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 saps and his life.
It didn't matter to the Pyramid that the pretext for the execution
was an act which human history had long stopped considering a capital
crime. Ritual sacrifice in any 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. Or,
at least, in the human race of which he was a part.
Nobody knew much about the Pyramids, but everybody knew _that_ much.
They wanted something--else why would they have bothered to steal the
Earth?
The date of the theft was 2027. A great year--the year of the first
landings on the Runaway Planet that had come blundering into the Solar
System. Maybe those landings were a mistake--although they were a very
great triumph, too; but maybe if it hadn't been for the landings, the
Runaway Planet might have run right through the ecliptic and away.
However, the triumphal mistake was made and that was the first time a
human eye saw a Pyramid.
Shortly after--though not before a 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 first, and only, Interplanetary Expeditionary Force was 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 and
the ice grew thick, because where was there to go? Not Mars. Not the
Moon, which was trailing alone. 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.
The sun grew too distant to be of use, and out of the old Moon, the
Pyramid aliens built a new small sun in the sky--a five-year sun that
burned out and was replaced, again and again and endlessly again.
It had been a fierce struggle against unbeatable odds on the part of
the ten billion; and when the uselessness of struggle was demonstrated
at last, many of the ten billion froze to death, and many of them
starved, and nearly all of the rest had something frozen or starved
out of them; and what was left, two centuries and more later, was more
or less like Citizen Boyne, except for a few--a very few--like Glenn
Tropile.
* * * * *
Gala Tropile stared miserably at her husband. "I want to get out of
here," he was saying urgently. "They mean to kill me. Gala, you know
you can't make yourself suffer by letting them kill me!"