strategy in the last year of World War Two, for instance.”
“Never heard of it,” Anderson admitted. “But it seems to make sense. What’s the other hole?”
“The other one is really only a guess,” Chris said. “It’s based on what I know about Frank Lutz, and I only saw him twice, and heard one of his aides talk about him. But I don’t think he’d ever allow anybody to outbluff him; he’d always fight first. He has to prove he’s the toughest guy in any situation, or his goose is cooked—somebody else’ll take over. It’s always like that in a thug society—look at the history of the Kingdom of Naples, or Machiavelli’s Florence.”
“I’m beginning to suspect you’re just inventing these examples,” Anderson said, frowning blackly. “But again, it does make a certain amount of sense—and nobody but you knows even a little about this man Lutz. Supposing you’re right; what could we do about it that we’re not doing now?”
“You could use the desperation,” Chris said eagerly. “If Lutz and his gang are desperate, then the ordinary citizen must be on the edge of smashing things up. And I’m sure they don’t have any ‘citizens’ in our sense of the word, because the aide I mentioned before let slip that they were short on the drugs. I think he meant me to overhear him, but it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. The man on the street must hate the gang even in good times. We could use them to turn Lutz out.”
“How?” Anderson said, with the air of a man posing a question he knows to be unanswerable.
“I don’t know exactly. It’d have to be done more or less by feel. But I used to have at least two friends over there, one of them with constant access to Lutz. If he’s still around and I could sneak over there and get in touch with him—”
Anderson held up a hand and sighed. “I was kind of afraid you were going to trot out something like that. Chris, when are we going to cure you of this urge to go junketing? You know what Amalfi said about that.”
“Circumstances alter cases,” Carla put in.
“Yes, but-oh, all right, all right, I’ll go one step farther, at least.” Once more he snapped the switch, and said to the air: “Comments?”
“W E ADVISE AGAINST SUCH A VENTURE, SERGEANT A NDERSON. THE CHANCE THAT MISTER DE F ORD WOULD BE RECOGNIZED IS PROHIBITIVELY HIGH. ”
“There, you see?” Anderson said. “Amalfi would ask them the same question. He ignores their advice more often than not, but in this case what they say is just what he’s already decided himself.”
“Okay,” Chris said, not very much surprised. “It’s a pretty fuzzy sort of idea, I’ll admit. But it was the only one I had.”
“There’s a lot to it. I’ll tell the Mayor your two points, and suggest that we try to do something to stir up the animals over there. Maybe hell think of another way of tackling that. Cheer up, Chris; it’s a darned good thing you told me all this, so you shouldn’t feel bad if a small part of what you said gets rejected. You can’t win them all, you know.”
“I know,” Chris said. “But you can try.”
If Amalfi thought of any better idea for “stirring up the animals” in Scranton, Chris did not hear of it; and if he tried it, obviously it had no significant effect. While the city worked, Scranton sat sullenly where it was, ominously silent, while New York’s contract termination date drew closer and closer. Poor and starving though it must have been, Scranton had no intention of being outsat at the game of playing for so rich a planet as Argus III; if Amalfi wanted Scranton off the planet, he was going to have to throw it off—or call for the cops. Frank Lutz was behaving pretty much as Chris had predicted, at least so far.
Then, in the last week of the contract, the roof fell in.
Chris got the news, as usual, from his guardian. “It’s your friend Piggy,” he said wrathfully. “He had the notion that he could pretend to turn his coat, worm his way into Scranton’s government, and then pull off some sort of coup. Of course Lutz didn’t believe him, and now we’re all in the soup.”
Chris was torn between shock and laughter. “But how’d he get there?”
“That’s one of the worst parts of it. Somehow he sold two women on the idea of being deadly female spies, concubine type, as if a thug government ever had any shortage of women, especially in a famine! One of them is a sixteen-year-old girl whose family is spitting flames, for every good reason. The other is a thirty-year-old passenger who’s the sister of a citizen, and
“You mean that the City Fathers heard Piggy and the others planning all this?”
“Sure they did. They hear everything—you know that.”
“But why didn’t they tell somebody?” Chris demanded.
“They’re under orders never to volunteer information. And a good thing too, almost all the time; without such an order they’d be jabbering away on all channels every minute of the day—they have no judgment. Now Lutz is demanding ransom. We’d pay any reasonable sum, but what he wants is the planet—you were right again, Chris, logic has gone out the window over there—and we can’t give him what we don’t own, and we wouldn’t if we could. Piggy has gotten us into a war, and not even the machines can see what the consequences will be.”
Chris blew out his breath in a long gust. “What are we going to do?”
“Can’t tell you.”
“No, I don’t want to know about tactics or anything like that. Just a general idea. Piggy is a friend of mine—it sounds silly right now, but I really like him.”
“If you don’t like a man when he’s in trouble, you probably never liked him at all,” the perimeter sergeant agreed reflectively. “Well, I can’t tell you very much more, all the same. In general terms, Amalfi is stalling in a way he hopes will give Lutz the idea that he’s going to give in, but won’t give the Argidae the same impression; the machines have run him up a set of key words that should convey the one thing to the colonists and the other to Scranton. Contract termination is only a week away, and if we can stall Lutz until the day before that—well, I can’t say what we’ll do. But generally, again, we’ll move in there and deprive him of his marbles. That’ll give us a day to get out of this system before the cops come running, and when they do catch us, at least they’ll find that we have a fulfilled contract. Incidentally, it also gives us a day to collect our pay—”
“OVERRIDE,” the City Fathers said suddenly, without being asked anything at all.
“Woof! Sorry. Either I’ve already said one word too many, or I was going to. Can’t say anything else, Chris.”
“But I thought they never volunteered information!”
“They don’t,” Anderson said. “That wasn’t volunteered. They are under orders from Amalfi to monitor talk about this situation and shut it up when it begins to get too loose. That’s all I can say—and it’s none of it the best news I ever spread.”
Only a week to go—and the contract date, Chris realized for the first time, was exactly one day before his birthday. Everything was going to be gained or lost within the same three days: for himself, for Piggy and his two victims, for Scranton, for Argus III, for the city.
And again he knew, as surely as he knew his left hand from his right, that Amalfi’s present plan was not going to work.
And again the rock upon which it was sure to founder was Frank Lutz.
Chris did not doubt that Amalfi could outsmart Lutz hands down in any face-to-face situation, but that was not what this was. He did doubt, and doubted most thoroughly, that any list of trigger words the City Fathers could prepare could fool Lutz for long, no matter how well they lulled the hundred eyes of Argus to sleep; the city manager of Scranton was educated, shrewd, experienced in the ways of politics and power—and by now, on top of all that, he would be almost insanely suspicious. Suspicion of everyone had been normal for him even in good times; if he suspected his friends when things were going right, he would hardly be more trustful of his enemies in the very last days of a disaster.
Chris knew very little yet about the politics of Okie cities, but he knew his history. Also, he knew skunks; he had often marveled at the obduracy with which poor Kelly had failed to profit by his tangles with them. Maybe the dog had liked them; they are affectionate pets for a cautious master. But the human variety was not worth the risk. One look at Frank Lutz had taught Chris that.
And even supposing that Lutz did not shoot from the hip while New York was still trying to stall, bringing down upon the city a rain of missiles or whatever other bombardment Scranton was able to mount; even supposing that
