Wolfbane

by C. M. Kornbluth

  It didn’t matter. The thing that really mattered, the only thing in the world, was all within his mind; and he was ready, he knew, to find it. Once more!

  He let the mind-clearing unanswerable question drift into his mind:

  If the sound of two hands together is a clapping, what is the sound of one hand?

  Gently he pawed at the question, the symbol of the futility of mind—and therefore the gateway to meditation. Unawareness of self was stealing deliciously over him.

  He was Glenn Tropile. He was more than that. He was the water boiling...and the boiling water was he; he was the gentle warmth of the fire, which was—which was, yes, itself the arc of the sky. As each thing was each other thing; water was fire, and fire air; Tropile was the first simmering bubble and the full roll of well-aged water was Self, was—

  The answer to the unanswerable question was coming clearer and softer to him. And then, all at once but not suddenly, for there was no time, it was not close, it was. The answer was his, was him, the arc of sky was the answer, and the answer belonged to sky—to warmth, to all warmths that there are, and to all waters, and—and the answer was—was—

  Tropile vanished. The mild thunderclap that followed made the flames dance and the column of steam fray; and then the fire was steady again, and so was the rising steam. But Tropile was gone.

  8

  Haendl plodded angrily through the high grass toward the dull throb of the Diesel.

  Maybe it had been a mistake to take this Glenn Tropile into the colony. He was more Citizen than Wolf—no, cancel that, Haendl thought; he was more Wolf than Citizen. But the Wolf in him was tainted with sheep’s blood. He competed like a Wolf; but in spite of everything he refused to give up some of his sheep’s ways. Meditation. He had been cautioned against meditation. But had he given it up?

  He had not.

  If it had been entirely up to Haendl, Glenn Tropile would have found himself out on his ear, back among the Sheep, or else dead. Fortunately for Tropile, it was not entirely up to Haendl. The community of Wolves was by no means a democracy, but the leader had a certain responsibility to his constituents, and the responsibility was this: He couldn’t afford to be wrong. Like the Old Gray Wolf who protected Mowgli, he had to defend his actions against attack; if he failed to defend, the pack would pull him down.

  And Innison thought they needed Tropile—not in spite of the taint of the Citizen that he bore, but because of it.

  Haendl bawled: “Tropile! Tropile, where are you?” There was only the wind and the thrum of the Diesel. It was enormously irritating. Haendl had other things to do than to chase after Glenn Tropile. And where was he? There was the Diesel, idling wastefully; there the end of the patterned furrows Tropile had plowed. There a small fire, burning—

  And there was Tropile.

  Haendl stopped, frozen, his mouth opened to yell Tropile’s name.

  It was Tropile, all right, staring with concentrated, oyster-eyed gaze at the fire and the little pot of water it boiled. Staring. Meditating. And over his head, like flawed glass in a pane, was the thing Haendl feared most of all things on Earth. It was an Eye.

  Tropile was on the very verge of being Translated...whatever that was.

  Maybe at last this was the time to find out what that was! Haendl ducked back into the shelter of the high grass, knelt, plucked his radio communicator from his pocket, urgently called. “Innison! Innison, will somebody for God’s sake put Innison on!” Seconds passed, voices answered; then there was Innison. “Innison, listen! You wanted to catch Tropile in the act of meditation? All right, you’ve got him. The old wheat field, south end, under the elms around the creek. Got it? Get here fast, Innison—there’s an Eye forming above him!”

  Luck! Lucky that they were ready for this, and only by luck, because it was the helicopter that Innison had patiently assembled for the attack on Everest that was ready now, loaded with instruments, planned to weigh and measure the aura around the Pyramid—now at hand when they needed it. That was luck, but there was driving hurry involved too; it was only a matter of minutes before Tropile heard the wobbling drone of the copter, saw the vanes fluttering low over the hedges, dropping to earth behind the elms. Haendl raised himself cautiously and peered. Yes, Tropile was still there, and the Eye still above him! But the noise of the helicopter had frayed the spell; Tropile stirred; the Eye wavered and shook—

  But did not vanish.

  Thanking what passed for his God, Haendl scuttled circuitously around the elms and joined Innison, furiously closing switches and pointing lenses, at the copter....

  They saw Tropile sitting there, the Eye growing larger and closer over his head. They had time—plenty of time; oh, nearly a minute of time. They brought to bear on the silent and unknowing form of Glenn Tropile every instrument that the copter carried. They were waiting for Tropile to disappear—

  He did.

  Innison and Haendl ducked at the thunderclap as air rushed in to replace him.

  “We’ve got what you wanted,” Haendl said harshly. “Let’s read some instruments.”

  Throughout the Translation high-tensile magnetic tape on a madly spinning drum had been hurtling under twenty-four recording heads at a hundred feet a second. Output to the recording heads had been from every kind of measuring device they had been able to conceive and build, all loaded on the helicopter for use on Mount Everest—all now pointed directly at Glenn Tropile. They had, for the instant of Translation, readings from one microsecond to the next on the varying electric, gravitational, magnetic, radiant and molecular-state conditions in his vicinity.

  They got back to Innison’s workshop and the laboratory inside it in less than a minute; but it took hours of playing back the magnetic pulses into machines that turned them into scribed curves on coordinate paper before Innison had anything resembling an answer.

  He said: “No mystery. I mean, no mystery except the speed. Want to know what happened to Tropile?”

  “I do,” said Haendl.

  “A pencil of electrostatic force maintained by a pinch effect bounced down from the approximate azimuth of Everest—God knows how they handled the elevation—and charged him and the area positive. A big charge; clear off the scale. They parted company. He was bounced straight up; a meter off the ground, a correcting vector was applied; when last seen he was headed fast in the direction of the Pyramids’ binary. Fast, I say. So fast that I would guess he’ll get there alive. It takes an appreciable time, a good part of a second, for his protein to coagulate enough to make him sick and then kill him. If they strip the charges off him immediately on arrival, as I should imagine they will, he’ll live.”

  “Friction—”

  “Be damned to friction,” Innison said calmly. “He carried a packet of air with him and there was no friction. How? I don’t know. How are they going to keep him alive in space, without the charges that hold the air? I don’t know. If they don’t maintain the charges, can they beat light speed? I don’t know. I tell you what happened, I can’t tell you how.”

  Haendl stood up thoughtfully. “It’s something,” he said grudgingly.

  “It’s more than we’ve ever had—a complete reading at the instant of Translation!”

  “We’ll get more,” Haendl promised. “Innison, now you know what to look for. Keep looking for it. Keep every possible detection device monitored twenty-four hours a day. Turn on everything you’ve got that’ll find a sign of imposed modulation. At any sign—or at anybody’s hunch that there might be a sign—I’m to be called. If I’m eating. If I’m sleeping. If I’m enjoying the pangs of love. Call me, you hear? Maybe you were right about Tropile; maybe he did have some use. Maybe he’ll give the Pyramids a bellyache.”

  Innison, flipping the magnetic-tape drum to rewind, said thoughtfully: “It’s too bad they’ve got him. We could have used some more readings.”

  “Too bad?” Haendl laughed sharply. “Maybe not, Innison. This time they’ve got themselves a Wolf.”

  The
Pyramids did have a Wolf—a datum which did not matter in the least to them.

  It is not possible to know what “mattered” to a Pyramid except by inference. But it is possible to know that they had no way of telling Wolf from Citizen.

  The planet which was their home—Earth’s binary—was small, dark, atmosphereless and waterless. It was honeycombed and packed with a myriad of devices.

  In the old days, when technology had followed war, luxury, government and leisure, their sun had run out of steam; and at about the same time the Pyramids had run out of the Components they imported from a neighboring planet. They used the last of their Components to implement their stolid metaphysic of dissection and pushing. They pushed their planet.

  They knew where to push it.

  Each Pyramid as it stood was a radio-astronomy observatory powerful and accurate beyond the wildest dreams of Earthly radio-astronomers. From this start, they built instruments to aid their about bringing order to this tired went into a kind of hibernation, reducing their activity to a bare trickle except for a small “crew,” and headed for the star. They had every reason to believe they would find more Components there, and they did.

  Tropile was one of the newest of them, and the only thing which set him apart from the others was that he was the most recent to be stockpiled.

  The religion, or vice, or philosophy he practiced made it possible for him to be a Component. Meditation derived from Zen Buddhism was a windfall for the Pyramids, though of course they had no idea at all of what lay behind it, and of course they did not “care.” They knew only that at certain times certain potential Components became Components which were no longer merely potential—which were, in fact, ripe for harvesting. It was useful to them that the minds they cropped be utterly blank—it saved the step of blanking them.

  Tropile had been harvested at the moment his inhibiting conscious mind had been cleared, for the Pyramids were not interested in him as an entity capable of will and conception. They used only the raw capacity of the human brain and its perceptors. They used Rashevsky’s Number, the gigantic, far more than astronomical, expression that denoted the number of switching operations performable within the human brain. They used “subception,” the phenomenon by which the human mind, uninhibited by consciousness, reacts directly to stimuli—shortcutting the cerebral censor, avoiding the weighing of shall-I-or-shan’t-I that precedes every conscious act.

  They were—Components. It is not desirable that your bedroom wall switch have a mind of its own; if you turn the lights on, you want them on. So it was with the Pyramids.

  A Component was needed in the industrial complex which transforms catabolism products into anabolism products.

  With long experience gained since their planetfall, Pyramids received the tabula rasa that was Glenn Tropile. He arrived in one piece, wearing a blanket of air. Quick-frozen mentally at the moment of inert blankness his meditation had granted him—the psychic drunkard’s coma—he was cushioned on repellent charges as he plummeted down, and instantly stripped of surplus electrostatic charge.

  At this point he was still human; only asleep.

  He remained “asleep.” Annular fields they used for lifting and lowering seized him and moved him into a snug tank of nutrient fluid. There were many such tanks, ready and waiting.

  The tanks themselves could be moved, and the one containing Glenn Tropile did move, to a metabolism complex where there were many other tanks, all occupied. This was a warm room—the Pyramids had wasted no energy on such foppish comforts in the receiving center. In this room Glenn Tropile gradually resumed the appearance of life. His heart once again began to beat. Faint stirrings were visible in his chest as his habit-numbed lungs attempted to breathe. Gradually the stirrings slowed and stopped; there was no need for that foppish comfort, either; the nutrient fluid supplied all.

  Tropile was “wired into circuit.”

  The only literal wiring, at first, was a temporary one—a fine electrode aseptically introduced into the great nerve that leads to the rhinencephalon—the “smell brain,” the area of the brain containing the pleasure centers which motivate human behavior. (More than a thousand Earthly Components had been spoiled and discarded before the Pyramids had located the pleasure centers so exactly.) While the Component Tropile was being “programmed” the wire rewarded him with minute pulses that made his body glow with animal satisfaction when he functioned correctly. That was all there was to it. After a time the wire was withdrawn, but by then Tropile had “learned” his entire task. Conditioned reflexes had been established. They could be counted on for the long and useful life of the Component.

  That life might be very long indeed; in the nutrient tank beside Tropile’s, as it happened, lay a Component with eight legs and a chitinous fringe around its eyes. It had lain in such a tank for more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand Terrestrial years.

  ***

  The Component was then placed in operation. It opened its eyes and saw things; the sensory nerves of its limbs felt things; the muscles of its hands and toes operated things.

  Where was Glenn Tropile?

  He was there, all of him; but a zombie-Tropile. Bereft of will, emptied of memories. He was a machine and part of a huger machine. His sex was the sex of a photoelectric cell; his politics were those of a transistor; his ambition that of a mercury switch. He didn’t know anything about sex, or fear, or hope. He only knew two things: Input and Output.

  Input to him was a display of small lights on a board before his vacant face; and also the modulation of a loudspeaker’s liquid-born hum in each ear, certain flavors, many twinges of pressure, heat or pain.

  Output from him was the dancing manipulation of certain buttons and keys, prompted by changes in Input and by nothing else.

  Between Input and Output he lay in the tank, Glenn Tropile, a human Black Box which was capable of Rashevsky’s Number of switchings, and of nothing else.

  He had been programmed to accomplish a specific task—to shepherd a chemical called 3, 7, 12-trihydroxycholanic acid, present in the catabolic product of the Pyramids, through a succession of more than five hundred separate operations until it emerged as the chemical, which the Pyramids were able to metabolize, called Protoporphin IX.

  He was not the only Component operating in this task; there were several, each with its own program. The acid accumulated in great tanks a mile from him. He knew its concentration, heat and pressure; he knew of all the impurities which would affect subsequent reactions. His fingers tapped, giving binary-coded signals to sluice gates to open for so many seconds and then to close; for such an amount of solvent at such a temperature to flow in; for the agitators to agitate for just so long at just such a force. And if a trouble signal disturbed any one of the 517 major and minor operations, he—it?—was set to decide among alternatives:

  —scrap the batch in view of flow conditions along the line?

  —isolate and bypass the batch through a standby loop?

  —immediate action to correct the malfunction?

  Without inhibiting intelligence, without the trammels of humanity on him, the intricate display board and the complex modulations of the input signals could be instantly taken in, evaluated and given their share in the decision.

  Was it—he?—still alive?

  The question has no meaning. It was working. It was an excellent machine, in fact, and the Pyramids cared for it well. Its only consciousness, apart from the reflexive responses that were its program, was “the sound of one hand alone”: zero, mindlessness, Samadhi, stupor.

  It continued to function for some time—until the required supply of Protoporphin IX had been exceeded by a sufficient factor of safety to make further processing unnecessary—that is, for some minutes or months. During that time it was Happy. (It had been programmed to be Happy when there were no uncorrected malfunctions of the process.) At the end of that time it shut itself off, sent out a signal that the task was completed; and was then laid aside in the analogue
of a deep-freeze, to be reprogrammed when another Component was needed.

  No. It was of utterly no importance to the Pyramids that this particular Component had not been stamped from Citizen but from Wolf.

  9

  Roget Germyn, of Wheeling a Citizen, found himself thinking of Glenn Tropile much more than he would have liked.

  It was not seemly for a Citizen’s thoughts to keep flashing back to a cried-upon Wolf. It wasn’t even sense. At this time of all times he should have devoted a seemly proportion of his thoughts—actually, nearly all of them—to his work, for this was the time when Germyn’s occupation of banker was both very demanding and very enjoyable.

  It was always that way in the first weeks after the birth of a New Sun. It was the time when even the soberest Citizen might permit himself to dream largely. Six months from now, when the first big harvests were already in and the earliest of the second ripening for the granaries, that was the time when a banker needed to be extremely conservative. Saving was the order of the day then. So Germyn would delicately remind his clients, deferentially counseling them to put away rather than spend, borrow only if they must, save, save, for the hard times that surely lay ahead.

  Then the hard times would begin to come.

  The crops would dwindle. Then Germyn would have to try harder than ever to find the words, the properly indirect and mannerly words, to keep his investors from drawing on their hoard before they had to.

  Then the Old Sun would begin to die, and the harvests went from slim to zero. That was the long-drawn-out time when everyone’s savings melted slowly away. Stretch it out if you can, he would say—as persuasively as a proper Citizen could. Make it last. Always keep a reserve in your account—for if you spend too much too fast, not only will you risk running out of reserves before the Re-Creation of the Sun, but you will perhaps drive up prices, and then everyone will suffer.