It merely plucked, when a mechanism was ripe. It had found that a mechanism was ripe now.
A world away, before the steps of Wheeling’s Federal Building, electrostatic charges gathered above a component whose name was Citizen Boyne. There was a small sound like the clapping of two hands which made the three hundred citizens of Wheeling jerk upright out of their meditations.
The sound was air filling the gap that had once been occupied by Citizen Boyne, who had instantly vanished—who had, in a word, been ripe and therefore been plucked.
VI
Glenn Tropile and his sobbing wife passed the night in the stubble of a cornfield. Neither of them slept much.
Tropile, numbed by contact with the iron chill of the field—it would be months before the new Sun warmed the Earth enough for it to begin radiating in turn—tossed restlessly, dreaming. He was Wolf. Let it be so, he told himself again and again. I will be Wolf. I will strike back at the Citizens. I will—
Always the thought trailed off. He would exactly What? What could he do?
Migration was an answer—go to another city. With Gala, he guessed. Start a new life, where he was not known as Wolf.
And then what? Try to live a sheep’s life, as he had tried all his years? And there was the question of whether, in fact, he could manage to find a city where he was not known. The human race was migratory, in these years of subjection to the never quite understood rule of the Pyramids.
It was a matter of insulation. When the new Sun was young, it was hot, and there was plenty of warmth; it was possible to spread north and south, away from final line of permafrost which, in North America, came just above the old Mason-Dixon line. When the Sun was dying, the cold spread down. The race followed the seasons. Soon all of Wheeling would be spreading north again, and how was he to be sure that none of Wheeling’s Citizens might not turn up wherever he might go?
He could be sure—that was the answer to that.
All right, scratch migration. What remained? He could—with Gala, he guessed—live a solitary life on the fringes of cultivated land. They both had some skill at rummaging the old storehouses of the ancients, and there was still food and other commodities to be found.
But even a Wolf is gregarious by nature and there were bleak hours in that night when Tropile found himself close to sobbing with his wife.
At the first break of dawn, he was up. Gala had fallen into a light and restless sleep; he called her awake.
“We have to move,” he said harshly. “Maybe they’ll get up enough guts to follow us. I don’t want them to find us.”
Silently she got up. They rolled and tied the blankets she had bought; they ate quickly from the food she had brought; they made packs and put them on their shoulders and started to walk. One thing in their favor: they were moving fast, faster than any Citizen was likely to follow. All the same, Tropile kept looking nervously behind him.
They hurried north and east, and that was a mistake, because by noon they found themselves blocked by water. Once it had been a river; the melting of the polar ice caps that had submerged the coasts of the old continents had drowned it out and now it was salt water. But whatever it was, it was impassable. They would have to skirt it westward until they found a bridge or a boat.
“We can stop and eat,” Tropile said grudgingly, trying not to despair.
They slumped to the ground. It was warmer now. Tropile found himself getting drowsier, drowsier—
He jerked erect and stared around belligerently. Beside him, his wife was lying motionless, though her eyes were open, gazing at the sky. Tropile sighed and stretched out. A moment’s rest, he promised himself, and then a quick bite to eat, and then onward. …
He was sound asleep when they spotted him.
There was a flutter of iron bird’s wings from overhead. Tropile jumped up out of his sleep, awakening to panic. It was outside the possibility of belief, but there it was:
In the sky over him, etched black against a cloud, a helicopter. And men staring out of it, staring down at him.
A helicopter!
But there were no helicopters, or none that flew—if there had been fuel to fly them with—if any man had had the skill to make them fly. It was impossible! And yet there it was, and the men were looking at him, and the impossible great whirling thing was coming down, nearer.
He began to run in the downward wash of air from the vanes. But it was no use. There were three men and they were fresh and he wasn’t. He stopped, dropping into the fighter’s crouch that is preset into the human body, ready to do battle.
The men didn’t want to fight. They laughed and one of them said amiably: “Long past your bedtime, boy. Get in. We’ll take you home.”
Tropile stood poised, hands half-clenched. “Take—”
“Take you home. Yeah. Where you belong, Tropile. Not back to Wheeling, if that’s what is worrying you.”
“Where I—”
“Where you belong.”
Then Tropile understood.
He got into the helicopter wonderingly. Home. So there was a home for such as he. He wasn’t alone. He needn’t keep his solitary self apart. He could be with his own kind.
He remembered Gala Tropile and paused. One of the men said with quick understanding: “Your wife? I think we saw her about half a mile from here. Heading back to Wheeling as fast as she could go.”
Tropile nodded. That was better, after all. Gala was no Wolf, though he had tried his best to
