Wolfbane

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Perhaps those landings were a mistake. Some thought so. Some thought that if the human race had cowered silent under its blanket of air the Pyramids might have run right through the ecliptic and away.

  However, the triumphal “mistake” was made, and that may have been the first time a human eye saw a Pyramid.

  Shortly after—though not before the 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 two ships of the Interplanetary Expeditionary Force were 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 along; 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. “—Want to get out of here,” he was saying urgently. “They want 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; he could feel her trembling.

  “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 hadn’t 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 quarrel, of course; Glenn Tropile knew just how heavily he could count 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 the Five Regulations ambled slack-bodied by and glanced into the room. “Wolf, what happened to your stool?”

  Tropile made a left-handed sign: 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....”

  The Keeper made an overruling sign: please-let-me-help. “It’s your last half hour, Wolf,” he reminded Tropile. “I’ll fix the stool for you.” He entered and slammed and banged it together, and left with an expression of mild concern. Even a Son of the Wolf was entitled to the fullest appreciation of that unique opportunity for meditation, the last half hour before a Donation.

  In five minutes he was back, looking solemn and yet glad, like a bearer of serious but welcome tidings. “It is the time for the first Donation,” he announced. “Which of you—”

  “Him,” said Tropile quickly, pointing. Boyne opened his eyes calmly and nodded. He got to his feet, made a formal leavetaking bow to Tropile, and followed the Keeper toward his Donation and his death. As they were going out Tropile coughed a minor supplication. The Keeper paused. “What is it, Wolf?”

  Tropile showed him the empty water pitcher—empty, all right; he had emptied it out the window.

  “My apologies,” the Keeper said, blushing, and hurried Boyne along. He came back almost at once to fill it. He didn’t even wait to watch the ceremonial Donation.

  Tropile stood watching him, his sub-adrenals beginning to pound like the rolling boil of Well-Aged Water. The Keeper was at a disadvantage. He had been neglectful of his charge—a broken stool; no water in the pitcher. And a Citizen, brought up in a Citizen’s mores of consideration and tact, could not help but be humiliated, seek to make amends.

  Tropile pressed his advantage home. “Wait,” he said winsomely to the Keeper. “I’d like to talk to you.”

  The Keeper hesitated, torn. “The Donation—”

  “Damn the Donation,” Tropile said calmly. “After all, what is it but sticking a pipe into a man’s backbone and sucking out the juice that keeps him alive? It’s killing, that’s all.”

  Crash, crash, crash. The Keeper turned literally white. Tropile was speaking blasphemy, and he wasn’t stopping.

  “I want to tell you about my wife,” Tropile went on, assuming a confidential air. “You know, there’s a real woman. Not one of those frozen-up Citizenesses, you know? Why, she and I used to—” He hesitated. “You’re a man of the world, aren’t you?” he demanded. “I mean, you’ve seen life.”

  “I—suppose so,” the Keeper said faintly.

  “Then you won’t be shocked, I know,” Tropile lied. “Well, let me tell you, there’s a lot to women that these stuffed-shirt Citizens don’t know about. Boy! Ever see a woman’s knee?” He sniggered. “Ever kiss one, with—” He winked—“with the light on? Ever sit in a big arm-chair, say, with a woman in your lap?—all soft and heavy, and kind of warm, and slumped up against your chest, you know, and—” He stopped and swallowed; he was almost making himself retch; it was hard to say these things. But he forced himself to go on: “Well, she and I used to do those things. Plenty. All the time. That’s what I call a real woman.”

  He stopped—warned by the Keeper’s sudden cha
nge of expression, glazed eyes, strangling breath. He had gone too far. He had only wanted to paralyze the man, revolt him, put him out of commission; but he was overdoing it; he jumped forward and caught the Keeper as he fell, fainting.

  Callously Tropile emptied the water pitcher over the man.

  The Keeper sneezed and sat up groggily. He focused his eyes on Tropile, and abruptly blushed.

  Tropile said harshly: “I wish to see the new sun from the street.”

  The request was incredible! The Keeper could not possibly allow dangerous liberties to a guest; that was not Citizenship, since the job of a Keeper was to Keep. But Tropile’s filthy mouth had unsettled Citizen Harmane.

  He floundered, choking on the obscenities he had heard. He was torn between two courses of action, both all but obligatory, both all but impossible. Tropile was in detention regarding the Fifth Regulation. That was all there was to it—looked at from one point of view. Such persons were not to be released from their quarters: the Keeper knew it, the world knew it, Tropile knew it.

  It was an obscenity almost greater than the lurid tales of perverted lust, for Tropile had asked something which was impossible! No one ever asked anything that was impossible to grant—for no one could ever refuse anything; that was utterly graceless, unthinkable.

  One could only attempt to compromise. The Keeper stammeringly said: “May I—May I let you see the new sun from the corridor?” And even that was wretchedly wrong; but he had to offer something. One always offered something. The Keeper had never since babyhood given a flat “no” to anybody about anything. No Citizen had. A flat “no” led to hard feelings, strong words—imaginably, even blows. The only flat “no” conceivable was the enormous, terminal “no” of an amok. Short of that—

  One offered. One split the difference. One was invariably filled with tepid pleasure when, invariably, the offer was accepted, the difference was split, both parties were satisfied.

  “That will do for a start,” Tropile snarled. “Open, man, open! Don’t make me wait.”

  The Keeper reeled and unlatched the door to the corridor.

  “Now the street!”

  “I can’t!” burst in an anguished cry from the Keeper. He buried his face in his hands and began to sob, hopelessly incapacitated.

  “The street!” Tropile said remorselessly. He felt himself wrenchingly ill; he was going against custom that had ruled his own life as surely as the Keeper’s.

  But he was Wolf. “I will be Wolf,” he growled, and advanced upon the Keeper. “My wife,” he said, “I didn’t finish telling you. Sometimes she used to put her arm around me and just snuggle up and—I remember one time—she kissed my ear. Broad daylight. It felt funny and warm, I can’t describe it.”

  Whimpering, the Keeper flung the keys at Tropile and tottered brokenly away.

  He was out of the action. Tropile himself was nearly as badly off; the difference was that he continued to function. The words coming from him seared like acid in his throat. “They call me Wolf,” he said aloud, reeling against the wall. “I will be one.”

  He unlocked the outer door and his wife was waiting, the things he had asked her to bring in her arms.

  Tropile said strangely to her: “I am steel and fire. I am Wolf, full of the old moxie.”

  She wailed: “Glenn, are you sure I’m doing the right thing?” He laughed unsteadily and led her by the arm through the deserted streets.

  5

  Citizen Germyn, as was his right by position and status as a connoisseur, helped prepare Citizen Boyne for his Donation. There was nothing much that needed to be done, actually. This made it an elaborate and lengthy task, according to the ethic of the Citizens; it had to be protracted, each step was surrounded by fullest dress of ritual.

  It was done in the broad daylight of the new Sun, and as many of the three hundred citizens of Wheeling as could manage it were in the courtyard of the old Federal Building to watch.

  The nature of the ceremony was this: A man who revealed himself Wolf, or who finally crumbled under the demands of life and ran amok, could not be allowed to live. He was haled before an audience of his equals and permitted—with the help of force, if that should be necessary, but preferably not—to make the Donation of Spinal Fluid. Execution was murder; and murder was not permitted under the gentle code of Citizens. So this was not execution. The draining of a man’s spinal fluid did not kill him. It only insured that, after a time and with much suffering, his internal chemistry would so arrange itself that he would die.

  Once the Donation was made the problem was completely altered, of course; suffering was agreed to be a bad thing in itself. So, to save the Donor from the suffering that lay ahead, it was the custom to have the oldest and gentlest Citizen on hand stand by with a sharp-edged knife. When the Donation was complete, the Donor’s head was lopped off. It was done purely to avert suffering. Therefore that was not execution either, but only the hastening of an inevitable end. The dozen or so Citizens whose rank permitted them to assist then solemnly dissolved the spinal fluids in water and ceremoniously drank the potion down, at which time it was proper to offer a small poem in commentary. All in all, it was a perfectly splendid opportunity for the second purest form of meditation (other than those on connectivity) by everyone concerned.

  Citizen Germyn, whose role was Catheter Bearer, took his place behind the Introducer Bearer, the Annunciators, and the Questioner of Purpose. As he passed Citizen Boyne, Germyn assisted him to assume the proper crouched-over position; Boyne: looked up gratefully and Germyn found the occasion proper for a Commendatory Half-Smile. The Questioner of Purpose said solemnly to Boyne:

  “It is your privilege to make a Donation here today. Do you wish to do so?”

  “I do,” said Boyne raptly. The anxiety had passed; clearly he was confident of making a good Donation; Germyn approved with all his heart.

  The Annunciators, in alternate stanzas, announced the proper pause for meditation to the meager crowd, and all fell silent. Citizen Germyn began the process of blanking out his mind, to ready himself for the great opportunity to Appreciate that lay ahead. A sound distracted him; he glanced up irritably. It seemed to come from the House of the Five Regulations, a man’s voice, carrying. But no one else appeared to notice it. All of the watchers, all of those on the stone steps, were in somber meditation.

  Germyn tried to return his thoughts to where they belonged....

  But something was troubling him. He had caught a glimpse of the Donor, and there had been something—something—

  He angrily permitted himself to look up once more to see just what it had been about Citizen Boyne that had attracted his attention.

  Yes, there was something. Over the form of Citizen Boyne, silent, barely visible, a flicker of life and motion. Nothing tangible. It was as if the air itself were in motion....

  It was—Germyn thought with a bursting heart—it was an Eye!

  The veritable miracle of Translation, it was about to take place here and now, upon the person of Citizen Boyne! And no one knew it but himself!

  In this last surmise Citizen Germyn was wrong.

  True, no other human eyes saw the flawed-glass thing that twisted the air over Boyne’s prostrate body; but there was, in a sense, another witness some thousands of miles away.

  The Pyramid on Mount Everest “stirred.”

  It did not move; but something about it moved, or changed, or radiated. The Pyramid surveyed its—cabbage patch? Wrist-watch mine? It would make as much sense, it may be, to say wrist-watch patch or cabbage mine; at any rate; it surveyed what to it was a place where intricate mechanisms grew, ripened and were dug up at the moment of usefulness, whereupon they were quick-frozen and wired into circuits.

  Through signals perceptible to it, the Pyramid had become “aware” that one of its mechanisms was now ready.

  The Pyramid’s blood was dielectric fluid. Its limbs were electrostatic charges. Its philosophy was, Unscrew it and push. Its motive was survival.


  Survival today was not what survival once had been, for a Pyramid. Once survival had merely been gliding along on a cushion of repellent charges, streaming electrons behind for the push, sending h-f pulses out often enough to get a picture of their bounced return integrated deep inside oneself.

  If the picture showed something metabolizable, one metabolized it. One broke it down into molecules by lashing it with the surplus protons left over from the dispersed electrons; one absorbed the molecules. Sometimes the metabolizable object was an Immobile and sometimes a Mobile—a vague, theoretical, frivolous classification to a philosophy whose basis was that everything unscrewed. If it was a Mobile one sometimes had to move after it; that was the difference.

  The essential was survival, not making idle distinctions.

  However, the Pyramids had learned, quite a long time ago, that some distinctions were very useful to make. For example, there was the difference between things that were merely metabolizable and things which, very handily, were assimilable. Quite a lot of effort could be saved if things could simply be “wired” into the places where they were needed, intact.

  Well, more or less intact.

  This planet was rich in assimilable things. These things had proven well suited to being incorporated right into the functions of the Pyramids’ elaborate devices, with hardly any processing at all bar the suppression of unnecessary “needs” or “desires.”

  It was for this reason that the Pyramids had bothered to steal the planet in the first place.

  So the Pyramid on Mount Everest sat and waited.

  It was not lonely in its isolation—no Pyramid had ever learned how to be “lonely.” For that matter, it was not really alone, either, since its directives came from the binary planet, with which—with all of which, fellow-Pyramids and self-acting devices and all—the Pyramid on Mount Everest was continuously in contact. It sent its h-f pulses bouncing and scattering out. It scattered them additionally on their return. Deep inside, the more-than-anamorphically distorted picture was reintegrated. Deeper inside still, it was interpreted and evaluated for its part in survival, in the sense that the Pyramids had come to understand survival.