The life ship had not come to He because of Hazleton’s Dirac warning, he said. The life ship and the burned Okie had not had any Dirac equipment to the best of his knowledge. The life ship had come to He, as Amalfi had predicted, because it was the only possible planetfall in the desert of the Rift. Even so, the refugees had had to use deep-sleep and strict starvation rationing to make it.
“Did you see the ’stiff again?”
“No, sir. If they heard your Dirac warning, they probably figured the police had spotted them and scrammed—or maybe they thought there was a military base or an advanced culture here on the planet.”
“You’re guessing,” Amalfi said gruffly. “What happened to Doctor Beetle?”
The man looked startled. “The Myrdian in the tank? He got blown up with the city, I suppose.”
“He wasn’t put off in another life ship?”
“Doesn’t seem very likely. But I was only a pilot. Could be that they took him out in the mayor’s gig for some reason.”
“You don’t know anything about his no-fuel drive?”
“First I heard of it.”
Amalfi was far from satisfied; he suspected that there was still a short circuit somewhere in the man’s memory. But that was all that could be gotten from him, and Amalfi had to accept the fact. All that remained to be done was to get some assessment of the weapons available to the bindlestiff; on this subject the ex-manic was ignorant, but the city’s neurophysiologist said cautiously that something might be extracted from the catatonic within a month or two; but thus far, he hadn’t even succeeded in capturing the man’s attention.
Amalfi accepted the estimate also, since it was the best he could get. With Moving Day for He coming near, he couldn’t afford to worry overtime about another problem. He had already decided that the simplest answer to vulcanism, which otherwise would be inevitable when the planet’s geophysical balance was changed, would be to reinforce the crust. At two hundred points on the surface of He, drilling teams were now sinking long, thin, slanting shafts, reaching toward the stress-fluid of the world’s core. The shafts interlocked intricately, and thus far only one volcano had been created by the drilling. In general, the lava pockets which had been tapped had already been anticipated, and the flow had been bled off into many intersecting channels without ever reaching the surface. After the molten rock had hardened, the clogged channels were re-drilled, with mesotron rifles set to the smallest possible dispersion.
None of the shafts had yet tapped the stress-fluid; the plan was to complete them all simultaneously. At that point, specific volcanic areas, riddled with channel intersections, would give way, and immense plugs would be forced up toward the crust, plugs of iron, connected by ferrous cantilevers through the channels between. The planet of He would wear a cruel corset, permitting only the slightest flexure—it would be stitched with threads of steel, steel that had held even granite in solution for geological ages.
The heat problem was tougher, and Amalfi was not sure whether or not he had hit upon the solution. The very fact of structural resistance would create high temperatures, and any general formation of shearplanes would cut the imbedded girders at once. The method being prepared to cope with that was rather drastic, and its aftereffects largely unknown.
On the whole, however, the plans were simple, and putting them into effect had seemed heavy but relatively uncomplicated labor. Some opposition, of course, had been expected from the local bandit towns.
But Amalfi had not expected to lose nearly 20 per cent of his crews during the first month after the raid on Fabr-Suithe.
It was Miramon who brought the news of the latest work camp found slaughtered. Amalfi was sitting under a tree fern on high ground overlooking the city, watching a flight of giant dragonflies and thinking about heat transfer in rock.
“You are sure they were adequately protected?” Miramon asked cautiously. “Some of our insects—”
Amalfi thought the insects, and the jungle, almost disturbingly beautiful. The thought of destroying it all occasionally upset him. “Yes, they were,” he said shortly. “We sprayed out the camp areas with dicoumarins and fluorine-substituted residuals. Besides—do any of your insects use explosives?”
“Explosives! There was dynamite used? I saw no evidence—”
“No. That’s what bothers me. I don’t like all those felled trees you describe; that sounds more like TDX than dynamite or high explosive. We use TDX ourselves to get a cutting blast—it has the property of exploding in a flat plane.”
Miramon goggled. “Impossible. An explosion has to expand evenly in all directions that are open to it.”
“Not if the explosive is a piperazohexynitrate built from polarized carbon atoms. Such atoms can’t move in any direction but at right angles to the gravity radius. That’s what I mean. You people are up to dynamite, but not to TDX.”
He paused, frowning. “Of course some of our losses have just been to bandit raids, with missile weapons and ordinary bombs—your friends from Fabr-Suithe and their allies. But these camps where there was an explosion and no crater to show for it—”
He fell silent. There was no point in mentioning the gassed corpses. It was hard even to think about them. Somebody on this planet had a gas which was a regurgitant, a sternutatory, and a vesicant all in one. The men had been forced out of their masks—which had been designed solely to protect them from volcanic gases—to vomit, had taken the stuff into their lungs by convulsive sneezing, and had blistered into great sacs of serum inside and out. That, obviously, had been the multiple-benzene-ring gas Hawkesite; it had been very popular during the days of the warring stellar “empires,” when it had been called
There was only one possible answer, and for a reason which he did not try to understand, it made Amalfi breathe a little easier. All around him the jungle sighed and swayed, and humming clouds of gnats made rainbows over the dew-laden pinnae of the ferns. The jungle, almost always murmurously quiet, had never seemed like the real enemy—and now Amalfi knew that his intuition had been right. The real enemy had at last declared itself, stealthily, but with a stealth with was naivete itself in comparison with the ancient guile of the jungle.
“Miramon,” Amalfi said tranquilly, “we’re in a spot. That criminal city I told you about—the bindlestiff—is already here. It must have landed even before my city arrived, long enough ago to hide itself very thoroughly. Probably it came down at night in some taboo area. The tramps in it have leagued themselves with Fabr-Suithe anyhow, that much is obvious.”
A moth with a two-meter wing spread blundered across the clearing, piloted by a gray-brown nematode which had sunk its sucker above the ganglion between the glittering creature’s pinions. Amalfi
Amalfi snapped the belt switch of his ultraphone. “Hazleton?”
“Here, boss.” Behind the city manager’s voice was the indistinct rumble of heavy mining. “What’s up?”
“Nothing yet. Are you having any bandit trouble out there?”
“No. We’re not expecting any, either, with all this artillery.”
“Famous last words,” Amalfi said. “The ’stiff’s here, Mark—and it’s no stranger, either.”
There was a short silence. In the background, Amalfi could hear the shouts of Hazleton’s crew. When the city manager’s voice came in again, it was moving from word to word very carefully, as if it expected each one to break under its weight. “You imply that the ’stiff was already on He when our Dirac broadcast went out. Right? I’m not sure these losses of ours can’t be explained some simpler way, boss; the theory … uh … lacks elegance.”
Amalfi grinned tightly. “A heuristic criticism,” he said. “Go to the foot of the class, Mark, and think it over. Thus far they’ve out-thought us six ways for Sunday. We may be able to put your old scheme about the women into effect still, but if it’s to work, we’ll have to smoke the ’stiff out into the open.”
“How?”
“Everybody here knows that there’s going to be a drastic change in the planet when we finish what we’re doing, but we’re the only ones who know exactly what we’re going to do. The ’stiffs will have to stop us, whether they’ve got Doctor Beetle or not. So I’m forcing their hand. Moving Day is hereby advanced by one thousand hours.”
