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.
Glenn Tropile sang as he putt-putted in his tractor, plowing the
thawing Jersey fields. Still, a faint doubt remained. Squads right
against the Pyramids?
Stiffly, Tropile stopped the tractor, slowed the diesel to a steady
_thrum_ and got off. It was hot--being midsummer of the five-year
calendar the Pyramids had imposed. It was time for rest and maybe
something to eat.
He sat in the shade of a tree, as farmers always have done, and opened
his sandwiches. He was only a mile or so from Princeton, but he might
as well have been in Limbo; there was no sign of any living human but
himself. The northering sheep didn't come near Princeton--it "happened"
that way, on purpose.
He caught a glimpse of something moving, but when he stood up for a
better look into the woods on the other side of the field, it was
gone. Wolf? _Real_ Wolf, that is? It could have been a bear, for that
matter--there was talk of wolves and bears around Princeton; and
although Tropile knew that much of the talk was assiduously encouraged
by men like Haendl, he also knew that some of it was true.
As long as he was up, he gathered straw from the litter of last
"year's" head-high grass, gathered sticks under the trees, built a
small fire and put water on to boil for coffee. Then he sat back and
ate his sandwiches, thinking.
Maybe it was a promotion, going from the nursery school to labor in
the fields. Or maybe it wasn't. Haendl had promised him a place in the
expedition that would--maybe--discover something new and great and
helpful about the Pyramids. And that might still come to pass, because
the expedition was far from ready to leave.
Tropile munched his sandwiches thoughtfully. Now _why_ was the
expedition so far from ready to leave? It was absolutely essential to
get there in the warmest weather possible--otherwise Mt. Everest was
unclimbable. Generations of alpinists had proved that. That warmest
weather was rapidly going by.
And _why_ were Haendl and the Wolf colony so insistent on building
tanks, arming themselves with rifles, organizing in companies and
squads? The H-bomb hadn't flustered the Pyramid. What lesser weapon
could?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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