the way up the corridor, searching for a lift shaft, disturbingly conscious of Dee’s wet soles padding cheerfully behind him.
In Astronomy, Jake was, as usual, peering wistfully at a galaxy somewhere out on the marches of nowhen, trying to turn spiral arms into elliptical orbits without recourse to the calculations section. He looked up as Amalfi and the girl entered.
“Hello,” he said dismally. “Amalfi, I really need some help here. How can a man work without machines? If only you’d turn the City Fathers back on—”
“Shortly. How long has it been since you looked back the way we came, Jake?”
“Not since we started across the Rift. Why, should I have? The Rift is just a scratch in a saucer; you need real distance to work on basic problems.”
“I know that. But let’s take a look. I have an idea that we’re not as alone in the Rift as we thought.”
Resignedly, Jake went to his control desk and thumbed the buttons that moved his telescope. “What do you expect to find?” he demanded. “A haze of iron filings, or a stray meson? Or a fleet of police cruisers?”
“Well,” Amalfi said, pointing to the screen, “those aren’t wine bottles.”
The police cruisers, so close that the light of He’s star had begun to twinkle on their sides, shot across the screen in a brilliant stream, contrails of false photons striping the Rift behind them.
“So they aren’t,” Jake said, not much interested. “Now may I have my scope back, Amalfi?”
Amalfi only grinned. Cops or no cops, he felt young again.
Hazleton was mud up to the thighs. Long ribands of it trailed behind him as he hurtled up the lift shaft to the control room. Amalfi watched him coming, noting the set whiteness of the city manager’s face as he looked up at Amalfi’s bent head.
“What’s this about cops?” Hazleton demanded while still in flight. “The message didn’t get to me straight. We were raided, and all hell’s broken loose everywhere. I nearly didn’t get here straight myself.” He sprang into the room, his boots shedding gummy clods.
“I saw some of the fighting,” Amalfi said. “Looks like the Moving Day rumor reached the ’stiffs, all right.”
“Sure. What’s this about cops?”
“The cops are here. They’re coming in from the northwest quadrant, already off overdrive, and should be ready to land day after tomorrow.”
“Surely they’re not still after us,” Hazleton said. “And I can’t see why they should come all this distance after the ’stiff. They must have had to use deep-sleep to make it. And we didn’t say anything about the no-fuel drive in our alarm ’cast—”
“We didn’t have to. They’re after the ’stiff, all right. Someday I must tell you the parable of the diseased bee, but there isn’t time now. Things are breaking too fast. We have to keep an eye on everything, and be ready to jump in any direction no matter which item on the agenda comes up first. How bad is the fighting?”
“Very bad. At least five of the local bandit towns are in on it, including Fabr-Suithe, of course. Two of them mount heavy stuff, about contemporary with the Hruntan Empire’s in its heyday … ah, I see you know that already. Well, this is supposed to be a holy war on us. We’re meddling with the jungle and interfering with their chances for salvation-through-suffering, or something—I didn’t stop to dispute the point.”
“That’s bad. It will convince some of the civilized towns, too. I doubt that Fabr-Suithe really believes this is a jihad—they’ve thrown their religion overboard—but it makes wonderful propaganda.”
“You’re right there. Only a few of the civilized towns, the ones that have been helping us from the beginning, are putting up a stiff fight. Almost everyone else, on both sides, is sitting it out waiting for us to cut each other’s throats. Our own handicap is that we lack mobility. If we could persuade all the civilized towns to come in on our side, we wouldn’t need it, but so many of them are scared.”
“The enemy lacks mobility, too, until the bindlestiff town is ready to take a direct hand,” Amalfi said thoughtfully. “Have you seen any signs that the tramps are in on the fighting?”
“Not yet. But they won’t wait much longer. And we don’t even know where they are!”
“They’ll be forced to locate themselves for us today or tomorrow, of that I’m certain. Right now it’s time to muster all the rehabilitated women you have and get ready to plant them; as far as I can see, that whole scheme is going to pay off. As soon as I get a fix on the bindlestiff, I’ll report the location of the nearest bandit town, and you can follow through from there.”
Hazleton’s eyes, very weary until now, began to glitter with gratification. “And how about Moving Day?” he said. “I suppose you know that not one of your stress-fluid plugs is going to hold with the work this incomplete.”
“I know it,” Amalfi said. “I’m counting on it. We’ll spin on the hour. If the plugs spring high, wide, and tall, I won’t weep; as a matter of fact, I don’t know how else we could hope to get rid of all that heat.”
The radar watch blipped sharply, and both men turned to look at the screen. There was a fountain of green dots on it. Hazleton took three quick steps and turned the switch which projected the new butterfly grid onto the screen.
“Well, where are they?” Amalfi demanded. That’s got to be them.”
“Right smack in the middle of the southwestern continent, in that vine jungle where the little chigger snakes nest—the ones that burrow under your fingernails. There’s supposed to be a lake of boiling mud on that spot.”
“There probably is. They could be under it, surrounded by a medium-light screen.”
“All right, then we’ve got them placed. But what’s this fountain effect the radar’s giving us? What are the ’stiffs shooting up?”
“Mines, I suspect,” Amalfi said. “On proximity fuses. Orbital.”
“Mines? Isn’t
“We’ll get out. And in the meantime, the cops can’t land, either. Go plant your women, Mark. And—put some clothes on ’em first. They’ll cause more of a stir that way.”
“You bet they will,” the city manager said feelingly. He stepped into the lift shaft and fell out of sight.
Amalfi went out onto the observation platform of the control tower. From there he could see all the rest of the city, including most of the perimeter, for the tower—it was still called, now and then, the Empire State Building— was the tallest structure in the city. There was plenty of battle noise rattling the garish tropical sunset along most of the northwest quadrant, and even an occasional tiny toppling figure. The city had adopted the local dodge of clearing and gelling the mud at its rim, and had returned the gel to the morass state at the first sign of attack, but the jungle men had broad skis, of some metal no Hevian could have machined so precisely, on which they slid over the muck. Discs of red fire marked bursting TDX shells, scything the air like death’s own winnows. No gas was in evidence, but Amalfi knew that there would be gas before long with the bindlestiff directing the fighting.
The city’s retaliatory fire was largely invisible, since it emerged below the top of the perimeter. There was a Bethe fender out, which would keep the rim from being scaled until one of the projectors was knocked out, and plenty of heavy rifles were being kept hot. But the city had never been designed for warfare, and many of its most efficient destroyers had their noses buried in the mud, since their intended function was only to clear a landing area. Using an out-and-out Bethe blaster was impossible where there was an adjacent planetary mass—fortunately, since the bindlestiff had such a blaster and Amalfi’s city did not.
Amalfi sniffed the scarlet edges of the struggle appraisingly. The screen set up beside him did not show an intelligible battle pattern yet, but it seemed to be almost on the verge of making sense. Under Amalfi’s fingers on the platform railing were three buttons which he had had placed there four hundred years ago, duplicating a set on the balcony of City Hall. They had set in motion different actions at different times. But each time they had represented choices of actions which he would have to make when the pinch came. He had never found any reason to have a fourth button installed on either railing.
Rockets shrilled overhead. Bombs fell from them, crepitating bursts of noise and smoke and flying metal. Amalfi did not look up. The very mild spindizzy screen would fend off anything moving that rapidly. Only slow-moving objects, like men, could sidle through a polarized gravitic field. He looked out toward the horizon, touching the three buttons very delicately.
Suddenly the sunset snuffed itself out. Amalfi, who had never seen a tropical sunset before coming to He, felt a vague alarm, but as far as he could tell, the abrupt darkness was natural, though startling. The fighting went on, the flying discs of TDX explosions much more lurid now against the blackness.
After a while there was a dogfight far aloft, identifiable mostly by the exhaust traceries of rockets and missiles.
