The Pyramids were the mightiest race of warriors the Universe had ever known. They were invulnerable and unconquerable, except from within. Like Alexander the Great, they had met every enemy and whipped them all. And, like dying Alexander, they writhed and raged against the tiny, unseen bacillus within themselves.
Blindly, almost suicidally, the Pyramids returned to their ancient principle of shove-and-haul.
The geography of the binary planet was like a hive of bees, nearly featureless on the surface, but internally a congeries of tunnels, chambers, warrens, rooms, tubes and amphitheaters. Machinery and metal Components were everywhere thick under the planet’s crust. The more delicate and more useful Components of flesh and blood were, to a degree, concentrated in a few areas. …
And one of those areas had disappeared.
Tropile, battering futilely with his mind at the periphery of the vanished area, cried sharply to Alla Narova and the others: “It looks as though they’ve broken a piece right out of the planet! Everything stops here—there’s a physical gap which I can’t cross. Hurry, one of you—what was this section for?”
“Propulsion.”
“I see.” Tropile hesitated, confused for the first time since his awakening. “Wait.”
He retreated to the snowflake and communed with the other eight-branched members, now become something that resembled his general staff. He told them—most of them already knew, but the telling took so little time that it was simpler to go through it from beginning to end:
“The Pyramids attempted to cut the propulsion-pneuma out of circuit some seconds or days ago and were unsuccessful; we awakened additional Components and were able to maintain contact with it. They have now apparently cut it loose from the planet itself. I do not think it is far, but there is a physical space between.”
“The importance of the propulsion-pneuma is this: It controls the master generators of electrostatic force, which are used both to move this planet and ours, and to perform the act of Translation. If the Pyramids control it, they may be able to take us out of circuit, perhaps back to Earth, perhaps throwing us into space, where we will die. The question for decision: How can we counteract this move?”
A rush of voices all spoke at once; it was no trick for Tropile and the others to sort them out and follow the arguments of each, but it cannot be reproduced.
At last, one said: “There is a way. I will do it.”
It was Alla Narova.
“What is the way?” Tropile demanded, curiously alarmed.
“I shall go with them, trace the areas the Pyramids are attempting to isolate, place my entire self—” by this she meant her “concentration,” her “psyche,” that part of all of them which flashed along the neurone guides unhampered by flesh or distance—“in the most likely point they will next cut loose. And then I shall cause the propulsion units on the severed sections to force them back into circuit.”
Tropile objected: “But you don’t know what will happen! We have never been cut off from our physical bodies, Alla Narova. It may be death. It may not be possible at all. You don’t know!”
Alla Narova thought a smile and a farewell. She said: “No, I do not.” And then, “Goodbye, Tropile.”
She had gone.
Furiously, Tropile hurled himself after her, but she was quick as he, too quick to catch; she was gone. Foolishness, foolishness! he shouted silently. How could she do an insane, chancy thing like this?
And yet what else was there to do? They were all ignorant babes, temporarily successful because there had been no defense against them, for who expects babes to rise up in rebellion? They didn’t know. For all they could guess or imagine, the Pyramids had an effective counter for any move they might make. Temporary success meant nothing. It was the final decision that counted, when either the Pyramids were vanquished or the men, and what steps were needed to make that decision favor the men were anyone’s guess—Alla Narova’s was as good as his.
Tropile could only watch and wait.
Through a great many viewpoints and observers, he was able to see roughly what happened.
There was a section of the planet next the severed chunk where the mind and senses of Alla Narova lay coiled for a moment—and were gone. For what it had accomplished, her purpose succeeded. She had been taken. She was out of circuit.
The overwhelming consciousness of loss that flooded through Glenn Tropile was something outside of all his experience.
Next to him in the snowflake, the body which he had learned to think of as the body of Alla Narova twisted sharply as though waking from a dream—and lay flaccid, floating in the fluid.
“Alla Narova! Alla Narova!”
There was no answer.
A voice came piercingly: “Tropile! Here now, quickly!”
Goodbye, Alla Narova! He flashed away to see what the other voice had found. Great mindless boulders were chipping away from the crust of the binary planet and whirling like midges in the void around it.
“What is it?” cried one of the others.
Tropile had no answer. It was the Pyramids, clearly. Were they attempting to demolish their own planet? Were they digging away at the crust to uncover the maggot’s-nest of awakened Components beneath?
“The air!” cried Tropile sharply, and knew it was true. What the Pyramids were up to was a simple delousing operation. If you could destroy their own machinery for maintaining air and pressure and temperature, they would destroy all living things within—including Haendl and Citizen Germyn and thus, in the final analysis, including the bodies of Tropile and his awakened fellows. For without the mobile troops to defend their helpless cocoons against the machines of the Pyramids, the limp bodies could be destroyed as easily as a larva under a farmer’s heel.
So Alla Narova had failed.
Alone against the Pyramids, she had been unable to bring the recaptured sections back into the circuit that Tropile’s Components now dominated. It was the end of hope; but it was not the fear of defeat and damnation for the Earth that
