Chapter 4

Half a world away, the midnight-blue Pyramid sat on its planed-off peak as it had sat since the days when Earth had a real sun of its own.

It was of no importance to the Pyramid that Glenn Tropile was about to receive a slim catheter into his spine, to drain his saps and his life. It didn’t matter to the Pyramid that the pretext for the execution was an act which human history had long stopped considering a capital crime. Ritual sacrifice in any guise made no difference to the Pyramid.

The Pyramid saw them come and the Pyramid saw them go--if the Pyramid could be said to “see.” One human being more or less, what matter? Who bothers to take a census of the cells in a hangnail?

And yet the Pyramid did have a kind of interest in Glenn Tropile. Or, at least, in the human race of which he was a part.

Nobody knew much about the Pyramids, but everybody knew that much. They wanted something--else why would they have bothered to steal the Earth?

The date of the theft was 2027. A great year--the year of the first landings on the Runaway Planet that had come blundering into the Solar System. Maybe those landings were a mistake--although they were a very great triumph, too; but maybe if it hadn’t been for the landings, the Runaway Planet might have run right through the ecliptic and away.

However, the triumphal mistake was made and that was the first time a human eye saw a Pyramid.

Shortly after--though not before a radio message was sent--that human eye winked out forever; but by then the damage was done. What passed in a Pyramid for “attention” had been attracted. The next thing that happened set the wireless channels between Palomar and Pernambuco, between Greenwich and the Cape of Good Hope, buzzing and worrying, as astronomers all over the Earth reported and confirmed and reconfirmed the astonishing fact that our planet was on the move. Rejoice in Messias had come to take us away.

A world of ten billion people, some of them brilliant, many of them brave, built and flung the giant rockets of Operation Up at the invader: Nothing.

The first, and only, Interplanetary Expeditionary Force was boosted up to no-gravity and dropped onto the new planet to strike back: Nothing.

Earth moved spirally outward.

If a battle could not be won, then perhaps a migration. New ships were built in haste. But they lay there rusting as the sun grew small and the ice grew thick, because where was there to go? Not Mars. Not the Moon, which was trailing alone. Not choking Venus or crushing Jupiter.

The migration was defeated as surely as the war, there being no place to migrate to.

One Pyramid came to Earth, only one. It shaved the crest off the highest mountain there was and squatted on it. An observer? A warden? Whatever it was, it stayed.

The sun grew too distant to be of use, and out of the old Moon, the Pyramid aliens built a new small sun in the sky--a five-year sun that burned out and was replaced, again and again and endlessly again.

It had been a fierce struggle against unbeatable odds on the part of the ten billion; and when the uselessness of struggle was demonstrated at last, many of the ten billion froze to death, and many of them starved, and nearly all of the rest had something frozen or starved out of them; and what was left, two centuries and more later, was more or less like Citizen Boyne, except for a few--a very few--like Glenn Tropile.

Gala Tropile stared miserably at her husband. “I want to get out of here,” he was saying urgently. “They mean to kill me. Gala, you know you can’t make yourself suffer by letting them kill me!”

She wailed: “I can’t!”

Tropile looked over his shoulder. Citizen Boyne was fingering the textured contrasts of a golden watch-case which had been his father’s--and soon would be his son’s. Boyne’s eyes were closed and he wasn’t listening.

Tropile leaned forward and deliberately put his hand on his wife’s arm. She started and flushed, of course.

“You can,” he said, “and what’s more, you will. You can help me get out of here. I insist on it, Gala, because I must save you that pain.”

He took his hand off her arm, content.

He said harshly: “Darling, don’t you think I know how much we’ve always meant to each other?”

She looked at him wretchedly. Fretfully she tore at the billowing filmy sleeve of her summer blouse. The seams hadn’t been loosened; there had not been time. She had just been getting into the appropriate Sun Re-creation Day costume, to be worn under the parka, when the messenger had come with the news about her husband.

She avoided his eyes. “If you’re really Wolf...”

Tropile’s sub-adrenals pulsed and filled him with confident strength. “You know what I am--you better than anyone else.” It was a sly reminder of their curious furtive behavior together; like the hand on her arm, it had its effect. “After all, why do we quarrel the way we did last night?”

He hurried on; the job of the rowel was to spur her to action, not to inflame a wound. “Because we’re important to each other. I know that you would count on me to help if you were in trouble. And I know that you’d be hurt--deeply, Gala!--if I didn’t count on you.”

She sniffled and scuffed the bright strap over her open-toed sandal.

Then she met his eyes.

It was the after-effect of the argument, of course. Glenn Tropile knew just how heavily he could rely on the after-spiral of a quarrel. She was submitting.

She glanced furtively at Citizen Boyne and lowered her voice.

“What do I have to do?” she whispered.

In five minutes, she was gone, but that was more than enough time. Tropile had at least thirty minutes left. They would take Boyne first; he had seen to that. And once Boyne was gone--

Tropile wrenched a leg off his three-legged stool and sat precariously balanced on the other two. He tossed the loose leg clattering into a corner.

The Keeper of the House of Five Regulations ambled slack-bodied by and glanced into the room. “Wolf, what happened to your stool?”

Tropile made a left-handed sign of no-importance. “It doesn’t matter. Except it is hard to meditate, sitting on this thing, with every muscle tensing and fighting against every other to keep my balance...”