“Get away from me!” he screamed. It was all there in his memory. A scuffed glass paperweight, very ancient and the size of a man’s fist, with swirling streaks of color in it, dim under the hundred nicks and chips on the surface, and an inset square plate of porcelain that said in ornamental Wedgwood blue letters GOD BLESS OUR HOME. His husband had laid there snoring and the snow had begun sifting down outside the tent wall, and she had battered, and battered mercilessly, red-eyed and hissing, consumed with hate and blood lust. She had done it; how could he forget the bubbling horror of the face that kept living and sputtering after the eyes had been bashed sightless and the jaw hung smashed in eight places, limber as the backbone of a snake?
“Get away from me!” he screamed.
She said only: “How?”
He began to laugh, titteringly. Perhaps if he laughed this twinness with a monster would not seem so bad. The whole thing was probably some universal joke of which he had just seen the point; he would spend the rest 01 his life laughing.
“Pervert,” she said to him. “Yes, I killed my husband, and you perverted your wife, giving her what she felt was a small living death, turning her love into sickness and shame. I suppose we are well matched. I can live with you, pervert.”
It came through; it was not part of the joke. “And I can live with you, murderess,” he said at last. “Because I know you’re not just murderess. There was Cadiz and Vincennes, too.”
“And for you there were a hundred daily tendernesses you gave your wife to compensate for evil. You are not so bad, Tropile. You are a human being.”
“And so are you. But what are we?”
“We must begin to find out. It is all so new. We must try to trick ourselves into finding out what we are, otherwise you and I will always stand in the way of Us.”
Tropile said: “If I told a story it would be about the famous Captain Sir Roderick Flandray, Intelligence Corps, Imperial Terran Space Navy-dark, sardonic, bright with melancholy, quite impossible, my asinine ideal.”
“And my story would be about doomed Iseult who flung herself from life into love like a rock-fanged Cornish coast, the poor fool. Farewell to the pleasures of the table and the stool; the world well lost for a few overrated contractions. But that is what my story would be about; I cannot help being what I am.”
They laughed together, and together went on: “If we told a story it would be about a circular fire that grew.”
And they jerked back in an ecstasy of terror at what they had said.
They were silent for a long time while their hands clicked and clicked away at the switches.
“I want no more of that,” Alia Narova said finally. “Or—?” She did not know.
“I have never been so frightened in my life,” Glenn Tropile said, “nor have you. Nor have we ever been so tantalized by a hint of meaning. My hero is Lucifer; your heroine is Ishtar the Young. Ours is a circular fire that grows.”
They were silent for a time, while Tropile pondered this new self with its new vocabulary and new memories. Was he still Glenn Tropile at all?
It didn’t seem to matter.
Many clicks later, Alia Narova said wistfully, “Of course, there is nothing we can do.”
Wolf rose in the heart of the Component named Glenn Tropile. “Don’t say that,” Tropile cried, astonished at his own fury.
Diplomatically, she said, “Yes, but really—”
“Really,” he said with a savage bite, “there’s always something. We just don’t know what it is.”
Another long silence, and then Alia Narova said, “I wonder if we can wake the others.”
11
Haendl was on the ragged edge of a nervous breakdown. It was something new in his life.
It was full hot summer, and the hidden colony of Wolves in Princeton should have been full of energy and life. The crops were growing on all the fields nearby; the drained storehouses were being replenished. The aircraft that had been so painfully rebuilt and fitted for the assault on Mount Everest were standing by, ready to be manned and to take off.
And nothing, absolutely nothing, was going right.
It looked as though there would be no expedition to Everest. Four times now Haendl had gathered his forces and been all ready. Four times a key man of the expedition had—vanished.
Wolves didn’t vanish!
And yet more than a score of them had.
First Tropile—then Innison—then two dozen more, by ones and twos; no one was immune. Take Innison, for example. There was a man who was Wolf through and through. He was a doer, not a thinker; his skills were the skills of an artisan, a tinkerer, a jackleg mechanic. How could a man like that succumb to the pallid lure of meditation?
But undeniably he had. Translated. Gone!
It had reached a point where Haendl himself was red-eyed and fretful. He had set curious alarms for himself—had enlisted the help of others of the colony to avert the danger of Translation from himself. When he went to bed at night, a lieutenant sat next to his bed, watchfully alert lest Haendl, in that moment of reverie before sleep, fall into meditation—and himself be Translated. There was no hour of the day when Haendl permitted himself to be alone; and his companions, or guards, were ordered to shake him awake, as violently as need be, at the first hint of an abstracted look in the eyes or a reflective cast of the features. As time went on, Haendl’s self-imposed regime of constant alertness began to cost him heavily in lost rest and sleep. And the consequences of that were: More and more occasions when the bodyguards shook him awake; less and less rest.
He was very close to breakdown indeed.
On a hot, wet morning a few days after his useless expedition to see Citizen Germyn in Wheeling, Haendl ate a tasteless breakfast and, reeling with fatigue, set out on a tour of inspection of Princeton. Warm rain dripped from low clouds; but that was merely one more annoyance to Haendl. He hardly noticed it.
There were upwards of a thousand Wolves in the Community; and there were signs of worry on the face of every one of them. Haendl was not the only man in Princeton who had begun laying traps for himself as a result of the unprecedented disappearances; he was not the only one who was short of sleep. A community of a thousand is closeknit. When one member in forty disappears, the morale of the whole community receives a shattering blow. To Haendl it was clear, looking into the faces of his compatriots, that not only was it going to be nearly impossible to mount the planned assault on the Pyramid on Everest this year, it was going to be unbearably difficult merely to keep the community going.
The whole Wolf pack was on the verge of panic.
There was a confused shouting behind Haendl. Groggily he turned and looked; half a dozen Wolves were yelling and pointing at something in the wet, muggy air.
It was an Eye, hanging silent and featureless over the center of the street.
Haendl took a deep breath and mustered command of himself. “Frampton!” he ordered one of his lieutenants. “Get the helicopter with the instruments here. We’ll get some more readings.”
Frampton opened his mouth, then looked more closely at Haendl and, instead, began to talk on his pocket radio. Haendl knew what was in the man’s mind—it was in his own, too. What was the use of more readings? From the time of Tropile’s Translation on, they had had a perfect superfluity of instrument readings on the forces and auras that surrounded the Eyes—yes, and on Translations themselves, top. Before Tropile there had never been an Eye seen in Princeton, much less an actual Translation; but things were different now, everything was different; Eyes roamed restlessly around day and night.