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_!"