Tropile stopped, suddenly aware that Citizen Germyn was looking tepidly pained.
“What’s the matter?” Tropile demanded harshly.
Citizen Germyn gave him the faint deprecatory Quirked Smile. “I know you thought you were a Wolf, but—I told you I’ve been thinking a lot, and that’s what I was thinking about. Truly, Citizen, you do yourself no good by pretending that you really thought you were Wolf. Clearly you were not; the rest of us might have been fooled, but certainly you couldn’t fool yourself.
“Now here’s what I think you ought to do. When I found you were coming, I asked several rather well-known Citizens to come here later this evening. There won’t be any embarrassment. I only want you to talk to them and set the record straight, so that this terrible blemish will no longer be held against you. Times change and perhaps a certain latitude is advisable now, but certainly you don’t want—”
Tropile also left Citizen Germyn sooner than he had expected to.
There remained Alla Narova, but, queerly, she was not to be found.
Instantly it became clear to Tropile that it was she above all whom he needed to talk to. He remembered the shared beauty of their plunging drive through the neurone-guides of the Pyramids, the linked and inextricable flow of their thoughts and of their most hidden feelings.
She could not be very far, he thought numbly, cursing the blindness of his human eyes, the narrowness of his human senses. Time was when two worlds could not have hidden her from him; but that time was gone. He walked from place to place with the angry resentful tread of one used to riding—no, to flying, or faster than flying. He asked after her. He searched.
And at last he found—not her. A note. At one of the stations where the reawakened Components were funneled back into human affairs, there was a letter waiting for him:
I’m sure you will look for me. Please don’t. You thought that there were no secrets between us, but there was one.
When I was Translated, I was sixty-one years old. Two years before that, I was caught in a collapsing building; my legs are useless, and I had grown quite fat. I do not want you to see me fat and old.
And that was that, and at last Glenn Tropile turned to the last person of all those on his list who had known him well. Her name was Gala Tropile.
She had got thinner, he observed. They sat together quietly and there was considerable awkwardness, but then he noticed that she was weeping. Comforting her ended the awkwardness and he found that he was talking:
“It was like being a god, Gala! I swear, there’s no feeling like it. I mean it’s like—well, maybe if you’d just had a baby, and invented fire, and moved a mountain, and transmuted lead into gold—maybe if you’d done all of those things, then you might have some idea. But I was everywhere at once, Gala, and I could do anything! I fought a whole world of Pyramids, do you realize that? Me! And now I come back to—”
He stopped her in time; it seemed she was about to weep again.
He went on: “No, Gala, don’t misunderstand, I don’t hold anything against you. You were right to leave me in the field. What did I have to offer you? Or myself, for that matter? And I don’t know that I have anything now, but—”
He slammed his fist against the table. “They talk about putting the Earth back in its orbit! Why? And how? My God, Gala, we don’t know where we are. Maybe we could tinker up the gadgets the Pyramids used and turn our course backward—but do you know what Old Sol looks like? I don’t. I never saw it.
“And neither did you or anyone else alive.
“It was like being a god—
“And they talk about going back to things as they were—
“I’m sick of that kind of thinking! Wolves or Citizens, they’re dead on their feet and don’t know it. I suppose they’ll snap out of it in time, but I can’t wait. I won’t live that long.
“Unless—”
He paused and looked at her, confused.
Gala Tropile met her husband’s eyes.
“Unless what, Glenn?”
He shrugged and turned away.
“Unless you go back, you mean.” He stared at her; she nodded. “You want to go back,” she said, without stress. “You don’t want to stay here with me, do you? You want to go back into that tub of soup again and float like a baby. You don’t want to have babies—you want to be one.”
“Gala, you don’t understand. We can own the Universe. I mean mankind can. And I can do it. Why not? There’s nothing for me—”
“That’s right, Glenn. There’s nothing for you here. Not anymore.”
He opened his mouth to speak, looked at her, spread his hands helplessly. He didn’t look back as he walked out the door, but he knew that his back was turned not only on the woman who happened to be his wife, but on mankind and all of the flesh.
It was night outside, and warm. Tropile stood in the old street surrounded by the low, battered houses—and he could make them new and grand! He looked up at the stars that swung in constellations too new and changeable to have names. There was the Universe.
Words were no good; there was no explaining things in words. Naturally he couldn’t make Gala or anyone else understand, for flesh couldn’t grasp the realities of mind and spirit that were liberated from flesh. Babies! A home! And the whole grubby animal business of eating and drinking and sleeping! How could anyone ask to stay in the mire when the stars challenged overhead?
He walked slowly down the street, alone in the night, an apprentice godling renouncing mortality. There was nothing here for him, so why
