Wolfbane

by C. M. Kornbluth

  “Wolf!” they were shouting. “Wolf!” It drowned out the distant noise from where Boyne had finally been run to earth, a block and more away. It drowned out everything.

  It was the other circumstance when they forgot to be gracious: When they had trapped a Son of the Wolf.

  3

  Engineering had long ago come to an end.

  Engineering is possible under one condition of the equation:

  When the ratio Calories-to-Population is large—say five thousand or more, five thousand daily calories for every living man—then the Artistic-Technological Style is big. People carve Mount Rushmore; they build great foundries; they manufacture an enormous automobile to carry one housewife half a mile for the purchase of one lipstick. Life is coarse and rich where C:P is large. At the other extreme, where C:P is too small, life does not exist at all. It has been starved out.

  Experimentally, add little increments to C:P and it will be some time before the right-hand side of the equation becomes significant. But at last, in the 1,000-1,500 calorie range, Artistic-Technological Style firmly appears in self-perpetuating form. C:P in that range produces the small arts, the appreciations, the peaceful arrangements of necessities into subtle relationships of traditionally-agreed-upon virtue. Japan, locked into its Shogunate prison, picked scanty food from mountainsides and beauty out of arrangements of lichens and paper. The small, inexpensive sub-sub-arts are characteristic of the 1,000-1,500 calorie range.

  And this was the range of Earth; the world of a hundred million men, after the planet was stolen by its new binary.

  Some few persons inexpensively pursued the study of science with pencil and renewable paper, but the last research accelerator had long since been shut down; the juice from its Hydropower dam was needed to supply meager light to a million homes and to cook the pablum for two million brand-new babies. In those days, one dedicated Byzantine wrote the definitive encyclopedia of engineering (though he was no engineer). Its four hundred and twenty tiny volumes exhausted the Gizeh pyramid and its unknown contractor, the Wall of Shih-Hwang Ti, the Gothic builders, Brunei who changed the face of England, the Roeblings of Brooklyn, Groves of the Pentagon, Duggan of the Anti-Ballistic-Missile System (before C:P dropped to the point where war became vanishingly implausible), Levern of Operation Up. But this encyclopedist could not use a slide rule without thinking, faltering, jotting down his decimals.

  And then the magnitudes grew less.

  Under the tectonic and climatic battering of the great abduction of Earth from its primary, under the sine-wave advances to and retreats from the equator of the ice sheath as the small successor Suns waxed, waned, died and were replaced, the ratio C:P remained stable. C had diminished enormously; so had P. As the calories to support life grew scarce, so the consuming mouths of mankind grew fewer in number.

  The forty-fifth small Sun shone on no engineers.

  Not even on the binary. The Pyramids, the things on the binary, the thing on Mount Everest, were not engineers. They employed a crude metaphysic based on dissection and shoving.

  They had no elegant field theories. All they knew was that everything came apart and that if you pushed a thing it would move. If your biggest push would not move a thing, you took it apart and pushed the parts, and then it would move. Sometimes, for nuclear effects, they had to take things apart into as many as 3 X 109 pieces, and shove each piece very carefully.

  By taking-apart and shoving, then, they landed their one space ship on the burnt-out sunlet that had once been Earth’s familiar Moon. You could not say that the Pyramids were late in the recreation of the Sun. The Pyramids were never late. That was impossible to them, for they had no sense of time at all. They knew “when” things must be done, because they possessed a planet-sized network of instruments, actuators and ancillary devices of every sort. When the mean global temperature of the Earth dropped below a certain pre-set value, a sensor reported the need to rekindle the Moon. Then it was done. The pyramids did not concern themselves with fiddly little details such as the movement of Earth’s air masses. It happened that Australia and Africa were exceptionally balmy that year, so the global average was slow to drop...and the calculations of the Skywatchers therefore wrong.

  But now it was “time” and the space ship was sent out.

  Inside it were eleven men and women, along with a few other, very different living things.

  These were not exactly passengers. “Fittings” was a better word. Since they had long since lost any awareness of language, or even of self, words did not concern them.

  Centuries ago, other human beings had lalumphed across the Moon in clumsy space-suits, radioing congratulatory messages back to Earth like happy tourists. In the two hundred years and more since human beings had last been able to get into space under their own power, many hundreds of humans (and others) had visited the satellite. None of those had been tourists, either. They had done just what the present batch did.

  They restarted the nuclear fires which turned the Moon into an almost-star. To do this was quite difficult, even with the machines and instruments that had accompanied them from the binary planet. Among other things, it was necessary for them to die.

  Even for the instruments of the Pyramids, kindling a nuclear fire on the surface of the Moon was not easy. There was really nothing there to burn. The Moon was made out of rock and dust—and now of slag as well; its elements were not the kind that would readily fission or fuse. But when the devices of the Pyramids had sufficiently taken-apart-and-shoved, neutrons crowded protons out of cores, nuclei crumbled, energy was released. Enough energy so that the new Sun would burn for five years or so before it needed relighting.

  So the space ship touched down, briefly, on a hillock on the Moon that was no longer burning, but only intolerably hot.

  The space ship deposited a detachable capsule containing the eleven human beings (and others) and the necessary machinery for taking apart and shoving. Then the space ship quickly departed, to avoid what would follow.

  Where the capsule touched the hot slag, heat flowed in. The human beings did not notice. They were only aware that their tasks must be performed very quickly now.

  They performed them, racing against the mounting heat that would soon cook them to a point where they could no longer function; and the New Sun was recreated.

  A point of new flame appeared on the sunlet’s surface. The eleven human beings had time to scream briefly before they died. Then the point of flame went from cherry through orange into blue-white, and began to spread.

  At the moment of the Re-Creation of the Sun there was general rejoicing on the Earth. Wherever people survived, in shadowy remnants of cities called Khartoum and Chicago and Beijing, the Citizens smiled with controlled joy at the sky.

  Not quite everywhere, though. In Wheeling’s House of the Five Regulations, Glenn Tropile waited unquietly for death. Citizen Boyne, who had run amok and slaughtered the baker, shared Tropile’s room and his doom, but not his rage. Boyne with demure pleasure was composing his death poem.

  “Talk to me!” snapped Tropile. “Why are we here? What did you do, and why did you do it? What have I done? Why don’t I pick up a bench and kill you with it? You would’ve killed me two hours ago if I’d caught your eye!”

  There was no satisfaction in Citizen Boyne. The passions were burned out of him; he politely tendered Tropile a famous aphorism: “Citizen, the art of living is the substitution of unimportant, answerable questions for important, unanswerable ones. Come, let us appreciate the new-born Sun.”

  He turned to the window, where the spark of blue-white flame in what had once been the crater of Tycho was beginning to spread across the charred moon.

  Tropile was child enough of his culture to turn with him almost involuntarily. He was silent. That blue-white infinitesimal up there growing slowly—the one-ness, the calm rapture of Being in a universe that you shaded into without harsh discontinua, the being one with the great blue-white gem-flower blossoming now in
the heavens that were no different stuff than you yourself—

  He closed his eyes, calm, and meditated on connectivity.

  He was being Good.

  By the time the fusion reaction had covered the whole small disk of the sunlet, a quarter-hour at the most, his meditation began to wear off, as it generally did for Glenn Tropile. That was good, he thought, as it seemed to exempt him from the worrisome possibility of Translation. He had no desire simply one day to disappear.

  All the same, he sometimes felt just a touch of regret.

  Tropile shrugged out of his torn parka, not bothering to rip it further. It was already growing warm in the room. Citizen Boyne, of course, was carefully opening every seam with graceful rending motions, miming great smooth effort of the biceps and trapezius.

  But the meditation was over, and as Tropile watched his cellmate he screamed a silent Why? Since his adolescence that wailing syllable had seldom been far from his mind. It could be silenced by appreciation and meditation. Tropile was so good at his specialty of Water Watching that several beginners had asked him for instruction in the subtle art, for all his notorious oddities of life and manner. He enjoyed Water Watching. He almost pitied anybody so single-mindedly devoted to, say, Clouds and Odors—great games though they were—that he had never even tried Water Watching. And after a session of Watching, when one was lucky enough to observe the Nine Boiling Stages in classic perfection, one might slip into meditation and be harmonious, feel Good.

  But what did one do when the meditations failed—as they had failed him? What did one do when they came farther and farther apart, became less and less intense, could be inspired, finally, only by a huge event like the renewal of the Sun?

  One went amok, he had always thought.

  But he had not; Boyne had. He had been declared a Son of the Wolf, on no evidence that he could understand. But he had not run amok.

  Still the penalties were the same, he thought, uncomfortably aware of an unfamiliar itch—not the inward intolerable itch of needing-the-advantage, but a realized sensation at the base of his spine. The penalties for all gross crimes—Wolfhood or running amok—were the same, and simply this: They would perform the Lumbar Puncture. He would make the Donation of Fluid.

  He would be dead.

  The Keeper of the House of the Five Regulations, an old man, Citizen Harmane, looked in on his charges—approvingly at Boyne, with a beclouded expression at Glenn Tropile. It was thought that even Wolves were entitled to the common human decencies in the brief interval between exposure and the Donation of Fluid. The Keeper would not have dreamed of scowling at the detected Wolf or of interfering with whatever wretched imitation of meditation-before-dying the creature might practice. But he could not, all the same, bring himself to offer even an assurance-of-identity gesture.

  Tropile had no such qualms.

  He scowled at Keeper Harmane with such ferocity that the old man almost ran away. Tropile turned an almost equally ugly scowl upon Citizen Boyne. How dared that knife-murderer be so calm, so relaxed!

  Tropile said brutally: “They’ll kill us! You know that? They’ll stick a needle in our spines and drain us dry. It hurts. Do you understand me? They’re going to drain us, and then they’re going to drink our spinal fluid, and it’s going to hurt.”

  He was gently corrected. “We shall make the Donation of fluid, which is proper for Citizens who have grossly misbehaved. That is all,” Citizen Boyne said calmly. “Is not the difference intelligible to a Son of the Wolf?”

  True culture demanded that that remark be accepted as a friendly joke, probably based on a truth—how else could an unpalatable truth be put in words? Otherwise the unthinkable might happen. They might quarrel. They might even come to blows! A person might be hurt that way!

  The appropriate mild smile formed on Tropile’s lips, but harshly he wiped it off. They were going to stab him in the spine with a great catheter and kill him. He would not smile for them! And the effort was enormous.

  “I’m not a Son of the Wolf!” he howled, desperate, knowing he was protesting to the one man of all men in Wheeling who didn’t care, and who could do least about it if he did. “What’s this crazy talk about Wolves? I don’t know what a Son of the Wolf is, and I don’t think you or anybody does. All I know is that I was acting sensibly. And everybody began howling! You’re supposed to know a Son of the Wolf by his unculture, his ignorance, his violence. But you chopped down three people, and I only picked up a piece of bread! And I’m supposed to be the dangerous one!”

  “Wolves never know they’re Wolves,” sighed Citizen Boyne. “Fish probably think they’re birds, and you evidently think you’re a Citizen. Would a Citizen speak as you are speaking?”

  “But they’re going to kill us!”

  “Then why aren’t you composing your death poem?”

  Glenn Tropile took a deep breath. Something was biting him.

  It was bad enough that he was about to die, bad enough that he had done nothing worth dying for. But what was gnawing at him now had nothing to do with dying.

  The percentages were going the wrong way. This pale Citizen was getting an edge on him.

  An engorged gland in Tropile’s adrenals—it was only a pinhead in Citizen Boyne’s—trickled subtle hormones into his bloodstream. He could die, yes—that was a skill everyone had to acquire, sooner or later. But while he was alive, he could not stand to be bested in an encounter, an argument, a relationship. It was not in Glenn Tropile’s makeup to allow anyone to defeat him, in anything, without a fight. Wolf? Call him Wolf. Call him Operator, or Percentage Player; call him Sharp Article; call him Gamesman.

  If there was an advantage to be derived, he would derive it. It was the way he was put together.

  He said, stalling for time to scheme, “You’re right. Stupid of me, I must have lost my head!”

  He thought. Some men think by poking problems apart, some think by laying facts side-by-side to compare. Tropile’s thinking was neither of these, but a species of judo. He conceded to his opponent such things as Strength, Armor, Resource. He didn’t need these things for himself; to every contest the opponent brought enough of them to supply two. It was Tropile’s habit (and definitely a Wolfish one, he had to admit) to use the opponent’s strength against him, to break the opponent against his own steel walls.

  He thought.

  The first thing, he thought, was to make up his mind: He was Wolf. Then let him be Wolf; he wouldn’t stay around for the spinal tap, he would go from there. But how?

  The second thing was to make a plan. There were obstacles. Citizen Boyne was one of the obstacles. Harmane, the Keeper of the House of the Five Regulations, was another.

  Where was the pole which would permit him to vault over these hurdles? There was, he thought, always his wife, Gala. He owned her; she would do what he wished—provided he made her want to do it.

  Yes, Gala. He walked to the door and shouted to Citizen Harmane: “Keeper! Keeper, I must see my wife. Have her brought to me!”

  It was impossible for the Keeper to refuse; he didn’t. He called gently, “I will invite the Citizeness,” and toddled away.

  The third thing was time.

  Tropile turned to Citizen Boyne. “Citizen,” he said persuasively, “since your death poem is ready and mine is not, will you be gracious enough to go first when they—when they come?”

  Citizen Boyne looked temperately at his cellmate and made the Quirked Smile.

  “You see?” he said. “Wolf.” And that was true; but what was also true was that he couldn’t refuse.

  4

  Half a world away, the midnight-blue Pyramid sat on its planed-off peak as it had sat since the days when Earth had a real Sun of its own.

  It was of no importance to the Pyramid that Glenn Tropile was about to receive a slim catheter into his spine, to drain his sap and his life. It didn’t matter to the Pyramid that the spinal fluid would then be swallowed by his fellows, or that the pretext for the execution was an
act which human history used not to consider a capital crime. Ritual sacrifice in whatever guise made no difference to the Pyramid. The Pyramid saw them come and the Pyramid saw them go—if the Pyramid could be said to “see”. One human being more or less, what matter? Who bothers to take a census of the cells in a hangnail?

  And yet, the Pyramid did have a kind of interest in Glenn Tropile, and in the human race of which he was a part.

  Nobody knew much about the Pyramid, but everybody knew that much. They wanted something—else why would they have bothered to steal the Earth?

  And that they had definitely done.

  The year was 2027 A.D., a true date to live in infamy. There were other years that human beings had chosen to remember—1941; 1066; 1492—but nothing, ever, with consequences so vast as the year 2027, no, not since those earliest and forgotten dates when the first amphibian crawled out of the sea or the first hairy biped picked up a tool. Twenty twenty-seven topped them all. The Runaway Planet had slipped feloniously into the solar system, intent on burglary, and ever since it had been making off with its plunder.

  Courageous human beings had blasted out into space to investigate. Three shiploads of them had actually landed on the Pyramid planet (they didn’t know that was what it was, then.) They didn’t even report, really. The first message back, right after touchdown, was, “It seems, ah, very barren.” There wasn’t any second.