Citizen Germyn quivered. He vent over the ID bracelet that once had belonged to the late PFC Joe Hartmann, fingering it to hide his thoughts. He said at last: “Perhaps you are right. Perhaps the Citizeness is with my wife. If this were so, would it not be possible that she was fearful of those who once were with her husband?”
Haendl laughed sourly. “She isn’t any more fearful than we are, Germyn. Let me tell you something. I told you about this man Innison who disappeared. He was a Son of the Wolf, you understand me? For that matter—” He glanced at his companion, licked his lips and changed his mind about what he had been going to say next. “He was a Wolf. Do you ever remember hearing of a Wolf being Translated before?”
“Translated?” Germyn dropped the ID bracelet. “But that’s impossible!” ne cried, forgetting his manners completely. “Oh, no. .Translation comes only to those who attain the moment of supreme detachment, you can be sure of that. I know. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. No Wolf could possibly—”
“At least five Wolves did,” Haendl said grimly. “Now you see what the trouble is? Tropile was Translated—I saw that with my own eyes. The next day, Innison. Within a week, two or three others. So we came down here, Germyn, not because we like you people, not because we enjoy it. But because we’re scared. What we want is to talk to Tropile’s wife—you too, I guess; we want to talk to anybody who ever knew him. We want to find out everything there is to find out about Tropile, and see if we can make any sense of the answers. Because maybe Translation is the supreme objective of life to you people, Germyn, but to us it’s just one more way of dying. And we don’t want to die.”
Citizen Germyn bent to pick up his cherished identification bracelet and dropped it absently on a table. There was very much on his mind.
He said at last: “That is strange. Shall I tell you another strange thing?”
Haendl, looking angry and baffled, nodded.
Germyn said: “There has been no Translation here since the day the Wolf, Tropile, escaped. But there have been Eyes. I have seen them myself. It—” he hesitated, and shrugged—”it has been disturbing. Some of our finest Citizens have ceased to Meditate; they have been worrying. So many Eyes, and no one taken! It is outside of all of our experience, and our customs have suffered. Politeness is dwindling among us; even in my own household—”
He coughed and went on: “No matter. But these Eyes have come into every home; they have peered about, peered about, and no one has been taken. Why? Is it something to do with the Translation of Wolves?” He stared hopelessly at his visitors. “All I know,” he said, “is that it is very strange, and therefore I am worried.”
Haendl boomed: “Then take us to Gala Tropile. Let’s see what we can find out!”
Citizen Germyn bowed. He cleared his throat and raised his voice just sufficiently to carry from one room to another. “Citizeness!” he called.
There was a pause and then his wife appeared in the doorway, looking concerned.
“Will you ask if Citizeness Tropile will join us here?’ he requested.
His wife nodded. “She is resting. I will suggest to her that it would be pleasant to speak together. ...”
But that Citizeness Germyn did not do.
As she turned, there was a sound of two hands loudly clapping from the other room.
All four of them jumped, and stared. Then the nearly self-admittecdWolf, Haendl, ran for the door and the others followed.
The thunderclap had been real, though not of any human hands. Air had rushed in to fill a void. The void had been the volume of space that once had been occupied by Citizeness Gala Tropile.
Roget Germyn turned pale. This woman—this Wolf-tainted woman, surely in no state for the grace of meditation—she had been Translated, too!
10
On the binary planet, the former Wolf (and also former human being) named Glenn Tropile had been reprogrammed.
In some ways, the Earth had been a disappointment to the Pyramids. True, it was wonderfully rich in Components, and the Components seemed perfectly willing to reseed and recultivate and reproduce themselves indefinitely. There were not as many as there once had been, to be sure, but you couldn’t knock a wrist-watch mine that kept on generating new wrist-watches. Moreover, these particular Components were high-grade goods. They were of a usefully high order of complexity, suitable for programming into almost any area of Pyramid concern: calculation, manufacture, repair, processing, data storage, whatever. It was also true that these particular Components had the delightful habit of ripening themselves for the greatest ease of assimilation; often as not, they arrived on the binary with their minds wholly blank and ready for recording upon. (The Pyramids didn’t know this was called “meditation”, and of course would not have cared anyway.)
The only thing that was really wrong with Earthly Components was their unfortunate anatomy. Because they were land-dwellers, and from a planet with an undesirably high surface gravity at that, they had evolvea all that completely unnecessary investment in skeletons and muscles and, of course, digestive and eliminatory systems to support them. The Pyramids liked little Components, with nerve-endings packed closely on the surface of their bodies and small but quick limbs (or tentacles or pseudopods).
(Of course, this was not really a problem for the Pyramids. There were no problems for the Pyramids. Take-apart-and-shove was good enough for them. The details they left to the million million systems and sub-systems that filled their dead old planet from crust to crust. Those systems, themselves Component-directed, were quite able to make do with odd-shaped Components, though it did involve a certain amount of rearranging—surgical, for example.)
So the Pyramids dragged their captive planet out of the Earth’s solar system, questing after that dream, the planet of perfect Components. Like any prudent traveler, they took the Earth as a sort of picnic lunch to sustain them on the way. They were not tidy picnickers. They had strewn half the Galaxy with the discards of earlier journeys. Some day, no doubt, they would have consumed all they wanted from the tuck basket that was the Earth. Then they would simply let go of it. There would be no further Re-Creation of the Sun. In only a wink of time—a few decades at the most—the planet would radiate the last of its stored heat, and drift frozen for all the rest of eternity.
But that moment was not yet.
Now it was the time for navigation. The Pyramids had taken Earth out past the orbit of Pluto with a simple shove, slow and massive. It had been enough merely to approximate the direction in which, eventually, they would want to go. There would be plenty of time for refining the course later, once the spiral had opened almost to a straight line.
The systems concerned with such things as navigation knew where they were going, at least in general terms. There was a star-cluster reasonably sure to be rich in Componentiferous planets. It was inherent in the nature of Component mines that eventually they played out. They had always done so.
That didn’t matter. There were always more mines. If that had not been so it would have been necessary, perhaps, to stockpile Components against future needs. But things being as they were, it was easier to work the vein out and move on.
This next hop would be quite a short one for the Pyramids, no more than a couple of thousand years at the maximum. Nevertheless, the navigation should be carefully done. Many of the navigation systems had been unused for a long time. Some of them were no longer functioning at optimum levels, because Components had failed. (It was the nature of Components to fail after a while. The Pyramids knew this, though they themselves were made to last forever; they accepted the fact that the life of a component was seldom more than some tens of thousands of years.) Other systems needed new data, small-scale information but important, on regions of the Galaxy not studied before.