“Okay. Give the details to the City Fathers and let them calculate the probabilities. Meanwhile we’ll take no chances. Thanks, Chris. Joel, come topside, will you?”
“Yes, sir.” Anderson waited until he heard the Mayor’s circuit cut out. Then his image, too, seemed to be staring directly at Chris. In fact, it was.
“Chris, did you understand what Amalfi meant about taking no chances?”
“Uh—no, not exactly.”
“He meant that we’re to keep you out of this Lutz’s sight. In other words,
It was all too clear.
CHAPTER TEN: Argus Asleep
THE ARGUS system was well named: It was not far inside a crowded and beautiful cluster of relatively young stars, so that the nights on its planet had indeed a hundred eyes, like the Argus of the myth. The youth of the cluster went far toward explaining the presence of Scranton, for like all third-generation stars, the sun of Argus was very rich in metals, and so were its planets.
Of these there were only a few—just seven, to be exact, of which only the three habitable ones had been given numbers, and only Argus III actually colonized; II was suitable only for Arabs, and IV for Eskimos. The other four planets were technically of the gas giant class, but they were rather undernourished giants; the largest of them was about the size of Sol’s Neptune. The closeness of the stars in the cluster to each other had swept up much of the primordial gas before planet formation had gotten a good start; the Argus system was in fact the largest yet to be encountered in the cluster.
Argus III, as the city droned down over it, looked heart-stoppingly like Pennsylvania; Chris began to feel a little sorry for the coming dispossession of Scranton—of which he had no doubts whatsoever—for surely the planet must have provided an intolerable temptation. It was mountainous over most of its land area, which was considerable; water was confined to many thousands of lakes, and a few small and intensely salty seas. It was also heavily wooded—almost entirely with conifers, or plants much like them, for evolution here had not yet gotten as far as a flowering plant. The firlike trees had thick boles and reared up hundreds of feet, noble monsters with their many shoulders hunched, as they had to be to bear their own weight in the two-G gravitation of this metal-heavy planet. The first sound Chris heard on Argus III after the city grounded was the explosion of a nearby seed cone, as loud as a crack of thunder. One of the seeds broke a window on the thirtieth floor of the McGraw-Hill Greenhouse, and the startled staff there had had to hack it to bits with fire axes to stop its germinating on the rug.
Under these circumstances it hardly mattered where the city settled; there was iron everywhere; and conversely there was no place on the planet which would be out of eavesdropping or of missile range of Scranton, to the mutual inconvenience of both parties. Nevertheless, Amalfi chose a site with great care, one just over the horizon from the great scar in the ground Scranton had made during its fumbled mining attempt, and with the highest points of an Allegheny-like range reared up between the two Okies. Only then did the machinery begin to rumble out into the forests.
Chris was beginning to practice thinking like Amalfi—not very confidently to be sure, since he had never seen the man, but at least it made a good game. The landing, Chris concluded tentatively, had been chosen mostly to prevent Scranton from seeing what the city was doing without sending over planes; and secondly to prevent foot traffic between the two cities. Probably it would never come to warfare between the two cities, anyhow, for nothing would be more likely to bring the cops to the scene in a hurry; and besides, it was already quite clear from New York’s history that Amalfi actively hated anything that did the city damage, whether it was bombs or only rust.
In the past, his most usual strategy had been to outsit the enemy. If that failed, he tried to outperform them. As a last resort, he tried to bring them into conflict with themselves. There were no pure cases of any of these policies on record—every example was a mixture, and a complicated one—but these three flavorings were the strongest, and usually one was far more powerful than the other two. When Amalfi salted his dish, you could hardly taste the pepper or the mustard.
Not everyone could eat it thereafter, either; there were, Chris suspected, more subtle schools of Okie cookery. But that was how Almalfi did it, and he was the only chef the city had. Thus far, the city had survived him, which was the only test that counted with the citizens and the City Fathers.
On Argus III, it seemed, Amalfi’s hope was to starve Scranton out by outperforming it. The city had the contract; Scranton had lost it. The city could do the job; Scranton had made a mess of it, and left behind a huge yellow scar around its planetfall which might not heal for a century. And while New York worked and Scranton starved—here was where a faint pinch of outsittery was added to the broth—Scranton couldn’t carry through on its desperate hope of seizing Argus III as a new home planet; though the Argidae could not yell for the cops at the first sign—or the last—of such a piracy, New York could and would. Okie solidarity was strong, and included a firm hatred of the cops … but it did not extend to encouraging another incident like Thor V, or bucking the cops against another city like IMT. Even the outlaw must protect himself against the criminally insane, especially if they seem to be on his side.
Okay; if that was what Amalfi planned, so be it. There was nothing that Chris could say about it, anyhow. Amalfi was the mayor, and he had the citizens and the City Fathers behind him. Chris was only a youngster and a passenger.
But he knew one thing about the plan that neither Amalfi nor any other New Yorker could know, except himself:
It was not going to work.
He knew Scranton; the city didn’t. If this was how Amalfi planned to proceed against Frank Lutz, it would fail.
But was he reading Amalfi’s mind aright? That was probably the first question. After several days of worrying —which worsened his school record drastically—he took the question to the only person he knew who had ever seen Amalfi: his guardian.
“I can’t tell you what Amalfi’s set us up to do, you aren’t authorized to know,” the perimeter sergeant said gently. “But you’ve done a lot of good guessing. As far as you’ve guessed, Chris, you’re pretty close.”
Carla banged a coffee cup angrily into a saucer. “Pretty close? Joel, all this male expertise is a pain in the neck. Chris is right and you know it. Give him a break and tell him so.”
“I’m not authorized,” Anderson said doggedly, but from him that was tantamount to an admission. “Besides, Chris is wrong on one point. We can’t sit there forever, just to prevent this tramp from taking over Argus Three. Sooner or later we’ll have to be on our own way, and we can’t overstay our contract, either—we’ve got Violations of our own on our docket that we care about, whether Scranton cares about Violations or not. We have a closing date that we mean to observe—and that makes the problem
“I see it does,” Chris said diffidently. “But at least I understood part of it. And it seems to me that there are two big holes in it—and I just hope I’m wrong about those.”
“Holes?” the perimeter sergeant said. “Where? What are they?”
“Well, first of all, they’re probably pretty desperate over there, or if they aren’t now, they soon will be. The fact that they’re in this part of space at all, instead of wherever it was the Mayor directed them, back when I came on board here, shows that something went wrong with their first job, too.”
Anderson snapped a switch on his chair. “Probability?” he said to the surrounding air.
“S EVENTY-TWO PER CENT,” the air said back, making Chris start. He still had not gotten used to the idea that the City Fathers overheard everything one said, everywhere and all the time; among many other things, the city was their laboratory in human psychology, which in turn enabled them to answer such questions as Anderson had just asked.
“Well, score another for you,” the sergeant said in a troubled voice.
“But I hadn’t quite gotten to my point yet, sir. The thing is, now
