“Then we’re ahead of them?”
“Not necessarily,” Schloss said. “If they’re at the center right now, they could be doing a good many things we couldn’t detect, under a very low screen. However, they would already have detected us and done something about us if that were the case. Let’s assume we’re ahead until the instruments say otherwise; I think that’s a fairly safe assumption.”
“How much longer to the center?” Hazleton said.
“A few months, perhaps,” Retma said. “If we’re right in assuming that this curve has a flat spot on top of it.”
“And the necessary machinery?”
“The last installation will be in at the end of this week,” Amalfi said. “We can begin countdown the moment we arrive … providing that we can learn to handle equipment operating at ten or a hundred times its rated efficiency, without blowing some of it out in the process. We’d better start practicing the moment the system is complete.”
“Amen,” Hazleton said fervently. “Can I borrow your slide-rule? I’ve got a few setting-up exercises I’d better start on right now.” He left the room. Amalfi looked uneasily out at the night. He would almost have preferred it had the Web of Hercules been there ahead of them and promptly taken a sitting-duck shot at them; this uncertainty as to whether or not someone really was lurking out there—coupled with the totally unknown nature of their opponents—was more unsettling than open battle. However, there was no help for it; and if He really was first, it gave them a sizable advantage ….
And their only advantage. The only defenses Amalfi had been able to conceive and jury-rig for He depended importantly on actually being at the metagalactic center, able to make use of the almost infinite number of weak resultant forces that could be used there to produce major responses—the buttercup-vs.-Sirius effect Bonner had so characterized. In this area he found Miramon and the Hevian council oddly uncooperative, even flaccid, as though mounting a defense for the whole planet was too big a concept for them to grasp—a hard thing to believe in view of the prodigious concepts they had mastered and put to work since Amalfi had first met them as savages up to their knees in mud and violence. Well, if he did not yet understand them, he was not going to make his understanding perfect in a few months; and at least Miramon was perfectly willing to let Amalfi and Hazleton direct Hevian labor in putting together their almost wholly theoretical breadboard rigs.
“Some of these,” Hazleton had said, looking at a just-completed tangle of wires, lenses, antennae and kernels of metal with rueful respect, “ought to prove pretty potent in the pinch. I just wish I knew which ones they were.” Which, unfortunately, was a perfect precis of the situation.
But the needles recording the stresses and currents of space around He continued to fall; those recording the output of Hevian equipment continued to rise. On May 23rd 4004, both sets of meters rose suddenly to their high ends and jammed madly against the pegs, and the whole planet rang suddenly with the awful, tortured roar of spindizzies driven beyond endurance. Miramon’s hand flashed out for the manual master switch so fast that Amalfi could not tell whether it had been he or the City Fathers that cut the power. Maybe even Miramon did not know; at least he must have gotten to the cut off button within a hair of the automatic reaction.
The howl died. Silence. The Survivors looked at each other.
“Well,” Amalfi said, “we’re here, evidently.” For some reason, he felt wildly elated—a wholly irrational reaction, but he did not stop to analyze it.
“So we are,” Hazleton said, his eyes snapping. “Now what the hell happened to the metering? I can understand the local apparatus going wild—but why did the input meters from outside rise instead of dropping back to zero?”
“Noise, I believe,” Retma said.
“Noise? How so?”
“It takes power to operate a meter—not a great deal, but it consumes some. Consequently, the input meters ran as wild as the machines did, because operating at peak efficiency with no incoming signals to register, they picked up the signals generated by their own functioning.”
“I don’t like that,” Hazleton said. “Do we have any way of finding out on what level it’s safe to run
Amalfi picked up the only instrument on the Hevian board that was “his”—the microphone to the City Fathers. “Are you still alive down there?” he said.
“YES, MR. MAYOR,” the answer came promptly. Miramon looked startled; since everything of which he had any knowledge had gone dead, even the lights—they were sitting bathed only in the barely ascertainable glow of the zodiacal light, that belt of tenuous ionized gas in He’s atmosphere brought to life by He’s magnetic field, plus the even dimmer glow of the few nearby galaxies—the sudden voice of the speakers must have alarmed him.
“Good. What are you operating on?”
“WET CELLS IN SERIES AT TWENTY-FIVE HUNDRED VOLTS.”
“All of your
“YES, MR. MAYOR.”
Amalfi grinned in the virtual darkness. “All right, apply your efficiency figures to a set of standard instrumental situations.”
“DONE.”
“Give me an operating level for Mr. Miramon’s line down to you, allowing for pilot lights on his board so he can see his settings.”
“MR. MAYOR, THAT IS NOT NECESSARY. WE HAVE ALREADY RESET THE MASTER CUTOUT AT THE NECESSARY BLOWPOINT LEVEL. WE CAN RE-ACTUATE ALL THE CIRCUITS AT ONCE.”
“No, don’t do that, we don’t want the spindizzies back on too—”
“THE SPINDIZZIES ARE OFF,” the City Fathers said, with austere simplicity.
“Well, Miramon? Do you trust them? Or would you rather have them tie in to you first and print their data for you, so you can turn the planet back on piecemeal?”
He heard Miramon draw in his breath slightly to answer, but he was never to know what that answer would have been; for at the same moment, Miramon’s whole board came alive at once.
“Hey!” Amalfi squalled. “Wait for orders down there, dammit!”
“STANDING ORDERS, MR. MAYOR. AFTER COUNTDOWN BEGINS WE ARE TO ACT AT THE FIRST SIGN OF OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE. COUNTDOWN BEGAN TWELVE HUNDRED SECONDS AGO, AND SEVEN SECONDS AGO OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE BECAME STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT.”
“What do they mean?” Miramon said, trying to read every instrument on his board at once. “I thought I understood your language, Mayor Amalfi, but—”
“The City Fathers don’t speak Okie, they speak Machine,” Amalfi said grimly. “What they mean is that the Web of Hercules—if that’s who it is—is coming in on us. And coming in on us fast.”
With a single, circumscribed flip of his closed fingers, Miramon turned off the lights.
Blackness. Then, seeping faintly over the windows around the tower, the air-glow of the zodiacal light; then, still later, the dim pinwheels of island universes. On Miramon’s board, there was a single spearpoint of yellow- orange which was only the heater of a vacuum tube smaller than an acorn; in this central gloom at the heart and birthplace of the universe, it was almost blinding. Amalfi had to turn his back on it to maintain the profound dark- adaptation that his vision needed to operate at all in the tower on his mountain.
While he waited for his sight to come back, he wondered at the speed of Miramon’s reaction, and the motives behind it. Surely the Hevian could not believe that a set of pilot lights in a tower on top of a remote mountain could be bright enough to be seen from space; for that matter, blacking out even as large an object as a whole planet could serve no military purpose—it had been two millennia since any reasonably sophisticated enemy depended upon light alone to see by. And where in Miramon’s whole lifetime could he have acquired the blackout reflex? It made no sense; yet Miramon had restored the blackout with all the trained positiveness of a boxer riding with a punch.
When the light began to grow, he had his answer—and no time left to wonder how Miramon had anticipated it.
