Frederik Pohl & Cecil Kornbluth - Wolfbane

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WOLFBANE

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to

real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Books.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises 260 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10001

First printing, June 1986

ISBN: 0-671-65576-0

Cover art by Jael

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by SIMON & SCHUSTER TRADE PUBLISHING GROUP 1230 Avenue of the Americas _.New York,

N.Y. 10020

Roget Germyn, banker, of Wheeling, West Virginia, a Citizen, woke gently from a

Citizen s dreamless sleep. It was the third-hour-rising time, the time proper to a day of

exceptional opportunity to appreciate.

Citizen Germyn dressed himself in the clothes proper for the appreciation of great

works—such as viewing the Empire State ruins against stormclouds from a small boat; or

walking in silent single file across the remaining course of the Golden Gate Bridge. Or—

as today; one hoped that it would be today— witnessing the re-creation of the Sun.

Germyn with difficulty retained a Citizen's necessary calm. When the rekindling of the

Sun was late one was tempted to meditate on improper things: would die Sun in fact be

re-created? What if it were not? He put his mind to his dress. First of all he put on an old

and storied bracelet, a veritable identity brace-

let of heavy silver links and a plate which was inscribed:

Korea 1953

PFC JOE HARTMANN

His fellow jewelry-appreciators would have envied him that bracelet—if they had

been capable of such an emotion as envy. No other ID bracelet as much as two

hundred and fifty years old was known to exist in Wheeling. His finest shirt and pair

of light pants went next to his skin, and over them he wore a loose parka whose seams

had been carefully weakened. When the Sun was re-created, every five clock-years or

so, it was the custom to remove the parka gravely and rend it with the prescribed

graceful gestures . . . but not so drastically that it could not be stitched together again.

Hence the weakened seams. This was, he counted, the forty-first day on which he and

all of Wheeling had donned the appropriate Sun-re-creation clothing. It was the forty-

first day on which the Sun—no longer white, no longer blazing yellow, no longer even

bright red—had risen and displayed a color that was darker maroon and always darker.

It had, thought Citizen Germyn, never grown so dark and so cold in all of his life.

Perhaps it was an occasion for special viewing? For surely it would never come again,

this opportunity to see the old Sun so near to death. . . .

One hoped.

Gravely Citizen Germyn completed his dress-

ing, carefully thinking only of the act of dressing itself. Apparel-donning was by no

means his specialty, but he considered when it was done that he had done it well, in

the traditional flowing gestures, with no flailing, at all times balanced lightly on the

ball of the foot. It was all the more perfectly consummated in that no one saw it but

himself.

He woke his wife gently, by placing the palm of his hand on her forehead as she lay

neatly, in the prescribed fashion, on the Woman's Third of the bed.

The warmth of his hand gradually penetrated her layers of sleep; her eyes demurely

opened.

"Citizeness Germyn," he greeted her, making the assurance-of-identity sign with his

left hand.

"Citizen Germyn," she said, with the assurance-of-identity inclination of the head

which was prescribed when the hands are covered.

He retired to his tiny study to wait.

It was the time appropriate to meditation on the properties of connectivity. Citizen

Germyn was skilled in meditation, even for a banker; it was a grace in which he had

schooled himself since earliest childhood.

Citizen Germyn, his young face composed, his slim body erect as he sat, but in no way

tense or straining, successfully blanked out, one after another, all of the external

sounds and sights and feelings that interfered with proper meditation. His mind was

very nearly

vacant except of one central problem: Connectivity.

Over his head and behind, out of sight, the cold air of the room seemed to thicken and

form a blob; a blob of air.

There was a name for those blobs of air; they had been seen before; they were a known

fact of existence in Wheeling and in all the world. They were recognized as something

associated with meditation on connectivity. They came. They hovered. Then they went

away . . . and often did not go away alone.

If someone had been in the room with Citizen Germyn to look at it, he would have seen a

distortion, a twisting of what was behind the blob, like flawed glass, a lens; like an eye.

And they were called Eye.

Germyn meditated . . .

The blob of air grew and slowly moved. A vagrant current that spun out from it caught a

fragment of paper and whirled it to the floor; Germyn stirred; the blob retreated as his

meditation, for a moment, was disturbed.

Germyn, all unaware, disciplined his thoughts to disregard the interruption, to return to

the central problem of connectivity. The blob hovered . . .

From the other room, his wife's small, thrice-repeated throat-clearing signaled to him that

she was decently dressed. Germyn got up to go to her, his mind returning to the world.

Meditation, for that time, was over.

The Eye overhead spun restlessly for a moment. It moved back and forth indecisively, as

a man might pace along a train platform when someone with whom he expected to share a

journey did not show up. Then it disappeared.

Some miles east of Wheeling, Glenn Tropile, a Jack of every trade who secretly wondered

whether he was a human being, awoke on the couch of his apartment.

He sat up, shivering. It was cold. Damned cold. The damned sun was still damned bloody

dark outside the window, and the apartment was soggy and chilled.

He had kicked off the blankets in his sleep— why couldn't he learn to sleep quietly, like

anybody else? Lacking a robe, he clutched them around him, got up and walked to the

unglassed window.

It was not unusual for Glenn Tropile to wake up on his couch. This happened because

Gala Tropile had a temper and was inclined to exile him from her bed after a quarrel. He

knew he always had the advantage over her for the whole day following the night's exile.

Therefore the quarrel was worth it. An advantage was, by definition, worth anything you

paid for it ... or else it was no advantage.

He could hear her moving about in one of the other rooms and cocked an ear, satisfied.

She hadn't waked him. Therefore she was about to make amends. A little itch in his spine

or his brain—it was not a physical itch, so he couldn't locate it; he could only be sure that

it was there—stopped troubling him momentar-

ily; he was winning a contest. It was Glenn Tropile's nature to win contests, and his nature

to create them.

Gala Tropile, young, dark, attractive, with a haunted look, came in tentatively carrying

coffee from some secret hoard of hers.

Glenn Tropile affected not to notice. He stared coldly out at the cold landscape. The sea,

white with thin ice, was nearly out of sight, so far had it retreated as the little sun waned

and the spreading polar ice caps hoarded more and more of the water of the seas.

"Glenn—"

Ah, good! Glenn. Where was the proper mode of first-greeting-one's-husband? Where

was the prescribed throat-clearing upon entering a room? Assiduously he had untaught

her the meticulous ritual of manners that they had all of them been brought up to know;

and it was the greatest of his many victories over her that sometimes, now, she was the

aggressor, she would be the first to depart from the formal behavior prescribed for

Citizens. Depravity! Perversion! Sometimes they would touch each other at times which

were not the appropriate coming-together times, Gala sitting on her husband's lap in the

late evening, perhaps, or Tropile kissing her, awake in the morning. Sometimes he would

force her to let him watch her dress—no, not now, for the cold of the waning sun made

that sort of frolic unattractive; but she had permitted it before; and such was his mastery

over her that he

knew she would permit it again, when the Sun was re-created. . . .

If, a thought came to him, if the Sun was re-created.

He turned away from the cold outside and looked at his wife.

"Good morning, darling." She was contrite.

He demanded jarringly: "Is it?" Deliberately he stretched, deliberately he yawned,

deliberately he scratched his chest. Every movement was ugly. Gala Tropile quivered but

said nothing.

Tropile flung himself on the better of the two chairs, one hairy leg protruding from under

the wrapped blankets. His wife was on her best behavior—in his unique terms; she didn't

avert her eyes. "What've you got there?" he asked. "Coffee?"

"Yes, dear. I thought—"

"Where'd you get it?"

The haunted eyes looked away. Good again, thought Glenn Tropile, more satisfied even

than usual; she's been ransacking an old warehouse again. It was a trick he had taught her,

and like all of the illicit tricks she had learned from him a handy weapon when he chose

to use it. It was not prescribed that a Citizeness should rummage through Old Places. A

Citizen did his work, whatever that work might be—banker, baker or furniture repairman.

He received what rewards were his due for the work he did. A Citizen never took

anything that was not his—no, not even if it lay abandoned and fated to spoil.

It was one of the differences between Glenn Tropile and the people he moved among.

I ve got it now, he exulted; it was what he needed to clinch his victory over her. He spoke:

"I need you more than I need coffee, Gala."

She looked up, troubled. "What would I do," he demanded, "if a beam fell on you one day

while you were scrambling through the fancy groceries? How can you take such chances?

Don't you know what you mean to me?"

She sniffed a couple of times. She said brokenly: "Darling, about last night—I'm sorry—"

and miserably held out the cup. He took it and swallowed the coffee thoughtfully. Then

he set it down. He took her hand, looked up at her, and kissed the hand lingeringly.

He felt her tremble. Then she gave him a wild, adoring look and flung herself into his

arms.

A new dominance cycle was begun at the moment he returned her frantic kisses.

Glenn knew, and Gala knew, that he had over her an edge—an advantage; the weather

gauge; initiative of fire; percentage; the can't-lose vigorish. Call it anything, but it was life

itself to Glenn Tropile's kind. He knew, and she knew, that having the advantage he

would press it and she would yield—on and on, in a rising spiral. He did it because it was

his life, the attaining of an advantage over whomever he might encounter; because he was

a Son of the Wolf.

A world away a Pyramid squatted sullenly on the planed-off top of the highest peak of the

Himalayas.

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? For that matter, 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. Human beings had toiled up Everest's grim slopes to learn that much. Almost

nothing else about it was known 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 more, like it on the unfamiliar planet that

was now Earth's binary, swinging around the miniature Sun that now hung at their

common center of gravity. But men knew very little about that planet itself, for that

matter, only that it had come out of space, and was now there.

Time was when men had tried to give a name to that binary, more than two centuries

before, when it first appeared. "Runaway Planet." "The Invader." "Rejoice in Messias, the

Day Is at Hand." The labels might as well have been belches; they were sensefree; they

were x's 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. They didn't show any interest in Earth's

weapons, either—no, not even when the worst and most deadly of them were deployed

against the invaders. The invaders simply went about their business.

Whatever that was.

For four billion years and more the Earth had rolled decorously around the Sun, always in

its proper place between the orbits of Venus and Mars, always with its captive Moon for a

companion. There was no reason that should ever change.

It did change, though. Something reached out from the interloper planet and changed

everything. That something, whatever it was, took hold of the Earth as it sailed around the

Sun, and the Earth left its ancient round and followed after, Moon and all. At first the

motion was very slow. Then it quickened.

In a week astronomers knew something was happening. In a month the old Sun was per-

ceptibly farther away, tinier, less warming. There was panic about that—added to all the

other panics that swept the globe.

Then the Moon sprang into flame.

That was a problem in nomenclature, too. What do you call a Moon when it becomes a

Sun? It did, though. Just in time, for already the parent Sol was visibly more distant, and

in a few years it was only one other star among many.

When the inferior little sun was burned to a clinker they—whoever "they" were, for men

saw only the one Pyramid—would hang a new one in the sky; it happened every five

clock-years, more or less. It was the same old moon-turned-sun; but it burned out, and the

fires needed to be rekindled. The first of these suns had looked down on an Earthly

population of ten billion. As the sequence of suns waxed and waned there were changes;

climatic fluctuation; all but immeasurable differences in the quantity and kind of radiation

from the new source.

The changes were such that the forty-fifth such sun looked down on a shrinking human

race that could not muster up a hundred million.

A frustrated man drives inward; it is the same with a race. The hundred million that clung

to existence were not the same as the bold, vital ten billion.

The thing on Everest had in its time received many labels, too: The Devil, The Friend,

The Beast, A Pseudo-living Entity of Quite Unknown Electrochemical Properties.

All these labels were also x's.

If it did wake that morning it did not open its eyes, for it had no eyes—apart from the

quivers of air that might or might not belong to it. Eyes might have been gouged;

therefore it had none; so an illogical person might have argued—and yet it was tempting,

to apply the "purpose, not function" fallacy to it. Limbs could be crushed; it had no limbs.

Ears could be deafened; it had none. Through a mouth it might be poisoned; it had no

mouth. Intentions and actions could be frustrated; apparently it had neither.

It was there; that was all.

It and others like it had stolen the Earth and the Earth did not know why. It was there.

And the one thing on Earth you could not do was hurt it, influence it, or coerce it in any

way whatever.

It was there—and it, or the masters it represented, owned the Earth by right of theft.

Utterly. Beyond human hope of challenge or redress.

_______2_______

Citizen and Citizeness Roget Germyn walked down Pine Street in the chill and dusk of—

one hoped—a Sun Re-creation Morning.

It was the convention to pretend that this was a morning like any other morning. It was

not proper either to cast frequent hopeful glances at the sky, nor yet to seem disturbed or

afraid because this was, after all, the forty-first such morning since those whose specialty

was Sky-Viewing had come to believe the Recreation of the Sun was near.

The Citizen and his Citizeness exchanged the assurance-of-identity sign with a few old

friends and stopped to converse. This also was a convention of skill divorced from

purpose; the conversation was without relevance to anything that any one of the

participants might know, or think, or wish to ask. Germyn said for his friends a twenty-

word poem he had made in honor of the occasion and heard their

responses. They did line-capping for a while until somebody indicated unhappiness and a

wish to change by frowning the Two Grooves between his brows. The game was deftly

ended with an improvised rhymed exchange.

Casually Citizen Germyn glanced aloft. The sky-change had not begun yet; the dying old

Sun hung just over the horizon, east and south, much more south than east. It was an ugly

thought, but suppose, thought Germyn, just suppose that the Sun were not re-created

today? Or tomorrow or—

Or ever.

The Citizen got a grip on himself and told his wife: "We shall dine at the oatmeal stall."

The Citizeness did not immediately reply. When Germyn glanced at her with well-

maslced surprise he found her almost staring down the dim street, at a Citizen who moved

almost in a stride, almost swinging his arms. Scarcely graceful.

"That might be more Wolf than man," she said doubtfully.

Germyn knew the fellow. Tropile was his name. One of those curious few who made their

homes outside of Wheeling, though they were not farmers; Germyn had had banker's

dealings with him.

"That is a careless man," he said, "and an ill-bred one." They moved toward the oatmeal

stall with the gait of Citizens, arms limp, feet scarcely lifted, slumped forward a little. It

was the ancient gait of fifteen hundred calories per day, not one of which could be

squandered.

There was a need for more calories. So many for walking, so many for gathering food. So

many for the economical pleasures of the Citizens, and so many more—oh, many more,

these days!—to keep out cold. Yet there were no more calories; the diet the whole world

lived on was a bare subsistence ration. It was impossible to farm well when half the

world's land was part of the time drowned in the rising sea, part of the time smothered in

falling snow. Citizens knew this and, knowing, did not struggle—it was ungraceful to

struggle, particularly when one could not win. Only the horrors known as Wolves

struggled, splurging calories, reckless of grace.

Wolves! Why must there be Wolves? Why must those few, secret, despicable monsters

threaten the whole fabric of civilized behavior?

Of course, Roget Germyn himself had once been a Wolf—at least, a Cub. Everybody

started out that way. That was what children were. You began by wailing when you were

hungry and taking whatever there was to take. Little kids weren't expected to understand

the rules of conduct. Certainly they were not equipped to understand how vital those rules

were to survival itself.

Form follows function. The customs of Citizen Germyn's world developed out of urgent

need. That tiny Sun, ne Moon, produced only enough warmth for marginal survival.

There was not enough food to go around. There was not enough of anything to go around;

so everyone was carefully schooled, from the age of

two onward, to eat sparingly, move slowly, contemplate instead of act. Even what one

contemplated was carefully prescribed. It was not wise to daydream about food or new

clothes or the pleasures of the marriage bed. Such dreams led to desires. Desires were

hard to control. The best things to contemplate were sunsets, storm clouds, stars, the

gracefully serendipitous trickle of a single raindrop down a windowpane—no one was

ever impelled to desire a raindrop. Best of all was to meditate on connectivity. When you

thought about how everything was connected to everything else— was a part of

everything else—was everything else, why, then the mind emptied itself. There - was no

"wanting" when you meditated on connectivity. There was no thinking. There was only

being.

A well-brought-up Citizen could spend thousands of hours out of his life in such

meditation—hours that were by definition saved from eating, acting, doing, lusting—any

of those so very undesirable things.

The things that Wolves did.

One could go even farther. It sometimes happened that a Citizen would attain the

ultimate. Non-acting rose to become non-wanting, and then non-thinking . . . and then,

perhaps, he would attain the final grace:

Non-being.

When you attained non-being you simply disappeared, with a clap of nearby thunder. And

all who were left behind would praise your memory—tepidly, and with dignity.

That was how Citizens should behave. That was how everyone did behave—

Except Wolves.

It was unseemly to think too much of Wolves. It led to anger, which was very wasteful of

calories. Citizen Germyn turned his mind to more pleasant things.

He allowed himself his First Foretaste of the oatmeal. It would be warm in the bowl, hot

in the throat, a comfort in the stomach. There was a great deal of pleasure there, in

weather like this, when the cold plucked through the loosened seams and the wind came

up the sides of the hills. Not that there wasn't pleasure in the cold itself, for that matter. It

was proper that one should be cold now, just before the re-creation of the Sun, when the

old Sun was smoky red and the new one not yet kindled.

"—Still looks like Wolf to me," his wife was muttering.

"Cadence," Germyn reproved his Citizen-ess, but took the sting out of it with a Quirked

Smile. The man with the ugly manners was standing at the very bar of the oatmeal stall

where they were heading. In the gloom of mid-morning he was all angles, and strained

lines; his head was turned awkwardly on his shoulder, peering toward the back of the stall

where the vendor was rhythmically measuring grain into a pot; his hands were resting

helter-skelter on the counter, not hanging by his sides.

Citizen Germyn felt a faint shudder from

his wife. But he did not reprove her again, for who could blame her? The exhibition was

revolting.

She said faintly, "Citizen, might we dine on bread this morning?"

He hesitated and glanced again at the ugly man. He said indulgently, knowing that he was

indulgent: "On Sun Re-creation Morning, the Citizeness may dine on bread." Bearing in

mind the occasion, it was only a small favor, and therefore a very proper one.

The bread was good, very good. They shared out the half-kilo between them and ate it in

silence, as it deserved. Germyn finished his first portion and, in the prescribed pause

before beginning his second, elected to refresh his eyes upward.

He nodded to his wife and stepped outside. Overhead the Old Sun parceled out its last

barrel-scrapings of heat. It was larger than the stars around it, but many of them were

nearly as bright. There was one star in Earth's sky which was brighter than the dying fire

on the old Moon, but it happened to be in the other half of the heavens at this time. When

it was visible, people looked at it wistfully. It was the Earth's parent star, receding always

behind them.

Germyn shivered slightly in the dusky morning air. Wheeling, West Virginia, was a

splendid place to be in the summer, when a New Sun was bright. Harvests were bountiful,

the polar caps released their ice and the oceans returned to drown the coastal plains. It

was

less good to be in these mountains when the Old Sun was dying. It was cold.

Cycle after cycle, as each Sun aged, Citizen Germyn and his Citizeness ritually debated

the question of whether they should remain in Wheeling or join the more adventurous

migrants in their trek to sea level, and the slightly warmer conditions along the coasts.

Since they were model Citizens, the decision was always to remain—one wasted fewer

calories that way. And of course the New Sun always came just when it was most

needed—always had before, at least.

He was saved from pursuing that thought when a high-pitched male voice said: "Citizen

Germyn, good morning."

Germyn was caught off balance. He took his eyes off the sky, half-turned, glanced at the

face of the person who had spoken to him, raised his hand in the assurance-of-identity

sign. It was all very quick and fluid—almost too quick, for he had had his fingers bent

nearly into the sign for female friends; and this was a man. Citizen Boyne; Germyn knew

him well; they had shared the Ice Viewing at Niagara a year before.

Germyn recovered quickly enough, but it had been disconcerting.

He improvised quickly: "There are stars^ but are stars still there if there is no Sun?" It was

a hurried effort, he grieved, but no doubt Boyne would pick it up and carry it along;

Boyne had always been very good, very graceful.

Boyne did no such thing. "Good morning," he said again, faintly. He glanced at the stars

overhead as though trying to unravel what Germyn was talking about. He said accusingly,

his voice cracking sharply: "There isn't any Sun, Germyn. What do you think of that?"

Germyn swallowed. "Citizen, perhaps you—"

"No Sun, you hear me!" The man sobbed, "It's cold, Germyn. The Pyramids aren't going

to give us another Sun, do you know that? They're going to starve us, freeze us; they're

through with us. We're done, all of us!" He was nearly screaming. All up and down Pine

Street people were trying not to look at him, some of them failing.

Boyne clutched at Germyn helplessly. Revolted, Germyn drew back—bodily contact!

It seemed to bring the man to his senses^ Reason returned to his eyes. He said, "I—" He

stopped, stared about him. "I think I'll have bread for breakfast," he said foolishly, and

plunged into the stall.

Strained voice, shouting, clutching, no manners at all!

Boyne left behind him a shaken Citizen, caught half-way into the wrist-flip of parting,

staring after him with jaw slack and eyes wide, as though Germyn had no manners either.

All this on Sun Re-creation Day!

What could it mean? Germyn wondered fretfully. Was Boyne on the point of— Could

Boyne be about to—

He drew back from the thought. There was one thing that might explain Boyne's behav-

ior. But it was not a proper speculation for one Citizen to make about another.

All the same—Germyn dared the thought— all the same, it did seem almost as though

Citizen Boyne were on the point of, well, running amok.

At the oatmeal stall, Glenn Tropile thumped on the counter.

The laggard oatmeal vendor finally brought the bowl of salt and the pitcher of thin milk.

Tropile took his paper twist of salt from the top of the neatly arranged pile in the bowl. He

glanced at the vendor; his fingers hesitated; then quickly he ripped the twist of paper into

his oatmeal and covered it to the permitted level with the milk.

He ate quickly and efficiently, watching the street outside.

They were wandering and mooning about, as always—maybe today more than most days,

since they hoped it would be the day the Sun blossomed flame once more.

Tropile always thought of the wandering, mooning Citizens as they. There was a "we"

somewhere for Tropile, no doubt, but Tropile had not as yet located it, not even in the

bonds of the marriage contract. He was in no hurry. At the age of fourteen Glenn Tropile

had reluctantly come to realize certain things about himself; that he disliked being bested;

that he had to have a certain advantage in all his dealings, or an intolerable itch of the

mind drove him to discomfort. The things added up to a terrifying fear, gradually

becoming knowl-

edge, that the only "we" that could properly include him was one that it was not very wise

to join.

He had realized, in fact, that he was a Wolf.

For some years Tropile had struggled against it—for Wolf was a bad word, the children

he played with were punished severely for saying it, and for almost nothing else. It was

not proper for one Citizen to advantage himself at the expense of another; Wolves did

that. It was proper for a Citizen to accept what he had, not to strive for more; to find

beauty in small things; to accommodate himself, with the minimum of strain and

awkwardness, to whatever his life happened to be. Wolves were not like that; Wolves

never Meditated, Wolves never Appreciated, Wolves never were Translated. That

supreme fulfillment, granted only to those who succeeded in a perfect meditation on

connectivity—that surrender of the world and the flesh by taking leave of both— that

could never be achieved by a Wolf.

Accordingly, Glenn Tropile had tried very hard to do all the things that Wolves could not

do.

He had nearly succeeded; his specialty, Water Watching, had been most rewarding; he

had achieved many partly successful meditations on connectivity.

And yet he was still a Wolf; for he still felt that burning, itching urge to triumph and to

hold an advantage. For that reason, it was almost impossible for him to make friends

among the Citizens and gradually he had almost stopped trying.

Tropile had arrived in Wheeling nearly a year before, making him one of the early settlers

in point of time. And yet there was not a Citizen in the street who was prepared to

exchange recognition gestures with him.

He knew them, nearly every one. He knew their names and their wives' names; he knew

what northern states they had moved down from with the spreading of the ice, as the sun

grew dim; he knew very nearly to the quarter of a gram what stores of sugar and salt and

coffee each one of them had put away—for their guests, of course, not for themselves; the

well-bred Citizen hoarded only for the entertainment of others. He knew these things

because there was an advantage to Tropile in knowing them. But there was no advantage

in having anyone know him.

A few did—that banker, Germyn; for Tropile had approached him only a few months

before about a prospective loan. But it had been a chancy, nervous encounter; the idea

was so luminously simple to Tropile—organize an expedition to the coal mines that once

had flourished nearby; find the coal, bring it to Wheeling, heat the houses. And yet it had

sounded blasphemous to Germyn. Tropile had counted himself lucky merely to have been

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WOLFBANEThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©1986byFrederikPohlandC.M.KornbluthAnearlierandsubstantiallydifferentversionofthisworkwaspublishedunderthesametitle©1959byBallantineBooks.Allrig...

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Frederik Pohl & Cecil Kornbluth - Wolfbane.pdf

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Frederik Pohl & Cecil Kornbluth - Wolfbane

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