up to the balcony and had himself ferried to the first setback of the mid-town RCA building. He would have liked to have landed at the top, where the penthouse was, but the cornices of the building now bristled with pompoms and mesotron rifles; Graf Nandor was taking no chances.
The elevator operator was not allowed to take Amalfi beyond the seventieth floor. Swearing, he climbed the last five flights of steps; the blue rage he was working up was not going to be counterfeit by the time he reached the penthouse. At every landing he was inspected with insolent suspicion by lounging groups of soldiers.
There was music in the penthouse, and it reelsed of the combination of perfume and unwashed bodies which was the personal trademark of Hruntan nobility. Nandor was sprawled in a chair, surrounded by women, listening to a harpist sing a ballad of unspeakable obscenity in a quavering, emotionless voice. In one jeweled hand he held a heavy goblet half full of fuming Rigellian wine—it must have come from the city’s stores, for the Hruntans had had no contact with Rigel for centuries—which he passed back and forth underneath his substantial nose, inhaling the vapors delicately.
He lifted his eyes over the rim of the goblet as Amalfi came in, but did not otherwise bother to acknowledge him. Amalfi felt his blood pressure mounting and his wrists growing cold and numb, and tried to control himself. It was all very well to be properly angry, but he needed some mastery over what he said and did.
“Well?” Nandor said at last.
“Are you aware of the fact that you’ve just escaped being blown into a rarefied gas?” Amalfi demanded.
“Oh, my dear fellow, don’t tell me you’ve just circumvented an assassination attempt on my behalf,” Nandor said. His English seemed to have been picked up from a Liverpudlian—only the men of that Okie city spoke through their adenoids in that strange fashion. “Really, that’s a bit thick.”
“There were twenty-five Hamiltonian ships over the city,” Amalfi said grimly. “We beat ’em off, but it was a close shave. Evidently the whole business didn’t even wake you or your bosses up. What good are we going to be to you if you can’t even protect us?”
Nandor looked alarmed. He pulled a mike from among the pillows and spoke into it for a moment in his own tongue. The answer was inaudible to Amalfi, but after it came, the Hruntan looked less anxious, though his face was still clouded.
“What are you selling me, my man?” he said querulously. “There was no battle. The ships dropped no bombs, did no damage; they have been pursued out as far as the police englobement.”
“Does a deaf man recognize an argument?” Amalfi said. “And how do you dazzle a blind man? You people think that all weapons have to go ‘bang!’ to be deadly. If you’ll look at our power boards, you’ll see records of a million megawatt drain over one half hour at dawn—and we don’t chew up energy at that rate making soup!”
“That’s of no moment,” the Graf murmured. “Such records can be faked, and there are a good many ways of consuming energy anyhow—or wasting it. Let us suppose instead that these ships who ‘attacked’ you landed a spy—eh? And that subsequently a Hruntan scientist, a traitor to his emperor, was taken from your city, perhaps in the hope of carrying him back to Utopia?”
His face darkened suddenly. “You interstellar tramps are childishly stupid. Obviously the Hamiltonian rabble hoped to rescue your city, and were frightened off by our warriors. Schloss may have gone with them—or he may be hiding in the city somewhere. We will have our answer directly.”
He waved at the silent women, who crowded hastily out through the curtained doorway. “Do you care to tell me now where he is?”
“I keep no tabs on Hruntans,” Amalfi said evenly. “Sorting garbage is no part of my duties.”
Coolly Nandor threw the remainder of his wine in Amalfi’s face. The fuming stuff turned his eye sockets into fire. With a roar he stumbled forward, groping for the Hruntan’s throat. The man’s laughter retreated from him mockingly; then he felt heavy hands dragging his arms behind his back.
“Enough,” the Graf said. “Hazca’s chief questioner will make some underling babble, if we have to hang them all up by their noses.” A blast of thunder interrupted him; outside the penthouse, rain roared along the walls like surf, the first such shower the city had experienced in more than thirty years. Through a haze of pain, Amalfi found that he could see the lights again, although the rest of the world was a red blur. “But I think we’d best shoot this one at once—he talks rather
Something moved across Amalfi’s clearing vision, a long shadow with a knot at the end of it—an arm with a pistol. “Any last words?” Nandor said pleasantly. “No?
A thousand bumblebees took flight in the room. Amalfi felt his whole body jerk upward. Oddly, there was no pain, and he could still see—things continued to take on definition all around him. The clear sight of the dying? …
The thunder cut him off again. Somewhere in the room one of the soldiers was whimpering with fright. To Amalfi’s fire-racked sight, everyone and everything seemed to be floating in mid-air. Nandor sprawled rigidly, half- erect, his body an inch or so off the cushions, his clothing standing away from him. The pistol was still pointed at Amalfi, but Nandor was not holding it; it hung immobile above the carpet, an inch away from his frozen fingers. The carpet itself was not on the floor but above it, a sea of fur, every filament of which bristled straight up. Pictures had sprung away from the walls and were suspended. The cushions had risen from the chair and moved away from each other a little, then stopped, as if caught by a stroboscopic camera in the first stages of an explosion; the chair itself was an inch above the rug. At the far side of the room, a bookshelf had burst, and the cans of microfilm were ranked neatly in front of the case, evenly spaced, supported by nothing but the empty air.
Amalfi took a cautious breath. His jacket, which, like Nandor’s, had ballooned away from his chest, creaked a little, but the fabric was elastic enough to stretch. Nandor saw the movement and made a frantic snatch for the pistol. His left forearm was glued to its position above the chair and could not be moved at all. The gun retreated from his free hand, then followed it back obediently as Nandor pulled back for another try.
The second try was an even greater fiasco. Nandor’s arm brushed one of the arms of the chair, and then it, too, was held firmly, an inch away from the wood. Amalfi chuckled.
“I would advise you not to move any more than you can help,” he said. “If you should bring your head too close to some other object, for instance, you would have to spend the rest of your time looking at the ceiling.”
“What … have you done?” Nandor said, choking. “When I get free—”
“You can’t, not as long as your friends have their friction-field in operation,” Amalfi said. “The plans we gave you were accurate enough, except in one respect: your generator can be operated only in reverse. Instead of allowing molecular valence full play, it freezes molecular relationships as they stand, and creates adherence between
He realized suddenly that his feet were aching violently; the plastic membranes of his shoes were trying to stand away from his flesh, and pressing heavily against his skin. His jaw muscles were aching, too; only the fact that the field traveled over surfaces had protected him from having his teeth jammed away from each other, and even at that it was an effort to part his lips to talk against the pressure.
He inhaled slowly. The jacket creaked again. His ribs ground against his sternum. Then, suddenly, the fabric gave way, and the silver belt which had been stitched into it snapped into a tense hoop around his body. His soles hit the straining carpet heavily, and the air puffed out of his shoes.
He swung his arms experimentally, brushing his hands past his thighs. They moved freely. Only the silver belt maintained its implausible position, girdling the keg of his chest like a stave, soaking up the field.
“Good-by,” he said. “Remember not to move. The cops will let you go in a little while.”
Nandor was not listening. He was watching with bulging eyes the slow amputation of six of his fingers by the rings he was wearing.
There was now, Amalfi knew, no longer than fifteen minutes before the overdriven friction-field would begin to have more serious effects. Normal molecular cohesion could not be disturbed; homogeneous objects—stones, girders, planks—would remain as they were, but things which were made up of fitted parts would soon begin to yield to the pressure driving them away from each other. After that, structures joined by binders of smaller coherence than the coherence of their parts would begin to give way; older buildings, such as City Hall, would become taller and of greater volume as the ancient bricks pulled away from each other—and would collapse the
