Wolfbane Read online

  “Survival” included the need for the complex components—a human being might have thought of them as “servomechanisms”—which could be assimilated, and which grew wild here.

  The planet was, in fact, very rich in these components, and they had a useful habit of “ripening”—which is to say, of becoming perfect for the Pyramids’ use—on their own. This occurred, however, at irregular and unpredictable intervals. Therefore the Pyramid on Mount Everest was obliged to maintain a constant surveillance, planet wide, for the perfect moment of plucking.

  (Of course, the components being harvested did not know they were ripening to be plucked. A wrist-watch on a jeweler’s shelf doesn’t know it is waiting for a shopper to buy it. The shopper has no interest in the previous state of the wrist-watch, either. So it was with the Pyramids and the useful devices they harvested on Earth.)

  So when its surveillance showed a component was ripe, the Pyramid plucked it. It used electrostatic charges. When the charges formed about a component about to be plucked, they distorted the refractive index of the air. Human beings called this an “Eye.”

  The Pyramid now found that a component was ripe for plucking.

  A world away from Mount Everest, in Wheeling, West Virginia, Citizen Boyne had attained the rapture of total emptying of the mind. The electrostatic charges over his head swirled into an Eye.

  There was a sound like the clapping of two hands, or a small thunder-crash.

  The Citizens of Wheeling knew that sound well. It was the miniature thunderclap of air slapping together, as it filled the space that had been occupied by the kneeling, meditating form of Citizen Boyne, raptly awaiting his Donation of Fluid.

  The three hundred Citizens of Wheeling were jerked out of their own meditations by the sound. They gasped in envy and admiration (and perhaps, a little, in fear) as they saw that Citizen Boyne had been Translated.

  Or, put in a different context, that Citizen Boyne had become ripe and therefore was harvested.

  6

  Glenn Tropile and his sobbing wife lay down for the night in the stubble of a cornfield. Gala Tropile ultimately fell asleep, still whimpering softly in her dreams. Her husband found sleep harder.

  Numbed by contact with the iron chill of the field—it would be weeks before the new Sun warmed the earth enough for it to begin radiating in turn—Tropile tossed restlessly. He closed his eyes and tried meditation; it would not work; unwanted visions flashed across his mind. He opened them and tried to meditate that way. Sometimes the heavenly blankness came best when you simply chose to ignore the visual world....

  Not this time; when Tropile opened his eyes he saw a bright star just over the horizon. It had not been in the sky lately, but Tropile recognized it at once.

  It was the binary planet. It was the home of the Pyramids.

  Tropile shivered with more than cold. No one liked to see that planet in the sky. To look at it was to remind oneself of all the evils that it had brought. To speak of it was unpardonable. Even before the littlest children had learned that one didn’t ask for more food or point to another child’s genitals, they learned that one never mentioned the binary planet, however bright it might appear in the sky.

  Its evil was lessened, microscopically, by the fact that it had no light of its own. Like any planet; like Mars or Jupiter or all the lost others, it shone only by reflection of the light from the nearest self-luminous body, in this case, Earth’s sunlet. So it was brightest when one could stand its hideous presence best—at the time of the Re-Creation of the Sun. And when the old and dying Sun was faint, and everyone was fearful and strained, it could hardly be picked out at all.

  That was only a very small mercy, but the basic fact of human life was that there weren’t any large ones any more.

  Tropile shut his eyes on the unwelcome sight and tried again to sleep. Even when it came it was fitful. He dreamed. He did not enjoy his dreams, because in them he was Wolf.

  Half-waking, he knew it was true. Well, let it be so, he told himself again and again; I will be Wolf; I will strike back at the Citizens, I will—

  Always the thought trailed off. He would exactly what? What could he do?

  Migration was an answer—go to another city. With Gala, he supposed. Start a new life, where he was not known as Wolf.

  And then what? Try to live a sheep’s life, as he had tried all his years? And there was the question of whether, in fact, he could manage to find a city where he was not known. The human race was migratory, in these years of subjection to the never-quite-understood rule of the Pyramids. It was a matter of insolation. When the new Sun was young, it was hot, and there was plenty of warmth; it was possible to spread north and south, away from the final line of permafrost which, in North America, came just above the old Mason-Dixon line. When the Sun was dying, the cold spread down. The race followed the seasons. Soon all of Wheeling would be spreading north again, and how was he to be sure that none of Wheeling’s citizens might not turn up wherever he might go?

  He was not to be sure, that was the answer to that.

  All right, scratch migration. What remained?

  He could—with Gala, he guessed—live a solitary life, on the fringes of cultivated land. They both had some skill at rummaging the old storehouses of the ancients.

  It took skill. Plundering the old supermarkets was not only bad manners—terminally bad—it was also dangerous. You could die of poisoning if you didn’t know what you were doing. Over the centuries, nearly all of the most interesting canned goods had decayed themselves into lethal and repellent mixtures. However, that did not mean there was nothing there. For reasons known only to themselves, the ancients had seen fit to take some kinds of foodstuffs which kept well enough by themselves, and go on to seal them into vacuum-tight cans. Crackers. Pasta. Unleavened bread—yes, there were lots of things still there.

  So it was possible.

  But even a Wolf is gregarious by nature; and there were bleak hours in that night when Tropile found himself close to sobbing with his wife.

  At the first break of dawn he was up. Gala had fallen into a light and restless sleep; he called her awake. “We have to move,” he said harshly. “Maybe they’ll get enough guts to follow us. I don’t want them to find us.”

  Silently she got up. They rolled and tied the blankets she had brought; they ate quickly from the food she had brought; they made packs and put them on their shoulders, and started to walk. One thing in their favor: They were moving fast, faster than any Citizen was likely to follow. All the same, Tropile kept looking nervously behind him.

  They hurried north and east, and that was a mistake; because by noon they found themselves blocked by water. It was impassable. They would have to skirt it westward until they found a bridge or a boat.

  “We can stop and eat,” Tropile said grudgingly, trying not to despair.

  They slumped to the ground. It was warmer now; Tropile found himself getting drowsier, drowsier—He jerked erect and stared around belligerently. Beside him his wife was lying motionless, though her eyes were open, gazing at the sky. Tropile sighed and stretched out. A moment’s rest, he promised himself. And then a quick bite to eat, and then onward....He was sound asleep when they came for him.

  There was a flutter of iron bird’s wings from overhead.

  Tropile jumped up out of sleep, awakening to panic. It was outside the possibility of belief, but there it was: In the sky over him, etched black against a cloud, a helicopter. And men staring out of it, staring down at him.

  A helicopter!

  But there were no helicopters, or none that flew—if there had been fuel to fly them with—if any man had had the skill to make them fly. It was impossible! And yet there it was, and the men were looking at him, and the impossible great whirling thing was coming down, nearer.

  He began to run in the downward wash of air from the vanes. But it was no use. There were three men, and they were fresh, and he wasn’t. He stopped, dropping into the fighter’s crouch that
is pre-set into the human body, ready to do battle. They didn’t want to fight. They laughed. One of them said amiably, “Long past your bedtime, boy. Get in. We’ll take you home.”

  Tropile stood poised, hands half-clenched and half-clawed. “Take—”

  “Take you home. Yeah.” The man nodded. “Where you belong, Tropile, you know? Not back to Wheeling, if that’s what is worrying you.”

  “Where I—”

  “Where you belong.” Then he understood. He got into the helicopter wonderingly. Home. Then there was a home for such as he. He wasn’t alone, he needn’t keep his solitary self apart; he could be with his own kind. “How,” he began, rummaging through the long list of questions he needed to put, and settling for, “How did you know my name?”

  The man laughed. “Did you think you were the only Wolf in Wheeling? We keep our eyes open, Tropile. We have to; that’s what Wolves are like.” And then, as Tropile opened his mouth for another question, “If you’re wondering about your wife, I think she must have heard us coming before you did. I think we saw her about half a mile from here, back along your track. Heading back to Wheeling as fast as she could go.”

  Tropile nodded. That was better, after all; Gala was no Wolf, though he had tried his best to make her one.

  One of the men closed the door; another did something with levers and wheels; the vanes whooshed around overhead; the helicopter bounced on its stiff-sprung landing legs and then rocked up and away.

  For the first time in his life Glenn Tropile looked down on the land.

  They didn’t fly high—but Glenn Tropile had never flown at all, and the two or three hundred feet of air beneath him made him faint and queasy. They danced through the passes in the West Virginia hills, crossed icy streams and rivers, swung past old empty towns which no longer had even names of their own. They saw no one.

  It was something over four hundred miles to where they were going, so one of the men told him. They made it easily before dark.

  Tropile walked through the town in the evening light. Electricity flared white and violet in the buildings around him. Imagine! Electricity was calories, and calories were to be hoarded.

  There were other walkers in the street. Their gait was not the economical shuffle with pendant arms. They burned energy visibly. They swung. They strode. It had been painted on his brain in earliest childhood that such walking was wrong, reprehensible, silly, debilitating. It wasted calories. These people did not look debilitated, and they didn’t seem to mind wasting calories.

  It was an ordinary sort of town, apparently named Princeton. It did not have the transient look to it of, say, Wheeling, or Altoona, or Gary, in Tropile’s experience. It looked like—well, it looked permanent. Tropile had heard of a town called Princeton but it happened that he had never passed through it south-warding or northbound. There was no reason why he or anybody should have or should not have. Still, there was a possibility, once he thought of it, that things were somehow so arranged that they should not; perhaps it was all on purpose. Like every town it was under-populated, but not as much so as most. Perhaps one living space in five was used. A high ratio.

  The man beside him was named Haendl, one of the men from the helicopter. They hadn’t talked much on the flight and they didn’t talk much now. “Eat first,” Haendl said, and took Tropile to a bright and busy sort of food stall. Only it wasn’t a stall, it was a restaurant.

  This Haendl, what to make of him? He should have been disgusting, nasty, an abomination. He had no manners whatever. He didn’t know, or at least didn’t use, the Seventeen Conventional Gestures. He wouldn’t let Tropile walk behind him and to his left, though he was easily five years Tropile’s senior. When he ate, he ate; the Sip of Appreciation, the Pause of First Surfeit, the Thrice Proffered Share meant nothing to him; he laughed when Tropile tried to give him the Elder’s Portion.

  Cheerfully patronizing, this man Haendl said to Tropile: “That stuffs all right when you don’t have anything better to do with your time. You poor mutts don’t. You’d die of boredom without your inky-pinky cults, and you don’t have the resources to do anything bigger. Yes, I do know the Gestures. Seventeen delicate ways of communicating emotions too refined for words to express—or too dangerous! The hell with all of that, Tropile. I’ve got words, and I’m not afraid to use them. Saves time. You’ll learn; we all did.”

  “But,” said Tropile, trying frantically to rebalance the budget of behavior in his mind, “what about waste? What about the need to economize on food? Where does it all come from?”

  “We steal it from the sheep,” the man said brutally. “You’ll do it too. Now why don’t you just shut up and eat?”

  Tropile ate silently, trying to think.

  A man arrived, threw himself in a chair, glanced curiously at Tropile and said: “Haendl, the Somerville Road. The creek backed up when it froze. Flooded, bad. Ruined everything.”

  Tropile ventured: “The flood ruined the road?”

  “The road? No. Say, you must be the fellow Haendl went after? Tropile, that’s the name?” He leaned across the table, pumped Tropile’s hand. “We had the road nicely blocked,” he explained. “The flood washed it clean. Now we have to block it again.”

  Haendl said: “Take the tractor if you need it.” The man nodded and left. Haendl said, “Eat up, we’re wasting time. About that road. We keep them blocked up, see? Why let a lot of Sheep in and out?”

  “Sheep?”

  “The opposite,” said Haendl, “of Wolves.”

  Haendl explained. Take ten billion people, and say that out of every million of them, one—just one—is different. He has a talent for survival; call him Wolf. Ten thousand of him, in a world of ten billion.

  Squeeze them, freeze them, cut them down. Let old Rejoice-in-Messias loom in the terrifying sky and so abduct the earth that the human race is decimated, fractionated, reduced to what is in comparison a bare handful of chilled, stunned survivors. There aren’t ten billion people in the world any more. No, not by a factor of a thousand. Maybe there are as many as ten million, more or less, rattling around in the space their enormous Elder Generations made for them.

  And of these ten million, how many are Wolf?

  Ten thousand.

  “You understand, Tropile. We survive. I don’t care what you call us. The Sheep call us Wolves, and me, I kind of like to call us Supermen. But we survive.”

  Tropile nodded, beginning to understand. “The way I survived the House of the Five Regulations.”

  Haendl gave him a pitying look. “The way you survived thirty years of Sheephood before that. Come on.”

  It was a tour of inspection. They went into a building, big, looking like any other big and useless building of the ancients, gray stone walls, windows with ragged shards of glass. Only inside it wasn’t like the others. Two subbasements down, Tropile winced and turned away from the flood of violet light that poured out of a quartz bulls-eye on top of a squat steel cone. “Perfectly harmless, Tropile, you don’t have to worry,” Haendl boomed. “Know what you’re looking at? There’s a fusion reactor down there. Heat. Power. All the power we need. Do you know what that means?” He stared somberly down at the flaring violet light of the inspection port. “Come on,” he said abruptly.

  Another building, also big, also gray stone. A cracked inscription over the entrance read: “—ORIAL HALL OF HUMANITIES.” The sense-shock this time was not light, it was sound. Hammering, screeching, rattling, rumbling. Men were doing noisy things with metal and machines. “Repair shop!” Haendl yelled. “See those machines? They belong to our man Innison. We’ve salvaged them from every big factory ruin we could find. Give Innison a piece of metal—any alloy, any shape—and one of those machines will change it into any other shape and damned near any other alloy. Drill it, cut it, plane it, weld it, smelt it, zone-melt it, bond it—you tell him what to do and he’ll do it. We got the parts to make six tractors and forty-one cars out of this shop. And we’ve got other shops—aircraft in Farmingd
ale and Wichita, armaments in Wilmington. Not that we can’t make some armaments here. Innison could build you a tank if he had to, complete with one-oh-five millimeter gun.”

  Tropile said: “What’s a tank?”

  Haendl only looked at him and said: “Come on!”

  Tropile’s head spun dizzily and all the spectacles merged and danced in his mind. They were incredible. All of them.

  Fusion pile, machine shop, vehicular garage, aircraft hangar. There was a storeroom under the seats of a football stadium, and Tropile’s head spun on his shoulders again as he tried to count the cases of coffee and canned soups and whisky and beans. There was another storeroom, only this one was called an armory. It was filled with...guns. Guns that could be loaded with cartridges, of which they had very many; guns which, when you loaded them and pulled the trigger, would fire.

  Tropile said, remembering: “I saw a gun once that still had its firing pin. But it was rusted solid.”

  “These work, Tropile. You can kill a man with them. Some of us have.”

  “Kill—”

  “Get that Sheep look out of your eyes, Tropile! What’s the difference how you execute a criminal? And what’s a criminal but someone who represents a danger to your world? We prefer a gun instead of the Donation of the Spinal Tap, because it’s quicker, because it’s less messy—and because we don’t like to drink spinal fluid, no matter what imaginary therapeutic or symbolic value it has. You’ll learn.”

  But he didn’t add “come on.” They had arrived where they were going.

  It was a small room in the building that housed the armory, and it held, among other things, a rack of guns.

  “Sit down,” said Haendl, taking one of the guns out of the rack thoughtfully and caressing it as the doomed Boyne had his watch-case. It was the latest pre-Pyramid model rifle, antipersonnel, short-range. It would not bunch a cluster of shots in a coffee can at much more than two and a half miles.