Good-by, Alla Narova! He flashed away to see what the other voice had
found. Great mindless boulders were chipping away from the crust of the
binary planet and whirling like midges in the void around it.
"What is it?" cried one of the others.
Tropile had no answer. It was the Pyramids, clearly. Were they
attempting to demolish their own planet? Were they digging away at the
crust to uncover the maggot's-nest of awakened Components beneath?
"The air!" cried Tropile sharply, and knew it was true. What the
Pyramids were up to was a simple delousing operation. If you could
destroy their own machinery for maintaining air and pressure and
temperature, they would destroy all living things within--including
Haendl and Citizen Germyn and thus, in the final analysis, including
the bodies of Tropile and his awakened fellows. For without the mobile
troops to defend their helpless cocoons against the machines of the
Pyramids, the limp bodies could be destroyed as easily as a larva under
a farmer's heel.
So Alla Narova had failed.
Alone against the Pyramids, she had been unable to bring the recaptured
sections back into the circuit that Tropile's Components now dominated.
It was the end of hope; but it was not the fear of defeat and
damnation for the Earth that paralyzed Tropile. It was Alla Narova,
gone from him forever.
The Pyramids were too strong.
And yet, he thought, quickening, they had been too strong before and
still a weak spot had been found!
"Think," he ordered himself desperately.
And then again: "Think!" Components stirred restlessly around him,
questioning. "Think!" he cried mightily. "All of you, think! Think of
your lives and hopes!
"Think!
"Hope!
"Worry!
"Dream!"
The Components were reaching toward him now, wonderingly. He commanded
them violently: "Do it--concentrate, wish, think! Let your minds run
free and think of Earth, pleasant grass and warm sun! Think of loving
and sweat and heartbreak! Think of death and birth! _Think_, for the
love of heaven, _think_!"
And the answer was not in sound, but it was deafening.
* * * * *
In the cut-off sections, Alla Narova's soaring mind lay trapped. It
had not been enough; she could not force her will against the dull
inflexibility of the Pyramids....
Until that inflexible will began to waver.
There was a leakage of thought.
It maddened and baffled the Pyramids. The whole neuronic network was
resounding to a babble of thoughts and emotions that, to a Pyramid,
were utterly demented! The rousing Component minds throbbed with urge
and emotion that were new to Pyramid experience. What could a Pyramid
make of a human's sex drive? Or of the ropy-armed aliens' passionate
deification of the Egg? What of hunger and thirst and the blazing
Wolf-need for odds and advantage that streamed out of such as Tropile?
They wavered, unsure. Their reactions were slow and very confused.
For Alla Narova succeeded in her purpose. She was able to reach out
across the space and barrier to Tropile and the propulsion-pneuma was
back in circuit. The section that controlled the master generators of
the electronic scythe lay under his hands.
"Now!" he cried, and all of the Components reached out to grasp and
move.
"Now!" And the central control was theirs; the full flood of power from
the generators was at their command.
"Now! Now! Now!" And they reached out, with a fat pencil of
electrostatic force and caught the sluggish, brooding Pyramid on Mount
Everest.
It had squatted there without motion for more than two centuries. Now
it quivered and seemed to draw back, but the probing pencil caught
it, and whirled it, and hurled it up and out of Earth, into the tiny
artificial sun.
It struck with a flare of blue-white light.
"One gone!" gloated Tropile. "Alla Narova, are you there?"
"Still here," she called from a great distance. "Again?"
"Again!"
They reached for the Pyramids and found them, wherever they were. Some
lay close to the surface of the binary planet, and some were hundreds
of miles within, and a few, more desperate than the others or merely
assigned to the task, they discovered at the very portal of the single
spaceship of the Pyramids.
But wherever they were and whatever they chose to do, each one of them
was found and seized. They came wriggling and shaking, like trout
on an angler's line. They came bursting through layer on layer of
impenetrable metal that, nevertheless, they penetrated. They came by
the dozens and scores, and at last by the thousands; but they came.
There were more and more flares of blue-white light on the tiny sun--so
many that Tropile found himself scouring the planet in a desperate
search for one surviving Pyramid--not to destroy as an enemy, but to
keep for a specimen.
But he searched in vain.
The Pyramids were destroyed, gone. There was not one left. The Earth
lay open and free under its tiny sun for the first time in centuries.
It had been a strange war, but a short one.
And it was over.