XIV

Tropile swam up out of hammering blackness into daylight and pain.

It _hurt_. He was being born again--coming back to life--and it had

all the agonies of parturition, except that they were visited upon the

creature being born, himself. There were crushing blows at his temples

that pounded and pained like no other ache he had ever felt. He moaned

raspingly.

Someone moved blurrily over his shut eyes. He felt something sting

sharply at the base of his brain. Then it tingled, warming his scalp,

comforting it, numbing it. Pain went slowly away.

He opened his eyes.

Four masked torturers were leaning over him. He stared, not

understanding; but the eyes were not torturers' eyes, and in a moment

the masks came off. Surgical masks--and the faces beneath the masks

were human faces.

Surgeons and nurses.

He blinked at them and said groggily: "Where am we?" And then he

remembered.

He was back on Earth; he was merely human again.

Someone came bustling into the room and he knew without looking that it

was Haendl.

"We beat them, Tropile!" Haendl cried. "No, cancel that. _You_ beat

them. We've destroyed every Pyramid there was, and a nice hot fire

they're making up there on the sun, eh? Beautiful work, Tropile.

Beautiful! You're a credit to the name of Wolf!"

The surgeons stirred uneasily, but apparently, Tropile thought, there

had been changes, for they did no more than that.

Tropile touched his temples fretfully and his fingers rested on gauze

bandages. It was true: he was out of circuit. The long reach of his

awareness was cut short at his skull; there was no more of the infinite

sweep and grasp he had known as part of the snowflake in the nutrient

fluid.

"Too bad," he whispered hopelessly.

"What?" Haendl frowned. The nurse next to him whispered something and

he nodded. "Oh, I see. You're still a little groggy, right? Well,

that's not hard to understand--they tell me it was a tricky job of

surgery, separating you from that gunk the Pyramids had wired into

your head."

"Yes," said Tropile, and closed his ears, though Haendl went on

talking. After a while, Tropile pushed himself up and swung his legs

over the side of the operating table. He was naked. Once that would

have bothered him enormously, but now it didn't seem to matter.

"Find me some clothes, will you?" he asked. "I'm back. I might as well

start getting used to it."

* * * * *

Glenn Tropile found that he was a returning hero, attracting a curious

sort of hero-worship wherever he went. It was not, he thought after

careful analysis, _exactly_ what he might have expected. For instance,

a man who went out and killed a dragon in the old days was received

with great gratitude and rejoicing, and if there was a prince's

daughter around, he married her. Fair enough, after all. And Tropile

had slain a foe more potent than any number of dragons.

But he tested the attention he received and found no gratitude in it.

It was odd.

What it was like most of all, he thought, was the sort of attention a

reigning baseball champion might get--in a country where cricket was

the national game. He had done something which, everybody agreed, was

an astonishing feat, but about which nobody seemed to care. Indeed,

there was an area of accusation in some of the attention he got.

Item: nearly ninety thousand erstwhile Components had now been brought

back to ambient life, most of them with their families long dead, all

of them a certain drain on the limited resources of the planet. And

what was Glenn Tropile going to do about it?

Item: the old distinctions between Citizen and Wolf no longer made much

sense now that so many Componentized Citizens had fought shoulder to

shoulder with Componentized Sons of the Wolf. But didn't Glenn Tropile

think he had gone a little too far _there_?

And item--looking pretty far ahead, of course, but still--well, just

what _was_ Glenn Tropile going to do about providing a new sun for

Earth, when the old one wore out and there would be no Pyramids to tend

the fire?

He sought refuge with someone who would understand him. That, he was

pleased to realize, was easy. He had come to know several persons

extremely well. Loneliness, the tortured loneliness of his youth, was

permanently behind him, _definitely_.

For example, he could seek out Haendl, who would understand everything

very well.

Haendl said: "It is a bit of a letdown, I suppose. Well, hell with

it; that's life." He laughed grimly. "Now that we've got rid of the

Pyramids, there's plenty of other work to be done. Man, we can breathe

now! We can plan ahead! This planet has maundered along in its stupid,

rutted, bogged-down course too many years already, eh? It's time we

took over! And we'll be doing it, I promise you. You know, Tropile--"

he sniggered--"I only regret one thing."

"What's that?" Tropile asked cautiously.

"All those weapons, out of reach! Oh, I'm not _blaming_ you. But you

can see what a lot of trouble it's going to be now, stocking up all

over again--and there isn't much we can do about bringing order to

this tired old world, is there, until we've got the guns to do it with

again?"

Tropile left him much sooner than he had planned.

* * * * *

Citizen Germyn, then? The man had fought well, if nothing else. Tropile

went to find him and, for a moment at least, it was very good. Germyn

said: "I've been doing a lot of thinking, Tropile. I'm glad you're

here." He sent his wife for refreshments, and decorously she brought

them in, waited for exactly one minute, and then absented herself.

Tropile burst into speech as soon as she left. "I'm beginning to

realize what has happened to the human race, Germyn. I don't mean just

now, when we licked the Pyramids and so on. No, I mean hundreds of

years ago, what happened when the Pyramids arrived, and what has been

happening since. Did you ever hear of Indians, Germyn?"

Germyn frowned minutely and shrugged.

"They were, oh, hundreds _and_ hundreds of years ago. They were a

different color and not very civilized--of course, nobody was then. But

the Indians were nomads, herdsmen, hunters--like that. And the white

people came from Europe and wanted this country for themselves. So they

took it. And do you know something? I don't think the Indians ever knew

what hit them."

"_They_ didn't know about land grants and claiming territory for the

crown and church missions and expanding populations. They didn't have

those things. It's true that they learned pretty well, by and by--at

least they learned things like guns and horses and firewater; they

didn't have those things, either, but they could see some sense to

them, you know. But I really don't think the Indians ever knew exactly

what the Europeans were up to, until it was too late to matter.

"And it was the same with us and the Pyramids, only more so. What

the devil _did_ they want? I mean, yes, we found out what they did

with the Translated people. But what were they _up_ to? What did

they _think_? _Did_ they think? You know, I've got a kind of a crazy

idea--maybe it's not crazy, maybe it's the truth. Anyway, I've been

thinking. Suppose even the _Pyramids_ weren't the Pyramids? We never

talked to one of them. We never gave it a Rorschach or tested its knee

jerks. We licked them, but we don't know anything about them. We don't

even know if they were the guys that started the whole bloody thing, or

if they were just sort of super-sized Components themselves. Do we?

"And meanwhile, here's the human race, up against something that it not

only can't understand, same as the Indians couldn't the whites, but

that it can't begin to make a _guess_ about. At least the Indians had

a clue now and then, you know--I mean they'd see the sailors off the

great white devil ship making a beeline for the Indian women and so on,

and they'd begin to understand there was _something_ in common. But we

didn't have that much.

"So what did we do? Why, we did like the reservation Indians. We turned

inward. We got loaded on firewater--Meditation--and we closed our minds

to the possibility of ever expanding again. And there we were, all

tied up in our own knots. Most of the race rebelled against action,

because it had proven useless--Citizens. A few of the race rebelled

against _that_, because it was not only useless but _deliberately_

useless--Wolves. But they're the same kind of people. You've seen that

for yourself, right? And--"

Tropile stopped, suddenly aware that Citizen Germyn was looking tepidly

pained.

"What's the matter?" Tropile demanded harshly.

Citizen Germyn gave him the faint deprecatory Quirked Smile. "I know

you thought you were a Wolf, but--I told you I've been thinking a lot,

and that's what I was thinking about. _Truly_, Citizen, you do yourself

no good by pretending that you really thought you were Wolf. Clearly

you were not; the rest of us might have been fooled, but certainly you

couldn't fool yourself.

"Now here's what I think you ought to do. When I found you were coming,

I asked several rather well-known Citizens to come here later this

evening. There won't be any embarrassment. I only want you to talk to

them and set the record straight, so that this terrible blemish will no

longer be held against you. Times change and perhaps a certain latitude

is advisable now, but certainly you don't want--"

Tropile also left Citizen Germyn sooner than he had expected to.

* * * * *

There remained Alla Narova, but, queerly, she was not to be found.

Instantly it became clear to Tropile that it was she above all whom he

needed to talk to. He remembered the shared beauty of their plunging

drive through the neurone-guides of the Pyramids, the linked and

inextricable flow of their thoughts and of their most hidden feelings.

She could not be very far, he thought numbly, cursing the blindness of

his human eyes, the narrowness of his human senses. Time was when two

worlds could not have hidden her from him; but that time was gone. He

walked from place to place with the angry resentful tread of one used

to riding--no, to flying, or faster than flying. He asked after her. He

searched.

And at last he found--not her. A note. At one of the stations where the

re-awakened Components were funneled back into human affairs, there was

a letter waiting for him:

_I'm sure you will look for me. Please don't. You thought that

there were no secrets between us, but there was one._

_When I was Translated, I was sixty-one years old. Two years before

that, I was caught in a collapsing building; my legs are useless,

and I had grown quite fat. I do not want you to see me fat and

old._

_Alla Narova._

And that was that, and at last Glenn Tropile turned to the last person

of all those on his list who had known him well. Her name was Gala

Tropile.

* * * * *

She had got thinner, he observed. They sat together quietly and there

was considerable awkwardness, but then he noticed that she was weeping.

Comforting her ended the awkwardness and he found that he was talking:

"It was like being a god, Gala! I swear, there's no feeling like it.

I mean it's like--well, maybe if you'd just had a baby, and invented

fire, and moved a mountain, and transmuted lead into gold--maybe if

you'd done all of those things, then you might have some idea. But I

was everywhere at once, Gala, and I could do anything! I fought a whole

world of Pyramids, do you realize that? Me! And now I come back to--"

He stopped her in time; it seemed she was about to weep again.

He went on: "No, Gala, don't misunderstand, I don't hold anything

against you. You were right to leave me in the field. What did I have

to offer you? Or myself, for that matter? And I don't know that I have

anything now, but--"

He slammed his fist against the table. "They talk about putting the

Earth back in its orbit! Why? And how? My God, Gala, we don't know

_where_ we are. Maybe we could tinker up the gadgets the Pyramids used

and turn our course backward--but do you know what Old Sol looks like?

I don't. I never saw it.

"And neither did you or anyone else alive.

"It was like being a god--

"And they talk about going back to things as they were--

"I'm sick of that kind of thinking! Wolves or Citizens, they're dead on

their feet and don't know it. I suppose they'll snap out of it in time,

but I can't wait. I won't live that long.

"Unless--"

He paused and looked at her, confused.

Gala Tropile met her husband's eyes.

"Unless what, Glenn?"

He shrugged and turned away.

"Unless you go back, you mean." He stared at her; she nodded. "You want

to go back," she said, without stress. "You don't want to stay here

with me, do you? You want to go back into that tub of soup again and

float like a baby. You don't want to _have_ babies--you want to _be_

one."

"Gala, you don't understand. We can own the Universe. I mean mankind

can. And I can do it. Why not? There's nothing for me--"

"That's right, Glenn. There's nothing for you here. Not any more."

He opened his mouth to speak, looked at her, spread his hands

helplessly. He didn't look back as he walked out the door, but he knew

that his back was turned not only on the woman who happened to be his

wife, but on mankind and all of the flesh.

* * * * *

It was night outside, and warm. Tropile stood in the old street

surrounded by the low, battered houses--and he could make them new and

grand! He looked up at the stars that swung in constellations too new

and changeable to have names. _There_ was the Universe.

Words were no good; there was no explaining things in words. Naturally

he couldn't make Gala or anyone else understand, for flesh couldn't

grasp the realities of mind and spirit that were liberated from flesh.

Babies! A home! And the whole grubby animal business of eating and

drinking and sleeping! How could anyone ask to stay in the mire when

the stars challenged overhead?

He walked slowly down the street, alone in the night, an apprentice

godling renouncing mortality. There was nothing here for him, so why

this sense of loss?

Duty said (or was it Pride?): "Someone must give up the flesh to

control Earth's orbit and weather--why not you?"

Flesh said (or was it his soul--whatever that was?): "But you will be

_alone_."

He stopped, and for a moment he was poised between destiny and the

dust....

Until he became aware of footsteps behind him, running, and Gala's

voice: "Wait! Wait, Glenn! I want to go with you!"

And he turned and waited, but only until she caught up, and then he

went on.

But not--forever and always again--not alone.