“I can see that. In fact, I’ve thought of it several times myself. Nevertheless, Amalfi, I have to say that this whole proposition distresses me a good deal. I suppose the matter of the mayoralty would settle itself out almost automatically; that wasn’t a real objection. What bothers me is the exit you’re contriving for yourself, not only because it’s dangerous—which it is, but that wouldn’t make any difference to you and I suppose it shouldn’t make any difference to me—but because it’s dangerous to no purpose.”

“It suits my purposes,” Amalfi said. “I don’t see that there are any other purposes to be suited, at this juncture. If I did, I wouldn’t go, Mark; you know that; but it seems to me that I am now, for the first time in all my life, a free agent; hence I may now do what I will do.”

Hazleton shrugged convulsively. “And so you may,” he said. “I can only say that I wish you wouldn’t.”

Dee bowed her head and said nothing.

And the rest was left unsaid. That Dee and Mark would be personally bereaved if Amalfi persisted on his present course, for their different reasons, was an obvious additional argument which they might have used, but they came no closer to it than that; it was the kind of argument which Hazleton would regard as pure emotional blackmail, precisely because it was unreasonably powerful, and Amalfi was grateful to him for not bringing it to bear. Why Dee had not was more difficult to fathom; there had been a time when she would have used it without a moment’s hesitation; and Amalfi thought he knew her well enough to suspect that she had good reasons for wanting to use it now. She had been waiting for the founding of New Earth for a long time, indeed, almost since she had come on board the city, and anything that threatened it now that she had children and grandchildren should provoke her into using every weapon at her command; yet, she was silent. Perhaps she was old enough now to realize that not even John Amalfi could steal from her an entire satellite galaxy; at any event, if that was what was on her mind, she gave no inkling of it, and the evening in Hazleton’s house ended with a stiff formality which, cold though it was, was far from the worst that Amalfi had expected.

The whole of the residential area to Amalfi’s eyes swarmed with pets. Those to whom freedom to run was paramount, frisked and scuttered, in the wide lanes. Few of them ventured onto the wheel-ways, and those who did were run down instantly, but four-footed animals were a constant and undignified hazard to walkers. By day raffish dogs stopped just short of bowling strangers over, but leaped to brace forepaws on the shoulders of anyone they knew—and everyone, including, seemingly, all the dogs of New Manhattan, knew Amalfi. An occasional svengali from Altair IV—originally a rare specimen in the flying city’s zoo, but latterly force-budded in New Earth labs during the full-fertility program of 3950, when every homesteader’s bride had her option of a vial of trilby water or a gemmate svengali and frequently wound up with both among the household lares and penates; the half-plant, half- animal, even nowadays a not infrequent pet—took the breeze and hunted in the half-light of dawn or dusk. A svengali lay bonelessly in mid-lane and fixed its enormous eyes on any moving object until something small enough and gelid enough to ingest might blunder near. Nothing suitable ever did, on New Earth. The two-legged victim tended to drift helplessly into that hypnotic stare until the starer got stepped on; than the svengali turned mauve and exuded a protective spray which might have been nauseating on Altair IV, but on New Earth was only euphoric. Sudden friendships, bursts of song, even a brief and deliriously happy crying jag might ensue, after which the shaken svengali would undulate back indoors to rest up and be given, usually, a bowl of jellied soup.

By night in the walkways of New Manhattan, it was cats, catching with sudden claw at floating cloak or fashionable sandal-streamer. Through the air of the town sizable and brightly colored creatures flew and glided: singing birds, squawking birds, talkers and mutes, but pets every last one of them. Amalfi loathed them all.

When he walked anywhere—and he walked almost everywhere, now that the city’s aircabs were no more—he more than half-expected to have to free himself from the embraces of a burbling citizen or a barking dog before he got where he was going. The half-century old fad for household pets had arisen after the landing, and after his effectual abdication. What time-wasting quirk had moved so many pioneers’ descendants to adopt the damnable svengalis as pets was beyond Amalfi.

He made it home from the Hazletons’ without any such encounter; instead, it rained. He wrapped his cloak more tightly around him and hastened, muttering, for his own square uncompromising box of a dwelling before the full force of the storm should be let loose; his house and grounds were sheltered by a 0.02 per cent spindizzy field —the New Earthmen called the household device a “spindilly,” a name which Amalfi loathed but put up with for the sake of, as Dee had once put it, “not knowing enough to come out of the rain.” He had growled at her so convincingly for that that she had never brought up the subject again, but she had put her fingers on it all the same.

Amalfi reached his entrance lane and laid his palm on the induction switch which softened the spindilly field just enough to let him through in a spatter of glistening drops, and noted with the grim dissatisfaction that was becoming natural to him that the storm had slacked off and would be over in minutes. Inside, he made a drink and stood, rubbing his hands, looking about him. If his house was an anachronism, well, he liked it that way, insofar as he liked anything on New Earth.

“What’s wrong with me?” he thought suddenly. “People’s pets are their own business, after all. If practically everybody else likes weather, what difference does it make if I don’t? If Jake doesn’t even take an interest, nor Mark either for that matter—”

He heard the distant, endlessly comforting murmur of the modified spindizzy under his feet alter momentarily; someone else had chosen to come in out of the rain. His visitor had never been there at that hour before, and had indeed never been there before alone, but he knew without a moment’s doubt who had followed him home.

CHAPTER TWO: Nova Magellanis

“YOU’LL have to make me more welcome than that, John,” Dee said.

Amalfi said nothing. He lowered his head like a bull contemplating a charge, spread his feet slightly, and clasped his hands behind him.

“Well, John?” Dee insisted gently.

“You don’t want me to go,” he said baldly. “Or, you suspect that if I do go, Mark just may throw up the managership and New Earth along with it and take off with me.”

Dee walked slowly all the way across the room and stood, hesitating, beside the great deep cushion. “Wrong, John, on both counts. I had something else altogether in mind. I thought—well, I’ll tell you later what I thought. Right now, may I have a drink?”

Amalfi was forced to abandon his position, which by being so firm had imparted a certain strength to his desire to oppose her, in order to play host. “Did Mark send you, then?”

She laughed. “King Mark sends me on a good many errands, but this wouldn’t be a very likely one for him.” She added bitterly, “Besides, he’s so wrapped up in Gifford Bonner’s group that he ignores me for months on end.”

Amalfi knew what she meant: Dr. Bonner was the teacher-leader of an informal philosophical group called the Stochastics; Amalfi hadn’t bothered to inform himself in detail on Bonner’s tenets, but he knew in general that Stochasticism was the most recent of many attempts to construct a complete philosophy, from esthetics to ethics, using modern physics as the metaphysical base. Logical positivism had been only the first of those; Stochasticism, Amalfi strongly suspected, would be far from the last.

“I could see something had been keeping his mind off the job lately,” he said grimly. “He might do better to study the doctrines of Jorn the Apostle. The Warriors of God control no less than fifteen of the border planets right now, and the faith doesn’t lack for adherents right here on New Earth. It appeals to the bumpkin type—and I’m afraid we’ve been turning out a lot of those lately.”

If Dee recognized this as in part a shaft at the changes in New Earth’s educational system which she had helped to institute, she showed no sign of it.

“Maybe so,” she said. “But I couldn’t persuade him, and I wonder if you could either. He doesn’t believe there’s any real threat; he thinks that a man simple-minded enough to be a Fundamentalist is too simple-minded to hold together an army.”

“Oh? Mark had better ask Bonner to tell about Godfrey of Bouillon.”

“Who was—?”

“The leader of the First Crusade.”

She shrugged. Possibly only Amalfi, as the only New Earthman who had actually been born and raised on Earth,

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