Perhaps the Pyramid on Mount Everest wondered, if it knew how to wonder, when it noticed that different criteria were involved in selecting components these days. If it knew how to "notice." Surely even a Pyramid might wonder when, without warning or explanation, its orders were changed--not merely to harvest a different sort of Component, but to drag along with the flesh-and-blood needful parts a clanking assortment of machinery and metal, as began to happen. Machines? Why would the Pyramids need to Translate machines? But why, on the other hand, would a Pyramid bother to question a directive, even if it were able to? In any case, it didn't. It swung its scythe and gathered in what it was caused to gather in. Men sometimes eat green fruit and come to regret it. Was it the same with Pyramids? * * * * * And Citizen Germyn fell into the unsuspected trap. Avoiding Connectivity, he thought of Glenn Tropile--and the unfelt h-f pulses found him out. He didn't see the Eye that formed above him. He didn't feel the gathering of forces that formed his trap. He didn't know that he was seized, charged, catapulted through space, caught, halted and drained. It happened too fast. One moment he was in his bed; the next moment he was--elsewhere. There wasn't anything in between. It had happened to hundreds of thousands of Components before him, but, for Citizen Germyn, what happened was in some ways different. He was not embalmed in nutrient fluid, formed and programmed to take his part in the Pyramid-structure, for he had not been selected by the Pyramid but by that single wild Component, Tropile. He arrived conscious, awake and able to move. He stood up in a red-lit chamber. Vast thundering crashes of metal buffeted his ears. Heat sprang little founts of perspiration on his skin. It was too much, too much to take in at once. Oily-skinned madmen, naked, were capering and shouting at him. It took him a moment to realize that they were not devils; this was not Hell; he was not dead. "This way!" they were bawling at him. "Come on, hurry it up!" He reeled, following their directions, across an unpleasantly warm floor, staggering and falling--the binary planet was a quarter denser than Earth--until he got his balance. The capering madmen led him through a door--or sphincter or trap; it was not like anything he had ever seen. But it was a portal of a sort, and on the other side of it was something closer to sanity. It was another room, and though the light was still red, it was a paler, calmer red and the thundering ironmongery was a wall away. The madmen were naked, yes, but they were not mad. The oil on their skins was only the sheen of sweat. "Where--where am I?" he gasped.