Tropile licked the bowl of his spoon and stepped into the street. He was comfortably aware under a double-thick parka that the wind was blowing very cold.
A Citizen passed him, walking alone: odd, thought Tropile. He was walking rapidly and there was a look of taut despair on his face. Still more odd. Odd enough to be worth another look, because that sort of haste, that sort of abstraction, suggested something to Tropile. They were in no way normal to the gentle sheep of the class They, except in one particular circumstance.
Glenn Tropile crossed the street to follow the abstracted Citizen, whose name, he knew, was Boyne. The man blundered into Citizen Germyn outside the baker’s stall, and Tropile stood back out of easy sight, watching and listening.
Boyne was on the ragged edge of breakdown. What Tropile heard and saw confirmed his diagnosis. The one particular circumstance was close to happening—Citizen Boyne was on the verge of running amok.
Tropile looked at the man with amusement and contempt. Amok! The gentle sheep could be pushed too far. He had seen Citizens run amok, the signs were obvious.
There was pretty sure to be an advantage in it for Glenn Tropile. There was an advantage in almost anything, if you looked for it.
He watched and waited. He picked his spot with care, so that he could see Citizen Boyne inside the baker’s stall, making a dismal botch of slashing his quarter-kilo of bread from the Morning Loaf.
He waited for Boyne to come racing out. …
Boyne did.
A yell—loud, piercing. It was Citizen Germyn, shrilling: “Amok, amok!” A scream. An enraged wordless cry from Boyne, and the baker’s knife glinting in the faint light as Boyne swung it. And then Citizens were scattering in every direction—all of the Citizens but one.
One Citizen was under the knife—his own knife, as it happened; it was the baker himself. Boyne chopped and chopped again. And then Boyne came out, roaring, the broad knife whistling about his head. The gentle Citizens fled panicked before him. He struck at their retreating forms and screamed and struck again. Amok.
It was the one particular circumstance when they forgot to be gracious—one of the two, Tropile corrected himself as he strolled across to the baker’s stall. His brow furrowed, because there was another circumstance when they lacked grace, and one which affected him nearly.
He watched the maddened creature, Boyne, already far down the road, chasing a knot of Citizens around a corner. Tropile sighed and stepped into the baker’s stall to see what he might gain from this.
Boyne would wear himself out—the surging rage would leave him as quickly as it came; he would be a sheep again and the other sheep would close in and capture him. That was what happened when a Citizen ran amok. It was a measure of what pressures were on the Citizens that, at any moment, there might be one gram of pressure too much and one of them would crack. It had happened here in Wheeling twice within the past two months. Glenn Tropile had seen it happen in Pittsburgh, Altoona and Bronxville.
There is a limit to the pressure that can be endured.
Tropile walked into the baker’s stall and looked down without emotion at the slaughtered baker. The corpse was a gory mess, but Tropile had seen corpses before.
He looked around the stall, calculating. As a starter, he bent to pick up the quarter-kilo of bread Boyne had dropped, dusted it off and slipped it into his pocket. Food was always useful. Given enough food, perhaps Boyne would not have run amok.
Was it simple hunger they cracked under? Or the knowledge of the thing on Mount Everest, or the hovering Eyes, or the sought-after-dreaded prospect of Translation, or merely the strain of keeping up their laboriously figured lives?
Did it matter? They cracked and ran amok, and Tropile never would, and that was what mattered.
He leaned across the counter, reaching for what was left of the Morning Loaf—
And found himself staring into the terrified large eyes of Citizeness Germyn.
She screamed: “Wolf! Citizens, help me! Wolf!”
Tropile faltered. He hadn’t even seen the damned woman, but there she was, rising up from behind the counter, screaming her head off: “Wolf! Wolf!”
He said sharply: “Citizeness, I beg you—” But that was no good. The evidence was on him and her screams would fetch others.
Tropile panicked. He started toward her to silence her, but that was no good, either. He whirled. She was screaming, screaming, and there were people to hear. Tropile darted into the street, but they were popping out of every doorway now, appearing from each rat’s hole in which they had hid to escape Boyne.
“Please!” he cried, sobbing. “Wait a minute!”
But they weren’t waiting. They had heard the woman and maybe some of them had seen him with the bread. They were all around him—no, they were all over him; they were clutching at him, tearing at his soft, warm furs.
They pulled at his pockets and the stolen twists of salt spilled accusingly out. They yanked at his sleeves and even the stout, unweakened seams ripped open. He was fairly captured.
“Wolf!” they were shouting. “Wolf!” It drowned out the distant noise from where Boyne had finally been run to earth, a block and more away. It drowned out everything.
It was the other circumstance when they forgot to be gracious: when they had trapped a Son of the Wolf.
III
Engineering had long ago come to an end.
Engineering is possible under one condition of the equation: Total available Calories divided by Population equals Artistic-Technological Style. When the ratio Calories-to-Population is large—say, five thousand or more, five thousand daily calories for every living person—then the Artistic-Technological Style is big. People carve Mount Rushmore; they build great foundries; they manufacture enormous automobiles to carry one housewife half a mile for the purchase of one lipstick.
Life is coarse and rich where C ∶ P is large. At the other extreme, where C ∶ P
