“What, then? This is just what I want to know. Let’s have it.”
“First of all, you will be asked for the secret of this … this cure for death. They will want to use it on themselves, and hide it from the rest of us. Wisdom, perhaps; it would make for more desertions otherwise—but I am sure they will want it.”
“They can have it, but I think we’ll see to it that the secret leaks out. The City Fathers know the therapy, and you have so rich a supply of the drugs here that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t all get it.” Privately, Amalfi had an additional reason: If He reached the other side of the Rift eventually with enough anti-agathics to extend coverage much among the galaxy’s general population, there would be all kinds of economic hell to pay. “What next?”
“You will be asked to wipe out the jungle.”
Amalfi sat back, stunned, and mopped his bald head. Wipe out the jungle! Oh, it would be easy enough to lay waste to almost all of it—even to give the Hevians energy weapons to keep those wastes clear—but sooner or later the jungle would come back. The weapons would short out in the eternal moisture; the Hevians would not take proper care of them, would not be able to repair them—how would the brightest Greek have repaired a shattered X-ray tube, even if he had known what steps to take? The technology didn’t exist.
No, the jungle would come back. And the cops, in pursuit of the bindlestiff on the city’s own Dirac alarm, would eventually come to He to see whether or not the Okies had fulfilled their contract—and would find the planet as raw as ever. Good-by to riches. This was jungle climate. There would be jungles here until the next Draysonian catastrophe, and that was that.
“Excuse me,” he said, and reached for the control helmet. “Get me the City Fathers,” he said into the mouthpiece.
“SPEAK,” the spokesman vodeur said after a while.
“How would you go about wiping out a jungle?”
There was a moment’s silence. “SODIUM FLUOSILICATE DUSTING WOULD SERVE. IN A WET CLIMATE IT WOULD CREATE FATAL LEAF BLISTER. HARDIER WEEDS COULD BE SPRAYED WITH 2,4-D. OF COURSE THE JUNGLE WOULD RETURN.”
“That’s what I meant. Any way to make the job stick?”
“NO, UNLESS THE PLANET EXHIBITS DRAYSONIANISM.”
“NO, UNLESS THE PLANET EXHIBITS DRAYSONIANISM. IN THAT CASE ITS AXIS MIGHT BE REGULARIZED. IT HAS NEVER BEEN TRIED, BUT THEORETICALLY IT IS QUITE SIMPLE; A BILL TO REGULARIZE EARTH’S AXIS WAS DEFEATED BY THREE VOTES IN THE EIGHTY-SECOND COUNCIL, OWING TO THE OPPOSITION OF THE CONSERVATION LOBBY.”
“Could the city handle it?”
“NO. THE COST WOULD BE PROHIBITIVE.
Amalfi tore the helmet from his head and flung it across the room. Miramon sprang up in alarm.
The city manager shot through the door as if he had been kicked through it on roller skates. “Here, boss— what’s the—”
“Get down below and turn off the City Fathers—
Hazleton was already gone. On the other side of the room, the phones of the helmet squawked dead data in anxious, even syllables.
Then suddenly they went silent.
The City Fathers had been turned off, and Amalfi was ready to move a world.
The fact that the City Fathers could not be consulted—for the first time since the Epoch affair five centuries ago, when the whole city had been without power for a while—made the job more difficult than it needed to be, barring their conservatism. Tipping the planet, the crux of the job, was simple enough in essence; the city’s spin- dizzies could handle it. But the side effects of the medicine might easily prove to be worse than the disease.
The problem was seismological. Rapidly whirling objects have a way of being stubborn about changing their positions in space. If that energy were overcome, it would have to appear somewhere else—the most likely place being multiple earthquakes.
Too, very little could be anticipated about the gravities of the task. The planet’s revolution produced, as usual, a sizable magnetic field. Amalfi did not know how well that field would take to being tipped in the space-lattice which it distorted, nor just what would happen to He when the city’s spindizzies polarized the whole gravity field. During “moving day” the planet would be, in effect, without magnetic moment of its own, and since computation was a function of the City Fathers, there was no way of finding out where the energy would reappear, in what form, or at what intensity.
He broached the latter question to Hazleton. “If we were dealing with an ordinary problem, I’d say the energy would show up as velocity,” he pointed out. “In which case we’d be in for an involuntary junket. But this is no ordinary case. The mass involved is … well, it’s planetary, that’s all. What do you think, Mark?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Hazleton admitted. “The equations only give us general solutions, and only quanticised solutions at that—and this whole problem is a classical field problem. When we move the city, we change the magnetic moment of its component electrons; but the city itself is a low-mass body with no spin of its own, and doesn’t have a
“That’s what stuck me. I can’t cross over from probability into tensors any more than poor old Einstein could. As far as I know, nobody’s ever really faced up to the discontinuity between what the spindizzy does to the electron and what happens to a body of classical mass in a spindizzy field.”
“Still—we could control velocity, or even ignore it out here. Suppose the energy reappears as heat, instead? There’d be nothing left of He but a cloud of gas.”
Amalfi shook his head. “I think that’s a bogey. The gyroscopic resistance may show up as heat, sure, but not the magnetogravitic. I think we’d be safest to assume that it’ll appear as velocity, just as in ordinary flight. Use the standard transformation and see what you get.”
Hazleton bent over his slide rule, the sweat standing out along his forehead and above his mustache in great heavy droplets. Amalfi could understand the eagerness of the Hevians to get rid of the jungle and its eternal humidity. His own clothing, sparse though it was, had been sopping ever since the city had landed here.
“Well,” the city manager said finally, “unless I’ve made a mistake somewhere, the whole kit and kaboodle, the planet itself, will go shooting away from here at about twice the speed of light. That’s not too bad—just about coasting speed for us. We could always loop around and bring the planet back to its orbit.”
“Ah, but could we? Remember, we don’t control it! The vector appears automatically when we turn on the spindizzies. We don’t even know in which direction that arrow is going to point. The planet could throw itself into the sun within the first second as far as we know. We can’t predict the direction.”
“Yes, we can,” Hazleton objected. “Along the axis of spin, of course.”
“Cant? And torque?”
“No problem—no, yes, there is. I keep forgetting that we’re dealing with a planet instead of electrons.” He applied the slipstick again. “No soap. Too many substitutions. Can’t be answered in time without the City Fathers —and torque might hype the end-velocity substantially. But if we can figure a way to control the flight, it won’t matter in the end. Of course there’ll be perturbations of the other planets when this one goes massless, whether it actually moves or not—but nobody lives on them anyhow.”
“All right, Mark, go figure a control system. I’ll see what can be done on the geology end—”
The door slid back suddenly, and Amalfi looked back over his shoulder. It was Sergeant Anderson. The perimeter sergeant was usually blase in the face of all possible wonders, unless they threatened the city. “What’s the matter?” Amalfi said, alarmed.
“Mr. Mayor, we’ve gotten an ultracast from some outfit claiming to be refugees from another Okie city—they claim they hit a bindle-stiff and got broken up. They’ve crash-landed on this planet up north, and they’re being mobbed by one of the local bandit towns. They were holding ’em off and yelling for help, and then they stopped transmitting. I thought you ought to know.”
Amalfi heaved himself to his feet almost instantly. “Did you get a bearing on that call?” he demanded.
