Haendl came back; yes, they were guns. Haendl was carrying one.
"Ours!" he crowed. "That Tropile must've looted our armory at Princeton. By the looks of what's here, I doubt if he left a single round of ammunition. What the hell, they're more use here!"
"But what are we going to do with guns?"
Haendl looked at him with savage amusement. "Shoot."
Citizen Germyn said: "Please, Citizen. Tell me what this is all about."
Haendl sat down next to him on the warm, quivering floor and began fitting cartridges into a clip.
"We're fighting," he explained gleefully. "Tropile did it all. You've been shanghaied and so have all the rest of us. Tropile's alive! He's part of the Pyramid communications network—don't ask me how. But he's there and he has been hauling men and weapons and God knows what all up from Earth—you're on the binary planet now, you know—and we're going to bust things up so the Pyramids will never be able to put them back together again. Understand? Well, it doesn't matter if you don't. All you have to understand is that when I tell you to shoot this gun, you shoot."
Numbly, Citizen Germyn took the unfamiliar stock and barrel into his hands. Muscles he had forgotten he owned straightened the limp curve of his back, squared his shoulders and thrust out his chest.
It had been many generations since any of Citizen Germyn's people had known the feeling of being an Armed Man.
A naked woman with wild hair and a full, soft figure came toward them, jiggling in a way that agonized Citizen Germyn. He dropped his eyes to his gun and kept them there.
She cried: "Orders from Tropile! We've got to form a party and blow something up."
Haendl demanded: "Such as what?"
"I don't know what. I only know where. We've got a guide. And Tropile particularly asked for you, Haendl. He said you'd enjoy it."
And enjoy it Haendl did—anticipation was all over his face.
They formed a party of a dozen. They armed themselves with the guns Tropile had levitated from the bulging warehouse at Princeton. They supplied themselves with gray metal cans of something that Haendl said were explosives, and with fuses and detonators to match, and they set off—with their guide.
A guide! It was a shambling, fearsome monster!
When Citizen Germyn saw it, he had to fight an almost irresistible temptation to be ill. Even the bare skins about him no longer mattered; this new horror canceled them out.
"What—What—" he strangled, pointing.
Haendl laughed raucously. "That's Joey."
"What's Joey?"
"He works for us," said Haendl, grinning.
Joey was neither human nor beast; it was not Pyramid; it was nothing Citizen Germyn had ever seen or imagined before. It crouched on many-jointed limbs, and even so was twice the height of a man. Its ropy arms and legs were covered with fine chitinous spines, laid on as close as hairs in a pelt, and sharp as thorns. There was a layer of chitin around its reddish eyes. What was more horrible than all, it spoke.
It said squeakily: "You all ready? Come on, snap it up! The Pyramids have got something big building up and we've got to squash it."
Citizen Germyn whispered feverishly to Haendl: "That voice! It sounds odd, yes—but isn't it Tropile's voice?"
"Sure it is! That's what old Joey is good for," said Haendl. "Tropile says he's telepathic, whatever that is. Makes it handy for us."
And it did. Telepathy was the alien's very special use to Glenn Tropile, for what Joey was in fact was another Component, from a previous wristwatch mine. Joey's planet had once circled a star never visible from Earth; his home air was thin and his home sunlight was weak, and in consequence his race had developed a species of telepathy for communicating at long range. This was handy for the Pyramids, because it simplified the wiring. And it was equally handy for Glenn Tropile, once he managed to wake the creature—with its permission, he could use its body as a sort of walkie-talkie in directing the tactics of his shanghaied army.
That permission was very readily given. Joey remembered what the Pyramids had done to its own planet.
"Come on!" ordered Joey in Tropile's filtered voice, and they hastened through a straight and achingly cramped tunnel in single file, toward what Tropile had said was their target.
They had nearly reached it when, abruptly, there was a thundering of explosions ahead.
The party stopped, looked at each other, and got ready to move on more slowly.
At last it had started. The Pyramids were beginning to fight back.
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