Endlessly he calculated sums in arithmetic in his mind, recited the Five Regulations, composed Greeting Poems and Verses on Viewing. And endlessly he kept coming back to Tropile, to Translation, to Connectivity. He didn't _want_ to be Translated. But still the thought had a certain lure. What was it like? Did it hurt? Well, probably not, he speculated. It was very fast, according to Haendl's report--if you could believe what an admitted Son of the Wolf reported. But Germyn had to. Well, if it was fast--at that kind of speed, he thought, perhaps you would die instantly. Maybe Tropile was dead. Was that possible? No, it didn't seem so; after all, there was the fact of the connection between Tropile and so many of the recently Translated. What was the connection there? Or, generalizing, what connections were involved in-- He rescued himself from the dread word and summoned up the first image that came to mind. It happened to be Tropile's wife--Gala Tropile, who had disappeared herself, in this very room. Gala Tropile. He stuck close to the thought of her, a little pleased with himself. That was the trick of _not_ thinking of Connectivity--to think so hard and fully of something else as to leave no room in the mind for the unwanted thought. He pictured every line of her face, every wave of her stringy hair.... It was very easy that way. He was pleased. XII On Mount Everest, the sullen stream of off-and-on responses that was "mind" to the Pyramid had taken note of a new input signal. It was not a critical mind. Its only curiosity was a restless urge to shove-and-haul, and there was no shove-and-haul about what to it was perhaps the analogue of a man's hunger pang. The input signal said: _Do thus._ It obeyed. Call it craving for a new flavor. Where once it had patiently waited for the state that Citizens knew as Meditation on Connectivity, and the Pyramid itself perhaps knew as a stage of ripeness in the fruits of its wristwatch mine, now it wanted a different taste. Unripe? Overripe? At any rate, different. Accordingly, the high-frequency wheep, wheep changed in tempo and in key, and the bouncing echoes changed and ... there was a ripe one to be plucked. (Its name was Innison.) And there another. (Gala Tropile.) And another, another--oh, many others--a babe from Tropile's nursery school and the Wheeling jailer and a woman Tropile once had coveted on the street. Once the ruddy starch-to-sugar mark of ripeness had been what human beings called Meditation on Connectivity and the Pyramids knew as a convenient blankness. Now the sign was a sort of empathy with the Component named Tropile. It didn't matter to the Pyramid on Mount Everest. It swung its electrostatic scythe and the--call them Tropiletropes--were harvested. It did not occur to the Pyramid on Mount Everest that a Component might be directing its actions. How could it?