On Mount Everest, the sullen stream of off-and-on responses that was
"mind" to the Pyramid had taken note of a new input signal.
It was not a critical mind. Its only curiosity was a restless urge to
shove-and-haul, and there was no shove-and-haul about what to it was
perhaps the analogue of a man's hunger pang. The input signal said: _Do
thus._ It obeyed.
Call it craving for a new flavor. Where once it had patiently waited
for the state that Citizens knew as Meditation on Connectivity, and the
Pyramid itself perhaps knew as a stage of ripeness in the fruits of its
wristwatch mine, now it wanted a different taste. Unripe? Overripe? At
any rate, different.
Accordingly, the high-frequency wheep, wheep changed in tempo and in
key, and the bouncing echoes changed and ... there was a ripe one to be
plucked. (Its name was Innison.) And there another. (Gala Tropile.)
And another, another--oh, many others--a babe from Tropile's nursery
school and the Wheeling jailer and a woman Tropile once had coveted on
the street.
Once the ruddy starch-to-sugar mark of ripeness had been what human
beings called Meditation on Connectivity and the Pyramids knew as
a convenient blankness. Now the sign was a sort of empathy with
the Component named Tropile. It didn't matter to the Pyramid on
Mount Everest. It swung its electrostatic scythe and the--call them
Tropiletropes--were harvested.
It did not occur to the Pyramid on Mount Everest that a Component might
be directing its actions. How could it?
Perhaps the Pyramid on Mount Everest wondered, if it knew how to
wonder, when it noticed that different criteria were involved in
selecting components these days. If it knew how to "notice." Surely
even a Pyramid might wonder when, without warning or explanation,
its orders were changed--not merely to harvest a different sort of
Component, but to drag along with the flesh-and-blood needful parts
a clanking assortment of machinery and metal, as began to happen.
Machines? Why would the Pyramids need to Translate machines?
But why, on the other hand, would a Pyramid bother to question a
directive, even if it were able to?
In any case, it didn't. It swung its scythe and gathered in what it was
caused to gather in.
Men sometimes eat green fruit and come to regret it. Was it the same
with Pyramids?
* * * * *
And Citizen Germyn fell into the unsuspected trap. Avoiding
Connectivity, he thought of Glenn Tropile--and the unfelt h-f pulses
found him out.
He didn't see the Eye that formed above him. He didn't feel the
gathering of forces that formed his trap. He didn't know that he was
seized, charged, catapulted through space, caught, halted and drained.
It happened too fast.
One moment he was in his bed; the next moment he was--elsewhere. There
wasn't anything in between.
It had happened to hundreds of thousands of Components before him, but,
for Citizen Germyn, what happened was in some ways different. He was
not embalmed in nutrient fluid, formed and programmed to take his part
in the Pyramid-structure, for he had not been selected by the Pyramid
but by that single wild Component, Tropile. He arrived conscious, awake
and able to move.
He stood up in a red-lit chamber. Vast thundering crashes of metal
buffeted his ears. Heat sprang little founts of perspiration on his
skin.
It was too much, too much to take in at once. Oily-skinned madmen,
naked, were capering and shouting at him. It took him a moment to
realize that they were not devils; this was not Hell; he was not dead.
"This way!" they were bawling at him. "Come on, hurry it up!"
He reeled, following their directions, across an unpleasantly warm
floor, staggering and falling--the binary planet was a quarter denser
than Earth--until he got his balance.
The capering madmen led him through a door--or sphincter or trap;
it was not like anything he had ever seen. But it was a portal of a
sort, and on the other side of it was something closer to sanity. It
was another room, and though the light was still red, it was a paler,
calmer red and the thundering ironmongery was a wall away. The madmen
were naked, yes, but they were not mad. The oil on their skins was only
the sheen of sweat.
"Where--where am I?" he gasped.
Two voices, perhaps three or four, were all talking at once. He could
make no sense of it. Citizen Germyn looked about him. He was in a sort
of chamber that formed a part of a machine that existed for the unknown
purposes of the Pyramids on the binary planet. And he was alive--and
not even alone.
He had crossed more than a million miles of space without feeling a
thing. But when what the naked men were saying began to penetrate, the
walls lurched around him.
It was true; he had been Translated.
He looked dazedly down at his own bare body, and around at the room,
and then he realized they were still talking: "--when you get your
bearings. Feel all right now? Come on, Citizen, snap out of it!"
Germyn blinked.
Another voice said peevishly: "Tropile's got to find some other place
to bring them in. That foundry isn't meant for human beings. Look at
the shape this one is in! Some time somebody's going to come in and we
won't spot him in time and--pfut!"