"Oh, no, Tropile," Haendl assured him. "We're never too late. If you
don't have enough guts and ingenuity to get away from sheep, you're no
wolf--simple as that. But there's this Translation. We know it happens,
but we don't even know what it is. All we know, people disappear.
There's a new sun in the sky every five years or so. Who makes it?
The Pyramids. How? We don't know that. Sometimes something floats
around in the air and we call it an Eye. It has something to do with
Translation, something to do with the Pyramids. What? We don't know
that."
"We don't know much of anything," interrupted Tropile, trying to hurry
him along.
"Not about the Pyramids, no." Haendl shook his head. "Hardly anyone has
ever seen one, for that matter."
"Hardly--You mean you have?"
"Oh, yes. There's a Pyramid on Mount Everest, you know. That's not just
a story. It's true. I've been there, and it's there. At least, it was
there five years ago, right after the last Sun Re-creation. I guess it
hasn't moved. It just sits there."
Tropile listened, marveling. To have seen a real Pyramid! Almost he had
thought of them as legends, contrived to account for such established
physical facts as the Eyes and Translation, as children with a Santa
Claus. But this incredible man had seen it!
"Somebody dropped an H-bomb on it, way back," Haendl continued, "and
the only thing that happened is that now the North Col is a crater. You
can't move the Pyramid. You can't hurt it. But it's alive. It has been
there, alive, for a couple of hundred years; and that's about all we
know about the Pyramids. Right?"
"Right."
Haendl stood up. "Tropile, that's what all of this is all about!" He
gestured around him. "Guns, tanks, airplanes--we want to know more!
We're going to find out more and then we're going to fight."
There was a jarring note and Tropile caught at it, sniffing the air.
Somehow--perhaps it was his sub-adrenals that told him--this very
positive, very self-willed man was just the slightest bit unsure of
himself. But Haendl swept on and Tropile, for a moment, forgot to be
alert.
"We had a party up Mount Everest five years ago," Haendl was saying.
"We didn't find out a thing. Five years before that, and five years
before _that_--every time there's a sun, while it is still warm enough
to give a party a chance to climb up the sides--we send a team up
there. It's a rough job. We give it to the new boys, Tropile. Like you."
There it was. He was being invited to attack a Pyramid.
Tropile hesitated, delicately balanced, trying to get the _feel_ of
this negotiation. This was Wolf against Wolf; it was hard. There had to
be an advantage--
"There is an advantage," Haendl said aloud.
Tropile jumped, but then he remembered: Wolf against Wolf.
Haendl went on: "What you get out of it is your life, in the first
place. You understand you can't get out now. We don't want sheep
meddling around. And in the second place, there's a considerable hope
of gain." He stared at Tropile with a dreamer's eyes. "We don't send
parties up there for nothing, you know. We want to get something out of
it. What we want is the Earth."
"The Earth?" It reeked of madness. But this man wasn't mad.
"Some day, Tropile, it's going to be us against them. Never mind the
sheep--they don't count. It's going to be Pyramids and Wolves, and the
Pyramids won't win. And then--"
It was enough to curdle the blood. This man was proposing to _fight_,
and against the invulnerable, the godlike Pyramids.
But he was glowing and the fever was contagious. Tropile felt his own
blood begin to pound. Haendl hadn't finished his "and then--" but he
didn't have to. The "and then" was obvious: And then the world takes up
again from the day the wandering planet first came into view. And then
we go back to our own solar system and an end to the five-year cycle of
frost and hunger.
And then the Wolves can rule a world worth ruling.
It was a meretricious appeal, perhaps, but it could not be refused.
Tropile was lost.