Evidently Miramon’s air force was tangling with Fabr-Suithe’s. The jungle jammered derision and fury at Amalfi’s city without any letup.
Amalfi stood, watching the screen so intently as to cut the rest of the world almost completely out of his consciousness. Understanding the emerging pattern was hard work, for he had never tried to grasp a situation at such close quarters before, and the blue-coded trajectory of every shell, sketched across the screen in glowing segments of ellipses, tried to capture his exclusive attention, as if they were all planets.
About an hour past midnight, at the height of the heaviest air raid yet, he felt a touch at his elbow.
“Boss—”
Amalfi heard the word as though it had been uttered at the bottom of the Rift. The still-ascending fountain of space mines the bindlestiff was throwing up had just come into the margin of the screen—meaning that O’Brian, the proxy chief, had just located the ’stiff with one of his flying robot bystanders—and Amalfi was trying to extrapolate the shape of the top of the fountain. Somewhere up there in the aeropause, the fountain flattened into a shell of orbits encompassing the whole of He, and it was important to know how high up that shell began.
But the utter exhaustion of the voice touched something deeper. He said, “Yes, Mark.”
“It’s done. We lost almost everybody in the party. But we planted the women in a clearing right where a ‘stiff outpost could see them …. What a riot that caused.” A ghost of animation stirred in the voice for a moment. “You should have been there.”
“I’m almost there now. Just getting the picture from a proxy. Good work, Mark …. Better … get some rest.”
“Now? But boss—”
Something very heavy described a searing parabola across the screen, and then the whole city turned to a scramble of magnesium-white and ink. As the light of the star-shell faded, the screen showed a formless dim-yellow spreading and crawling, as if someone had spilled paint in the innards of the machine. Amalfi had been waiting for it.
“Gas alarm, Mark,” he heard himself saying. “Sure to be Hawke-site. Barium suits for everybody—that stuff’s pure death-by-torture.”
“Yes, right. Boss, have you been up here all this time? You’ll kill yourself running things this way. You need rest more than I do.”
Amalfi found that he did not have time to answer. O’Brian’s proxy had come upon the town where Hazleton had dropped the women. There was certainly a riot there. Amalfi snapped a switch, backing the point of view off to another proxy which was hovering a mile up, scanning the whole battle area. From here he could see the black tendrils of movement which were files of soldiers moving through the jungle. Some which had been approaching Amalfi’s city were now turning back. Furthermore, new tendrils were being put out from Hevian towns which up to now had taken no part in the fighting—the on-the-fence towns. Evidently they were no longer on the fence, but which side they had jumped to still remained to be seen.
He snapped the switch again, bringing back a close look at the lake of boiling mud which lay at the base of the mine fountain. Something new was going on there, too: the hot mud was flowing slowly, thickly, away from the center of the lake. Then there was a clear area in the center, as if the lake had suddenly developed a vortex. The clear area widened.
The bindlestiff city was rising to the surface. It came cautiously; half an hour went by before its periphery touched the lake shore. Then black tendrils stretched out into the tangled desolation of the jungle; the bindlestiff was at last risking its own men in the struggle. What they were after was plain enough, for the files were all moving in the direction of the town where Hazleton had dropped the women.
The bindlestiff city itself sat and waited. Even against the mass-pressure of the planet of He, Amalfi’s sense of spatial orientation could pick up the unmistakable, slightly nauseating sensation of spindizzy field under medium drive, doming the seething mud.
Dawn was coming now. The riot around the town where the women had been dropped dwindled a little. Then one of the task forces from the bindlestiff reached it, and it flared all over again, worse than ever. The ’stiffs were fighting their own allies.
Abruptly there was no Hevian town in the center of the riot at all. There was only a mushrooming pillar of radioactive gas which made the screen race with interference patterns. The ’stiffs had bombed the town. What was left of the riot retreated slowly toward the lake of boiling mud; the ’stiffs had their women and were fighting a rear-guard action. The news, Amalfi knew, would travel fast.
Amalfi’s own city was shrouded in sick orange mist, lit with flashes of no-color. The blistering gas could not pass the spindizzy screen in a body, but it diffused through, molecule by heavy molecule. The mayor realized suddenly that he had not heeded his own gas warning, and that there was probably some harm coming to him. He started and moved slightly, and discovered that he was completely encased. What …
Barium paste. Evidently Hazleton had known that Amalfi could not leave the platform, and instead had plastered him with the paste in default of trying to get a suit on him. Even his eyes were covered with a transparent visor, and a feeling of distension in his nostrils bespoke a Kolman barium filter.
So much for the gas. The heavy tensions in and around the bindlestiff city continued to gather; they would soon be unbearable. Above, just outside the shell of circling mines, the first few police cruisers were sidling down with great caution. The war in the jungle had already fallen apart into meaninglessness. The abduction of the women by the tramps had collapsed all Hevian rivalries. Bandits and civilized towns alike were bent now upon nothing but the destruction of Fabr-Suithe and its allies. Fabr-Suithe could hold them off for a long time, but it was clearly time for the bindlestiff to leave—time for it to make off with its pleased and wondering Hevian women, its anti-agathics, its germanium, and whatever else it had managed to garner—time for it to lose itself again in the Rift before the Earth police could invest the planet of He.
The gravitic field around the bindlestiff city knotted suddenly, painfully, in Amalfi’s brain, and began to rise away from the lake of boiling mud. The ’stiff was taking off. In a moment it would be gone through the rent in the mine umbrella which only the tramps could see.
Amalfi pressed the button—the only one, this time, that had been connected to anything.
Moving Day began.
Moving Day began with six pillars of glaring white, forty miles in diameter, which burst through the soft soil at each compass point of He. Fabr-Suithe had sat directly over the site of one of them. The bandit town was nothing but a flake of ash in a split second, a curled black flake borne aloft on the top of a white-hot piston.
The pillars lunged, roaring, into the heavens, fifty, a hundred, two hundred miles, and burst at their tops like popcorn. The Hevian sky burned thermite-blue with steel meteors. Outside, the space mines, cut off from the world of which they had been satellites by the greatest spindizzy field in history, fled away into the Rift.
And when the meteors had burned away, the sun was growing.
The world of He was on spindizzy drive, its magnetic moment transformed into momentum. It was the biggest Okie “city” that had ever flown. There was no time to feel alarm. The sun flashed by and was dwindling to a point before the fact could be grasped. Then it was gone. The far wall of the Rift began to swell and separate into individual points of light.
The planet of He was crossing the Rift.
Appalled, Amalfi fought to understand the scale of speed. He failed. The planet of He was moving, that was all he could comprehend. It was moving at a proper cruising speed for a “city” of its size—a speed that gulped down light years as if they were gnats. Even to think of controlling such a flight was ridiculous.
Stars began to wink past He like fireflies. They had reached the other side of the Rift. The planet began to curve gradually away from the main cloud. Then the stars were all behind.
The surface of the saucer that was the galaxy began to come into view.
“Boss! We’re going out of the galaxy! Look—”
“I know it. Get me a fix on He’s old sun as soon as we’re high enough above the Rift to see it again. After that it’ll be too late.”
Hazleton worked feverishly. It took him only half an hour, but during that time, the massed stars receded far enough to make plain the gray scar of the Rift as a long shadow on a spangled ground. At the end the Hevian sun was only a tenth-magnitude point in it.
“Got it, I think. But we can’t swing the planet back. It’ll take us thousands of years to cross to the next galaxy. We’ll have to abandon He, boss, or we’re sunk.”
