The Pyramids were too strong.
And yet, he thought, quickening, they had been too strong before and still a weak spot had been found!
“Think,” he ordered himself desperately.
And then again: “Think!” Components stirred restlessly around him, questioning. “Think!” he cried mightily. “All of you, think! Think of your lives and hopes!
“Think!
“Hope!
“Worry!
“Dream!”
The Components were reaching toward him now, wonderingly. He commanded them violently: “Do it—concentrate, wish, think! Let your minds run free and think of Earth, pleasant grass and warm sun! Think of loving and sweat and heartbreak! Think of death and birth! Think, for the love of heaven, think!”
And the answer was not in sound, but it was deafening.
In the cut-off sections, Alla Narova’s soaring mind lay trapped. It had not been enough; she could not force her will against the dull inflexibility of the Pyramids. …
Until that inflexible will began to waver.
There was a leakage of thought.
It maddened and baffled the Pyramids. The whole neuronic network was resounding to a babble of thoughts and emotions that, to a Pyramid, were utterly demented! The rousing Component minds throbbed with urge and emotion that were new to Pyramid experience. What could a Pyramid make of a human’s sex drive? Or of the ropy-armed aliens’ passionate deification of the Egg? What of hunger and thirst and the blazing Wolf-need for odds and advantage that streamed out of such as Tropile?
They wavered, unsure. Their reactions were slow and very confused.
For Alla Narova succeeded in her purpose. She was able to reach out across the space and barrier to Tropile and the propulsion-pneuma was back in circuit. The section that controlled the master generators of the electronic scythe lay under his hands.
“Now!” he cried, and all of the Components reached out to grasp and move.
“Now!” And the central control was theirs; the full flood of power from the generators was at their command.
“Now! Now! Now!” And they reached out, with a fat pencil of electrostatic force and caught the sluggish, brooding Pyramid on Mount Everest.
It had squatted there without motion for more than two centuries. Now it quivered and seemed to draw back, but the probing pencil caught it, and whirled it, and hurled it up and out of Earth, into the tiny artificial sun.
It struck with a flare of blue-white light.
“One gone!” gloated Tropile. “Alla Narova, are you there?”
“Still here,” she called from a great distance. “Again?”
“Again!”
They reached for the Pyramids and found them, wherever they were. Some lay close to the surface of the binary planet, and some were hundreds of miles within, and a few, more desperate than the others or merely assigned to the task, they discovered at the very portal of the single spaceship of the Pyramids.
But wherever they were and whatever they chose to do, each one of them was found and seized. They came wriggling and shaking, like trout on an angler’s line. They came bursting through layer on layer of impenetrable metal that, nevertheless, they penetrated. They came by the dozens and scores, and at last by the thousands; but they came.
There were more and more flares of blue-white light on the tiny sun—so many that Tropile found himself scouring the planet in a desperate search for one surviving Pyramid—not to destroy as an enemy, but to keep for a specimen.
But he searched in vain.
The Pyramids were destroyed, gone. There was not one left. The Earth lay open and free under its tiny sun for the first time in centuries.
It had been a strange war, but a short one.
And it was over.
XV
Tropile swam up out of hammering blackness into daylight and pain.
It hurt. He was being born again—coming back to life—and it had all the agonies of parturition, except that they were visited upon the creature being born, himself. There were crushing blows at his temples that pounded and pained like no other ache he had ever felt. He moaned raspingly.
Someone moved blurrily over his shut eyes. He felt something sting sharply at the base of his brain. Then it tingled, warming his scalp, comforting it, numbing it. Pain went slowly away.
He opened his eyes.
Four masked torturers were leaning over him. He stared, not understanding; but the eyes were not torturers’ eyes, and in a moment the masks came off. Surgical masks—and the faces beneath the masks were human faces.
Surgeons and nurses.
He blinked at them and said groggily: “Where am we?” And then he remembered.
He was back on Earth; he was merely human again.
Someone came bustling into the room and he knew without looking that it was Haendl.
“We beat them, Tropile!” Haendl cried. “No, cancel that. You beat them. We’ve destroyed every Pyramid there was, and a nice hot fire they’re making up there on the sun, eh? Beautiful work, Tropile. Beautiful! You’re a credit to the name of Wolf!”
The surgeons stirred uneasily, but apparently, Tropile thought, there had been changes, for they did no more than that.
Tropile touched his temples fretfully and his fingers rested on gauze bandages. It was true: he was out of circuit. The long reach of his awareness was cut short at his skull; there was no more of the infinite sweep and grasp he had known as part of the snowflake in the nutrient fluid.
“Too bad,” he whispered hopelessly.
“What?” Haendl frowned. The nurse next to him whispered something and he nodded. “Oh, I see. You’re still a little groggy, right? Well, that’s not hard to understand—they tell me it was a tricky job of surgery, separating you from that gunk the Pyramids had wired into your head.”
“Yes,” said Tropile, and closed his ears, though Haendl went on talking. After a while, Tropile pushed himself up and swung his legs over the side of the operating table. He was naked. Once that would have bothered him enormously, but now it didn’t seem to matter.
“Find me some clothes, will you?” he asked. “I’m back. I might as well start getting used to it.”
Glenn Tropile found that he was a returning hero,
