Citizen Germyn looked at the naked man in front of him and took a deep
breath of hot, sour air. "Of course I'm all right," he said.
The naked man was Haendl.
* * * * *
The Tropile-petal "said" to the Alla Narova-petal: "Got another one!
It's Citizen Germyn!" The petal fluttered feebly in soundless laughter.
The Alla Narova-petal "said": "Glenn, come back! The whole
propulsion-pneuma just went out of circuit!"
Tropile pulled his attention away from his human acquisitions in
the chamber off the foundry and allowed himself to fuse with the
woman-personality. Together they reached out and explored along the
pathways they had laboriously traced. The propulsion-pneuma was the
complex of navigation-computers, drive generators, course-vectoring
units that their own unit had been originally part of--until Glenn
Tropile, by waking its Components, had managed to divert it for
purposes of his own. The two of them reached out into it--
Dead end.
It was out of circuit, as Alla Narova had said. One whole limb of their
body--their new, jointly tenanted body, that spanned a whole planet and
reached across space to Earth--had been lopped off. Quick, quick, they
separated, traced separate paths. They came together again: Still dead
end.
The dyad that was Tropile and the woman reached out to touch the others
in the snowflake and communicated--not in words, not in anything as
slow and as opaque as words: _The Pyramids have lopped off another
circuit._ The compound personality of the snowflake considered its
course of action, reached its decision, acted. Quick, quick, three of
the other members of the snowflake darted out of the collective unit
and went about isolating and tracing the exact area that had been
affected.
Tropile: "We expected this. They couldn't help noticing sooner or
later that something was going wrong."
Alla Narova: "But, Glenn, suppose they cut _us_ out of circuit? We're
stuck here. We can't move. We can't get out of the tanks. If they know
that we are the source of their trouble--"
Tropile: "Let them know! That's what we've got the others here for!" He
was cocky now, self-assured, fighting. For the first time in his life,
he was free to fight--to let his Wolf blood strive to the utmost--and
he knew what he was fighting for. This wasn't a matter of Haendl's
pitiful tanks and carbines against the invulnerable Pyramids; this was
the invulnerability of the whole Pyramid system turned against the
Pyramids!
It was a warning, the fact that the Pyramids had become alert to
danger, had begun cutting sections of their planetary communications
system out of the main circuit. But as a warning, it didn't frighten
Tropile; it only spurred him to action.
Quick, quick, he and the woman-personality dissolved, sped away.
Figuratively they sought out the most restive Components they could
find, shook them by the shoulder, tried to wake them. Actually--well,
what is "actually?" The physical fact was surely that they didn't
move at all, for they were bound to their tank and to the surgical
joinings, each to each, at their temples. No crawling child in a
playpen was more helplessly confined than Tropile and Alla Narova and
the others.
And yet no human being had ever been more free.
* * * * *
Regard that imbecile servant of Everyman, the thermostat.
He runs the furnace in Everyman's house, he measures the doneness of
Everyman's breakfast toast, he valves the cooling fluid through the
radiator of Everyman's car. If Everyman's house stays too hot or too
cold, the man swears at the lackwit switch and maybe buys a new one
to plug in. But he never, never thinks that his thermostat might be
plotting against him.
Thermostat : Man = Man : Pyramid. Only that and nothing more. It was
not in the nature of a Pyramid to think that its Components, once
installed, could reprogram themselves. No Component ever had. (But
before Glenn Tropile, no Component had been Wolf.)
When Tropile found himself, he found others. They were men and women,
real persons with gonads and dreams. They had been caught at the moment
of blankness--yes; and frozen into that shape, true. But they were
palimpsest personalities on which the Pyramids had programmed their
duties. Underneath the Pyramids' cabalistic scrawl, the men and women
still remained. They had only to be reached.
Tropile and Alla Narova reached them--one at a time, then by scores.
The Pyramids made that possible. The network of communication that they
had created for their own purposes encompassed every cell of the race
and all its works. Tropile reached out from his floating snowflake
and went where he wished--anywhere within the binary planet; to the
brooding Pyramid on Earth; through the Eyes, wherever he chose on
Earth's surface.
Physically, he was scarcely able to move a muscle. But, oh, the soaring
range of his mind and vision!
* * * * *
Citizen Germyn was past shock, but just the same it was uncomfortable
to be in a room with several dozen other persons, all of them naked.
Uncomfortable. Once it would have been brain-shattering. For a Citizen
to see his own Citizeness unclothed was gross lechery. To be part of a
mixed and bare-skinned group was unthinkable. Or had been. Now it only
made him uneasy.
He said numbly to Haendl: "Citizen, I pray you tell me what sort of
place this is."
"Later," said Haendl gruffly, and led him out of the way. "Stay put,"
he advised. "We're busy."
And that was true. Something was going on, but Citizen Germyn couldn't
make out exactly what it was. The naked people were worrying out a
distribution of some sort of supplies. There were tools and there were
also what looked to Citizen Germyn's unsophisticated eyes very much
like guns. Guns? It was foolishness to think they were guns, Citizen
Germyn told himself strongly. _Nobody_ had guns. He touched the floor
with an exploratory hand. It was warm and it shook with a nameless
distant vibration. He shuddered.
Haendl came back; yes, they were guns. Haendl was carrying one.
"Ours!" he crowed. "That Tropile must've looted our armory at
Princeton. By the looks of what's here, I doubt if he left a single
round of ammunition. What the hell, they're more use here!"
"But what are we going to do with _guns_?"