CHAPTER FOUR: He

 

MIRAMON shifted nervously in the chair, the great black saw-toothed feather stuck into his topknot bobbing uncertainly. It was a testimonial to his confidence in Amalfi that he sat in it at all, for in the beginning he had squatted, as was customary on his planet. Chairs were the uncomfortable prerogatives of the gods.

"I myself do not believe in the gods," he explained to Amalfi, bobbing the feather. "It would be plain to a technician, you understand, that your city is simply a product of a technology superior to ours, and you yourselves are men such as we are. But on this planet, religion has a terrible force, a very immediate force. It is not expedient to run counter to public sentiment in such matters."

Amalfi nodded. "From what you tell me, I can believe that. Your situation is unique, to the best of our knowledge. What, precisely, happened when your civilization fell?"

Miramon shrugged. "We do not know. It was over eight thousand years ago, and nothing is left but legend. There was a high culture here then-the priests and the scientists agree on that. And the climate was different; it got cold regularly every year, I am told, although how men could survive such a period is difficult to understand. Besides, there were many more stars-the ancient carvings show thousands of them, although they fail to agree on the details."

"Naturally. You're not aware that your sun is moving at an abnormally fast relative speed?"

"Moving?" Miramon laughed shortly. "Some of our more mystical scientists are of that opinion-they maintain that if the planets move, so must the sun. It is an imperfect analogy, in my opinion; after all, planets and suns are not otherwise alike as far as we can see. And would we still be in this trough of nothingness if we were moving?"

"Yes, you would-you are. You underestimate the size of the Rift. It's impossible to detect any parallax at this distance, although in a few thousand years you'll begin to suspect it. But while you were actually among the other stars, your ancestors could see the motion very well, by the changing positions of the neighboring suns."

Miramon looked dubious. "I bow to your superior knowledge, of course. But, be that as it may-the legends have it that for some sin of our people, the gods plunged us into this starless desert, and changed our climate to perpetual heat. This is why our priests say that we are in hell, and that to be put back among the cool stars again, we must redeem our sins. We have no heaven as you have defined the term; when we die, we die damned; we must win 'salvation' right here in the mud while we are still alive. The doctrine has its attractive features under the circumstances."

Amalfi meditated. It was reasonably clear, now, what had happened, but he despaired of explaining it to Miramon-hard common sense sometimes has a way of being impenetrable. This planet's axis had a pronounced tilt, and the concomitant amount of liberation. This meant that, like Earth, it had a Draysonian cycle: every so often the top wobbled, and then resumed spinning at a new angle. The result was a disastrous climatic change. Such a thing happened on Earth roughly once every twenty-five thousand years, and the first one in recorded history had given birth to some extraordinarily silly legends and faiths-sillier than those the Hevians now entertained, on the whole.

Still, it was miserably bad luck for the Hevians that a Draysonian overturn had occurred almost at the same time that the planet had begun its journey across the Rift. It had thrown a very high civilization, a culture just entering its ripest phase, forcibly back into the Inter-destructional period without the slightest transition.

The planet of He was a strange mixture now. Politically the regression had stopped just before barbarism-a measure of the lofty summits this race had scaled before the catastrophe-and was now in reverse, clawing through the stage of warring city-states. Yet the basics of the scientific techniques of eight thousand years ago had not been forgotten; now they were exfoliating, bearing "new" fruits.

Properly, city-states should fight each other with swords, not with missile weapons, chemical explosives, and supersonics-and flying should be still in the dream stage, a dream of flapping wings at that, not already a jet-propelled fact. Astronomical and geological accident had mixed history up for fair.

"What would have happened to me if I'd unlocked that cage?" Amalfi demanded abruptly.

Miramon looked sick. "Probably you would have been killed-or they would have tried to kill you, anyhow," he said, with considerable reluctance. "That would have been releasing Evil again upon us. The priests say that it was women who brought about the sins of the Great Age. In the bandit cities, to be sure, that savage creed is no longer maintained-which is one reason why we have so many deserters to the bandit cities. You can have no idea of what it is like to do your duty to the race each year as our law requires. Madness!"

He sounded very bitter. "This is why it is hard to make our people see how suicidal the bandit cities are. Everyone on this world is weary of fighting the jungle, sick of trying to rebuild the Great Age with handfuls of mud, sick of maintaining social codes which ignore the presence of the jungle-but most of all, sick of serving in the Temple of the Future. In the bandit cities the women are clean, and do not scratch one."

"The bandit cities don't fight the jungle?" Amalfi asked.

"No. They prey on those who do. They have given up the religion entirely-the first act of a city which revolts is to slay its priests. Unfortunately, the priesthood is essential; and our beast-women must be borne, since we cannot modify one tenet without casting doubt upon all-or so they tell us. It is only the priesthood which teaches us that it is better to be men than mud-puppies. So we-the technicians-follow the rituals with great strictness, stupid though some of them are, and consider it a matter of no moment that we ourselves do not believe in the gods."

"Sense in that," Amalfi admitted. Miramon, in all conscience, was a shrewd apple. If he was representative of as large a section of Hevian thought as he believed himself to be, much might yet be done on this wild runaway world.

"It amazes me that you knew to accept the key as a trust," Miramon said. "It was precisely the proper move- but how could you have guessed that?"

Amalfi grinned. "That wasn't hard. I know how a man looks when he's dropping a hot potato. Your priest made all the gestures of a man passing on a great gift, but he could hardly wait until he'd got it over with. Incidentally, some of those women are quite presentable now that Dee's bathed 'em and Medical has taken off the under layers. Don't look so alarmed, We won't tell your priests- I gather that we're the foster fathers of He from here on out."

"You are thought to be emissaries from the Great Age," Miramon agreed gravely. "What you actually are, you have not said."

"True. Do you have migratory workers here? The phrase comes easily in your language, yet I can't quite see how—"

"Surely, surely. The singers, the soldiers, the fruit-pickers-all go from city to city, selling their services." Then, much faster than Amalfi had expected, the Hevian reached bottom. "Do you ... do you imply ... that your resources are for sale? For sale to us?"

"Exactly, Miramon."

"But how shall we pay you?" Miramon gasped. "All of what we call wealth, all that we have, could not buy a length of the cloth in your sash!"

Amalfi thought about it, wondering principally how much of the real situation Miramon could be expected to understand. It occurred to him that he had persistently underestimated the Hevian so far. It might be profitable to try the full dose-and hope that it wouldn't prove lethal.

"It's this way," Amalfi said. "In the culture we belong to, a certain metal serves for money. You have enormous amounts of it on your planet, but it's very hard to refine, and I'm sure you've never done more than detect it. One of the things we would like is your permission to mine for that metal."

Miramon's pop-eyed skepticism was close to comical. "Permission?" he repeated. "Please, Mayor Amalfi-is your ethical code as foolish as ours? Why do you not mine this metal without permission and be done with it?"

"Our law-enforcement agencies would not allow it. Mining your planet would make us rich-almost unbelievably rich. Our assays show, not only fabulous amounts of germanium on He, but also the presence of certain drugs in your jungle-drugs which are known to be anti-agathics."

"Sir?"

"Sorry. I mean that, used properly, these drugs indefinitely postpone death."

Miramon rose with great dignity.

"You are mocking me," he said. "I will return at a later date, and perhaps we may talk again."

"Sit down, please," Amalfi said contritely. "I had forgotten that aging is not everywhere known to be an anomaly, a decrease in the cell-building efficiency of the body which can be circumvented if you know how. It was conquered a long time ago-before interstellar flight, in fact. But the pharmaceuticals involved have always been in very short supply, shorter and shorter as man spread through the galaxy. Less than a two-thousandth of one per cent of our present population can get the treatment now, and most of the legitimate trade goes to the people who need life-extension the most-in other words, to people who make their living by traveling long distances in space. The result is that an ampule of any anti-agathic, even the least efficient ones, that a spaceman thinks he can spare can be sold for the price the seller asks. Not a one of the anti-agathics has ever been synthesized, so if we could harvest here—"

"That is enough; it is not necessary that I understand more," Miramon said. He squatted reflectively, evidently having abandoned the chair as an impediment to thought. "All this makes me wonder if you are not from the Great Age after all. Well-this is difficult to think about reasonably. Why would your culture object to your being rich?"

"It wouldn't, as long as we came by it honestly. We'll have to show that we worked for our riches-otherwise we'll be suspected of having peddled cut drugs on the black market, at the expense of the rank-and-file people on board our own city. We'll need a written agreement with you. A permission."

"That is clear," Miramon said. "You will get it, I am sure. I cannot grant it myself. But I can predict what the priests will ask you to do to earn it."

"What, then? This is just what I want to know. Let's have it."

"First of all, you will be asked for the secret of this ... this cure for death. They will want to use it on themselves, and hide it from the rest of us. Wisdom, perhaps; it would make for more desertions otherwise-but I am sure they will want it."

"They can have it, but I think we'll see to it that the secret leaks out. The City Fathers know the therapy, and you have so rich a supply of the drugs here that there's no reason why you shouldn't all get it." Privately, Amalfi had an additional reason: If He reached the other side of the Rift eventually with enough anti-agathics to extend coverage much among the galaxy's general population, there would be all kinds of economic hell to pay. "What next?"

"You will be asked to wipe out the jungle."

Amalfi sat back, stunned, and mopped his bald head. Wipe out the jungle! Oh, it would be easy enough to lay waste to almost all of it-even to give the Hevians energy weapons to keep those wastes clear-but sooner or later the jungle would come back. The weapons would short out in the eternal moisture; the Hevians. would not take proper care of them, would not be able to repair them- how would the brightest Greek have repaired a shattered X-ray tube, even if he had known what steps to take? The technology didn't exist.

No, the jungle would come back. And the cops, in pursuit of the bindlestiff on the city's own Dirac alarm, would eventually come to He to see whether or not the Okies had fulfilled their contract-and would find the planet as raw as ever. Good-by to riches. This was jungle climate. There would be jungles here until the next Draysonian catastrophe, and that was that.

"Excuse me," he said, and reached for the control helmet. "Get me the City Fathers," he said into the mouthpiece.

"SPEAK," the spokesman vodeur said after a while.

"How would you go about wiping out a jungle?"

There was a moment's silence. "SODIUM FLUOSILICATE DUSTING WOULD SERVE. IN A WET CLIMATE. IT WOULD CREATE FATAL LEAF BLISTER. HARDIER WEEDS COULD BE SPRAYED WITH 2, 4-D. OF COURSE THE JUNGLE WOULD RETURN."

"That's what I meant. Any way to make the job stick?"

"NO, UNLESS THE PLANET EXHIBITS DRAY-SONIANISM."

"What?"

"NO, UNLESS THE PLANET EXHIBITS DRAY-SONIANISM. IN THAT CASE ITS AXIS MIGHT BE REGULARIZED. IT HAS NEVER BEEN TRIED, BUT THEORETICALLY IT IS QUITE SIMPLE; A BILL TO REGULARIZE EARTH'S AXIS WAS DEFEATED BY THREE VOTES IN THE EIGHTY-SECOND COUNCIL, OWING TO THE OPPOSITION OF THE CONSERVATION LOBBY."

"Could the city handle it?"

"NO. THE COST WOULD BE PROHIBITIVE. MAYOR AMALFI, ARE YOU CONTEMPLATING TIPPING THIS PLANET? WE FORBID IT! EVERY INDICATION SHOWS-—"

Amalfi tore the helmet from his head and flung it across the room. Miramon sprang up in alarm.

"Hazleton!"

The city manager shot through the door as if he had been kicked through it on roller skates. "Here, boss- what's the-—"

"Get down below and turn off the City Fathers-fast, before they catch on and do something! Quick, man—"

Hazleton was already gone. On the other side of the room, the phones of the helmet squawked dead data in anxious, even syllables.

Then suddenly they went silent.

The City Fathers had been turned off, and Amalfi was ready to move a world.

The fact that the City Fathers could not be consulted- for the first time since the Epoch affair five centuries ago, when the whole city had been without power for a while- made the job more difficult than it needed to be, barring their conservatism. Tipping the planet, the crux of the job, was simple enough in essence; the city's spindizzies could handle it. But the side effects of the medicine might easily prove to be worse than the disease.

The problem was seismological. Rapidly whirling objects have a way of being stubborn about changing their positions in space. If that energy were overcome, it would have to appear somewhere else-the most likely place being multiple earthquakes.

Too, very little could be anticipated about the gravities of the task. The planet's revolution produced, as usual, a sizable magnetic field. Amalfi did not know how well that field would take to being tipped in the space-lattice which it distorted, nor just what would happen to He when the city's spindizzies polarized the whole gravity field. During "moving day" the planet would be, in effect, without magnetic moment of its own, and since computation was a function of the City Fathers, there was no way of finding out where the energy would reappear, in what form, or at what intensity.

He broached the latter question to Hazleton. "If we were dealing with an ordinary problem, I'd say the energy would show up as velocity," he pointed out. "In which case we'd be in for an involuntary junket. But this is no ordinary case. The mass involved is ... well, it's planetary, that's all. What do you think, Mark?"

"I don't know what to think," Hazleton admitted. "The equations only give us general solutions, and only quanticised solutions at that-and this whole problem is a classical field problem. When we move the city, we change the magnetic moment of its component electrons; but the city itself is a low-mass body with no spin of its own, and doesn't have a gross magnetic moment."

"That's what stuck me. I can't cross over from probability into tensors any more than poor old Einstein could. As far as I know, nobody's ever really faced up to the discontinuity between what the spindizzy does to the electron and what happens to a body of classical mass in a spindizzy field."

"Still-we could control velocity, or even ignore it out here. Suppose the energy reappears as heat, instead? There'd be nothing left of He but a cloud of gas."

Amalfi shook his head. "I think that's a bogey. The gyroscopic resistance may show up as heat, sure, but not the magnetogravitic. I think we'd be safest to assume that it'll appear as velocity, just as in ordinary flight. Use the standard transformation and see what you get."

Hazleton bent over his slide rule, the sweat standing out along his forehead and above his mustache in great heavy droplets. Amalfi could understand the eagerness of the Hevians to get rid of the jungle and its eternal humidity. His own clothing, sparse though it was, had been sopping ever since the city had landed here.

"Well," the city manager said finally, "unless I've made a mistake somewhere, the whole kit and kaboodle, the planet itself, will go shooting away from here at about twice the speed of light. That's not too bad-just about coasting speed for us. We could always loop around and bring the planet back to its orbit."

"Ah, but could we? Remember, we don't control it! The vector appears automatically when we turn on the spindizzies. We don't even know in which direction that arrow is going to point. The planet could throw itself into the sun within the first second as far as we know. We can't predict the direction."

"Yes, we can," Hazleton objected. "Along the axis of spin, of course."

"Cant? And torque?"

"No problem-no, yes, there is. I keep forgetting that we're dealing with a planet instead of electrons." He applied the slipstick again. "No soap. Too many substitutions. Can't be answered in time without the City Fathers- and torque might hype the end-velocity substantially. But if we can figure a way to control the flight, it won't matter in the end. Of course there'll be perturbations of the other planets when this one goes massless, whether it actually moves or not-but nobody lives on them anyhow."

"All right, Mark, go figure a control system. I'll see what can be done on the geology end—"

The door slid back suddenly, and Amalfi looked back over his shoulder. It was Sergeant Anderson. The perimeter sergeant was usually blase in the face of all possible wonders, unless they threatened the city. "What's the matter?" Amalfi said, alarmed.

"Mr. Mayor, we've gotten an ultracast from some outfit claiming to be refugees from another Okie city-they claim they hit a bindlestiff and got broken up. They've crash-landed on this planet up north, and they're being mobbed by one of the local bandit towns. They were holding 'em off and yelling for help, and then they stopped transmitting. I thought you ought to know."

Amalfi heaved himself to his feet almost instantly. "Did you get a bearing on that call?" he demanded.

"Yes sir."

"Give me the figures. Come on, Mark. That's our life craft from the city with the no-fuel drive. We need those boys."

Amalfi and Hazleton grabbed a cab to the edge of the city, and went the rest of the way to the Hevian town on foot, across the supersonics-cleared strip of bare turf which surrounded the walls. The turf felt rubbery. Amalfi suspected that some rudimentary form of friction-field was keeping the mud in a state of stiff gel. He had visions of foot soldiers sinking suddenly into slowly-folding ooze as the fields were turned off, and quickened his pace.

Inside the gates, the Hevian guards summoned a queer, malodorous vehicle which seemed to be powered by the combustion of hydrocarbons, and the Okies were roared through the streets toward Miramon. Throughout the journey, Amalfi clung to a cloth strap in an access of nervousness. Traveling right on a surface at any good speed was a rare experience for him, and the way things zipped past the windows made him jumpy.

"Is this bird out to smash us up?" Hazleton demanded petulantly. "He must be doing all of four hundred kilos an hour."

"I'm glad you feel the same way," Amalfi said, relaxing a little. "Actually, I'll bet he's doing less than two hundred. It's just the way the—"

The driver, who had been holding his car down to a conservative fifty out of deference to the strangers from the Great Age, wrenched the machine around a corner and halted it neatly before Miramon's door. Amalfi got out, his knees wobbly. Hazleton's face was a delicate puce.

"I'm going to figure out a way to make our cabs operate outside the city," he muttered. "Every time we make a new planetfall, we have to ride on ox carts, the backs of bull kangaroos, in hot air balloons, steam-driven air-screws, things that drag you feet first and face down through tunnels, or whatever else the natives think is classy transportation. My stomach won't stand much more."

Amalfi grinned and raised his hand to Miramon, whose expression suggested laughter smothered with great difficulty.

'"What brings you here?" the Hevian said. "Come in. I have no chairs, but-—"

"No time," Amalfi said. "Listen closely, Miramon, because this is going to be complex to explain, and I'm going to have to give it to you fast. You already know that our city isn't the only one of its type. Well, the fact is that we aren't even the first Okie city to enter the Rift; there were two others ahead of us. One of them, a criminal city that we call a bindlestiff, attacked and destroyed the other; we were too far away to prevent it. Do you follow me?"

"I think so," Miramon said. "This bindlestiff is like our bandit cities—"

"Yes, precisely. And as far as we know, it's still in the Rift, somewhere. Now the city that the 'stiff destroyed had something that we want very badly, and that we must have before the 'stiffs get it. We know that the dead city put off some life craft, and that one of those craft has just landed on your world and has fallen afoul of one of your own bandit cities. We've got to rescue them. They're the sole survivors of the dead city as far as we know, and it's vital for us to question them. We need to know what they know about the thing we want-the no-fuel drive-and what they know about where the bindlestiff is now."

"I see," Miramon said thoughtfully. "Will this-this bindlestiff follow them to He?"

"We think it will. And it's powerful-it packs all the stuff we have and more besides. We have to pick up these survivors first, and work out some way to defend ourselves and you people against the 'stiff when it gets here. And above all, we must prevent the 'stiff from getting the secret of that fuelless drive!"

"What would you like me to do?" Miramon said gravely.

"Can you locate the Hevian town that's holding these people prisoner? We have a fix on it, but only a blurred one. If you can, we'll be able to get them out of there ourselves."

Miramon went back into his house-actually, like all the other living quarters in the town, it was a dormitory housing twenty-five men of the same trade or profession- and returned with a map. The map-making conventions of He were anything but self-explanatory, but after a while

Hazleton was able to figure out the symbolism involved. "There's your city, and here's ours," he said to Miramon, pointing. "Right? And this peeled-orange thing is a butterfly grid. I've always claimed that it was a lot more faithful to spherical territory than our Geographic projection, boss."

"Easier still to express what you want to remember as a topological relationship," Amalfi said impatiently. "Nobody ever confuses a table of symbols with the territory. Show Miramon where the signals came from."

"Up here, on this wing of the butterfly."

Miramon frowned. "There is only one city there-Fabr-Suithe. A very bad place to approach, even in the military sense. But if you insist on trying, we will help you. Do you know what the end result will be?"

"We'll rescue our friends, I hope. What else?"

"The bandit cities will come out in force to hinder the Great Work. They oppose it; the jungle is their life."

"Then why haven't they impeded us before now?" Hazleton said. "Are they scared?"

"No. They fear nothing-we think they take drugs-but they have seen no way to attack you without huge losses, and their reasons for attacking you have not been sufficiently compelling to make them take the risk up to now. But if you attack one of them, that will give them reason enough. They learn hatred very quickly."

"I think we can handle them," Hazleton said coldly.

"I am sure you can," Miramon said. "But you should be warned that Fabr-Suithe is the leader of all the bandit cities. If Fabr-Suithe attacks you, so will they all."

Amalfi shrugged. "We'll chance it. We'll have to: we must have those men. Maybe we can make it quick enough to crush resistance before it starts. We can pick our own town up and go calling on Fabr-Suithe; if they don't want to deliver up these Okies—"

"Boss-—"

"Eh?"

"How are you going to get us off the ground?"

Amalfi could feel his ears turning red, and swore. "I forgot that Twenty-third Street machine. Miramon, we'll have to have a task force of your own rockets. Hazleton, how are we going to work this? We can't fit anything really powerful into a Hevian rocket plane-a pile would go into one easily enough, but a frictionator or a naval-size mesotron rifle wouldn't, and there'd be no point in taking popguns. Do you suppose we could gas Fabr-Suithe?"

"You couldn't carry enough gas in a Hevian rocket either. Or carry enough men to make a raid in force."

"Excuse me," Miramon said, "but it is not even certain that the priests will authorize the use of our planes against Fabr-Suithe. We had best drive directly over to the temple and ask them for permission."

"Belsen and bebop!" Amalfi said. It was the oldest oath in his repertoire.

Talk, even with electronic aids, was impossible inside the little rocket. The whole machine roared like a gigantic tam-tam to the vibration of the Venturis. Morosely Amalfi watched Hazleton connecting the mechanism in the nose of the plane with the power-leads from the pile-no mean balancing feat, considering the way the craft pitched in its passage through the tortured Hevian crosswinds. The pile itself, of course, was .simple enough to handle; it consisted only of a tank about the size of a glass brick, filled with a fine white froth: heavy water containing uranium235 hexafluoride in solution, damped by bubbles of cadmium vapor. Most of its weight was shielding and the peripheral capillary network of the heat-exchanger.

There had been no difficulty with the priests about the little rocket task force itself; the priests had been delighted at the proposal that the emissaries from the Great Age should teach an apostate Hevian city the error of its ways. Amalfi suspected that the straight-faced Miramon had invented the need for priestly permission just to get the two Okies back into the smelly ground car again and watch their faces during the drive to the temple. Still the discomforts of that ride had been small compared to this one.

The pilot shifted his feet on the treadles, and the deck pitched. A metal trap rushed back under Amalfi's nose, and he found himself looking through misty air at a crazily canted jungle. Something long, thin, and angry flashed over it and was gone. At the same time there was a piercing, inhuman shriek, sharp enough to dwarf for a long instant the song of the rocket.

Then there were more of the same: ptsouiiirrrl ptsoidiirrr! ptsouiiirrrl The machine jerked to nearly every one and then shook itself violently, twisting and careening across the jungle top Amalfi had never felt so helpless before in his life. He did not even know what the noise was; he could only be sure that it was ill-tempered. The coarse blaam of high explosive, when it began, was recognizable-the city had often had occasion to blast on jobs- but nothing in his experience went kerchowkerchowker-chowkerchow, like a demented vibratory drill, and the invisible thing that screamed its own pep yell as it flew- eeeeeeeeyokKRCHackackarackarackaracka-seemed wholly impossible.

He was astonished to discover that the hull around him was stippled with small holes, real holes with the slipstream fluting over them. It took him what seemed to be three weeks to realize that the whooping and cheer-leading which meant nothing to him was riddling the ship and threatening to kill him at any second.

Someone was shaking him. He lurched to his knees, trying to unfreeze his eyeballs.

"Amalfi! Amalfi!" The voice, although it was breathing on his ear, was parsecs away. "Pick your spot, quick! They'll have us shot down in a—"

Something burst outside and threw Amalfi back to the deck. Doggedly he crawled to the trap and peered down through the now-shattered glass. The bandit Hevian city swooped past, upside down. The mayor felt a sudden wave of motion sickness, and the city was lost in a web of tears. The second time it came by, he managed to see which building in it had the heaviest guard, and pointed, choking.

The rocket threw its tailfeathers over the nearest cloud and bored beak-first for the ground. Amalfi hung on to the edge of the suddenly blank trap, his own blood spraying back in a fine mist into his face from his cut fingers.

"Now!"

Nobody heard, but Hazleton saw his nod. A blast of pure light blew through the upended cabin, despite the shielding between it and the pile. Even through the top of his head, the violet-white light of that soundless blast nearly blinded Amalfi, and he could feel the irradiation of his shoulders and chest. He would develop no allergies on this planet, anyhow-every molecule of histamine in his blood must have been detoxified in that instant.

The rocket yawed wildly, and then came under control again. The ordnance noises Had already quit, cut off at the moment of the flash.

The bandit Hevian city was blind.

The sound of the jets cut off, and Amalfi understood for the first time what an "aching void" might be. The machine fell into a steep glide, the air howling dismally outside it. Another rocket, under the guidance of Carrel, dived down before it, scything a narrow runway in the jungle with portable mesotron rifles-for the bandit towns kept no supersonic no-plant's-land between themselves and the rank vegetation.

The moment the rocket stopped moving, Amalfi and a hand-picked squad of Okies and Hevians were out of it and slogging through the muck. From inside Fabr-Suithe drifted a myriad of screams-human screams now, screams of rage and grief, from men who thought themselves blinded for life. Amalfi did not doubt that many of them were. Certainly anyone who had had the misfortune to be looking at the sky during that instant when the entire output of the pile had been converted to visible light would never see again?

But the laws of chance would have protected most of the renegades, so speed was vital. The mud built up heavy pads under his shoes, and the jungle did not thin out until they hit the town's wall itself.

The gates had been rusted open years ago, and were choked with greenery. The Hevians hacked their way through it with practiced knives and cunning.

Inside, the going was still almost as thick. Fabr-Suithe proper presented a depressing face of proliferating despair. Most of the buildings were completely enshrouded in vines, and many were halfway toward ruins. Iron-hard tendrils had thrust their way between stones, into windows, under cornices, up drains and chimney funnels. Poison-green succulent leaves plastered themselves greedily upon every surface, and in shadowed places there were huge blood-colored fungi which smelled like a man six days dead; the sweetish taint hung heavily hi the air. Even the paving blocks had sprouted-inevitably, since, whether by ignorance or laziness, most of the recent ones had been cut from green wood.

The screaming began to die into whimpers. Amalfi did his best to keep himself from inspecting the stricken inhabitants. A man who believes he has just been blinded permanently is not a pretty sight, even when he is wrong. Yet it was impossible-' not to notice the curious mixture of soiled finery with gleamingly clean nakedness. It was as if two different periods had mixed in the city, as if a gathering of Hruntan nobles had been sprinkled with Noble Savages. Possibly the 'men who had given in completely to the jungle had also slid back enough to discover the pleasures of bathing. If so, they would shortly discover the pleasures of the mud-wallow, too, and would not look so noble after that.

"Amalfi, here they are—"

The mayor's suppressed sympathy for the blinded men evaporated when he got a look at the imprisoned Okies. They had been systematically mauled to begin with, and after that sundry little attentions had been paid to them which combined the best features of savagery and decadence. One of them, mercifully, had been strangled by his comrades early in the "questioning." Another, a basket case, should have been rescued, for he could still talk rationally, but he pleaded so persistently for death that Amalfi had him shot in a sudden fit of sentimentality. Of the other three men, all could walk and talk, but two were mad. The catatonic was carried out on a stretcher, and the manic was bound, gagged, and led gingerly away.

"How did you do it?" asked the rational man in Russian, the dead universal language of, Earth. He was a human skeleton, but he radiated an amazing personal force. He had lost his tongue early in the "questioning," but had already taught himself to talk by the artificial method-the result was weird, but it was intelligible. "The savages were coming down to kill us as soon as they heard your rockets. Then there was a sort of flash, and they all started screaming-a pretty sound, let me tell you."

"I'll bet," Amalfi said. "Do you speak Interlingua? Good, my Russian is rudimentary these days. That 'sort of a flash' was a photon explosion. It was the only way we could figure on being sure of getting you out alive. We thought of trying gas, but if they had had gas masks, they would have been able to kill you anyhow."

"I haven't actually seen any masks, but I'm sure they have them. There are traveling volcanic gas clouds in this part of the planet, they say; they must have evolved some absorption device-charcoal is well known here. Lucky we were so far underground, or-we'd be blind, too, then. You people must be engineers."

"More or less," Amalfi agreed. "Strictly, we're miners and petroleum geologists, but we've developed a lot of side lines since we went aloft-like any Okie. On Earth we were a port city and did just about everything, but aloft you have to specialize. Here's our rocket-crawl in. It's rough, but it's transportation. How about you?"

"Agronomists. Our mayor thought there was a good field for it out here along the periphery-teaching the abandoned colonies and the offshoots how to work poisoned soil and manage low-yield crops without heavy machinery. Our side line was waxmans."

"What are those?" Amalfi said, adjusting the harness around the wasted body.

"Soil-source antibiotics. It was those the bindlestiff wanted-and got. The filthy swine. They can't bother to keep a reasonably sanitary city; they'd rather pirate some honest outfit for drugs when they have an epidemic. Oh, and they wanted germanium, too, of course. They blew us up when they found we didn't have any-we'd converted to a barter economy as soon as we got out of the last commerce lanes."

"What about your passenger?" Amalfi said with studied nonchalance.

"Doctor Beetle? Not that that was his name-I couldn't pronounce that even when I had my tongue. I don't imagine he survived. We had to keep him in a tank even in the city, and I can't quite see him living through a lifeship journey. He was a Myrdian-smart cookies all of them, too. That no-fuel drive of his—"

Outside, a shot cracked, and Amalfi winced. "We'd best take off-they're getting their eyesight back. Talk to you later. Hazleton, any incidents?"

"Nothing to speak of, boss. Everybody stowed?"

"Yep. Kick off."

There was a volley of shots, and then the rocket coughed, roared, and stood on its tail. Amalfi pulled a deep sigh loose from the acceleration and turned his head toward the rational man.

He was still securely strapped in, and looked quite relaxed. A brass-nosed slug had come through the side of the ship next to him and had neatly removed the top of his skull.

Working information out of the madmen was a painfully long, anxious process. Even after the manic case had been returned to a semblance of rationality, he could contribute very little.

The lifeship had not come to He because of Hazleton's Dirac warning, he said. 'The lifeship and the burned Okie had not had any Dirac equipment to the best of his knowledge. The lifeship had come to He, as Amalfi had predicted, because it was the only possible planetfall in the desert of the Rift. Even so, the refugees had had to use deep-sleep and strict starvation rationing to make it.

"Did you see the 'stiff again?"

"No, sir. If they heard your Dirac warning, they probably figured the police had spotted them and scrammed- or maybe they thought there was a military base or an advanced culture here on the planet."

"You're guessing," Amalfi said gruffly. "What happened to Doctor Beetle?"

The man looked startled. "The Myrdian in the tank? He got blown up with the city, I suppose."

"He wasn't put off in another lifeship?"

"Doesn't seem very likely. But I was only a pilot. Could be that they took him out in the mayor's gig for some reason."

"You don't know anything about his no-fuel drive?"

"First I heard of it."

Amalfi was far from satisfied; he suspected that there was still a short circuit somewhere in the man's memory. But that was all that could be gotten from him, and Amalfi had to accept the fact. All that remained to be done was to get some assessment of the weapons available to the bindlestiff; on this subject the ex-manic was ignorant, but the city's neurophysiologist said cautiously that something might be extracted from the catatonic within a month or two; thus far, he hadn't even succeeded in capturing the man's attention.

Amalfi accepted the estimate also, since it was the best he could get. With Moving Day for He coming near, he couldn't afford to worry overtime about another problem. He had already decided that the simplest answer to vulcanism, which otherwise would be inevitable when the planet's geophysical balance was changed, would be to reinforce the crust. At two hundred points on the surface of He, drilling teams were now sinking long, thin, slanting shafts, reaching toward the-stress-fluid of the world's core. The shafts interlocked intricately, and thus far only one volcano had been created by the drilling. In general, the lava pockets which had been tapped had already been anticipated, and the flow had been bled off into many intersecting channels without ever reaching the surface. After the molten rock had hardened, the clogged channels were re-drilled, with mesotron rifles set to the smallest possible dispersion.

None of the shafts had yet tapped the stress-fluid; the plan was to complete them all simultaneously. At that point, specific volcanic areas, riddled with channel intersections, would give way, and immense plugs would be forced up toward the crust, plugs of iron, connected by ferrous cantilevers through the channels between. The planet of He would wear a cruel corset, permitting only the slightest flexure-it would be stitched with threads of steel, steel that had held even granite in solution for geological ages.

The heat problem was tougher, and Amalfi was not sure whether or not he had hit upon the solution. The very fact of structural resistance would create high temperatures, and any general formation of shearplanes would cut the imbedded girders at once. The method being prepared to cope with that was rather drastic, and its after-effects largely unknown.

On the whole, however, the plans were simple, and putting them into effect had seemed heavy but relatively uncomplicated labor. Some opposition, of course, had been expected from the local bandit towns.

But Amalfi had not expected to lose nearly 20 per cent of his crews during the first month after the raid on Fabr-Suithe.

It was Miramon who brought the news of the latest work camp found slaughtered. Amalfi was sitting under a tree fern on high ground overlooking the city, watching a flight of giant dragonflies and thinking about heat transfer in rock.

"You are sure they were adequately protected?" Miramon asked cautiously. "Some of our insects—"

Amalfi thought the insects, and the jungle, almost disturbingly beautiful. The thought of destroying it all occasionally upset him. "Yes, they were," he said shortly. "We sprayed out the camp areas with dicoumarins and fluorine-substituted residuals. Besides-do any of your insects use explosives?"

"Explosives! There" was dynamite used? I saw no evidence—"

"No. That's what bothers me. I don't like all those felled trees you describe; that sounds more like TDX than dynamite or high explosive. We use TDX ourselves to get a cutting blast-it has the property of exploding in a flat plane."

Miramon goggled. "Impossible. An explosion had to expand evenly in all directions that are open to it."

"Not if the explosive is a piperazohexynitrate built from polarized carbon atoms. Such atoms can't move in any direction but at right angles to the gravity radius. That's what I mean. You people are up to dynamite, but not to TDX."

He paused, frowning. "Of course some of our losses have just been to bandit raids, with missile weapons and ordinary bombs-your friends from Fabr-Suithe and their allies. But these camps where there was an explosion and no crater to show for it-—"

He fell silent. There was no point in mentioning the gassed corpses. It was hard even to think about them. Somebody on this planet had a gas which was a regurgitant, a sternutatory, and a vesicant all in one. The men had been forced out of their masks-which had been designed solely to protect them from volcanic gases-to vomit, had taken the stuff into their lungs by convulsive sneezing, and had blistered into great sacs of serum inside and out. That, obviously, had been the multiple-benzene-ring gas Hawkesite; it had been very popular during the days of the warring stellar "empires," when it had been called "polybathroomfloorine" for no discoverable reason. But what was it doing on He?

There was only one possible answer, and for a reason which he did not try to understand, it made Amalfi breathe a little easier. All around him the jungle sighed and swayed, and humming clouds of gnats made rainbows over the dew-laden pinnae of the ferns. The jungle, almost always murmurously quiet, had never seemed like the real enemy-and now Amalfi knew that his intuition had been right. The real enemy had at last declared itself, stealthily, but with a stealth which was naivete itself in comparison with the ancient guile of the jungle.

"Miramon," Amalfi said" tranquilly, "we're in a spot. That criminal city I told you about-the bindlestiff-is already here. It must have landed even before my city arrived, long enough ago to hide itself very thoroughly. Probably it came down at night in some taboo area. The tramps in it have leagued themselves with Fabr-Suithe anyhow, that much is obvious."

A moth with a two-meter wingspread blundered across the clearing, piloted by a gray-brown nematode which had sunk its sucker above the ganglion between the glittering creature's pinions. Amalfi was in a mood to read parables into things, and the parasitism reminded him of how greatly he had underestimated the enemy. The bindlestiff evidently knew, and was skillful with, the secret of manipulating a new culture. A-shrewd Okie never attempts to overwhelm a civilization by direct assault, but instead pilots it, as indetectably as possible, doing no apparent harm, adding no apparent burden, but turning history deftly and tyrannically aside at the crucial instant...

Amalfi snapped the belt switch of his ultraphone. "Hazleton?"

"Here, boss." Behind the city manager's voice was the indistinct rumble of heavy mining. "What's up?"

"Nothing yet. Are you having any bandit trouble out there?"

"No. We're not expecting any, either, with all this artillery."

"Famous last words," Amalfi said. "The 'stiffs here, Mark-and it's no stranger, either."

There was a short silence. In the background, Amalfi could hear the shouts of Hazleton's crew. When the city manager's voice came in again, it was moving from word to word very carefully, as if it expected each one to break under its weight. "You imply that the 'stiff was already on He when our Dirac broadcast went out. Right? I'm not sure these losses of ours can't be explained some simpler way, boss; the theory ... uh ... lacks elegance."

Amalfi grinned tightly. "A heuristic criticism," he said. "Go to the foot of the class, Mark, and think it over. Thus far they've out-thought us six ways for Sunday. We may be able to put your old scheme about the women into effect still, but if it's to work, we'll have to smoke the 'stiff out into the open."

"How?"

"Everybody here knows that there's going to be a drastic change in the planet when we finish what we're doing, but we're the only ones who know exactly what we're going to do. The 'stiffs will have to stop us, whether they've got Doctor Beetle or not. So I'm forcing their hand. Moving Day is hereby advanced by one thousand hours."

"What! I'm sorry, boss, but that's flatly impossible."

Amalfi felt a rare spasm of anger. "That's as may be," he growled. "Nevertheless, spread it around; let the Hevians hear it. And just to prove that I'm not kidding, Mark, I'm turning the City Fathers back on at M plus 1100. If you're not ready to spin before then, you may well swing instead."

The click of the belt switch to the off position was unsatisfying. Amalfi would much have preferred to have concluded the interview with something really final-a clash of cymbals, for instance. He swung suddenly on Miramon.

"What are you goggling at?"

The Hevian shut his mouth, flushing. "Your pardon," he said. "I was hoping to understand your instructions to your assistant, in the hope of being of some use. But you spoke in such incomprehensible terms that it sounded like a theological dispute. As for me, I never argue about politics or religion." He turned on his heel and stamped off through the trees.

Amalfi watched him go, cooling off gradually. This would never do. He must be getting to be an old man. All during the conversation with Hazleton he had felt his temper getting the better of his judgment, yet he had felt sudden and inert, unwilling to make the effort of opposing the momentum of his anger. At this rate, the City Fathers would soon depose him and appoint some stable character to the mayoralty-not Hazleton, certainly, but some un-poetic youngster who would play everything by empirics. Amalfi was in no position to be threatening anyone else with liquidation, even as a joke.

He walked toward the grounded city, heavy with sunlight, sunk in reflection. He was now about nine hundred years old, give or take fifty; strong as an ox, mentally alert and active, in good hormone balance, all twenty-eight . senses sharp, his own special psi faculty- orientation-still as infallible as ever, and all in all as sane as a compulsively peripatetic starman could be. The anti-agathics would keep him in this shape indefinitely, as far as anyone knew-but the problem of patience had never been solved.

The older a man became, the more quickly he saw answers to tough questions because the more experience he had to bring to bear on them; and the less likely he was to tolerate slow thinking among his associates. If he were sane, his answers were generally right answers-if he were unsane, they were not; but what mattered was the speed of the thinking itself. In the end, both the sane and the unsane became equally dictatorial, less and less ready to explain why they picked one answer over another.

It was funny: before death had been indefinitely postponed, it had been thought that memory would turn longevity into a Greek gift, because not even the human brain could remember a practical infinity of accumulated facts. Nowadays, however, nobody bothered to remember many facts. That was what the City Fathers and like machines were for: they stored data. Living men memorized nothing but processes, throwing out obsolete ones for new ones as invention made it necessary. When they needed facts, they asked the machines.

In some cases, even processes were wiped from human memory to make more room if there were simple, indestructible machines to replace them-the slide rule, for instance. Amalfi wondered suddenly if there was a single man in the city who could multiply, divide, take square root, or figure pH in his head or on paper. The thought was so novel as to be alarming-as novel as if an ancient astrophysicist had seriously wondered how many of his colleagues could run an abacus.

No, memory was no problem. But it was hard to be patient after a thousand years.

The bottom of an airlock drifted into his field of view, plastered with brown tendrils of mud. He looked up. The lock, drilled directly into the great granite disc which was the foundation of the city, was a severed end of what had been a subway line running out of Manhattan centuries ago; this one evidently had been the Astoria line of the BMT, a lock seldom used, since it was too far from both the Empire State and City Hall, the city's two present centers of control. It was certainly a long way around the perimeter from where Amalfi had expected to go back on board. Feeling like a stranger, he went in.

Inside, the corridor rang with bloodcurdling shrieks which echoed endlessly. It was as if somebody were flaying a live dinosaur, or, better, a pack of them. Underneath the noise there was a sound like water being expelled under high pressure, arid someone was laughing hysterically. Alarmed, Amalfi ran up the nearest steps; the noise got louder. He hunched his bull shoulders and burst through the door behind which the butchery seemed to be going on.

Surely there had never been such a place in the city. It was a huge, steamy chamber, walled with some ceramic substance placed in regular tiles. The tiles were slimy and stained, hence, old-very old. On the floor, smaller hexagonal white tiles made an endlessly repeating mosaic, reminding Amalfi at once of the structural formula of Hawkesite.

Hordes of nude women ran aimlessly back and forth in the chamber, screaming, battering at the wall, dodging wildly, or rolling on the mosaic floor. Every so often a thick stream of water caught one of them, bowling her howling away. Overhead, long banks of nozzles sprayed needles of mist into the air; Amalfi was soaking wet almost at once. The laughter got louder. ;

The mayor bent quickly, threw off his muddy shoes, and stalked the laughter, his toes gripping the slippery tiles. The heavy column of water swerved toward him, then was warped away again.

"John! Do you need a bath so badly? Come join the party!"

It was Dee Hazleton. She was as nude as any of her victims, and was gleefully plying an enormous hose. She looked lovely; Amalfi turned his mind determinedly away from that thought.

"Isn't this fun? We just got a new batch of these creatures. I got Mark to have the old fire hose connected, and I've been giving them their first wash."

It did not sound much like the old Dee. Amalfi expressed his opinion of women who lost their inhibitions with such drastic thoroughness. He went on at some length, and Dee made as if to turn the hose on him again.

"No, you don't," he growled, wresting it from her. It proved extremely hard to manage. "What is this place, anyhow? I don't recall any such torture chamber in the plans."

"It was a public bath, Mark says. There's another one downtown, in the Baruch Houses district, and another one on Forty-first Street beside the Port Authority Terminal, and quite a few others. Mark says they must have been closed up when the city first went aloft. I've been using this one to sluice off these women before they're sent to Medical."

"With city water?" Even the thought of such waste made his hackles rise.

"Oh no, John, I know better than that. The water's pumped in from the river to the west."

"Water for bathing!" Amalfi said. "No wonder the ancients sometimes didn't have enough to drink. Still, I'd thought the static jet was older than that."

He surveyed the Hevian women, who, now that the water was turned off, were huddled in the warmest part of the echoing chambers. None of them shared Dee's gently curved ripeness, but, as usual, some of them showed promise. Hazelton was prescient, it had to be granted. Of course it had been expectable that the Hevians would turn out to be human. Only eleven non-human civilizations had ever been discovered, and of these, only the Lyrans and the Myrdians had any brains to speak of (unless one counted the Vegans; Earthmen did not think of them as human, but all the non-human cultures did; anyhow, they were extinct as a civilization).

But to have the Hevians turn over complete custody of their women to the Okies, without so much as a preliminary conference, at the first contact, had been a colossal break. Hazleton had advanced his proposal to use any possible women as bindlestiff-bait years before any Okie could have known that there were people on He at all.

Well, that was Hazleton's own psi gift: not true clairvoyance, but an ability to pluck workable plans out of logically insufficient data. Time after time only the seemingly miraculous working-out of some obvious flight of fancy had prevented Hazleton's being jettisoned by the blindly logical City Fathers.

"Dee, come to Astronomy with me," Amalfi said. "I've got something to show you. And for my sake, put on something, or the men will think I'm out to found a dynasty."

"All right," Dee said reluctantly. She was not yet used to the odd Okie standards of exposure, and sometimes appeared nude when it wasn't customary-a compensation, Amalfi supposed for her Utopian upbringing, which had taught her that nudity had a deleterious effect upon the purity of one's politics. The Hevian women moaned and hid their heads while she put on her shorts. Most of them had been stoned for inadvertently covering themselves at one time or another, for in Hevian society women were not people but reminders of damnation, doubly evil for the slightest taint of secretiveness.

History, Amalfi thought, would be more instructive a teacher if it were not so stupefyingly repetitious. He led the way up the corridor, searching for a lift shaft, disturbingly conscious of Dee's wet soles padding cheerfully behind him.

In Astronomy, Jake was, as usual, peering wistfully at a galaxy somewhere out on the marches of nowhen, trying to turn spiral arms into elliptical orbits without recourse to the calculations section. He looked up as Amalfi and the girl entered.

"Hello," he said dismally. "Amalfi, I really need some help here. How can a man work without machines? If only you'd turn the City Fathers back on—"

"Shortly. How long has it been since you looked back the way we came, Jake?"

"Not since we started across the Rift. Why, should I have? The Rift is just a scratch in a saucer; you need real distance to work on basic problems."

"I know that. But let's take a look. I have an idea that we're not as alone in the Rift as we thought."

Resignedly, Jake went to his control desk and thumbed the buttons that moved his telescope. "What do you expect to find?" he demanded. "A haze of iron filings, or a stray meson? Or a fleet of police cruisers?"

"Well," Amalfi said, pointing to the screen, "those aren't wine bottles."

The police cruisers, so close that the light of He's star had begun to twinkle on their sides, shot across the screen in a brilliant stream, contrails of false photons striping the Rift behind them.

"So they aren't," Jake said, not much interested. "Now may I have my scope back, Amalfi?"

Amalfi only grinned. Cops or no cops, he felt young again.

Hazleton was mud up to the thighs. Long ribands of it trailed behind him as he hurtled up the lift shaft to the control room. Amalfi watched him coming, noting the set whiteness of the city manager's face as he looked up at Amalfi's bent head.

"What's this about cops?" Hazleton demanded while still in flight. "The message didn't get to me straight. We were raided, and all hell's broken loose everywhere. I nearly didn't get here straight myself." He sprang into the room, his boots shedding gummy clods.

"I saw some of the fighting," Amalfi said. "Looks like the Moving Day rumor reached the 'stiffs, all right."

"Sure. What's this about cops?"

"The cops are here. They're coming in from the northwest quadrant, already off overdrive, and .should be ready to land day after tomorrow."

"Surely they're not still after us," Hazleton said. "And I can't see why they should come all this distance after the 'stiff. They must have had to use deep-sleep to make it. And we didn't say anything about the no-fuel drive in our alarm 'cast—"

"We didn't have to. They're after the 'stiff, all right. Someday I must tell you the parable of the diseased bee, but there isn't time now. Things are breaking too fast. We have to keep an eye on everything, and be ready to jump in any direction no matter which item on the agenda comes up first. How bad is the fighting?"

"Very bad. At least five of the local bandit towns are in on it, including Fabr-Suithe, of course. Two of them mount heavy stuff, about contemporary with the Hruntan Empire's in its heyday ... ah, I see you know that already. Well, this is supposed to be a holy war on us. We're meddling with the jungle and interfering with their chances for salvation-through-suffering, or something-I didn't stop to dispute the point."

"That's bad. It will convince some of the civilized towns, too. I doubt that Fabr-Suithe really believes this is a jihad-they've thrown their religion overboard-but it makes wonderful propaganda,"

"You're right there. Only a few of the civilized towns, the ones that have been helping us from the beginning, are putting up a stiff fight. Almost everyone else, on both sides, is sitting it out wilting for us to cut each other's throats. Our own handicap is that we lack mobility. If we could persuade all the civilized towns to come in on our side, we wouldn't need it, but so many of them are scared."

"The enemy lacks mobility, too, until the bindlestiff town is ready to take a direct hand," Amalfi said thoughtfully. "Have you seen any signs that the tramps are in on the fighting?"

"Not yet. But they won't wait much longer. And we don't even know where they are!"

"They'll be forced to locate themselves for us today or tomorrow, of that I'm certain. Right now it's time to muster all the rehabilitated women you have and get ready to plant them; as far as I can see, that whole scheme is going to pay off. As soon as I get a fix on the bindlestiff, I'll report the location of the nearest bandit town, and you can follow through from there."

Hazleton's eyes, very weary until now, began to glitter with gratification. "And how about Moving Day?" he said. "I suppose you know that not one of your stress-fluid plugs is going to hold with the work thus incomplete."

"I know it," Amalfi said. "I'm counting on it. We'll spin on the hour. If the plugs spring high, wide, and tall, I won't weep; as a matter of fact, I don't know how else we could hope to get rid of all that heat."

The radar watch blipped sharply, and both men turned to look at the screen. There was a fountain of green dots on it. Hazleton took three quick steps and turned the switch which projected the new butterfly grid onto the screen.

"Well, where are they?" Amalfi demanded. "That's got to be them."

"Right smack hi the middle of the southwestern continent, in that vine jungle where the little chigger snakes nest-the ones that burrow under your fingernails. There's supposed to be a lake of boiling mud on that spot."

"There probably is. They could be under it, surrounded by a medium-light screen."

"All right, then we've got them placed. But what's this fountain effect the radar's giving us? What are the 'stiffs shooting up?"

"Mines, I suspect," Amalfi said. "On proximity fuses. Orbital."

"Mines? Isn't that dandy," Hazleton said. "They'll leave an escape lane for themselves, of course, but we'll never be able to find it. They've got us under a plutonium umbrella, Amalfi."

"We'll get out. And in the meantime, the cops can't land, either. Go plant your women, Mark. And-put some clothes on 'em first. They'll cause more of a stir that way."

"You bet they will," the city manager said feelingly. He stepped into the lift shaft and fell out of sight.

Amalfi went out onto the observation platform of the control tower. From there he could see all the rest of the city, including most of the perimeter, for the tower-it was still called, now and then, the Empire State Building- was the tallest structure in the city. There was plenty of battle noise rattling the garish tropical sunset along most of the northwest quadrant, and even an occasional tiny toppling figure. The city had adopted the local dodge of clearing and gelling the mud at its rim, and had returned the gel to the morass state at the .first sign of attack, but the jungle men had broad skis, of some metal no Hevian could have machined so precisely, on which they slid over the muck. Discs of red fire marked bursting TDX shells, scything the air like death's own winnows. No gas was in evidence, but Amalfi knew that there would be gas before long with the bindlestiff directing the fighting.

The city's retaliatory fire was largely invisible, since it emerged below the top of the perimeter. There was 'a Bethe fender out, which would keep the run from being scaled until one of the projectors was knocked out, and plenty of heavy rifles were being kept hot. But the city had never been designed for warfare, and many of its most efficient destroyers had their noses buried in the mud, since their intended function was only to clear a landing area. Using an out-and-out Bethe blaster was impossible where there was an adjacent planetary mass-fortunately, since the bindlestiff had such a blaster and Amalfi's city did not.

Amalfi sniffed the scarlet edges of the struggle appraisingly. The screen set up beside him did not show an intelligible battle pattern yet, but it seemed to be almost on the verge of making sense. Under Amalfi's fingers on the platform railing were three buttons which he had had placed there four hundred years ago, duplicating a set on the balcony of City Hall. They had set in motion different actions at different times. But each time they had represented choices of actions which he would have to make when the pinch came. He had never found any reason to have a fourth button installed on either railing.

Rockets shrilled overhead. Bombs fell from them, crepitating bursts of noise and smoke and flying metal. Amalfi did not look up. The very mild spindizzy screen would fend off anything moving that rapidly. Only slow-moving objects, like men, could sidle through a polarized gravitic field. He looked out toward the horizon, touching the three buttons very delicately.

Suddenly the sunset snuffed itself out. Amalfi, who had never seen a tropical sunset before coming to He, felt a vague alarm, but as far as he could tell, the abrupt darkness was natural, though startling. The fighting went on, the flying discs of TDX explosions much more lurid now against the blackness.

After a while there was a dogfight far aloft, identifiable mostly by the exhaust traceries of rockets and missiles. Evidently Miramon's air force was tangling with Fabr-Suithe's. The jungle hammered derision and fury at Amalfi's city without any letup.

Amalfi stood, watching the screen so intently as to cut the rest of the world almost completely out of his consciousness. Understanding the emerging pattern was hard work, for he had never tried to grasp a situation at such close quarters before, and the blue-coded trajectory of every shell, sketched across the screen in glowing segments of ellipses, tried to capture his exclusive attention, as if they were all planets.

About an hour past midnight, at the height of the heaviest air raid yet, he felt a touch at his elbow.

"Boss—"

Amalfi heard the word as though it had been uttered at the bottom of the Rift. The still-ascending fountain of space mines the bindlestiff was throwing up had just come into the margin of the screen-meaning that O'Brian, the proxy chief, had just located the 'stiff with one of his flying robot bystanders-and Amalfi was trying to extrapolate the shape of the top of the fountain. Somewhere up there in the aeropause, the fountain flattened into a shell of orbits encompassing the whole of He, and it was important to know how high up that shell began.

But the utter exhaustion of the voice touched something deeper. He said, "Yes, Mark."

"It's done. We lost almost everybody in the party. But we planted the women in a clearing right where a 'stiff outpost could see them.... What a riot that caused." A ghost of animation stirred in the voice for a moment. "You should have been there."

"I'm almost there now. Just getting the picture from a proxy. Good work, Mark.... Better ... get some rest."

"Now? But boss-—"

Something very heavy described a searing parabola across the screen, and then the whole city turned to a scramble of magnesium-white and ink. As the light of the star-shell faded, the screen showed a formless dim-yellow spreading and crawling, as if someone had spilled paint in the innards of the machine. Amalfi had been waiting for it.

"Gas alarm, Mark," he heard himself saying. "Sure to be Hawkesite. Barium suits for everybody-that stuff's pure death-by-torture."

"Yes, right. Boss, have you been up here all this time? You'll kill yourself running things this way. You need rest more than I do."

Amalfi found that he did not have time to answer. O'Brian's proxy had come upon the town where Hazleton had dropped the women. There was certainly a riot there. Amalfi snapped a switch, backing the point of view off to another proxy which was hovering a mile up, scanning the whole battle area. From here he could see the black tendrils of movement which were files of soldiers moving through the jungle. Some which had been approaching Amalfi's city were now turning back. Furthermore, new tendrils were being put out from Hevian towns which up to now had taken no part in the fighting-the on-the-fence towns. Evidently they were no longer on the fence, but which side they had jumped to still remained to be seen.

He snapped the switch again, bringing back a close look at the lake of boiling mud which lay at the base of the mine fountain. Something new was going on there, too: the hot mud was flowing slowly, thickly, away from the center of the lake. Then there was a clear area in the center, as if the lake had suddenly developed a vortex. The clear area widened.

The bindlestiff city was rising to the surface. It came cautiously; half an hour went by before its periphery touched the lake shore. Then black tendrils stretched out into the tangled desolation of the jungle; the bindlestiff was at last risking its own men in the struggle. What they were after was plain enough, for the flies were all moving in the direction of the town where Hazleton had dropped the women.

The bindlestiff city itself sat and waited. Even against the mass-pressure of the planet of He, Amalfi's sense of spatial orientation could pick up the unmistakable, slightly nauseating sensation of spindizzy field under medium drive, doming the seething mud.

Dawn was coming now. The riot around the town where the women had been dropped dwindled a little. Then one of the task forces from the bindlestiff reached it, and it flared all over again, worse than ever. The 'stiffs were fighting their own allies.

Abruptly there was no Hevian town in the center of the riot at all. There was only a mushrooming pillar of radioactive gas which made the screen race with interference patterns. The 'stiffs had bombed the town. What was left of the riot retreated slowly toward the lake of boiling mud; the 'stiffs had their women and were fighting a rear-guard action. The news, Amalfi knew, would travel fast.

Amalfi's own city was shrouded in sick orange mist, lit with flashes of no-color. The blistering gas could not pass the spindizzy screen in a body, but it diffused through, molecule by heavy molecule. The mayor realized suddenly that he had not heeded his own gas warning, and that there was probably some harm coming to him. He started and moved slightly, and discovered that he was completely encased. What...

Barium paste. Evidently Hazleton had known that Amalfi could not leave the platform, and instead had plastered him with the paste in default of trying to get a suit on him. Even his eyes were covered with a transparent visor, and a feeling of distension in his nostrils bespoke a Kolman barium filter.

So much for the gas. The heavy tensions in and around the bindlestiff city continued to gather; they would soon be unbearable. Above, just outside the shell of circling mines, the first few police cruisers were sidling down with great caution. The war in the jungle had already fallen apart into meaninglessness. The abduction of the women by the tramps had collapsed all Hevian rivalries. Bandits and civilized towns alike were bent now upon nothing but the destruction of Fabr-Suithe and its allies. Fabr-Suithe could hold them off for a long time, but it was clearly time for the bindlestiff to leave-time for it to make off with its pleased and wondering Hevian women, its anti-agathics, its germanium, and whatever else it had managed to garner-tune for it to lose itself again hi the Rift before the Earth police could invest the planet of He.

The gravitic field "around the bindlestiff city knotted suddenly, painfully, in Amalfi's brain, and began to rise away from the lake of boiling mud. The 'stiff was taking off. In a moment it would be gone through the rent in the mine umbrella which only the tramps could see.

Amalfi pressed the button-the only one, this time, that had been connected to anything.

Moving Day began.

Moving Day began with six pillars of glaring white, forty miles in diameter, which burst through the soft soil at each compass point of He. Fabr-Suithe had sat directly over the site of one of them. The bandit town was nothing but a flake of ash in a split second, a curled black flake borne aloft on the top of a white-hot piston.

The pillars lunged, roaring, into the heavens, fifty, a hundred, two hundred miles, and burst at their tops like popcorn. The Hevian sky burned thermite-blue with steel meteors. Outside, the space mines, cut off from the world of which they had been satellites by the greatest spindizzy field in history, fled away into the Rift.

And when the meteors had burned away, the sun was growing.

The world of He was on spindizzy drive, its magnetic moment transformed into momentum. It was the biggest Okie "city" that had ever flown. There was no time to feel alarm. The sun flashed by and was dwindling to a point before the fact could be grasped. Then it was gone. The far wall of the Rift began to swell and separate into individual points of light.

The planet of He was crossing the Rift.

Appalled, Amalfi fought to understand the scale of speed. He failed. The planet of He was moving, that was all he could comprehend. It was moving at a proper cruising speed for a City of its size-a speed that gulped down light years as if they were gnats. Even to think of controlling such a flight was ridiculous.

Stars began to wink past He like fireflies. They had reached the other side of the Rift. The planet began to curve gradually away from the main cloud. Then the stars were all behind.

The surface of the saucer that was the galaxy began to come into view.

"Boss! We're going out of the galaxy! Look—"

"I know it. Get me a fix on He's old sun as soon as we're high enough above the Rift to see it again. After that it'll be too late."

Hazleton worked feverishly. It took him only half an hour, but during that time, the massed stars receded far enough to make plain the gray scar of the Rift as a long shadow on a spangled ground. At the end the Hevian sun was only a tenth-magnitude point in it.

"Got it, I think. But we can't swing the planet back. It'll take us thousands of years to cross to the next galaxy. We'll have to abandon He, boss, or we're sunk."

"All right. Get us aloft. Full drive."

"Our contract-—"

"Fulfilled-take my word for it now. Spin!"

The city sprang aloft. The planet of He did not dwindle in the city's sky. It simply vanished, snuffed out in the intergalactic gap. Miramon, if he lived, would be the first of a totally new race of pioneers.

Amalfi moved then, back towards the controls, the barium casing cracking and falling off him as he came back to life. The air of the city still stank of Hawkesite, but the concentration of the gas already had been taken down below the harmful level by the city's purifiers. The mayor began to edge the city away from the vector of He's flight and the city's own, back toward the home lens.

Hazleton stirred restlessly.

"Your conscience bothering you, Mark?"

"Maybe," Hazleton said. "Is there some escape clause in our contract with Miramon that lets us desert him like this? If there is, I missed it, and I read the fine print pretty closely."

"No, there's no escape clause," Amalfi said abstractedly, shifting the space stick by a millimeter or two. "The Hevians won't be hurt. The spindizzy screen will protect them from loss of heat and atmosphere-their volcanoes will keep them warmer than they'll probably like, and their technology is up to producing all the light they'll need. But they won't be able to keep the planet well enough lit to satisfy the jungle. That will die. By the time Miramon and his friends reach the star that suits them in the Andromedan galaxy, they'll understand the spindizzy well enough to put their planet back into, the proper orbit. Or maybe they'll like roaming better by that time, and will decide to be an Okie planet. Either way, we licked the jungle for them, just as we promised to do, fair and square."

"We didn't get paid," the city manager pointed out. "And it'll take a lot of fuel to get back to any part of our own galaxy. The bindlestiff got off ahead of us, and got carried way out of range of the cops in the process, right on our backs-with plenty of germanium, drugs, women, the no-fuel drive, everything."

"No, they didn't," Amalfi said. "They blew up the moment we moved He."

"All right," Hazleton said resignedly. "You could detect that where I couldn't, so I'll take your word for it. But you'd better be able to explain it!"

"It's not hard to explain. The 'stiffs had captured Doctor Beetle. I was pretty sure they had; after all, they came to He for no other reason. They needed the no-fuel drive, and they knew Doctor Beetle had it because they heard the agronomists' SOS, just as we did. So they snatched Doctor Beetle when he was landed-do you remember what a big fuss their bandit-city allies made about the other agronomist lifeship, to divert us? It worked, too-and in the meantime they cooked the secret out of him. Probably in his own tank."

"So?"

"So," Amalfi said, "the tramps forgot that any Okie city always has passengers like Doctor Beetle-people with big ideas only partially worked out, ideas that need the finishing touches that can only be provided by some other culture. After all, a man doesn't take passage on an Okie city unless he's a third-rater, hoping to make his everlasting fortune on some planet where the inhabitants know much less than he dribs."

Hazleton scratched his head ruefully. "That's right. We had the same experience with the Lyran invisibility machine. It never worked until we took Doc Schloss on board."

"Exactly. The 'stiffs were in too much of a hurry. They didn't carry their stolen no-fuel drive with them until they found some culture which could perfect it. They tried to use it right away. They were lazy. And they tried to use it inside the biggest spindizzy field ever generated. What happened? It blew up. I felt it happen-and the top of my head nearly came off then and there. If we hadn't left the 'stiffs parsecs behind in the first split second. Doctor Beetle's drive would have blown up He at the same time. It doesn't pay to be lazy, Mark."

"Who ever said it did?" Hazleton said. After a moment's more thought, he began to plot the point at which the city would probably re-enter its own galaxy. That point turned out to be a long way away from the Rift, in an area that, after a mental wrench to visualize it backwards from the usual orientation, promised a fair population.

"Look," he said, "we'll hit about where the last few waves of the Acolytes settled-remember the Night of Hadjji?"

Amalfi didn't, since he hadn't been born then, but he remembered the history, which was what the city manager had meant. He said, "Good. I want to take us to garage and get that Twenty-third Street machine settled for good and all. I'm tired of its blowing out in the pinches, and it's going sour for fair now. Hear it?"

Hazleton, cocked his head intently. In the lull, Amalfi saw suddenly that Dee was standing in the doorway, still completely enswathed in her anti-gas suit except for the faceplate.

"Is it over?" she said.

"Well, our stay on He is over. We're still on the run, if that's what you mean. The cops never give up, Dee; you'll learn that sooner or later."

"Where are we going?"

She asked the question in the same tone in which she had once said, "What is a volt, John?" For an astonishing moment Amalfi was almost overwhelmed with an urge to send Hazleton from the room on some excuse, to return almost bodily to those days of her innocence, to relive all the previous questions that she had asked-the moments when he had known the answers better.

There was, of course, no real answer to this one. Where would an Okie go? They were going, that was all. If there was a destination, no one could know what it was.

He endured the surge of emotion stoically. In the end, he only shrugged.

"By the way," he said, "what's the operational day?" Hazleton looked at the clock. "M plus eleven twenty-five."

With a sidelong glance, Amalfi leaned forward, resumed the helmet he had cast aside on He, and turned on the City Fathers.

The helmet phones shrilled with alarm. "All right, all right," he growled. "What is it?"

"MAYOR AMALFI, HAVE YOU TIPPED THIS PLANET?"

"No," Amalfi said. "We sent it on its way as it was." There was a short silence, humming with computation. It was probably just as well, Amalfi thought, that the machines had been turned off for a while; they had not had a rest in many centuries. They would probably emerge into consciousness a little saner for it.

"VERY WELL. WE MUST NOW SELECT THE POINT AT WHICH WE LEAVE THE RIFT. STAND BY FOR DETERMINATION."

Hazleton and Amalfi grinned at each other. Amalfi said, "We're coming in on the last Acolyte stars, and we'll need to decelerate far beyond spindizzy safety limits. We urgently need an overhaul on the Twenty-third Street driver. Give us a determination for the present social setup there, please—"

"YOU ARE MISTAKEN. THAT CLUSTER IS NOWHERE NEAR THE RIFT. FURTHERMORE, THE POPULACE THERE HAS A LONG RECORD OF MASS XENOPHOBIA AND HAD BEST BE AVOIDED. WE WILL GIVE YOU A DETERMINATION FOR THE FAR RIFT WALL. STAND BY."

Amalfi removed the headset gently. "The Rift wall," he said, moving the microphone away from his mouth. "That was long ago-and far away."