Wolfbane

by C. M. Kornbluth

  More of the quiescent machinery that littered the bleak planetscape stirred. From under a battery of dead, abandoned electrolysis cells crawled the primary food-main repair machines. They had not been in hiding. They were universal environment equipment; it did not matter where they waited until summoned by pressure drops in the main and the breaking of circuits built into the main’s fabric. They had done their last job an earth-century ago, the meteorite-hole repairs to the riser. They had waited nearby since then and when the lead cells of a chlorine-factory complex wore out, the repair machines had suffered the cells to be dumped on them by disposal machinery. They could dig out on signal, and the signal had come.

  There were about one hundred of them. They resembled hugely oversized tank-dozers to which had been fitted a variety of materialhandling accessories: extensible cranes, pairs of hands, lift forks. They were not fighting machines, but by the nature of their mission they were built to survive natural damage and bull their way through to the injured mains against any conceivable opposition by earthquake, meteor, flood or lashing broken electric cable.

  But not by man.

  The thirty humans waited silently for the ten machines that ground toward the shattered riser and the fallen overhead tube: ninety other monsters angled across the gaunt planetscape towards the other enigmatic wounds reported to their deep-buried brains. With fascinated horror Roget Germyn unscrewed the lid from a box which bore an ancient stencil: ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND. Inside, in honeycomb cells, nested a dozen slim tubes with egg-bulges at one end and fins at the other.

  “You will load for us as you were shown,” Tropile said to Germyn. Tropile shouldered a bazooka, sighted along its barrel and caught the foremost of the repair machines in the cross-wires, three hundred yards away, coming fast.

  The Snowflake died at that moment. In one burst of love, farewell and pain it transmitted through to Tropile the image of the searing blue line of plasmoid, the nutrient tank boiling dry, boiling them with it.

  Germyn slapped him hesitantly on the shoulder—the signal for “armed and loaded.” Glen Tropile collapsed under the trifling weight of the sheetmetal tube and missile and lay sobbing. He was dead; he had just died.

  “Give me that damned thing,” Gala Tropile said, wrenched the rocket launcher from him and shouldered it inexpertly.

  “My God, be careful!” Germyn screamed. “They’re atomics!”

  “I know,” she said shortly. She steadied the fore-end of the tube on a hummock, got her sight-picture, and put her finger on the button. A woman who had stood foolishly in line behind her and caught the rocket’s exhaust blast clapped her hands to her burnt-away shoulder and collapsed, writhing. Nobody paid the slightest attention to her; their eyes were only for the little fireball that streaked into the leading repair machine and turned it into a big fireball. A red-purple mushroom cloud leaped into being above it, but before the cap formed Gala Tropile was snapping at Germyn: “Load! Load!”

  That sector of the dark planet’s equator was bright for the next hour with the death-throes of the hundred machines. Some men and women died with them. One box of the hotwire rockets consisted of duds that had slipped through inspection down in Princeton. That group fought off the repair machines with rifle fire to pock and dimple their gears, and shaped charges hurled at a suicidal short range. Two were left of the thirty human beings in that group by the time their neighbors could turn their own rocket launchers to the flank.

  18

  After all was silent and the dead were numbered, the Pyramids came, gliding silently and slowly on their cushions of electrostatic force. They fitted themselves into the black, cliff-high booths and waited...

  They would wait thus until the end of time for food to absorb so they could go about their business of making more food to absorb, so they could...

  The human beings, at first scared and angry and unable to turn their backs on the monsters, were at last surprised to find that they could pity the great dead stupid things.

  19

  If, a lifetime of labor later, one of those skinny and starving Ellis Island immigrants had returned, plump and secure, to his shtetl or Mediterranean fishing village, he would have been hopelessly out of place. No subways! No elevators’ No all-night supermarkets: No friends, even, because the ones he had once known had changed so—or he had—that there was nothing to talk about. Such a person would have been an alien among his own people.

  No more so than Glen Tropile, when he returned to life.

  The naked, sweating, pugnacious members of the mouse pack tried at first to welcome him. He would have none of it. Not even from Gala Tropile—especially not from Gala Tropile, because the woman made the unforgivable mistake of throwing her arms around him. Sweat-stained, shaggy-haired, smelly—she was lucky her husband didn’t throw up on her. He might have, if there had been anything in his stomach to void. That came later, when he realized that he would once again have to contend with the disgusting business of eating food, not to mention the even more disgusting business of getting rid of what the food turned into. (He mourned for the sweet, clean nutrient fluid of his tank—and its occupants, his more-than-siblings, his very self.)

  Fortunately there was a war to be won. His task was to lead his army into battle.

  But then that was done...and he was, tragically, still alive.

  He closed himself off as best he could. His hands went often to the places at his temples where he had once been joined to the rest of the Snowflake. His eyes looked at infinity. He offered no speech, though he would answer questions:

  Haendl: “How can we get back to Earth?”

  Tropile: “The ship used for Sun kindling will be found at Latitude North 32.08, Longitude West 16.53. It will accommodate 114 persons and make the passage in six hours and forty-five minutes.”

  Innison: “How can we disconnect all our people from these damned machines? How do we wake them up?”

  Tropile: “Neurosurgery machines used for disconnection of Components will be found against the North wall of the Reception and Reprocessing Complex and may be programmed manually to administer electro-shock through the forebrain which will have the effect of scrambling the pleasure-reflex you refer to by implication as ‘sleep’: after some hours of disorientation and mania the primary personality will assert itself. Notice should be taken that there will be a mortality rate of about seven per cent for this operation.”

  Germyn: “Can I get you anything, Citizen Tropile, for your comfort? Are you all right? Do you wish to see your wife?”

  Tropile: “No. No. No.”

  The reclamation of the Components proceeded exponentially. At the start there was only the ragged tribe, reduced to two hundred by its war, tentatively recognizing a friend or a husband here and there wired into the network of the planet. With trepidation the neurosurgery machines, the first ones programmed by the hands of Tropile, were brought to the Components and they were awakened. Then there were a hundred and ten, and the ten had useful shadow-memories. They “guessed” that you worked this machine so—and that’s the way it was. Then there were four hundred and ten, and the tribe was outnumbered and a little resentful of these well-fed come-latelies who had not been in the battle at all and who knew so much about this damned planet. Then there was a regular assembly line set up to process Components out, and the Sun ship, on a ferry run to return them to an astounded Earth.

  Tropile was among those returned, sitting relaxed but unmoving, his eyes dead. He sat thus for three months before it occurred to somebody that “electro-shock through the forebrain” might be what he needed.

  It was.

  Tropile was Tropile again, living, aching, looking up at masked 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!
” he cried. “No, cancel that. You beat them. 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.”

  “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 stark naked, and 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 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, why, he 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 what was undoubtedly a foe more potent than any number of dragons.

  But he tested the attention he received, and there was 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 too much sense now that so many Citizens fought shoulder to shoulder with Sons of the Wolf. But didn’t Glenn Tropile think he had gone a little too far there? And item—well, 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 a few 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.

  Tropile did.

  Haendl said: “It is a bit of a let-down, I suppose. Well, hell with it; that’s life.” He laughed grimly. “Now that we’ve got rid of the Pyramids,” he said, “there’s plenty of other work ahead. 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, Tropile. You know, Tropile—” he grinned—“I only regret one thing.”

  “What’s that?” Tropile asked cautiously.

  “All those beautiful bazooka fission bombs we fired! Oh, I know you needed them. 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 have the stuff 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 linking. 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; he had been hard put to it to conform to the polite patterns while she lingered. He said: “I’m just now beginning to realize what has happened to the human race, Germyn, The false division into Sheep and Wolves. You fought like a Wolf...”

  Tropile stopped, suddenly aware that he had lost his audience. Citizen Germyn was looking tepidly pained.

  “What’s the matter?” Tropile demanded harshly.

  Citizen Germyn gave him the faint deprecatory Quirked Smile. “Wolves,” he said, gazing off into the distance. “Really, Citizen Tropile. I know you thought you were a Wolf, but—Well, I told you I’ve been thinking a lot, and that’s what I was thinking about. Truly, Citizen,” he said earnestly, “you do yourself no good by pretending that you really thought you were Wolf. Clearly you were not; the rest of us might have been fooled, but certainly you couldn’t fool yourself. Now, here’s what I think you ought to do. When I found you were coming I asked several rather well known Citizens to come here later this evening. Oh, I explained everything to them very fully; there won’t be any embarrassment. I only want you to talk to them and set the record straight, so that this terrible blemish will no longer be held against you. Times change, and perhaps a certain latitude is advisable now, but certainly you don’t want—”

  Tropile left Citizen Germyn much sooner than he had expected to also. So at last Glenn Tropile turned to the last person on his list who had known him well. Her name was Gala Tropile.

  She had got thinner, he observed. They sat together quietly, and there was considerable awkwardness; but then he noticed that she was weeping. Comforting her ended awkwardness, and he found that he was talking:

  “It was like being a god, Gala! I swear, there’s no feeling like it. I mean, it’s like—well, maybe if you’d just had a baby; and invented fire; and moved a mountain; and transmuted lead into gold...maybe if you’d done all of those things at once, then you might have some idea. But I was everywhere at once, Gala, and I could do anything! I fought a whole world of Pyramids, do you realize that? Me! And now I come back to—”

  He stopped her in time; it seemed she was about to weep again. He went on: “No, Gala, don’t misunderstand, I don’t hold anything against you. You were right to leave me. What did I have to offer you? Or myself, for that matter. And I don’t know that I have anything now, but—”

  He slammed his fist against the table.

  “They talk about putting the earth back in its orbit!” he roared. “Why? And how? My God, Gala, we don’t know where we are. Maybe we could tinker up the gadgets the Pyramids used and turn our course backward—but do you know what our orbit is supposed to look like? I don’t. I never saw it.

  “And neither did you or anyone else alive.

  “It was like being a god—

  “And they talk about going back to things as they were. Wolves! Citizens! Meditation, the cheapest of the cheap thrills! Flesh! Mere flesh! Mere flesh! Once I could see, Gala, but I’m blind now! I was a ring of fire that grew! Now I am only a man, now I will never be anything but a man unless—”

  He stopped and looked at her, confused.

  Gala Tropile met her husband’s eyes. “Unless what, Glenn?”

  He shrugged and looked away.

  “Unless you go back, you mean.” He turned to her; she nodded. “You want to go back,” she said without stress. “You want to get back into your tub of soup again, and float like a baby. You don’t want to have babies; you want to be one.”

  “Gala,” he said, “you don’t understand. There was a wonderful, wise old person, witty too, who happened to be green and happened to have tentacles and happened to be dead. I wanted to know him better; his thoughts tasted good. And we knew that there’s a tri-symbiotic race in the Magellanic
Cloud beloved by all that part of the Galaxy. You see, they have learned a fact about—call it God. We wanted to visit them. And the Coalsack Nebula isn’t a dust cloud at all; it’s a hole in space. There are races in the Universe whose entire cultural history is the building of a slow understanding of the nature of that hole. Think how the thoughts of such a race would taste to an eightmind—”

  He stopped. “You think I’m crazy,” he said. “Crazy to forget that I’m an animal, that I can never be anything but an animal, that a twitch at the neck of a gland matters more than the tri-symbiotes of the Magellanic and their Fact. You may be right.”

  “What I think,” whimpered his wife through tears, “is that you’d be dead again.”

  Dead? Tropile was startled at the vastness of the misunderstanding between them. Where could one begin, to explain things to a person who thought that when you had lost all your physical attributes in the tank of a Snowflake you were dead? He tried clumsy bribery:

  “You know,” he said, “if I went back, I think I could take care of the Sun for you, and probably reverse the propulsion machinery.”

  The only answer was a wail.

  Doggedly Tropile retraced his tracks. He rapped on the door of Citizen Germyn, and the man blinked at him. It was a moment before Tropile recognized the Quirked Smile. “Oh, am I doing something wrong?” Tropile asked. “Sorry. If it’s because I didn’t stay to see your friends—” An ironic, deprecatory tilt of the head, meaning, Yes, it damn well is. “I just wanted to say something.”

  “Come in,” said Citizen Germyn. “How nice that the moments just before retiring should be made more interesting in this way.” Meaning, It’s pretty late for this, chum.

  Dismayed, Tropile stayed in the doorway. “I’ll make it quick, Germyn. What would you think if I went back to the binary planet? Had myself wired in, and all?”

  There was a pause while Citizen Germyn gravely considered, his nostrils faintly expanded, as though sniffing the bouquet of an unfamiliar bloom. Then he smiled. The scent was, after all, beautiful. “I think that would be quite fine,” he said warmly.