regaining the screeching velocity across the face of the galaxy for which two Okie cities had died.
“… YOUR
The mouthy voice abruptly ceased to exist. The blue fleck of light which had been Amalfi’s last sight of his ancestral planet had already been gone for long seconds.
The whole of Hern VI lurched and rang. Amalfi was thrown heavily to the floor of the balcony. The heavy helmet fell askew on his head and shoulders, cutting off his view of the battle in the jungle.
But he didn’t care. That impact, and the death of that curious voice, meant the real end of the battle in the jungle. It meant the end of any real threat that might have existed for Earth. And it meant the end of the Okie cities—not just those in the jungle, but all of them, as a class, including Amalfi’s own.
For that impact, transmitted to the belfry of City Hall through the rock of Hern VI, meant that Amalfi’s instant of personal control had been fair and true. Somewhere on the leading hemisphere of Hern VI there was now an enormous white-hot crater. That crater, and the traces of metal salts which were dissolved in its molten lining, held the grave of the oldest of all Okie legends:
The Vegan orbital fort.
It would be forever impossible now to know how long the summated, distilled, and purified power of the Vegan military, conquered once only in fact, had been bowling through the galaxy, awaiting this one unrepeatable clear lane to a strike. Certainly no answer to that question could be found on the degenerate planets of Vega itself; the fort was as much a myth there as it had been anywhere else in the galaxy.
But it had been real all the same. It had been awaiting its one chance to revenge Vega upon Earth, not, certainly, in the hope of re-asserting the blue-white glory of Vega over every other star, but simply to smash the average planet of the average sun which had so inexplicably prevailed over Vega’s magnificence. Not even the fort could have expected to prevail against Earth by itself—but in the confusion of the Okies’ March on Earth, and under the expectation that Earth would hesitate to burn down its own citizen-cities until too late, it had foreseen a perfect triumph. It had swung in from its long, legend-blurred exile, disguised primarily as a city, secondarily as a fable, to make its last bid.
Residual tremors, T-waves, made the belfry rock gently. Amalfi got to his feet, steadying himself on the railing.
“O’Brian, cast us off. The planet goes on as she is. Switch the city to the alternate orbit.”
“To the Greater Magellanic?”
“That’s right. Make fast any quake damage; pass the word to Mr. Hazleton and Mr. Carrel.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Vegan fortress had nearly won, at that; only the passage of a forlorn and outcast-piloted little world had defeated it. But the Earth would never know more than a fraction of that, only the fraction which was the passage of Hern VI across the solar system. All the rest of the evidence was now seething and amalgamating in a cooling crater on the leading hemisphere of Hern VI; and Amalfi meant to see to it that Hern VI would be lost to Earth forever … As the Earth was lost to Okies, from now on.
Everyone was in the old office of the mayor: Dee, Hazleton, Carrel, Dr. Schloss, Sergeant Anderson, Jake, O’Brian, the technies; and, by extension, the entire population of the city, through a city-wide, two-way P.A. hook- up; even the City Fathers. It was the first such gathering since the last election; that election having been the one which put Hazleton into office, few present now remembered the occasion very well, except for the City Fathers— and they would be the least likely of all to be able to apply that memory fruitfully to the present meeting. Undertones were not their forte.
Amalfi began to speak. His voice was gentle, matter-of-fact, impersonal; it was addressed to everyone, to the city as an organism. But he was looking directly at Hazleton.
“First of all,” he said, “it’s necessary for everyone to understand our gross physical and astronomical situation. When we cut loose from Hern VI a while back, that planet was well on its way toward the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, which, for those of you who come from the northerly parts of the galaxy, is one of two small satellite galaxies moving away from the main galaxy along the southern limb. Hern Six is still on its way there, and unless something unlikely happens to it, it will go right on to the Cloud, through it, and on into deep intergalactic space.
“We left on it almost all the equipment we had accumulated from other cities while we were in the jungle because we had to. We hadn’t the room to take much of it on board our own city; and we couldn’t stick with Hern VI because Earth will almost certainly chase the planet, either until the planet leaves the galaxy, or until they’re sure we aren’t on it any longer.”
“Why, sir?” several voices from the G.C. speaker said, almost simultaneously.
“For a long list of reasons. Our flying the planet across the face of the solar system—as well as our flying it through a number of other systems and across main interstellar traffic areas—was a serious violation of Earth laws. Furthermore, Earth has us chalked up as having sideswiped a city as we went by; they don’t know the real nature of that ‘city.’ And incidentally, it’s important that they never find out, even if keeping it a secret results in our being written up in the history books as murderers.”
Dee stirred protestingly. “John, I don’t see why we shouldn’t take the credit. Especially since it really was a pretty big thing we did for the Earth.”
“Somewhere in the galaxy there is a colony of Vega which is still dangerous. That colony must be kept in utter ignorance of what happened to its major weapon. It must be made to live on faith; to believe that the fort failed on its first attempt but may some day be back for another try. It must not know that the fort is destroyed, or it will build another one.
“The second one will succeed where the first one failed. The first one failed because of the nature of the nomadic kind of culture on which Earth has been depending up to now; the Okies defeated it. We happened to have been the particular city to do the job, but it was no accident that we were on hand to do it.
“But for quite a while to come, Okies are not going to be effective or even welcome factors in the galaxy as a whole; and the galaxy, Earth in particular, is going to be as weak as a baby all during that period because of the depression. If the Vegans hear that their fort did strike at Earth, and came within a hair’s breadth of knocking it out, they’ll be building another fort the same day they get the news. After that …
“No, Dee, I’m afraid we’ll have to keep the secret.”
Dee, still a little rebellious, looked at Hazleton for support; but he shook his head.
“Our own situation, right now, is neither good nor bad,” Amalfi continued. “We still have Hern VI’s velocity. It’s enough slower than the velocity we hit when we flew the planet of He to make us readily maneuverable, even though clumsily, especially since we’re so much less massive than a planet. We will be able to make any port of call which is inside the cone our trajectory would describe if we rotated it. Finally, Earth has figures only on the path of Hern VI; it has none on the present path of the city.
“Cast up against that the fact that our equipment is old and faltering, and will never carry us anywhere again under our own steam. When we land at the next port of call, we will be landed for good. We have no money to buy new equipment; without new equipment, we can’t make money. So it will pay us to pick our next stop with great care. That’s why I’ve asked everybody to sit in on this conference.”
One of the technies said, “Boss, are you sure it’s as bad as all that? We should be able to make some kind of repairs—”
“THE CITY WILL NOT SURVIVE ANOTHER LANDING,” the City Fathers said flatly. The technie swallowed and subsided.
“Our present orbit,” Amalfi said, “would lead us eventually out into the greater of the two Magellanic clouds. At our present velocity, that’s about twenty years’ journey away still. If we actually want to go there, we’ll have to plan on that period stretching on by another six years, since the clip at which we’re traveling now is so great that