The man nodded and left.
Haendl said: "Eat up. We're wasting time. About that road--we keep all
entrances blocked up, see? Why let a lot of sheep in and out?"
"Sheep?"
"The opposite," said Haendl, "of Wolves."
* * * * *
Take ten billion people and say that, out of every million of them,
one--just one--is different. He has a talent for survival; call him
Wolf. Ten thousand of him in a world of ten billion.
Squeeze them, freeze them, cut them down. Let old Rejoice in Messias
loom in the terrifying sky and so abduct the Earth that the human race
is decimated, fractionated, reduced to what is in comparison a bare
handful of chilled, stunned survivors. There aren't ten billion people
in the world any more. No, not by a factor of a thousand. Maybe there
are as many as ten million, more or less, rattling around in the space
their enormous Elder Generations made for them.
And of these ten million, how many are Wolf?
Ten thousand.
"You understand, Tropile?" said Haendl. "We survive. I don't care what
you call us. The sheep call us Wolves. Me, I kind of call us Supermen.
We have a talent for survival."
Tropile nodded, beginning to understand. "The way I survived the House
of the Five Regulations."
Haendl gave him a pitying look. "The way you survived thirty years of
Sheephood before that. Come on."
It was a tour of inspection. They went into a building, big, looking
like any other big and useful building of the ancients, gray stone
walls, windows with ragged spears of glass. Inside, though, it wasn't
like the others. Two sub-basements down, Tropile winced and turned away
from the flood of violet light that poured out of a quartz bull's-eye
on top of a squat steel cone.
"Perfectly harmless, Tropile--you don't have to worry," Haendl boomed.
"Know what you're looking at? There's a fusion reactor down there.
Heat. Power. All the power we need. Do you know what that means?"
He stared soberly down at the flaring violet light of the inspection
port.
"Come on," he said abruptly to Tropile.
Another building, also big, also gray stone. A cracked inscription over
the entrance read: ORIAL HALL OF HUMANITIES. The sense-shock this time
was not light; it was sound. Hammering, screeching, rattling, rumbling.
Men were doing noisy things with metal and machines.
"Repair shop!" Haendl yelled. "See those machines? They belong to our
man Innison. We've salvaged them from every big factory ruin we could
find. Give Innison a piece of metal--any alloy, any shape--and one of
those machines will change it into any other shape and damned near any
other alloy. Drill it, cut it, plane it, weld it, smelt it, zone-melt
it, bond it--you tell him what to do and he'll do it.
"We got the parts to make six tractors and forty-one cars out of
this shop. And we've got other shops--aircraft in Farmingdale and
Wichita, armaments in Wilmington. Not that we can't make some armaments
here. Innison could build you a tank if he had to, complete with
105-millimeter gun."
"What's a tank?" Tropile asked.