Chapter 15

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, attracting a curious sort of hero-worship wherever he went. It was not, he thought after careful analysis, exactly what he might have expected. For instance, a man who went out and killed a dragon in the old days was received with great gratitude and rejoicing, and if there was a prince’s daughter around, he married her. Fair enough, after all. And Tropile had slain a foe more potent than any number of dragons.

But he tested the attention he received and found no gratitude in it. It was odd.

What it was like most of all, he thought, was the sort of attention a reigning baseball champion might get--in a country where cricket was the national game. He had done something which, everybody agreed, was an astonishing feat, but about which nobody seemed to care. Indeed, there was an area of accusation in some of the attention he got.

Item: nearly ninety thousand erstwhile Components had now been brought back to ambient life, most of them with their families long dead, all of them a certain drain on the limited resources of the planet. And what was Glenn Tropile going to do about it?

Item: the old distinctions between Citizen and Wolf no longer made much sense now that so many Componentized Citizens had fought shoulder to shoulder with Componentized Sons of the Wolf. But didn’t Glenn Tropile think he had gone a little too far there?

And item--looking pretty far ahead, of course, but still--well, just what was Glenn Tropile going to do about providing a new sun for Earth, when the old one wore out and there would be no Pyramids to tend the fire?

He sought refuge with someone who would understand him. That, he was pleased to realize, was easy. He had come to know several persons extremely well. Loneliness, the tortured loneliness of his youth, was permanently behind him, definitely.

For example, he could seek out Haendl, who would understand everything very well.

Haendl said: “It is a bit of a letdown, I suppose. Well, hell with it; that’s life.” He laughed grimly. “Now that we’ve got rid of the Pyramids, there’s plenty of other work to be done. Man, we can breathe now! We can plan ahead! This planet has maundered along in its stupid, rutted, bogged-down course too many years already, eh? It’s time we took over! And we’ll be doing it, I promise you. You know, Tropile--” he sniggered--”I only regret one thing.”

“What’s that?” Tropile asked cautiously.

“All those weapons, out of reach! Oh, I’m not blaming you. But you can see what a lot of trouble it’s going to be now, stocking up all over again--and there isn’t much we can do about bringing order to this tired old world, is there, until we’ve got the guns to do it with again?”

Tropile left him much sooner than he had planned.

Citizen Germyn, then? The man had fought well, if nothing else. Tropile went to find him and, for a moment at least, it was very good. Germyn said: “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Tropile. I’m glad you’re here.” He sent his wife for refreshments, and decorously she brought them in, waited for exactly one minute, and then absented herself.

Tropile burst into speech as soon as she left. “I’m beginning to realize what has happened to the human race, Germyn. I don’t mean just now, when we licked the Pyramids and so on. No, I mean hundreds of years ago, what happened when the Pyramids arrived, and what has been happening since. Did you ever hear of Indians, Germyn?”

Germyn frowned minutely and shrugged.

“They were, oh, hundreds and hundreds of years ago. They were a different color and not very civilized--of course, nobody was then. But the Indians were nomads, herdsmen, hunters--like that. And the white people came from Europe and wanted this country for themselves. So they took it. And do you know something? I don’t think the Indians ever knew what hit them.”

“They didn’t know about land grants and claiming territory for the crown and church missions and expanding populations. They didn’t have those things. It’s true that they learned pretty well, by and by--at least they learned things like guns and horses and firewater; they didn’t have those things, either, but they could see some sense to them, you know. But I really don’t think the Indians ever knew exactly what the Europeans were up to, until it was too late to matter.

“And it was the same with us and the Pyramids, only more so. What the devil did they want? I mean, yes, we found out what they did with the Translated people. But what were they up to? What did they think? Did they think? You know, I’ve got a kind of a crazy idea--maybe it’s not crazy, maybe it’s the truth. Anyway, I’ve been thinking. Suppose even the Pyramids weren’t the Pyramids? We never talked to one of them. We never gave it a Rorschach or tested its knee jerks. We licked them, but we don’t know anything about them. We don’t even know if they were the guys that started the whole bloody thing, or if they were just sort of super-sized Components themselves. Do we?