“We had a party up Mount Everest five years ago,” Haendl was saying. “We didn’t find out a thing. Five years before that, and five years before that—every time there’s a sun, while it is still warm enough to give a party a chance to climb up the sides—we send a team up there. It’s a rough job. We give it to the new boys, Tropile. Like you.”
There it was. He was being invited to attack a Pyramid.
Tropile hesitated, delicately balanced, trying to get the feel of this negotiation. This was Wolf against Wolf; it was hard. There had to be an advantage—
“There is an advantage,” Haendl said aloud.
Tropile jumped, but then he remembered: Wolf against Wolf.
Haendl went on: “What you get out of it is your life, in the first place. You understand you can’t get out now. We don’t want sheep meddling around. And in the second place, there’s a considerable hope of gain.” He stared at Tropile with a dreamer’s eyes. “We don’t send parties up there for nothing, you know. We want to get something out of it. What we want is the Earth.”
“The Earth?” It reeked of madness. But this man wasn’t mad.
“Some day, Tropile, it’s going to be us against them. Never mind the sheep—they don’t count. It’s going to be Pyramids and Wolves, and the Pyramids won’t win. And then—”
It was enough to curdle the blood. This man was proposing to fight, and against the invulnerable, the godlike Pyramids.
But he was glowing and the fever was contagious. Tropile felt his own blood begin to pound. Haendl hadn’t finished his “and then—” but he didn’t have to. The “and then” was obvious: And then the world takes up again from the day the wandering planet first came into view. And then we go back to our own solar system and an end to the five-year cycle of frost and hunger.
And then the Wolves can rule a world worth ruling.
It was a meretricious appeal, perhaps, but it could not be refused. Tropile was lost.
He said: “You can put away the gun, Haendl. You’ve signed me up.”
VII
The way to Mount Everest, Tropile glumly found, lay through supervising the colony’s nursery school. It wasn’t what he had expected, but it had the advantages that while his charges were learning, he was learning, too.
One jump ahead of the three-year-olds, he found that the “wolves,” far from being predators on the “sheep,” existed with them in a far more complicated ecological relationship. There were Wolves all through sheepdom; they leavened the dough of society.
In barbarously simple prose, a primer said: “The Sons of the Wolf are good at numbers and money. You and your friends play money games almost as soon as you can talk, and you can think in percentages and compound interest when you want to. Most people are not able to do this.”
True, thought Tropile subvocally, reading aloud to the tots. That was how it had been with him.
“Sheep are afraid of the Sons of the Wolf. Those of us who live among them are in constant danger of detection and death—although ordinarily a Wolf can take care of himself against any number of sheep.” True, too.
“It is one of the most dangerous assignments a Wolf can be given to live among the sheep. Yet it is essential. Without us, they would die—of stagnation, of rot, eventually of hunger.”
It didn’t have to be spelled out any further. Sheep can’t mend their own fences.
The prose was horrifyingly bald and the children were horrifyingly—he choked on the word, but managed to form it in his mind—competitive. The verbal taboos lingered, he found, after he had broken through the barriers of behavior.
But it was distressing, in a way. At an age when future Citizens would have been learning their Little Pitcher Ways, these children were learning to fight. The perennial argument about who would get to be Big Bill Zeckendorf when they played a strange game called “Zeckendorf and Hilton” sometimes ended in bloody noses.
And nobody—nobody at all—meditated on Connectivity.
Tropile was warned not to do it himself. Haendl said grimly: “We don’t understand it and we don’t like what we don’t understand. We’re suspicious animals, Tropile. As the children grow older, we give them just enough practice so they can go into one meditation and get the feel of it—or pretend to, at any rate. If they have to pass as Citizens, they’ll need that much. But more than that we do not allow.”
“Allow?” Somehow the word grated; somehow his sub-adrenals began to pulse.
“Allow! We have our suspicions and we know for a fact that sometimes people disappear when they meditate. We don’t want to disappear. We think it’s not a good thing to disappear. Don’t meditate, Tropile. You hear?”
But later, Tropile had to argue the point. He picked a time when Haendl was free, or as nearly free as that man ever was. The whole adult colony had been out on what they used as a parade ground—it had once been a football field, Haendl said. They had done their regular twice-a-week infantry drill, that being one of the prices one paid for living among the free, progressive Wolves instead of the dull and tepid sheep.
Tropile was mightily winded, but he cast himself on the ground near Haendl, caught his breath and said: “Haendl—about meditation.”
“What about it?”
“Well, perhaps you don’t really grasp it.”
Tropile searched for words. He knew what he wanted to say. How could anything that felt as good as Oneness be bad? And wasn’t Translation, after all, so rare as hardly to matter? But he wasn’t sure he could get through to Haendl in those terms.
He tried: “When you meditate successfully, Haendl, you’re one with the Universe. Do you know what I mean? There’s no feeling like it. It’s indescribable peace, beauty, harmony, repose.”
“It’s the world’s cheapest narcotic,” Haendl snorted.
“Oh, now, really—”
“And the world’s cheapest religion. The stone-broke mutts can’t afford gilded idols, so they use their own navels.
