Short Fiction · Wolfbane (6/15) (2/2)

Tropile listened, marveling. To have seen a real Pyramid! Almost he had thought of them as legends, contrived to account for such established physical facts as the Eyes and Translation, as children with a Santa Claus. But this incredible man had seen it!

“Somebody dropped an H-bomb on it, way back,” Haendl continued, “and the only thing that happened is that now the North Col is a crater. You can’t move the Pyramid. You can’t hurt it. But it’s alive. It has been there, alive, for a couple of hundred years; and that’s about all we know about the Pyramids. Right?”

“Right.”

Haendl stood up. “Tropile, that’s what all of this is all about!” He gestured around him. “Guns, tanks, airplanes⁠—we want to know more! We’re going to find out more and then we’re going to fight.”

There was a jarring note and Tropile caught at it, sniffing the air. Somehow⁠—perhaps it was his sub-adrenals that told him⁠—this very positive, very self-willed man was just the slightest bit unsure of himself. But Haendl swept on and Tropile, for a moment, forgot to be alert.

“We had a party up Mount Everest five years ago,” Haendl was saying. “We didn’t find out a thing. Five years before that, and five years before that⁠—every time there’s a sun, while it is still warm enough to give a party a chance to climb up the sides⁠—we send a team up there. It’s a rough job. We give it to the new boys, Tropile. Like you.”

There it was. He was being invited to attack a Pyramid.

Tropile hesitated, delicately balanced, trying to get the feel of this negotiation. This was Wolf against Wolf; it was hard. There had to be an advantage⁠—

“There is an advantage,” Haendl said aloud.

Tropile jumped, but then he remembered: Wolf against Wolf.

Haendl went on: “What you get out of it is your life, in the first place. You understand you can’t get out now. We don’t want sheep meddling around. And in the second place, there’s a considerable hope of gain.” He stared at Tropile with a dreamer’s eyes. “We don’t send parties up there for nothing, you know. We want to get something out of it. What we want is the Earth.”

“The Earth?” It reeked of madness. But this man wasn’t mad.

“Some day, Tropile, it’s going to be us against them. Never mind the sheep⁠—they don’t count. It’s going to be Pyramids and Wolves, and the Pyramids won’t win. And then⁠—”

It was enough to curdle the blood. This man was proposing to fight, and against the invulnerable, the godlike Pyramids.

But he was glowing and the fever was contagious. Tropile felt his own blood begin to pound. Haendl hadn’t finished his “and then⁠—” but he didn’t have to. The “and then” was obvious: And then the world takes up again from the day the wandering planet first came into view. And then we go back to our own solar system and an end to the five-year cycle of frost and hunger.

And then the Wolves can rule a world worth ruling.

It was a meretricious appeal, perhaps, but it could not be refused. Tropile was lost.

He said: “You can put away the gun, Haendl. You’ve signed me up.”