She looked up, troubled.
"What would I do," he demanded, "if a beam fell on you one day while
you were scrambling through the fancy groceries? How can you take such
chances? Don't you _know_ what you mean to me?"
She sniffed a couple of times. She said brokenly: "Darling, about last
night--I'm sorry--" and miserably held out the cup. He took it and set
it down. He took her hand, looked up at her, and kissed it lingeringly.
He felt her tremble. Then she gave him a wild, adoring look and flung
herself into his arms.
A new dominance cycle was begun at the moment he returned her frantic
kisses.
Glenn knew, and Gala knew, that he had over her an edge, an
advantage--the weather gauge, initiative of fire, percentage, the
can't-lose lack of tension. Call it anything, but it was life itself to
such as Glenn Tropile. He knew, and she knew, that having the advantage
he would press it and she would yield--on and on, in a rising spiral.
He did it because it was his life, the attaining of an advantage over
anyone he might encounter; because he was (unwelcomely but justly)
called a Son of the Wolf.
* * * * *
A world away, a Pyramid squatted sullenly on the planed-off top of the
highest peak of the Himalayas.
It had not been built there. It had not been carried there by Man or
Man's machines. It had--come, in its own time; for its own reasons.
Did it wake on that day, the thing atop Mount Everest, or did it
ever sleep? Nobody knew. It stood, or sat, there, approximately a
tetrahedron. Its appearance was known: constructed on a base line of
some thirty-five yards, slaggy, midnight-blue in color. Almost nothing
else about it was known--at least, to mankind.
It was the only one of its kind on Earth, though men thought (without
much sure knowledge) that there were more, perhaps many thousands more,
like it on the unfamiliar planet that was Earth's binary, swinging
around the miniature Sun that hung at their common center of gravity
like an unbalanced dumbbell. But men knew very little about that planet
itself, only that it had come out of space and was now there.
Time was when men had tried to label that binary, more than two
centuries before, when it had first appeared. "Runaway Planet." "The
Invader." "Rejoice in Messias, the Day Is at Hand." The labels were
sense-free; they were Xs in an equation, signifying only that there was
_something_ there which was unknown.
"The Runaway Planet" stopped running when it closed on Earth.
"The Invader" didn't invade; it merely sent down one slaggy,
midnight-blue tetrahedron to Everest.
And "Rejoice in Messias" stole Earth from its sun--with Earth's old
moon, which it converted into a miniature sun of its own.
That was the time when men were plentiful and strong--or thought they
were--with many huge cities and countless powerful machines. It didn't
matter. The new binary planet showed no interest in the cities or the
machines.
There was a plague of things like Eyes--dust-devils without dust,
motionless air that suddenly tensed and quivered into lenticular
shapes. They came with the planet and the Pyramid, so that there
probably was some connection. But there was nothing to do about the
Eyes. Striking at them was like striking at air--was the same thing, in
fact.
While the men and machines tried uselessly to do something about it,
the new binary system--the stranger planet and Earth--began to move,
accelerating very slowly.
But accelerating.
In a week, astronomers knew something was happening. In a month, the
Moon sprang into flame and became a new sun--beginning to be needed,
for already the parent Sol was visibly more distant, and in a few years
it was only one other star among many.
* * * * *
When the little sun was burned to a clinker, they--whoever "they"
were, for men saw only the one Pyramid--would hang a new one in the
sky. It happened every five clock-years, more or less. It was the same
old moon-turned-sun, but it burned out, and the fires needed to be
rekindled.
The first of these suns had looked down on an Earthly population of ten
billion. As the sequence of suns waxed and waned, there were changes,
climatic fluctuation, all but immeasurable differences in the quantity
and kind of radiation from the new source.
The changes were such that the forty-fifth such sun looked down on a
shrinking human race that could not muster up a hundred million.
A frustrated man drives inward; it is the same with a race. The
hundred million that clung to existence were not the same as the bold,
vital ten billion.
The thing on Everest had, in its time, received many labels, too: The
Devil, The Friend, The Beast, A Pseudo-living Entity of Quite Unknown
Electrochemical Properties.
All these labels were also Xs.
If it did wake that morning, it did not open its eyes, for it had no
eyes--apart from the quivers of air that might or might not belong
to it. Eyes might have been gouged; therefore it had none. So an
illogical person might have argued--and yet it was tempting to apply
the "purpose, not function" fallacy to it. Limbs could be crushed; it
had no limbs. Ears could be deafened; it had none. Through a mouth, it
might be poisoned; it had no mouth. Intentions and actions could be
frustrated; apparently it had neither.
It was there. That was all.
It and others like it had stolen the Earth and the Earth did not know
why. It was there. And the one thing on Earth you could not do was hurt
it, influence it, or coerce it in any way whatever.
It was there--and it, or the masters it represented, owned the Earth by
right of theft. Utterly. Beyond human hope of challenge or redress.