He said: “No mystery. I mean no mystery except the speed. Want to know what happened to Tropile?”
“I do,” said Haendl.
“A pencil of electrostatic force maintained by a pinch effect bounced down the approximate azimuth of Everest—God knows how they handled the elevation—and charged him and the area positive. A big charge, clear off the scale. They parted company. He was bounced straight up. A meter off the ground, a correcting vector was applied. When last seen, he was headed fast in the direction of the Pyramids’ binary—fast! So fast that I would guess he’ll get there alive. It takes an appreciable time, a good part of a second, for his protein to coagulate enough to make him sick and then kill him. If the Pyramids strip the charges off him immediately on arrival, as I should think they will, he’ll live.”
“Friction—”
“Be damned to friction,” Innison said calmly. “He carried a packet of air with him and there was no friction. How? I don’t know. How are they going to keep him alive in space, without the charges that hold air? I don’t know. If they don’t maintain the charges, can they beat the speed of light? I don’t know. I can tell you what happened. I can’t tell you how.”
Haendl stood up thoughtfully. “It’s something,” he said grudgingly.
“It’s more than we’ve ever had—a complete reading at the instant of Translation!”
“We’ll get more,” Haendl promised. “Innison, now that you know what to look for, go on looking for it. Keep every possible detection device monitored twenty-four hours a day. Turn on everything you’ve got that’ll find a sign of imposed modulation. At any sign—or at anybody’s hunch that there might be a sign—I’m to be called. If I’m eating. If I’m sleeping. If I’m enjoying with a woman. Call me, you hear? Maybe you were right about Tropile; maybe he did have some use. He might give the Pyramids a bellyache.”
Innison, flipping the magnetic tape drum to rewind, said thoughtfully: “It’s too bad they’ve got him. We could have used some more readings.”
“Too bad?” Haendl laughed sharply. “This time they’ve got themselves a Wolf.”
The Pyramids did have a Wolf—a fact which did not matter in the least to them.
It is not possible to know what “mattered” to a Pyramid except by inference. But it is possible to know that they had no way of telling Wolf from Citizen.
The planet which was their home—Earth’s old Moon—was small, dark, atmosphereless and waterless. It was completely built over, much of it with its propulsion devices.
In the old days, when technology had followed war, luxury, government and leisure, the Pyramids’ sun had run out of steam; and at about the same time, they had run out of the Components they imported from a neighboring planet. They used the last of their Components to implement their stolid metaphysic of hauling and pushing. They pushed their planet.
They knew where to push it.
Each Pyramid as it stood was a radio-astronomy observatory, powerful and accurate beyond the wildest dreams of Earthly radio-astronomers. From this start, they built instruments to aid their naked senses. They went into a kind of hibernation, reducing their activity to a bare trickle except for a small “crew” and headed for Earth. They had every reason to believe they would find more Components there, and they did.
Tropile was one of them. The only thing which set him apart from the others was that he was the most recent to be stockpiled.
The religion, or vice, or philosophy he practiced made it possible for him to be a Component. Meditation derived from Zen Buddhism was a windfall for the Pyramids, though, of course, they had no idea at all of what lay behind it and did not “care.” They knew only that, at certain times, certain potential Components became Components which were no longer merely potential—which were, in fact, ripe for harvesting.
It was useful to them that the minds they cropped were utterly blank. It saved the trouble of blanking them.
Tropile had been harvested at the moment his inhibiting conscious mind had been cleared, for the Pyramids were not interested in him as an entity capable of will and conception. They used only the raw capacity of the human brain and its perceptors.
They used Rashevsky’s Number, the gigantic, far more than astronomical expression that denoted the number of switching operations performable within the human brain. They used “subception,” the phenomenon by which the reasoning mind, uninhibited by consciousness, reacts directly to stimuli—shortcutting the cerebral censor, avoiding the weighing of shall-I-or-shan’t-I that precedes every conscious act.
The harvested minds were—Components.
It is not desirable that your bedroom wall switch have a mind of its own; if you turn the lights on, you want them on. So it was with the Pyramids.
A Component was needed in the industrial complex which transformed catabolism products into anabolism products.
With long experience gained since their planetfall, Pyramids received the tabula rasa that was Glenn Tropile. He arrived in one piece, wearing a blanket of air. Quick-frozen mentally at the moment of inert blankness his Meditation had granted him—the psychic drunkard’s coma—he was cushioned on repellent charges as he plummeted down, and instantly stripped of surplus electrostatic charge.
At this point, he was still human; only asleep.
He remained “asleep.” Annular fields they used for lifting and lowering seized him and moved him into a snug tank of nutrient fluid. There were many such tanks, ready and waiting.
The tanks themselves could be moved, and the one containing Glenn Tropile did move, to a metabolism complex where there were many other tanks, all occupied. This was a warm room—the Pyramids had wasted no energy on such foppish comforts in the first “room.” In this room, Glenn Tropile gradually resumed the appearance of life. His heart once again began to beat. Faint stirrings were visible in his chest as his habit-numbed lungs attempted to breathe. Gradually the stirrings slowed and stopped. There was no need for that foppish comfort, either; the nutrient fluid
