They reached for the Pyramids and found them, wherever they were. Some lay close to the surface of the binary planet, and some were hundreds of miles within, and a few, more desperate than the others or merely assigned to the task, they discovered at the very portal of the single spaceship of the Pyramids. But wherever they were and whatever they chose to do, each one of them was found and seized. They came wriggling and shaking, like trout on an angler's line. They came bursting through layer on layer of impenetrable metal that, nevertheless, they penetrated. They came by the dozens and scores, and at last by the thousands; but they came. There were more and more flares of blue-white light on the tiny sun--so many that Tropile found himself scouring the planet in a desperate search for one surviving Pyramid--not to destroy as an enemy, but to keep for a specimen. But he searched in vain. The Pyramids were destroyed, gone. There was not one left. The Earth lay open and free under its tiny sun for the first time in centuries. It had been a strange war, but a short one. And it was over. XIV Tropile swam up out of hammering blackness into daylight and pain. It _hurt_. He was being born again--coming back to life--and it had all the agonies of parturition, except that they were visited upon the creature being born, himself. There were crushing blows at his temples that pounded and pained like no other ache he had ever felt. He moaned raspingly. Someone moved blurrily over his shut eyes. He felt something sting sharply at the base of his brain. Then it tingled, warming his scalp, comforting it, numbing it. Pain went slowly away. He opened his eyes. Four masked torturers were leaning over him. He stared, not understanding; but the eyes were not torturers' eyes, and in a moment the masks came off. Surgical masks--and the faces beneath the masks were human faces. Surgeons and nurses. He blinked at them and said groggily: "Where am we?" And then he remembered. He was back on Earth; he was merely human again. Someone came bustling into the room and he knew without looking that it was Haendl. "We beat them, Tropile!" Haendl cried. "No, cancel that. _You_ beat them. We've destroyed every Pyramid there was, and a nice hot fire they're making up there on the sun, eh? Beautiful work, Tropile. Beautiful! You're a credit to the name of Wolf!" The surgeons stirred uneasily, but apparently, Tropile thought, there had been changes, for they did no more than that. Tropile touched his temples fretfully and his fingers rested on gauze bandages. It was true: he was out of circuit. The long reach of his awareness was cut short at his skull; there was no more of the infinite sweep and grasp he had known as part of the snowflake in the nutrient fluid. "Too bad," he whispered hopelessly.