"It's more than we've ever had—a complete reading at the instant of Translation!"
"We'll get more," Haendl promised. "Innison, now that you know what to look for, go on 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 with a woman. Call me, you hear? Maybe you were right about Tropile; maybe he did have some use. He might 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. "This time they've got themselves a Wolf."
The Pyramids did have a Wolf—a fact 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 old Moon—was small, dark, atmosphereless and waterless. It was completely built over, much of it with its propulsion devices.
In the old days, when technology had followed war, luxury, government and leisure, the Pyramids' sun had run out of steam; and at about the same time, they 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 hauling and pushing. They pushed their planet.
They knew where to push it.