN
_Korea_
1953
His fellow jewelry-appreciators would have envied him that bracelet--if
they had been capable of such an emotion as envy. No other ID bracelet
as much as two hundred and fifty years old was known to exist in
Wheeling.
His finest shirt and pair of light pants went next to his skin,
and over them he wore a loose parka whose seams had been carefully
weakened. When the Sun was re-created, every five years or so, it was
the custom to remove the parka gravely and rend it with the prescribed
graceful gestures ... but not so drastically that it could not be
stitched together again. Hence the weakened seams.
This was, he counted, the forty-first day on which he and all of
Wheeling had donned the appropriate Sun Re-creation clothing. It was
the forty-first day on which the Sun--no longer white, no longer
blazing yellow, no longer even bright red--had risen and displayed a
color that was darker maroon and always darker.
* * * * *
It had, thought Citizen Germyn, never grown so dark and so cold in all
of his life. Perhaps it was an occasion for special viewing. For surely
it would never come again, this opportunity to see the old Sun so near
to death....
One hoped.
Gravely, Citizen Germyn completed his dressing, thinking only of
the act of dressing itself. It was by no means his specialty, but
he considered, when it was done, that he had done it well, in the
traditional flowing gestures, with no flailing, at all times balanced
lightly on the ball of the foot. It was all the more perfectly
consummated because no one saw it but himself.
He woke his wife gently, by placing the palm of his hand on her
forehead as she lay neatly, in the prescribed fashion, on the Woman's
Third of the bed.
The warmth of his hand gradually penetrated the layers of sleep. Her
eyes demurely opened.
"Citizeness Germyn," he greeted her, making the assurance-of-identity
sign with his left hand.
"Citizen Germyn," she said, with the assurance-of-identity inclination
of the head which was prescribed when the hands are covered.
He retired to his tiny study.
It was the time appropriate to meditation on the properties of
Connectivity. Citizen Germyn was skilled in meditation, even for a
banker; it was a grace in which he had schooled himself since earliest
childhood.
Citizen Germyn, his young face composed, his slim body erect as he
sat but in no way tense or straining, successfully blanked out, one
after another, all of the external sounds and sights and feelings that
interfered with proper meditation. His mind was very nearly vacant
except of one central problem: Connectivity.
Over his head and behind, out of sight, the cold air of the room seemed
to thicken and form a--call it a blob; a blob of air.
There was a name for those blobs of air. They had been seen before.
They were a known fact of existence in Wheeling and in all the world.
They came. They hovered. And they went away--sometimes not alone. If
someone had been in the room with Citizen Germyn to look at it, he
would have seen a distortion, a twisting of what was behind the blob,
like flawed glass, a lens, like an eye. And they were called Eye.
Germyn meditated.
The blob of air grew and slowly moved. A vagrant current that spun out
from it caught a fragment of paper and whirled it to the floor. Germyn
stirred. The blob retreated.
Germyn, all unaware, disciplined his thoughts to disregard the
interruption, to return to the central problem of Connectivity. The
blob hovered....
From the other room, his wife's small, thrice-repeated throat-clearing
signaled to him that she was dressed. Germyn got up to go to her, his
mind returning to the world; and the overhead Eye spun relentlessly,
and disappeared.
* * * * *
Some miles east of Wheeling, Glenn Tropile--of a class which found it
wisest to give itself no special name, and which had devoted much time
and thought to shaking the unwelcome name it had been given--awoke on
the couch of his apartment.
He sat up, shivering. It was cold. The damned Sun was still bloody dark
outside the window and the apartment was soggy and chilled.
He had kicked off the blankets in his sleep. _Why couldn't_ he learn
to sleep quietly, like anybody else? Lacking a robe, he clutched the
blankets around him, got up and walked to the unglassed window.
It was not unusual for Glenn Tropile to wake up on his couch. This
happened because Gala Tropile had a temper, was inclined to exile
him from her bed after a quarrel, and--the operative factor--he knew
he always had the advantage over her for the whole day following the
night's exile. Therefore the quarrel was worth it. An advantage was, by
definition, worth anything you paid for it or else it was no advantage.
He could hear her moving about in one of the other rooms and cocked an
ear, satisfied. She hadn't waked him. Therefore she was about to make
amends. A little itch in his spine or his brain--it was not a physical
itch, so he couldn't locate it; he could only be sure that it was
there--stopped troubling him momentarily; he was winning a contest. It
was Glenn Tropile's nature to win contests ... and his nature to create
them.
Gala Tropile, young, dark, attractive, with a haunted look, came in
tentatively carrying coffee from some secret hoard of hers.
Glenn Tropile affected not to notice. He stared coldly out at the cold
landscape. The sea, white with thin ice, was nearly out of sight, so
far had it retreated as the little sun waned.
"Glenn--"
Ah, good! _Glenn._ Where was the proper mode of
first-greeting-one's-husband? Where was the prescribed throat-clearing
upon entering a room?
Assiduously, he had untaught her the meticulous ritual of manners that
they had all of them been brought up to know; and it was the greatest
of his many victories over her that sometimes, now, _she_ was the
aggressor, _she_ would be the first to depart from the formal behavior
prescribed for Citizens.
Depravity! Perversion!
Sometimes they would touch each other at times which were not the
appropriate coming-together times, Gala sitting on her husband's lap in
the late evening, perhaps, or Tropile kissing her awake in the morning.
Sometimes he would force her to let him watch her dress--no, not now,
for the cold of the waning sun made that sort of frolic unattractive,
but she had permitted it before; and such was his mastery over her that
he knew she would permit it again, when the Sun was re-created....
If, a thought came to him, _if_ the Sun was re-created.
* * * * *
He turned away from the cold outside and looked at his wife. "Good
morning, darling." She was contrite.
He demanded jarringly: "Is it?" Deliberately he stretched, deliberately
he yawned, deliberately he scratched his chest. Every movement was
ugly. Gala Tropile quivered, but said nothing.
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. Still better, 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 Citizen 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 due--not even
if it lay abandoned and rotting.
It was one of the differences between Glenn Tropile and the people he
moved among.
I've got it made, he exulted; it was what I needed to clinch my victory
over her.