around corners and came close to grazing the youngsters were unable to make out, even had they known where to look for it, the graven letters of the city’s ancient motto— MOW YOUR LAWN, LADY?— if only for the sense it might have given them of the reason why Okie cities once flew; but the motto had become unreadable a long time ago, as its meaning had become obliterated soon after. Only the memory remained to remind Amalfi that were the city ever to go aloft again—which, suddenly, he did not even believe—it would not be for the purpose of mowing lawns for hire; there were no more; that was all over and done with.
The control room in City Hall muted the children considerably, as well it might, for no one much below the age of a century had ever been allowed in it before, and the many screens which lined its walls had seen events in a history unlikely to be matched for drama (or even simple interest) in any imaginable future saga of New Earth. In this dim stagnant-smelling room the very man who was with them now had watched the rise and fall of a galaxy- dominating race—of which, to be sure, these children were genetically a part, but whose inheritors they could never be; history had passed them by.
“And don’t touch anything,” Amalfi said. “Everything in this room is alive, more or less. We’ve never had the time to disarm the city totally; I’m not even sure we’d know how to go about it now. That’s why it’s off limits. You’d better come stand behind me, Web and Estelle, and watch what I do; it’ll keep you out of reach of the boards.”
“We won’t touch anything,” Web said fervently.
“I know you won’t, intentionally. But I don’t want any accidents. Better you learn how to run the board from scratch; come stand right here—you too, Estelle—and call your grandfather’s house for me. Touch the clear plastic bar—that’s it, now wait for it to light up. That lets the City Fathers know that you want to talk to somebody outside the city; that’s very important; otherwise they’d give you a long argument, believe you me. Now you see the five little red buttons just above the bar; the one you touch is number two; four and five are ultraphone and Dirac lines, which you don’t need for a local call. One and three are inside trunk lines, which is why they’re not lit up. Go ahead, push it.”
Web touched the glowing red stud tentatively. Over his head, a voice said: “Communications.”
“Now it’s my turn,” Amalfi said, picking up the microphone. “This is the mayor. Get me the city manager, crash priority.” He lowered the microphone and added, “That requires the Communications section to scan for your grandfather along all of the channels on which he’s known to be available, and send him a ‘call-in’ signal wherever he may be; New Earth Hospital has much the same call-in system for its doctors.”
“Can we hear him being called?” Estelle said.
“Yes, if you like,” Amalfi said. “Here, take the microphone, and put your finger on the two-button as Web did. There.”
“Communications,” the invisible speaker again said briskly.
“Say, ‘Reprise, please’,” Amalfi whispered.
“Reprise, please,” the girl said.
Immediately the air of the ancient room was filled with a series of twittering pure tones and chords, as though every shadow hid a bird with a silver throat. Estelle almost dropped the microphone; Amalfi took it from her gently.
“Machines don’t call for people by name,” he explained. “Only very complicated machines, like the City Fathers, are able to speak at all; a simple computer like the Communications section finds it easier to use musical tones. If you listen a while, you’ll begin to hear a kind of melody; that’s the code for Web’s grandfather; the harmonies represent the different places where the computer is looking for him.”
“I like it,” Estelle said. At the same instant the pipings of the invisible birds came to an end with a metallic snap, and Mark Hazleton’s voice said in the middle of the air: “Boss, are you looking for me?”
Amalfi lifted the microphone back to his lips with a grim smile, the children instantly forgotten.
“You bet I am. Are you on top of this dirigible planet which seems to be heading for u
“Yes; I didn’t know you were interested. In fact I didn’t know that it was a planet instead of a star until yesterday, when Schloss and Carrel came in to see me about it.” Amalfi threw Jake a meaningful glance. “I gather you’re calling me from the city; what do the City Fathers think?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t talked to them,” Amalfi said. “But Jake is here, and he’s come to the obvious conclusion, as I’m sure you have. What I want to know is, have you or Carrel made any attempt to communicate with this object?”
“Yes, but I can’t say that it’s been very fruitful,” Hazleton’s voice said. “We’ve called them four or five times on the Dirac, but if they’ve answered us, it’s gotten lost in the general babble of Dirac ’casts we’re surrounded with from the home galaxy. It puzzles me a little bit; they do seem to be homing on us, without any question, but it’s hard to imagine what kind of signal from us they could be using to guide on.”
“Do you really think that this is He come back again?” Amalfi said cautiously.
“Yes, I think I do,” Hazleton said, with apparent equal caution. “I don’t see what other conclusion one could come to with the data as they stand now.”
“Then use your head,” Amalfi said. “If this really is He, you’ll never be able to reach it with a Dirac ’cast. While we were on He, we never even let the Hevians hear a Dirac ’cast, or see a Dirac transmitter; they had no reason to suspect that any such universal transmitter even existed, or could exist. And if by the same token this is
“He didn’t have the ultraphone either, when last we saw it,” Hazleton’s voice said amusedly. “And if we don’t know how to drive an ultraphone carrier through a spindizzy screen, I very much doubt that they do. If we’re going to go all the way back to methods of communications as primitive as that, shouldn’t we first try wigwagging?”
“I think probably there is an ultraphone message from that planet on its way here,” Amalfi said. “It would be the part of common sense to precede such a flight as that planet is conducting into so densely populated an area as the Greater Magellanic Cloud with a general identification signal, which you could hardly do with a Dirac signal in any event; a signal which is received uniformly everywhere simultaneously with its being sent is not a proper beacon signal. It doesn’t matter whether this is He or a visitor coming to us from the entirely unknown; they will be sending some sort of pip in advance, which they would absolutely have to do by ultraphone, there being no other way to do it, and if this requires them to work out a way to punch an ultraphone signal through a spindizzy screen, then they will have done so and you should be listening for it; and you can put a return signal through the same hole.” He took a deep breath. “At the very least, Mark, stop wasting my time telling me it’s impossible before you’ve even tried it.”
“I tell
The riot act, however, had been becoming less and less effective with Hazleton in the past few decades, as Amalfi knew well; perhaps it dated from Hazleton’s new preoccupation with the Stochastics, about which Amalfi had not known until Dee had brought it up; or perhaps—though this was a much less attractive possibility—from an awareness in Hazleton, paralleling Amalfi’s own, of Amalfi’s growing impotence on New Earth. “Nevertheless,” Hazleton said gravely, “I will raise one further objection, boss, if I may. Even supposing that they are putting out an ultraphone beam we can tie to, they’re still roughly fifty light-years away; by the time they hear anything we say to them by ultraphone and get a message back to us the same way, we’ll be seventy-five years into the next millennium.”
“True,” Amalfi admitted. “Which means we’ll have to send a ship. I’m all for taking ten years or so about full contact, anyhow, since we really have no idea what it is we’re confronted with, and we may need to lay in some armaments. But you’d better tell Carrel to stand ready to fly me out there no later than the beginning of next week, and in the meantime, try to eavesdrop on whatever transmission our visitor is broadcasting. I’ll attend to the answering part later from shipboard.”
“Right,” Hazleton said, and switched out.
“Can we go too?” Web demanded immediately.
“What do you say to that, Jake? These kids were all for going with me on board the city, too.”
The astronomer smiled and shrugged. “Wherever she gets the taste for spaceflight from, it can’t be from me,”
