Haendl was on the ragged edge of breakdown, which was something new in
his life.
It was full hot summer and the hidden colony of Wolves in Princeton
should have been full of energy and life. The crops were growing on all
the fields nearby; the drained storehouses were being replenished.
The aircraft that had been so painfully rebuilt and fitted for the
assault on Mount Everest were standing by, ready to be manned and to
take off.
And nothing, absolutely nothing, was going right.
It looked as though there would _be_ no expedition to Everest. Four
times now, Haendl had gathered his forces and been all ready. Four
times, a key man of the expedition had--vanished.
Wolves didn't vanish!
And yet more than a score of them had. First Tropile--then
Innison--then two dozen more, by ones and twos. No one was immune. Take
Innison, for example. There was a man who was Wolf through and through.
He was a doer, not a thinker; his skills were the skills of an artisan,
a tinkerer, a jackleg mechanic. How could a man like that succumb to
the pallid lure of Meditation?
But undeniably he had.
It had reached a point where Haendl himself was red-eyed and jumpy. He
had set curious alarms for himself--had enlisted the help of others of
the colony to avert the danger of Translation from himself.
When he went to bed at night, a lieutenant sat next to his bed,
watchfully alert lest Haendl, in that moment of reverie before sleep,
fell into Meditation and himself be Translated. There was no hour of
the day when Haendl permitted himself to be alone; and his companions,
or guards, were ordered to shake him awake, as violently as need be, at
the first hint of an abstracted look in the eyes or a reflective cast
of the features.
As time went on, Haendl's self-imposed regime of constant alertness
began to cost him heavily in lost rest and sleep. And the consequences
of that were--more and more occasions when the bodyguards shook him
awake; less and less rest.
He was very close to breakdown indeed.
On a hot, wet morning a few days after his useless expedition to see
Citizen Germyn in Wheeling, Haendl ate a tasteless breakfast and,
reeling with fatigue, set out on a tour of inspection of Princeton.
Warm rain dripped from low clouds, but that was merely one more
annoyance to Haendl. He hardly noticed it.
There were upward of a thousand Wolves in the Community and there
were signs of worry on the face of every one of them. Haendl was not
the only man in Princeton who had begun laying traps for himself as a
result of the unprecedented disappearances; he was not the only one who
was short of sleep. When one member in forty disappears, the morale of
the whole community receives a shattering blow.
To Haendl, it was clear, looking into the faces of his compatriots,
that not only was it going to be nearly impossible to mount the planned
assault on the Pyramid on Everest this year, it was going to be
unbearably difficult merely to keep the community going.
The whole Wolf pack was on the verge of panic.
* * * * *
There was a confused shouting behind Haendl. Groggily he turned and
looked; half a dozen Wolves were yelling and pointing at something in
the wet, muggy air.
It was an Eye, hanging silent and featureless over the center of the
street.
Haendl took a deep breath and mustered command of himself. "Frampton!"
he ordered one of his lieutenants. "Get the helicopter with the
instruments here. We'll take some more readings."
Frampton opened his mouth, then looked more closely at Haendl and,
instead, began to talk on his pocket radio. Haendl knew what was in the
man's mind--it was in his own, too.
What was the use of more readings? From the time of Tropile's
Translation on, they had had a superfluity of instrument readings on
the forces and auras that surrounded the Eyes--yes, and on Translations
themselves, too. Before Tropile, there had never been an Eye seen in
Princeton, much less an actual Translation. But things were different
now. Everything was different. Eyes roamed restlessly around day and
night.
Some of the men nearest the Eye were picking up rocks and throwing
them at the bobbing vortex in the air. Haendl started to yell at them
to stop, then changed his mind. The Eye didn't seem to be affected--as
he watched, one of the men scored a direct hit with a cobblestone. The
stone went right through the Eye, without sound or effect; why not let
them work off some of their fears in direct action?
There was a fluttering of vanes and the copter with the instruments
mounted on it came down in the middle of the street, between Haendl and
the Eye.
It was all very rapid from then on.
The Eye swooped toward Haendl. He couldn't help it; he ducked. That
was useless, but it was also unnecessary, for he saw in a second that
it was only partly the motion of the Eye toward him that made it loom
larger; it was also that the Eye itself was growing.
An Eye was perhaps the size of a football, as near as anyone could
judge. This one got bigger, bigger. It was the size of a roc's egg,
the size of a whale's blunt head. It stopped and hovered over the
helicopter, while the man inside frantically pointed lenses and meters--
Thundercrash.
Not a man this time--Translation had gone beyond men. The whole
helicopter vanished, man, instruments, spinning vanes and all.
Haendl picked himself up, sweating, shocked beyond sleepiness.
The young man named Frampton said fearfully: "Haendl, what do we do
now?"
"Do?" Haendl stared at him absently. "Why, kill ourselves, I guess."
He nodded soberly, as though he had at last attained the solution of a
difficult problem. Then he sighed.
"Well, one thing before that," he said. "I'm going to Wheeling. We
Wolves are licked; maybe the Citizens can help us now."
* * * * *
Roget Germyn, of Wheeling, a Citizen, received the message in the
chambers that served him as a place of business. He had a visitor
waiting for him at home.
Germyn was still Citizen and he could not quickly break off the
pleasant and interminable discussion he was having with a prospective
client over a potential business arrangement. He apologized for the
interruption caused by the message the conventional five times,
listened while his guest explained once more the plan he had come to
propose in full, then turned his cupped hands toward himself in the
gesture of Denial of Adequacy. It was the closest he could come to
saying no.
On the other side of the desk, the Citizen who had come to propose an
investment scheme immediately changed the subject by inviting Germyn
and his Citizeness to a Sirius Viewing, the invitation in the form of
rhymed couplets. He had wanted to transact his business very much, but
he couldn't _insist_.
Germyn got out of the invitation by a Conditional Acceptance in proper
form, and the man left, delayed only slightly by the Four Urgings to
Stay. Almost immediately, Germyn dismissed his clerk and closed his
office for the day by tying a triple knot in a length of red cord
across the open door.
When he got to his home, he found, as he had suspected, that the
visitor was Haendl.
There was much doubt in Citizen Germyn's mind about Haendl. The man had
nearly admitted to being Wolf, and how could a citizen overlook that?
But in the excitement of Gala Tropile's Translation, there had been no
hue and cry. Germyn had permitted the man to leave. And now?
He reserved judgment. He found Haendl distastefully sipping tea in
the living room and attempting to keep up a formal conversation with
Citizeness Germyn. He rescued him, took him aside, closed a door--and
waited.
He was astonished at the change in the man. Before, Haendl had been
bouncy, aggressive, quick-moving--the very qualities least desired in
a Citizen, the mark of the Son of the Wolf. Now he was none of these
things, but he looked no more like a Citizen for all that; he was
haggard, tense.
He said, with an absolute minimum of protocol: "Germyn, the last time I
saw you, there was a Translation. Gala Tropile, remember?"
"I remember," Citizen Germyn said. Remember! It had hardly left his
thoughts.
"And you told me there had been others. Are they still going on?"
* * * * *
Germyn said: "There have been others." He was trying to speak
directly, to match this man Haendl's speed and forcefulness. It
was hardly good manners, but it had occurred to Citizen Germyn
that there were times when manners, after all, were not the most
important thing in the world. "There were two in the past few days.
One was a woman--Citizeness Baird; her husband's a teacher. She was
Viewing Through Glass with four or five other women at the time. She
just--disappeared. She was looking through a green prism at the time,
if that helps."
"I don't know if it helps or not. Who was the other one?"
Germyn shrugged. "A man named Harmane. No one saw it. But they heard
the thunderclap, or something like a thunderclap, and he was missing."
He thought for a moment. "It is a little unusual, I suppose. Two in a
week--"
Haendl said roughly: "Listen, Germyn. It isn't just two. In the past
thirty days, within the area around here and in _one other place_,
there have been at least fifty. In _two_ places, do you understand?
Here and in Princeton. The rest of the world--nothing much; a few
Translations here and there. But just in these two communities, fifty.
Does that make sense?"