"Where'd you get it?"
The haunted eyes looked away. Still better, thought Glenn Tropile,
more satisfied even than usual; she's been ransacking an old warehouse
again. It was a trick he had taught her, and like all of the illicit
tricks she had learned from him, a handy weapon when he chose to use it.
It was not prescribed that a Citizen should rummage through Old Places.
A Citizen did his work, whatever that work might be--banker, baker or
furniture repairman. He received what rewards were his due for the work
he did. A Citizen _never_ took anything that was not his due--not even
if it lay abandoned and rotting.
It was one of the differences between Glenn Tropile and the people he
moved among.
I've got it made, he exulted; it was what I needed to clinch my victory
over her.
He spoke: "I need you more than I need coffee, Gala."
She looked up, troubled.
"What would I do," he demanded, "if a beam fell on you one day while
you were scrambling through the fancy groceries? How can you take such
chances? Don't you _know_ what you mean to me?"
She sniffed a couple of times. She said brokenly: "Darling, about last
night--I'm sorry--" and miserably held out the cup. He took it and set
it down. He took her hand, looked up at her, and kissed it lingeringly.
He felt her tremble. Then she gave him a wild, adoring look and flung
herself into his arms.
A new dominance cycle was begun at the moment he returned her frantic
kisses.
Glenn knew, and Gala knew, that he had over her an edge, an
advantage--the weather gauge, initiative of fire, percentage, the
can't-lose lack of tension. Call it anything, but it was life itself to
such as Glenn Tropile. He knew, and she knew, that having the advantage
he would press it and she would yield--on and on, in a rising spiral.
He did it because it was his life, the attaining of an advantage over
anyone he might encounter; because he was (unwelcomely but justly)
called a Son of the Wolf.
* * * * *
A world away, a Pyramid squatted sullenly on the planed-off top of the
highest peak of the Himalayas.
It had not been built there. It had not been carried there by Man or
Man's machines. It had--come, in its own time; for its own reasons.
Did it wake on that day, the thing atop Mount Everest, or did it
ever sleep? Nobody knew. It stood, or sat, there, approximately a
tetrahedron. Its appearance was known: constructed on a base line of
some thirty-five yards, slaggy, midnight-blue in color. Almost nothing
else about it was known--at least, to mankind.
It was the only one of its kind on Earth, though men thought (without
much sure knowledge) that there were more, perhaps many thousands more,
like it on the unfamiliar planet that was Earth's binary, swinging
around the miniature Sun that hung at their common center of gravity
like an unbalanced dumbbell. But men knew very little about that planet
itself, only that it had come out of space and was now there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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