vacated ’visor. “There. You’ll find the proper people waiting at your gig, young lady. If Captain Savage will phone us exactly one week from today and tell us where on Utopia we’re to land, we’ll be out of occultation with this gas planet, and will get the message.”
There was a long silence after the Utopian girl had left. At last Amalfi said slowly, “Mark, there is no shortage of women in the city.”
Hazleton flushed. “I’m sorry, boss. I knew it was impossible directly the words were out of my mouth. Still, I think we may be able to do something for them; the Hruntan Empire was a pretty nauseating sort of state, if I remember correctly.”
“That’s none of our business,” Amalfi said sharply. He disliked having to turn the full force of his authority upon Hazleton; the city manager was for Amalfi the next best thing to that son his position had never permitted him to father—for the laws of all Okie cities include elaborate safeguards against the founding of any possible dynasty. Only Amalfi knew how many times this youngster’s elusive, amoral intelligence had brought him close to being deposed and shot by the City Fathers; and a situation like this one was crucial to the survival of the city.
“Look, Mark. We can’t afford to have sympathies. We’re Okies. What are the Hamiltonians to us? What are they to themselves, for that matter? I was thinking a minute ago of what a disaster it’d be if the Hruntans got a Canceller or some such weapon and blackmailed their way back to a real empire again. But can you see a rebirth of Hamiltonianism any better—in
Amalfi stopped for a breath, taking the mangled cigar out of his mouth and eyeing it with mild surprise. “I knew that the girl was disturbing your judgment the moment I realized that I’d have to read you the riot act like this. Ordinarily you’re the best cultural morphologist I’ve ever had, and every city manager has to be a good one. If you weren’t in a sexual uproar, you’d see that these people are the victims of a pseudomorphosis—dead cultures both of ’em, going through the pangs of decay, even though they both do think it’s rebirth.”
“The cops don’t see it that way,” Hazleton said abstractedly.
“How could they? They haven’t our point of view. I’m not talking to you as a cop. I’m trying to talk like an Okie. What good does it do you to be an Okie if you’re going to mix in on some petty border feud? Mark, you might as well be dead—or back on Earth, it’s the same thing in the end.”
He stopped again. Eloquence was unnatural to him; it embarrassed him a little. He looked sharply at the city manager, and what he saw choked off the springs of his rare volubility. He felt, not for the first time, the essential loneliness that went with perspective.
Hazleton wasn’t listening any more.
There was a battle in progress when the city made its run to Utopia. It was rather spectacular. The Hruntan planet, military in organization and spirit down to the smallest detail of daily living, had not waited for the Earth police to englobe it. The Hruntan ships, though they were nearly of the same vintage as those flown by the Utopians, were being fought to the limit, fought by experienced officers who were unencumbered by any sniveling notions about the intrinsic value of human life. There was not much doubt as to the outcome, but for the time being, the police were unhappy.
The battle was not directly visible from the city; the Hruntan planet was nearly forty degrees away from Utopia now. It was the steady widening of the distance between the two planets that had first given Hazleton his idea for a sneak landing. It had also been Hazleton who had dispatched the proxies—guided missiles less than five meters long—which hung invisibly upon the outskirts of the conflict and watched it with avid television eyes.
It was an instructive dogfight. The police craft, collectively, had not engaged in a major battle for decades; and individually, few of the Earthmen had ever been involved in anything more dangerous than a pushover. The Hruntans, vastly inferior in equipment, were rich in experience, and their tactics were masterly. They had forced the engagement in a heavily mined area, which was equivalent to picking a fight in the heart of a furnace—except that the Hruntans, having sown the mines, knew where the fire was hottest. Their losses, of course, were terrific— nearly five to one. But they had the numbers to waste, and it was obvious that officers who did not value their own lives would be unlikely to value those of their crews.
After a while, even Hazleton had to turn the screen off and order O’Brien to recall the proxies. The carnage was frightening, not just per se, but in the mental attitude behind it. Even a hardened killer, after a certain amount of watching men trying to snuff out a fire by leaping into it, might have felt his brains cracking.
The city settled toward Utopia. Outlying police scouts reported the fact—the reports were plainly audible in the city’s Communications Room—and those reports would be exhumed later and acted upon. But now, in the midst of the battle, the cops had no time to care about what the city did. When they began to care again, the city hoped to be gone—or invulnerable.
The question of how Utopia had resisted the Hruntan onslaught for nearly a century remained a riddle. It became more of a riddle after the city landed on Utopia. The planet was a death trap of radioactivity. There were no cities; there were seething white-hot pools that would never cool within the lifetime of humanity to show where cities once had stood. One of the continental land masses was not habitable at all. The very air disturbed counters slightly. In the daytime, the radioactivity was just below the dangerous limit; at night, when the drop in temperature released the normal microscopic increase in the radon content—a phenomenon common to the atmospheres of all Earthlike planets—the air was unbreathable.
Utopia had been bombarded with fission bombs and dust canisters at every opposition with the Hruntan planet for the past seventy Utopian years. The favorable oppositions occurred only once every twelve years—otherwise even the underground life of Utopia would have been impossible.
“How have you kept them off?” Amalfi asked. “Those boys are soldiers. If they can put up this much of a battle against the police, they should be able to wipe up the floor with you folks.”
Captain Savage, perched uncomfortably in the belfry, blinking at the sun, managed a thin smile. “We know all their tricks. They are very fine strategists—I will grant you that. But in some respects they are unimaginative. Necessarily, I suppose; initiative is not encouraged among them.” He stirred uneasily. “Are you going to leave your city out here in plain sight? And at night, too?”
“Yes. I doubt that the Hruntans will attack us; they’re busy, and besides, they probably know that the police don’t love us, and will be too puzzled to call us an enemy of theirs right off the bat. As for the air—we’re maintaining a point naught two per cent spindizzy field. Not enough to be noticeable, but it changes the moment of inertia of our own atmosphere enough to prevent much of your air from getting in.”
“I don’t think I understand that,” Savage said. “But doubtless you know your own resources. I confess, Mayor Amalfi, that your city is a complete mystery to us. What does it do? Why are the police against you? Are you exiled?”
“No,” Amalfi said. “And the police aren’t against us exactly. We’re just rather low in the social scale; we’re migratory workers, interstellar hobos, Okies. The police are as obligated to protect us as they are to protect any other citizen—but our mobility makes us possible criminals by their figuring, so we have to be watched.”
Savage’s summary of his reaction to this was the woeful sentence Amalfi had come to think of as the motto of Utopia. “Things have changed so much,” the officer said.
“You should set that to music. I can’t say that I understand yet how you’ve held out so long, either. Haven’t you ever been invaded?”
“Frequently,” Savage said. His voice was half gloomy and half charged with pride. “But you have seen how we live. At best, we have beaten them off; at worst, we cannot be found. And the Hruntans themselves have made this planet a difficult place to live. Many of their landing parties succumbed to the results of their own bombing.”
“Still—”
“Mob psychology,” Savage said, “is something of a science with us—as it is with them, but we have developed it in a different direction. Combined with the subsidiary art of camouflage, it is a powerful weapon. By dummy installations, faked weather conditions, false high-radioactivity areas, we have thus far been able to make the Hruntans erect their invasion camps exactly on the spots we have previously chosen for them. It is a form of chess: one persuades, or lures, the enemy into entering an area where one can dispose of him in perfect safety and with a minimum of effort.”
He blinked up at the sun, nibbling at his lower lip. After a while he added, “There is another important factor. It is freedom. We have it. The Hruntans do not. They are defending a system which is ascetic in character—that is, it
