“Suppose somebody notices us?” Amalfi said.
“This square is usually avoided. Also, I have men posted around it to divert any chance traffic. If you don’t wander away, you’ll be safe.”
The Proctor strode away toward the big domed building and disappeared abruptly down an alleyway. Behind Amalfi, Karst began to sing, in an exceedingly scratchy voice, but very softly: a folk-tune of some kind, obviously. The melody, which once had had to do with a town named Kazan, was too many thousands of years old for Amalfi to recognize it, even had he not been tune-deaf. Nevertheless, the mayor abruptly found himself listening to Karst, with the intensity of a hooded owl sonar-tracking a field mouse, Karst chanted:
Seeing that Amalfi was listening to him, Karst stopped with an apologetic gesture. “Go ahead, Karst,” Amalfi said at once. “How does the rest go?”
“There isn’t time. There are hundreds of verses; every singer adds at least one of his own to the song. It is always supposed to end with this one:
“That’s great,” Amalfi said grimly. “We really are in the soup-just about in the bottom of the bowl, I’d say. I wish I’d heard that song a week ago.”
“What does it tell you?” Karst said, wonderingly. “It is only an old legend.”
“It tells me why Heldon wants his spindizzies fixed. I knew he wasn’t telling me the straight goods, but that old Laputa gag never occurred to me—more recent cities aren’t strong enough in the keel to risk it. But with all the mass this burg packs, it can squash us flat —and we’ll just have to sit still for it!”
“I don’t understand—”
“It’s simple enough. Your prophet Maalvin used IMT like a nutcracker. He picked it up, flew it over the opposition, and let it down again. The trick was dreamed up away before spaceflight, as I recall. Karst, stick close to me; I may have to get a message to you under Heldon’s eye, so watch for—
The Proctor had been uttered by the alleyway like an untranslatable word. He came rapidly toward them across the crumbling flagstones.
“I think,” Heldon said, “that we are now ready for your valuable aid, Mayor Amalfi.”
Heldon put his foot on a jutting pyramidal stone and pressed down. Amalfi watched carefully, but nothing happened. He swept his flash around the featureless stone walls of the underground chamber, then back again to the floor. Impatiently, Heldon kicked the little pyramid.
This time, there was a protesting rumble. Very slowly, and with a great deal of scraping, a block of stone perhaps five feet long by two feet wide began to rise, as if pivoted or hinged at the far end. The beam of the mayor’s flash darted into the opening, picking out a narrow flight of steps.
“I’m disappointed,” Amalfi said. “I expected to see Jonathan Swift come out from under it. All right, Heldon, lead on.”
The Proctor went cautiously down the steps, holding his skirts up against the dampness. Karst came last, bent low under the heavy pack, his arms hanging laxly. The steps felt cold and slimy through the thin soles of the mayor’s sandals, and little trickles of moisture ran down the close-pressing walls. Amalfi felt a nearly intolerable urge to light a cigar; he could almost taste the powerful aromatic odor cutting through the humidity. But he needed his hands free.
He was almost ready to hope that the spindizzies had been ruined by all this moisture, but he discarded the idea even as it was forming in the back of his mind. That would be the easy way out, and in the end it would be disastrous. If the Okies were ever to call this planet their own, IMT had to be made to fly again.
How to keep it off his own city’s back, once IMT was aloft, he still was unable to figure. He was piloting, as he invariably wound up doing in the pinches, by the seat of his pants.
The steps ended abruptly in a small chamber, so small, chilly and damp that it was little more than a cave. The flashlight’s eye roved, came to rest on an oval doorway sealed off with dull metal—almost certainly lead. So IMT’s spindizzies ran “hot”? That was already bad news; it backdated them far beyond the year to which Amalfi had tentatively assigned them.
“That it?” he said.
“That is the way,” Heldon agreed. He twisted an inconspicuous handle.
Ancient fluorescents flickered into bluish life as the valve drew back, and glinted upon the humped backs of machines. The air was quite dry here—evidently the big chamber was kept sealed—and Amalfi could not repress a fugitive pang of disappointment. He scanned the huge machines, looking for control panels or homologues thereof.
“Well?” Heldon said harshly. He seemed to be under considerable strain. It occurred to Amalfi that Heldon’s strategy might well be a personal flier, not an official policy of the Great Nine; in which case it might go hard with Heldon if his colleagues found him in this particular place of all places with an Okie. “Aren’t you going to make any tests?”
“Certainly,” Amalfi said. “I was a little taken aback at their size, that’s all.”
“They are old, as you know,” said the Proctor. “Doubtless they are built much larger nowadays.”
That, of course, wasn’t so. Modern spindizzies ran less than a tenth the size of these. The comment cast new doubt upon Heldon’s exact status. Amalfi had assumed that the Proctor would not let him touch the spindizzies except to inspect; that there would be plenty of men in IMT capable of making repairs from detailed instructions; that Heldon himself, and any Proctor, would know enough physics to comprehend whatever explanations Amalfi might proffer. Now he was not so sure—and on this question hung the amount of tinkering Amalfi would be able to do without being detected.
The mayor mounted a metal stair to a catwalk which ran along the tops of the generators, then stopped and looked down at Karst. “Well, stupid, don’t just stand there,” he said. “Come on up, and bring the stuff.”
Obediently Karst shambled up the metal steps, Heldon at his heels. Amalfi ignored them to search for an inspection port in the casing, found one, and opened it. Beneath was what appeared to be a massive rectifying circuit, plus the amplifier for some kind of monitor-probably a digital computer. The amplifier involved more vacuum tubes than Amalfi had ever before seen gathered into one circuit, and there was a separate power supply to deliver D.C. to their heaters. Two of the tubes were each as big as his fist.
Karst bent over and slung the pack to the deck. Amalfi drew out of it a length of slender black cable and thrust its double prongs into a nearby socket. A tiny bulb on the other end glowed neon-red.
“Your computer’s still running,” he reported. “Whether it’s still sane or not is another matter. May I turn the main banks on, Heldon?”
“I’ll turn them on,” the Proctor said. He went down the stairs again and across the chamber.
Instantly Amalfi was murmuring through motionless lips into the inspection port. The result to Karst’s ears must have been rather weird. The technique of speaking without moving one’s lips is simply a matter of substituting consonants which do not involve lip movement, such as “y,” for those which do, such as “w.” If the resulting sound is picked up from inside the resonating chamber, as it is with a throat-mike, it is not too different from ordinary speech, only a bit more blurred. Heard from outside the speaker’s nasopharyngeal cavity, however, it has a tendency to sound like Japanese Pidgin.
“Yatch Heldon, Karst. See yhich syitch he kulls, an’ nenorize its location. Got it? Good.”
The tubes lit. Karst nodded once, very slightly. The Proctor watched from below while Amalfi inspected the lines.
“Will they work?” he called. His voice was muffled, as though he were afraid to raise it as high as he thought necessary.
“I think so. One of these tubes is gassing, and there may have been some failures here and there. Better check the whole lot before you try anything ambitious. You do have facilities for testing tubes, don’t you?”
Relief spread visibly over Heldon’s face, despite his obvious effort to betray nothing. Probably he could have fooled any of his own people without effort, but for Amalfi, who like any Okie mayor could follow the parataxic
