Haendl plodded angrily through the high grass toward the dull throb of
the diesel.
Maybe it had been a mistake to take this Glenn Tropile into the colony.
He was more Citizen than Wolf--no, cancel that, Haendl thought; he was
more Wolf than Citizen. But the Wolf in him was tainted with sheep's
blood. He _competed_ like a Wolf, but in spite of everything, he
refused to give up some of his sheep's ways. Meditation. He had been
cautioned against that. But had he given it up?
He had not.
If it had been entirely up to Haendl, Glenn Tropile would have found
himself back among the sheep or dead. Fortunately for Tropile, it
was not entirely up to Haendl. The community of Wolves was by no
means a democracy, but the leader had a certain responsibility to his
constituents, and the responsibility was this: He couldn't afford to be
wrong. Like the Old Gray Wolf who protected Mowgli, he had to defend
his actions against attack; if he failed to defend, the pack would pull
him down.
And Innison thought they needed Tropile--not in spite of the taint of
the Citizen that he bore, but because of it.
Haendl bawled: "Tropile! Tropile, where are you?" There was only the
wind and the _thrum_ of the diesel. It was enormously irritating.
Haendl had other things to do than to chase after Glenn Tropile. And
where was he? There was the diesel, idling wastefully; there the end of
the patterned furrows Tropile had plowed. There a small fire, burning--
And there was Tropile.
Haendl stopped, frozen, his mouth opened, about to yell Tropile's name.
It was Tropile, all right, staring with concentrated, oyster-eyed gaze
at the fire and the little pot of water it boiled. Staring. Meditating.
And over his head, like flawed glass in a pane, was the thing Haendl
feared most of all things on Earth. It was an Eye.
Tropile was on the very verge of being Translated ... whatever that was.
Time, maybe, to find out _what_ that was! Haendl ducked back into the
shelter of the high grass, knelt, plucked his radio communicator from
his pocket, urgently called.
"Innison! Innison, will somebody, for God's sake, put Innison on!"
Seconds passed. Voices answered. Then there was Innison.
"Innison, listen! You wanted to catch Tropile in the act of Meditation?
All right, you've got him. The old wheat field, south end, under the
elms around the creek. Get here fast, Innison--there's an Eye forming
above him!"
Luck! Lucky that they were ready for this, and only by luck, because it
was the helicopter that Innison had patiently assembled for the attack
on Everest that was ready now, loaded with instruments, planned to
weigh and measure the aura around the Pyramid--now at hand when they
needed it.
That was luck, but there was driving hurry involved, too; it was only a
matter of minutes before Haendl heard the wobbling drone of the copter,
saw the vanes fluttering low over the hedges, dropping to earth behind
the elms.
Haendl raised himself cautiously and peered. Yes, Tropile was still
there, and the Eye still above him! But the noise of the helicopter had
frayed the spell. Tropile stirred. The Eye wavered and shook--
But did not vanish.
Thanking what passed for his God, Haendl scuttled circuitously around
the elms and joined Innison at the copter. Innison was furiously
closing switches and pointing lenses.
They saw Tropile sitting there, the Eye growing larger and closer over
his head. They had time--plenty of time; oh, nearly a minute of time.
They brought to bear on the silent and unknowing form of Glenn Tropile
every instrument that the copter carried. They were waiting for Tropile
to disappear--
He did.
* * * * *
Innison and Haendl hunched at the thunderclap as air rushed in to
replace him.
"We've got what you wanted," Haendl said harshly. "Let's read some
instruments."
Throughout the Translation, high-tensile magnetic tape on a madly
spinning drum had been hurtling under twenty-four recording heads at
a hundred feet a second. Output to the recording heads had been from
every kind of measuring device they had been able to conceive and
build, all loaded on the helicopter for use on Mount Everest--all now
pointed directly at Glenn Tropile.
They had, for the instant of Translation, readings from one microsecond
to the next on the varying electric, gravitational, magnetic, radiant
and molecular-state conditions in his vicinity.
They got back to Innison's workshop, and the laboratory inside it, in
less than a minute; but it took hours of playing back the magnetic
pulses into machines that turned them into scribed curves on coordinate
paper before Innison had anything resembling an answer.
He said: "No mystery. I mean no mystery except the speed. Want to know
what happened to Tropile?"
"I do," said Haendl.
"A pencil of electrostatic force maintained by a pinch effect bounced
down the approximate azimuth of Everest--God knows how they handled the
elevation--and charged him and the area positive. A _big_ charge, clear
off the scale. They parted company. He was bounced straight up. A meter
off the ground, a correcting vector was applied. When last seen, he was
headed fast in the direction of the Pyramids' binary--fast! So fast
that I would guess he'll get there alive. It takes an appreciable time,
a good part of a second, for his protein to coagulate enough to make
him sick and then kill him. If the Pyramids strip the charges off him
immediately on arrival, as I should think they will, he'll live."
"Friction--"
"Be damned to friction," Innison said calmly. "He carried a packet of
air with him and there _was_ no friction. How? I don't know. How are
they going to keep him alive in space, without the charges that hold
air? I don't know. If they don't maintain the charges, can they beat
the speed of light? I don't know. I can tell you _what_ happened. I
can't tell you _how_."
Haendl stood up thoughtfully. "It's something," he said grudgingly.
"It's more than we've ever had--a complete reading at the instant of
Translation!"
"We'll get more," Haendl promised. "Innison, now that you know what to
look for, go on looking for it. Keep every possible detection device
monitored twenty-four hours a day. Turn on everything you've got
that'll find a sign of imposed modulation. At any sign--or at anybody's
hunch that there _might_ be a sign--I'm to be called. If I'm eating. If
I'm sleeping. If I'm enjoying with a woman. Call me, you hear? Maybe
you were right about Tropile; maybe he did have some use. He might give
the Pyramids a bellyache."
Innison, flipping the magnetic tape drum to rewind, said thoughtfully:
"It's too bad they've got him. We could have used some more readings."
"Too bad?" Haendl laughed sharply. "This time they've got themselves a
Wolf."
* * * * *
The Pyramids did have a Wolf--a fact which did not matter in the least
to them.
It is not possible to know what "mattered" to a Pyramid except by
inference. But it is possible to know that they had no way of telling
Wolf from Citizen.
The planet which was their home--Earth's old Moon--was small, dark,
atmosphereless and waterless. It was completely built over, much of it
with its propulsion devices.
In the old days, when technology had followed war, luxury, government
and leisure, the Pyramids' sun had run out of steam; and at about the
same time, they had run out of the Components they imported from a
neighboring planet. They used the last of their Components to implement
their stolid metaphysic of hauling and pushing. They pushed their
planet.
They knew where to push it.
Each Pyramid as it stood was a radio-astronomy observatory, powerful
and accurate beyond the wildest dreams of Earthly radio-astronomers.
From this start, they built instruments to aid their naked senses. They
went into a kind of hibernation, reducing their activity to a bare
trickle except for a small "crew" and headed for Earth. They had every
reason to believe they would find more Components there, and they did.
Tropile was one of them. The only thing which set him apart from the
others was that he was the most recent to be stockpiled.
The religion, or vice, or philosophy he practiced made it possible
for him to be a Component. Meditation derived from Zen Buddhism was
a windfall for the Pyramids, though, of course, they had no idea at
all of what lay behind it and did not "care." They knew only that,
at certain times, certain potential Components became Components
which were no longer merely potential--which were, in fact, ripe for
harvesting.
It was useful to them that the minds they cropped were utterly blank.
It saved the trouble of blanking them.
Tropile had been harvested at the moment his inhibiting conscious mind
had been cleared, for the Pyramids were not interested in him as an
entity capable of will and conception. They used only the raw capacity
of the human brain and its perceptors.
They used Rashevsky's Number, the gigantic, far more than astronomical
expression that denoted the number of switching operations performable
within the human brain. They used "subception," the phenomenon by which
the reasoning mind, uninhibited by consciousness, reacts directly to
stimuli--shortcutting the cerebral censor, avoiding the weighing of
shall-I-or-shan't-I that precedes every conscious act.
The harvested minds were--Components.
It is not desirable that your bedroom wall switch have a mind of its
own; if you turn the lights on, you want them _on_. So it was with the
Pyramids.
A Component was needed in the industrial complex which transformed
catabolism products into anabolism products.
* * * * *
With long experience gained since their planetfall, Pyramids received
the _tabula rasa_ that was Glenn Tropile. He arrived in one piece,
wearing a blanket of air. Quick-frozen mentally at the moment of inert
blankness his Meditation had granted him--the psychic drunkard's
coma--he was cushioned on repellent charges as he plummeted down, and
instantly stripped of surplus electrostatic charge.
At this point, he was still human; only asleep.
He remained "asleep." Annular fields they used for lifting and lowering
seized him and moved him into a snug tank of nutrient fluid. There were
many such tanks, ready and waiting.
The tanks themselves could be moved, and the one containing Glenn
Tropile did move, to a metabolism complex where there were many other
tanks, all occupied. This was a warm room--the Pyramids had wasted no
energy on such foppish comforts in the first "room." In this room,
Glenn Tropile gradually resumed the appearance of life. His heart once
again began to beat. Faint stirrings were visible in his chest as his
habit-numbed lungs attempted to breathe. Gradually the stirrings slowed
and stopped. There was no need for that foppish comfort, either; the
nutrient fluid supplied all.