He runs the furnace in Everyman’s house, he measures the doneness of Everyman’s breakfast toast, he valves the cooling fluid through the radiator of Everyman’s car. If Everyman’s house stays too hot or too cold, the man swears at the lackwit switch and maybe buys a new one to plug in. But he never, never thinks that his thermostat might be plotting against him.
Thermostat : Man = Man : Pyramid. Only that and nothing more. It was not in the nature of a Pyramid to think that its Components, once installed, could reprogram themselves. No Component ever had. (But before Glenn Tropile, no Component had been Wolf.)
When Tropile found himself, he found others. They were men and women, real persons with gonads and dreams. They had been caught at the moment of blankness—yes; and frozen into that shape, true. But they were palimpsest personalities on which the Pyramids had programmed their duties. Underneath the Pyramids’ cabalistic scrawl, the men and women still remained. They had only to be reached.
Tropile and Alla Narova reached them—one at a time, then by scores. The Pyramids made that possible. The network of communication that they had created for their own purposes encompassed every cell of the race and all its works. Tropile reached out from his floating snowflake and went where he wished—anywhere within the binary planet; to the brooding Pyramid on Earth; through the Eyes, wherever he chose on Earth’s surface.
Physically, he was scarcely able to move a muscle. But, oh, the soaring range of his mind and vision!
Citizen Germyn was past shock, but just the same it was uncomfortable to be in a room with several dozen other persons, all of them naked. Uncomfortable. Once it would have been brain-shattering. For a Citizen to see his own Citizeness unclothed was gross lechery. To be part of a mixed and bare-skinned group was unthinkable. Or had been. Now it only made him uneasy.
He said numbly to Haendl: “Citizen, I pray you tell me what sort of place this is.”
“Later,” said Haendl gruffly, and led him out of the way. “Stay put,” he advised. “We’re busy.”
And that was true. Something was going on, but Citizen Germyn couldn’t make out exactly what it was. The naked people were worrying out a distribution of some sort of supplies. There were tools and there were also what looked to Citizen Germyn’s unsophisticated eyes very much like guns. Guns? It was foolishness to think they were guns, Citizen Germyn told himself strongly. Nobody had guns. He touched the floor with an exploratory hand. It was warm and it shook with a nameless distant vibration. He shuddered.
Haendl came back; yes, they were guns. Haendl was carrying one.
“Ours!” he crowed. “That Tropile must’ve looted our armory at Princeton. By the looks of what’s here, I doubt if he left a single round of ammunition. What the hell, they’re more use here!”
“But what are we going to do with guns?”
Haendl looked at him with savage amusement. “Shoot.”
Citizen Germyn said: “Please, Citizen. Tell me what this is all about.”
Haendl sat down next to him on the warm, quivering floor and began fitting cartridges into a clip.
“We’re fighting,” he explained gleefully. “Tropile did it all. You’ve been shanghaied and so have all the rest of us. Tropile’s alive! He’s part of the Pyramid communications network—don’t ask me how. But he’s there and he has been hauling men and weapons and God knows what all up from Earth—you’re on the binary planet now, you know—and we’re going to bust things up so the Pyramids will never be able to put them back together again. Understand? Well, it doesn’t matter if you don’t. All you have to understand is that when I tell you to shoot this gun, you shoot.”
Numbly, Citizen Germyn took the unfamiliar stock and barrel into his hands. Muscles he had forgotten he owned straightened the limp curve of his back, squared his shoulders and thrust out his chest.
It had been many generations since any of Citizen Germyn’s people had known the feeling of being an Armed Man.
A naked woman with wild hair and a full, soft figure came toward them, jiggling in a way that agonized Citizen Germyn. He dropped his eyes to his gun and kept them there.
She cried: “Orders from Tropile! We’ve got to form a party and blow something up.”
Haendl demanded: “Such as what?”
“I don’t know what. I only know where. We’ve got a guide. And Tropile particularly asked for you, Haendl. He said you’d enjoy it.”
And enjoy it Haendl did—anticipation was all over his face.
They formed a party of a dozen. They armed themselves with the guns Tropile had levitated from the bulging warehouse at Princeton. They supplied themselves with gray metal cans of something that Haendl said were explosives, and with fuses and detonators to match, and they set off—with their guide.
A guide! It was a shambling, fearsome monster!
When Citizen Germyn saw it, he had to fight an almost irresistible temptation to be ill. Even the bare skins about him no longer mattered; this new horror canceled them out.
“What—What—” he strangled, pointing.
Haendl laughed raucously. “That’s Joey.”
“What’s Joey?”
“He works for us,” said Haendl, grinning.
Joey was neither human nor beast; it was not Pyramid; it was nothing Citizen Germyn had ever seen or imagined before. It crouched on many-jointed limbs, and even so was twice the height of a man. Its ropy arms and legs were covered with fine chitinous spines, laid on as close as hairs in a pelt, and sharp as thorns. There was a layer of chitin around its reddish eyes. What was more horrible than all, it spoke.
It said squeakily: “You all ready? Come on, snap it up! The Pyramids have got something big building up and we’ve got to squash it.”
Citizen Germyn whispered feverishly to Haendl: “That voice! It sounds odd, yes—but isn’t it Tropile’s voice?”
“Sure it is! That’s what old Joey is good for,” said Haendl. “Tropile says he’s telepathic, whatever that is. Makes it handy for us.”
And it did. Telepathy was
