It had not been built there. It had not been carried there by Man or Man's machines. It had—come, in its own time; for its own reasons.
Did it wake on that day, the thing atop Mount Everest, or did it ever sleep? Nobody knew. It stood, or sat, there, approximately a tetrahedron. Its appearance was known: constructed on a base line of some thirty-five yards, slaggy, midnight-blue in color. Almost nothing else about it was known—at least, to mankind.
It was the only one of its kind on Earth, though men thought (without much sure knowledge) that there were more, perhaps many thousands more, like it on the unfamiliar planet that was Earth's binary, swinging around the miniature Sun that hung at their common center of gravity like an unbalanced dumbbell. But men knew very little about that planet itself, only that it had come out of space and was now there.
Time was when men had tried to label that binary, more than two centuries before, when it had first appeared. "Runaway Planet." "The Invader." "Rejoice in Messias, the Day Is at Hand." The labels were sense-free; they were Xs in an equation, signifying only that there was something there which was unknown.
"The Runaway Planet" stopped running when it closed on Earth.
"The Invader" didn't invade; it merely sent down one slaggy, midnight-blue tetrahedron to Everest.
And "Rejoice in Messias" stole Earth from its sun—with Earth's old moon, which it converted into a miniature sun of its own.
That was the time when men were plentiful and strong—or thought they were—with many huge cities and countless powerful machines. It didn't matter. The new binary planet showed no interest in the cities or the machines.
There was a plague of things like Eyes—dust-devils without dust, motionless air that suddenly tensed and quivered into lenticular shapes. They came with the planet and the Pyramid, so that there probably was some connection. But there was nothing to do about the Eyes. Striking at them was like striking at air—was the same thing, in fact.
While the men and machines tried uselessly to do something about it, the new binary system—the stranger planet and Earth—began to move, accelerating very slowly.