"Take you home. Yeah. Where you belong, Tropile. Not back to Wheeling,
if that's what is worrying you."
"Where I--"
"Where you belong."
Then Tropile understood.
He got into the helicopter wonderingly. Home. So there _was_ a home
for such as he. He wasn't alone. He needn't keep his solitary self
apart. He could be with his own kind.
He remembered Gala Tropile and paused. One of the men said with quick
understanding: "Your wife? I think we saw her about half a mile from
here. Heading back to Wheeling as fast as she could go."
Tropile nodded. That was better, after all. Gala was no Wolf, though he
had tried his best to make her one.
One of the men closed the door; another did something with levers and
wheels; the vanes whooshed around overhead; the helicopter bounced on
its stiff-sprung landing legs and then rocked up and away.
For the first time in his life, Glenn Tropile looked _down_ on the land.
They didn't fly high--but Glenn Tropile had never flown at all, and
the two or three hundred feet of air beneath made him faint and queasy.
They danced through the passes in the West Virginia hills, crossed icy
streams and rivers, swung past old empty towns which no longer even had
names of their own. They saw no one.
It was something over four hundred miles to where they were going, one
of the men told him. They made it easily before dark.
* * * * *
As Tropile walked through the town in the evening light, electricity
flared white and violet in the buildings around him. Imagine!
Electricity was calories, and calories were to be hoarded.
There were other walkers in the street. Their gait was not the
economical shuffle with pendant arms. They burned energy visibly. They
swung. They _strode_. It had been chiseled on his brain in earliest
childhood that such walking was wrong, reprehensible, debilitating. It
wasted calories. These people did not look debilitated and they didn't
seem to mind wasting calories.
It was an ordinary sort of town, apparently named Princeton. It did not
have the transient look to it of, say, Wheeling, or Altoona, or Gary,
in Tropile's experience. It looked like--well, it looked permanent.
Tropile had heard of a town called Princeton, but it happened that
he had never passed through it southwarding or northbound. There was
no reason why he or anybody should or should not have. Still, there
was a possibility, once he thought of it, that things were somehow so
arranged that they should not; maybe it was all on purpose. Like every
town, it was underpopulated, but not so much so as most. Perhaps one
living space in five was used. A high ratio.
The man beside him was named Haendl, one of the men from the
helicopter. They hadn't talked much on the flight and they didn't talk
much now. "Eat first," Haendl said, and took Tropile to a bright and
busy sort of food stall. Only it wasn't a stall. It was a restaurant.
This Haendl--what to make of him? He should have been disgusting,
nasty, an abomination. He had no manners whatever. He didn't know, or
at least didn't use, the Seventeen Conventional Gestures. He wouldn't
let Tropile walk behind him and to his left, though he was easily five
years Tropile's senior. When he ate, he _ate_. The Sip of Appreciation,
the Pause of First Surfeit, the Thrice Proffered Share meant nothing to
him. He laughed when Tropile tried to give him the Elder's Portion.
Cheerfully patronizing, this man Haendl said to Tropile: "That stuffs
all right when you don't have anything better to do with your time.
Those poor mutts don't. They'd die of boredom without their inky-pinky
cults and they don't have the resources to do anything bigger. Yes, I
do know the Gestures. Seventeen delicate ways of communicating emotions
too refined for words. The hell with them, Tropile. I've got words.
You'll learn them, too."
Tropile ate silently, trying to think.
A man arrived, threw himself in a chair, glanced curiously at Tropile
and said: "Haendl, the Somerville Road. The creek backed up when it
froze. Flooded bad. Ruined everything."