jerked to nearly every one and then shook itself violently, twisting and careening across the jungle top. Amalfi had never felt so helpless before in his life. He did not even know what the noise was; he could only be sure that it was ill-tempered. The coarse
He was astonished to discover that the hull around him was stippled with small holes, real holes with the slip- stream fluting over them. It took him what seemed to be three weeks to realize that the whooping and cheerleading which meant nothing to him was riddling the ship and threatening to kill him at any second.
Someone was shaking him. He lurched to his knees, trying to unfreeze his eyeballs.
“Amalfi! Amalfi!” The voice, although it was breathing on his ear, was parsecs away. “Pick your spot, quick! They’ll have us shot down in a—”
Something burst outside and threw Amalfi back to the deck. Doggedly he crawled to the trap and peered down through the now-shattered glass. The bandit Hevian city swooped past, upside down. The mayor felt a sudden wave of motion sickness, and the city was lost in a web of tears. The second time it came by, he managed to see which building in it had the heaviest guard, and pointed, choking.
The rocket threw its tailfeathers over the nearest cloud and bored beak-first for the ground. Amalfi hung on to the edge of the suddenly blank trap, his own blood spraying back in a fine mist into his face from his cut fingers.
Nobody heard, but Hazleton saw his nod. A blast of pure light blew through the upended cabin, despite the shielding between it and the pile. Even through the top of his head, the violet-white light of that soundless blast nearly blinded Amalfi, and he could feel the irradiation of his shoulders and chest. He would develop no allergies on this planet, anyhow—every molecule of histamine in his blood must have been detoxified in that instant.
The rocket yawed wildly, and then came under control again. The ordnance noises had already quit, cut off at the moment of the flash.
The bandit Hevian city was blind.
The sound of the jets cut off, and Amalfi understood for the first time what an “aching void” might be. The machine fell into a steep glide, the air howling dismally outside it. Another rocket, under the guidance of Carrel, dived down before it, scything a narrow runway in the jungle with portable mesotron rifles—for the bandit towns kept no supersonic no-plant’s-land between themselves and the rank vegetation.
The moment the rocket stopped moving, Amalfi and a hand-picked squad of Okies and Hevians were out of it and slogging through the muck. From inside Fabr-Suithe drifted a myriad of screams—human screams now, screams of rage and grief, from men who thought themselves blinded for life. Amalfi did not doubt that many of them were. Certainly anyone who had had the misfortune to be looking at the sky during that instant when the entire output of the pile had been converted to visible light would never see again.
But the laws of chance would have protected most of the renegades, so speed was vital. The mud built up heavy pads under his shoes, and the jungle did not thin out until they hit the town’s wall itself.
The gates had been rusted open years ago, and were choked with greenery. The Hevians hacked their way through it with practiced knives and cunning.
Inside, the going was still almost as thick. Fabr-Suithe proper presented a depressing face of proliferating despair. Most of the buildings were completely enshrouded in vines, and many were halfway toward ruins. Iron-hard tendrils had thrust their way between stones, into windows, under cornices, up drains and chimney funnels. Poison-green succulent leaves plastered themselves greedily upon every surface, and in shadowed places there were huge blood-colored fungi which smelled like a man six days dead; the sweetish taint hung heavily in the air. Even the paving blocks had sprouted—inevitably, since, whether by ignorance or laziness, most of the recent ones had been cut from green wood.
The screaming began to die into whimpers. Amalfi did his best to keep himself from inspecting the stricken inhabitants. A man who believes he has just been blinded permanently is not a pretty sight, even when he is wrong. Yet it was impossible not to notice the curious mixture of soiled finery with gleamingly clean nakedness. It was as if two different periods had mixed in the city, as if a gathering of Hruntan nobles had been sprinkled with Noble Savages. Possibly the men who had given in completely to the jungle had also slid back enough to discover the pleasures of bathing. If so, they would shortly discover the pleasures of the mud-wallow, too, and would not look so noble after that.
“Amalfi, here they are—”
The mayor’s suppressed sympathy for the blinded men evaporated when he got a look at the imprisoned Okies. They had been systematically mauled to begin with, and after that sundry little attentions had been paid to them which combined the best features of savagery and decadence. One of them, mercifully, had been strangled by his comrades early in the “questioning.” Another, a basket case, should have been rescued, for he could still talk rationally, but he pleaded so persistently for death that Amalfi had him shot in a sudden fit of sentimentality. Of the other three men, all could walk and talk, but two were mad. The catatonic was carried out on a stretcher, and the manic was bound, gagged, and led gingerly away.
“How did you do it?” asked the rational man in Russian, the dead universal language of Earth. He was a human skeleton, but he radiated an amazing personal force. He had lost his tongue early in the “questioning,” but had already taught himself to talk by the artificial method—the result was weird, but it was intelligible. “The savages were coming down to kill us as soon as they heard your rockets. Then there was a sort of flash, and they all started screaming—a pretty sound, let me tell you.”
“I’ll bet,” Amalfi said. “Do you speak Interlingua? Good, my Russian is rudimentary these days. That ‘sort of a flash’ was a photon explosion. It was the only way we could figure on being sure of getting you out alive. We thought of trying gas, but if they had had gas masks, they would have been able to kill you anyhow.”
“I haven’t actually seen any masks, but I’m sure they have them. There are traveling volcanic gas clouds in this part of the planet, they say; they must have evolved some absorption device—charcoal is well known here. Lucky we were so far underground, or we’d be blind, too, then. You people must be engineers.”
“More or less,” Amalfi agreed. “Strictly, we’re miners and petroleum geologists, but we’ve developed a lot of side lines since we went aloft—like any Okie. On Earth we were a port city and did just about everything, but aloft you have to specialize. Here’s our rocket—crawl in. It’s rough, but it’s transportation. How about you?”
“Agronomists. Our mayor thought there was a good field for it out here along the periphery—teaching the abandoned colonies and the offshoots how to work poisoned soil and manage low-yield crops without heavy machinery. Our side line was waxmans.”
“What are those?” Amalfi said, adjusting the harness around the wasted body.
“Soil-source antibiotics. It was those the bindlestiff wanted—and got. The filthy swine. They can’t bother to keep a reasonably sanitary city; they’d rather pirate some honest outfit for drugs when they have an epidemic. Oh, and they wanted germanium, too, of course. They blew us up when they found we didn’t have any—we’d converted to a barter economy as soon as we got out of the last commerce lanes.”
“What about your passenger?” Amalfi said with studied nonchalance.
“Doctor Beetle? Not that that was his name—I couldn’t pronounce
Outside, a shot cracked, and Amalfi winced. “We’d best take off—they’re getting their eyesight back. Talk to you later. Hazleton, any incidents?”
“Nothing to speak of, boss. Everybody stowed?”
“Yep. Kick off.”
There was a volley of shots, and then the rocket coughed, roared, and stood on its tail. Amalfi pulled a deep sigh loose from the acceleration and turned his head toward the rational man.
He was still securely strapped in, and looked quite relaxed. A brass-nosed slug had come through the side of the ship next to him and had neatly removed the top of his skull.
Working information out of the madmen was a painfully long, anxious process. Even after the manic case had been returned to a semblance of rationality, he could contribute very little.
