Chapter 7

The way to Mount Everest, Tropile glumly found, lay through supervising the colony’s nursery school. It wasn’t what he had expected, but it had the advantages that while his charges were learning, he was learning, too.

One jump ahead of the three-year-olds, he found that the “wolves,” far from being predators on the “sheep,” existed with them in a far more complicated ecological relationship. There were Wolves all through sheepdom; they leavened the dough of society.

In barbarously simple prose, a primer said: “The Sons of the Wolf are good at numbers and money. You and your friends play money games almost as soon as you can talk, and you can think in percentages and compound interest when you want to. Most people are not able to do this.”

True, thought Tropile subvocally, reading aloud to the tots. That was how it had been with him.

“Sheep are afraid of the Sons of the Wolf. Those of us who live among them are in constant danger of detection and death--although ordinarily a Wolf can take care of himself against any number of sheep.” True, too.

“It is one of the most dangerous assignments a Wolf can be given to live among the sheep. Yet it is essential. Without us, they would die--of stagnation, of rot, eventually of hunger.”

It didn’t have to be spelled out any further. Sheep can’t mend their own fences.

The prose was horrifyingly bald and the children were horrifyingly--he choked on the word, but managed to form it in his mind--competitive. The verbal taboos lingered, he found, after he had broken through the barriers of behavior.

But it was distressing, in a way. At an age when future Citizens would have been learning their Little Pitcher Ways, these children were learning to fight. The perennial argument about who would get to be Big Bill Zeckendorf when they played a strange game called “Zeckendorf and Hilton” sometimes ended in bloody noses.

And nobody--nobody at all--meditated on Connectivity.

Tropile was warned not to do it himself. Haendl said grimly: “We don’t understand it and we don’t like what we don’t understand. We’re suspicious animals, Tropile. As the children grow older, we give them just enough practice so they can go into one meditation and get the feel of it--or pretend to, at any rate. If they have to pass as Citizens, they’ll need that much. But more than that we do not allow.”

“Allow?” Somehow the word grated; somehow his sub-adrenals began to pulse.

“Allow! We have our suspicions and we know for a fact that sometimes people disappear when they meditate. We don’t want to disappear. We think it’s not a good thing to disappear. Don’t meditate, Tropile. You hear?”

But later, Tropile had to argue the point. He picked a time when Haendl was free, or as nearly free as that man ever was. The whole adult colony had been out on what they used as a parade ground--it had once been a football field, Haendl said. They had done their regular twice-a-week infantry drill, that being one of the prices one paid for living among the free, progressive Wolves instead of the dull and tepid sheep.

Tropile was mightily winded, but he cast himself on the ground near Haendl, caught his breath and said: “Haendl--about meditation.”

“What about it?”

“Well, perhaps you don’t really grasp it.”

Tropile searched for words. He knew what he wanted to say. How could anything that felt as good as Oneness be bad? And wasn’t Translation, after all, so rare as hardly to matter? But he wasn’t sure he could get through to Haendl in those terms.

He tried: “When you meditate successfully, Haendl, you’re one with the Universe. Do you know what I mean? There’s no feeling like it. It’s indescribable peace, beauty, harmony, repose.”

“It’s the world’s cheapest narcotic,” Haendl snorted.

“Oh, now, really--”

“And the world’s cheapest religion. The stone-broke mutts can’t afford gilded idols, so they use their own navels. That’s all it is. They can’t afford alcohol; they can’t even afford the muscular exertion of deep breathing that would throw them into a state of hyperventilated oxygen drunkenness. Then what’s left? Self-hypnosis. Nothing else. It’s all they can do, so they learn it, they define it as pleasant and good, and they’re all fixed up.”

Tropile sighed. The man was so stubborn! Then a thought occurred to him and he pushed himself up on his elbows. “Aren’t you leaving something out? What about Translation?”

Haendl glowered at him. “That’s the part we don’t understand.”

“But surely self-hypnosis doesn’t account for--”

“Surely it doesn’t!” Haendl mimicked savagely. “All right. We don’t understand it and we’re afraid of it. Kindly do not tell me Translation is the supreme act of Un-willing, Total Disavowal of Duality, Unison with the Brahm-Ground or any such slop. You don’t know what it is and neither do we.” He started to get up. “All we know is, people vanish. And we want no part of it, so we don’t meditate. None of us--including you!”

It was foolishness, this close-order drill. Could you defeat the unreachable Himalayan Pyramid with a squads-right flanking maneuver?

And yet it wasn’t all foolishness. Close-order drill and 2500-calorie-a-day diet began to put fat and flesh and muscle on Tropile’s body, and something other than that on his mind. He had not lost the edge of his acquisitiveness, his drive--his whatever it was that made the difference between Wolf and sheep.

But he had gained something. Happiness? Well, if “happiness” is a sense of purpose, and a hope that the purpose can be accomplished, then happiness. It was a feeling that had never existed in his life before. Always it had been the glandular compulsion to gain an advantage, and that was gone, or anyway almost gone, because it was permitted in the society in which he now lived.