He didn’t see the Eye that formed above him. He didn’t feel the gathering offerees that formed his trap. He didn’t know that he was: Seized, charged, catapulted through space, caught, halted and drained. It happened too fast.
One moment he was in his bed; the next moment he was—elsewhere. There wasn’t anything between.
It had happened to hundreds of thousands of Components before him, but for Citizen Germyn what happened was in some ways different. He was not embalmed in nutrient fluid, formed and programmed to take his part in the Pyramid-structure; for he had not been selected by the Pyramid-structure but by the wild Component. He arrived conscious, awake, and able to move.
He stood up in a red-lit chamber. Vast crashes of metal buffeted his ears. Heat sprang little founts of perspiration on his skin.
It was too much, too much to take in at once. Oily-skinned madmen, naked, were capering and shouting at him. It took him a moment to realize that they were not devils; this was not Hell; he was not dead. “This way!” they were bawling at him. “Come on, hurry up!’ He reeled, following their directions, across an unpleasantly warm floor, staggering and falling (the binary planet was a quarter lighter than Earth), until he got his balance.
The capering madmen led him through a door—or sphincter or trap; it was not like anything he had ever seen. But it was a portal of a sort, and on the other side of it was something closer to sanity. It was another room, and though the light was still red it was a paler, calmer red; and the thundering ironmongery was a wall away. The madmen were naked, yes; but they were not mad. The oil on their skins was only the sheen of sweat.
“Where—where am I?” he gasped.
Two voices, perhaps three or four, were all talking at once. He could make no sense of it. Citizen Germyn looked about him. He was in a sort of a chamber that formed a part of a machine that existed for the unknown purposes of the Pyramids on the binary planet. And he was alive—and not even alone.
He had crossed more than a million miles of space without feeling a thing. But when what the naked men were saying began to penetrate, the walls lurched around him. For a time the words were a meaningless noise. It wasn’t the fall that hurt, it was the landing.
It was true; he had been Translated.
He looked dazedly down at his own bare body, and around at the room, and then he realized they were still talking: “—when you get your bearings. Feel all right now? Come on, Citizen, snap out of it!” Germyn blinked.
Another voice said peevishly: “There should be some other place to bring them in. That foundry isn’t meant for human beings. Look at the shape this one is in! Some time somebody’s going to come in, and we won’t spot him in time, and—pfut!”
The first voice said: “Can’t be helped. Hey! Are you all right?”
Citizen Germyn took a deep breath of the hot sour air and looked at the naked man before him. “Of course I’m all right,” he said.
The naked man was Haendl.
There were several hundred of them. He learned that they were divided into eight natural groups. One group, Citizen Germyn’s, was composed of people who had known Tropile. Another, given the clue of common-knowledge by Haendl, had conferred and decided that their link was acquaintance with one Citizeness Alia Narova, widow, of Nice. African origin and knowledge of one Django Tembo accounted for a third, and so on. They were spread through an acre of huge corridors primarily occupied by automatic machine tools which averaged eighty feet in height. Many were on legs, as though an ancient history of directly-operated machines irrationally dictated the shape of their fully-automatic descendants. Bars of metal sometimes abruptly popped into position as chuck jaws opened and then closed; then the metal bars began to spin, then tools advanced, sliced at them and retreated in order, and then the finished incomprehensible pieces would float away on just-visible annular magnetic fields. Every three hours a hexagonal forged plate floated in through the precisely-opened “ofoor” of the foundry, clamped itself magnetically to one machine after another, and was drilled, bored, reamed, broached, milled, ground and polished into a greater mystery than it had been before. The toolbit, as tall as a man, of one slotting machine seemed to require regular replacement from a magazine after it worked on one of the hexagons, but the other tools did not noticeably lose their edges. Chips were carried away by a flood, every eleven hours or so, of glycerine. It came in jets from the walls, rose ankle-high, and gurgled down drainholes.
Once a Pyramid came by, gliding a hands-breadth off the floor and smelling of ozone. They hid like mice; they did not know whether the thing “saw” them or not.
They were fed from one set of taps in the wall and watered from another. Their water was a disgrace and an affront to the several Water Tasters among them, utterly lacking in the tang of carbonates and halogen salts. Their food was glucose syrup which must have been freighted with the necessary minerals and amino acids, for they did not fall sick of any deficiency disease. Their air was adequate—perhaps spillover from the adjoining foundry where an atmosphere was required for some of the processes.
Mostly, they waited and talked.
Citizen Germyn, for one, had a maggot in his brain about Translation. “Perhaps,” he would say, “this really is Translation, really is bliss, and we lack only the wits to appreciate it. We have food, freedom from drastic temperature changes—” He slashed the sweat from his brow and went to the row of ever-running water faucets for a long drink before returning to his argument. “And there seems to be a sort of dispensation from ordinary manners and routine.” He looked forlornly about him. No Husband’s Chairs, no Wifely Chairs (decently armless). He squatted on the metal floor.
Haendl was more forthright. “Bliss, my foot! We’re a bunch of damned Red Indians. I guess the Indians never knew what hit them. They didn’t know about land grants and claiming territory for the crown, and about church missions and expanding populations. They didn’t have those things. They learned by and by—at least about things like guns and firewater; they didn’t have those things but they could see the sense to them. But I really don’t think the Indians ever knew what the white men were up to until it was too late to matter. We’re even deeper in the dark. At least the Indians had a clue now and then—they’d see the sailors come off the big white devil-ship and make a bee-line for their women; there was something in common. But we don’t have that much. We’re in the hands of the Pyramids—see? Our language! I have to say ‘hands.’ We don’t even have a language to use about them!”
After about the fifieth time he had taken nourishment from the taps, Citizen Germyn ran tentatively amok. Luckily for all, it happened soon after one of the regular cleansings by glycerine; there were no sharp chips a foot long for him to use as daggers, and the floor was so slippery he couldn’t keep his feet when he tried to strangle one of the Africans. People held his arms until he came to himself, bitterly chagrined.
“I am ready,” he told them at last, with what dignity he could muster. “I realize that there is no proper catheter for a Donation, but withholding of air is an alternative method sanctified by tradition.”
Innison told him not to be stupid, and added: “If you make a habit of amok we’ll have to do something about you, but not until I figure a way to get you down an eight-inch drain.”
It was a dreadful insult, delivered without so much as a Quirked Smile. Citizen Germyn could not bring himself to speak to Innison for three more feedings. Citizen Germyn’s rage was such that he nerved himself up to turning his back on Innison in a marked manner; Innison was not only not crushed but did not even notice. He went right on talking to Haendl.
Citizen Germyn thereupon took Innison by the hair with one hand and slapped him ringingly across the face with his other.