“All right. Get us aloft. Full drive.”
“Our contract—”
“Fulfilled—take my word for it now. Spin!”
The city sprang aloft. The planet of He did not dwindle in the city’s sky. It simply vanished, snuffed out in the intergalactic gap. Miramon, if he lived, would be the first of a totally new race of pioneers.
Amalfi moved then, back towards the controls, the barium casing cracking and falling off him as he came back to life. The air of the city still stank of Hawkesite, but the concentration of the gas already had been taken down below the harmful level by the city’s purifiers. The mayor began to edge the city away from the vector of He’s flight and the city’s own, back toward the home lens.
Hazleton stirred restlessly.
“Your conscience bothering you, Mark?”
“Maybe,” Hazleton said. “Is there some escape clause in our contract with Miramon that lets us desert him like this? If there is I missed it, and I read the fine print pretty closely.”
“No, there’s no escape clause,” Amalfi said abstractedly, shifting the space stick by a millimeter or two. “The Hevians won’t be hurt. The spindizzy screen will protect them from loss of heat and atmosphere—their volcanoes will keep them warmer than they’ll probably like, and their technology is up to producing all the light they’ll need. But they won’t be able to keep the planet well enough lit to satisfy the jungle. That will die. By the time Miramon and his friends reach the star that suits them in the Andromedan galaxy, they’ll understand the spindizzy well enough to put their planet back into the proper orbit. Or maybe they’ll like roaming better by that time, and will decide to be an Okie planet. Either way, we licked the jungle for them, just as we promised to do, fair and square.”
“We didn’t get paid,” the city manager pointed out. “And it’ll take a lot of fuel to get back to any part of our own galaxy. The bindlestiff got off ahead of us, and got carried way out of range of the cops in the process, right on our backs—with plenty of germanium, drugs, women, the no-fuel drive, everything.”
“No, they didn’t,” Amalfi said. “They blew up the moment we moved He.”
“All right,” Hazleton said resignedly. “You could detect that where I couldn’t, so I’ll take your word for it. But you’d better be able to explain it!”
“It’s not hard to explain. The ’stiffs had captured Doctor Beetle. I was pretty sure they had; after all, they came to He for no other reason. They needed the no-fuel drive, and they knew Doctor Beetle had it because they heard the agronomists’ SOS, just as we did. So they snatched Doctor Beetle when he was landed—do you remember what a big fuss their bandit-city allies made about the
“So?”
“So,” Amalfi said, “the tramps forgot that any Okie city always has passengers like Doctor Beetle—people with big ideas only partially worked out, ideas that need the finishing touches that can only be provided by some other culture. After all, a man doesn’t take passage on an Okie city unless he’s a third-rater, hoping to make his everlasting fortune on some planet where the inhabitants know much less than he does.”
Hazleton scratched his head ruefully. “That’s right. We had the same experience with the Lyran invisibility machine. It never worked until we took Doc Schloss on board.”
“Exactly. The ’stiffs were in too much of a hurry. They didn’t carry their stolen no-fuel drive with them until they found some culture which could perfect it. They tried to use it right away. They were lazy. And they tried to use it inside the biggest spindizzy field ever generated. What happened? It blew up. I felt it happen—and the top of my head nearly came off then and there. If we hadn’t left the ’stiffs parsecs behind in the first split second, Doctor Beetle’s drive would have blown up He at the same time. It doesn’t pay to be lazy, Mark.”
“Who ever said it did?” Hazleton said. After a moment’s more thought, he began to plot the point at which the city would probably re-enter its own galaxy. That point turned out to be a long way away from the Rift, in an area that, after a mental wrench to visualize it backwards from the usual orientation, promised a fair population.
“Look,” he said, “we’ll hit about where the last few waves of the Acolytes settled—remember the Night of Hadjjii?”
Amalfi didn’t, since he hadn’t been born then, but he remembered the history, which was what the city manager had meant. He said, “Good. I want to take us to garage and get that Twenty-third Street machine settled for good and all. I’m tired of its blowing out in the pinches, and it’s going sour for fair now. Hear it?”
Hazleton cocked his head intently. In the lull, Amalfi saw suddenly that Dee was standing in the doorway, still completely en-swathed in her anti-gas suit except for the faceplate.
“Is it over?” she said.
“Well, our stay on He is over. We’re still on the run, if that’s what you mean. The cops never give up, Dee; you’ll learn that sooner or later.”
“Where are we going?”
She asked the question in the same tone in which she had once said, “What is a volt, John?” For an astonishing moment Amalfi was almost overwhelmed with an urge to send Hazleton from the room on some excuse, to return almost bodily to those days of her innocence, to relive all the previous questions that she had asked—the moments when he had known the answers better.
There was, of course, no real answer to this one. Where would an Okie go? They were going, that was all. If there was a destination, no one could know what it was.
He endured the surge of emotion stoically. In the end, he only shrugged.
“By the way,” he said, “what’s the operational day?”
Hazleton looked at the clock. “M plus eleven twenty-five.”
With a sidelong glance, Amalfi leaned forward, resumed the helmet he had cast aside on He, and turned on the City Fathers.
The helmet phones shrilled with alarm. “All right, all right,” he growled. “What is it?”
“MAYOR AMALFI, HAVE YOU TIPPED THIS PLANET?”
“No,” Amalfi said. “We sent it on its way as it was.”
There was a short silence, humming with computation. It was probably just as well, Amalfi thought, that the machines had been turned oft for a while; they had not had a rest in many centuries. They would probably emerge into consciousness a little saner for it.
“VERY WELL. WE MUST NOW SELECT THE POINT AT WHICH WE LEAVE THE RIFT. STAND BY FOR DETERMINATION.”
Hazleton and Amalfi grinned at each other. Amalfi said, “We’re coming in on the last Acolyte stars, and we’ll need to decelerate far beyond spindizzy safety limits. We urgently need an overhaul on the Twenty-third Street driver. Give us a determination for the present social setup there, please—”
“YOU ARE MISTAKEN. THAT CLUSTER IS NOWHERE NEAR THE RIFT. FURTHERMORE, THE POPULACE THERE HAS A LONG RECORD OF MASS XENOPHOBIA AND HAD BEST BE AVOIDED. WE WILL GIVE YOU A DETERMINATION FOR THE FAR RIFT WALL. STAND BY.”
Amalfi removed the headset gently.
“The Rift wall,” he said, moving the microphone away from his mouth. “That was long ago—and far away.”
CHAPTER FIVE: Murphy
ASPINDIZZY going sour makes the galaxy’s most unnerving noise. The top range of the sound is inaudible, but it feels like a multiple toothache. Just below that, there is a screech like metal tearing, which blends smoothly into a composite cataract of plate glass, slate, and boulders; this is the middle register. After that, there is a painful gap in the sound’s spectrum, and the rest of the noise comes into one’s ears again with a hollow round dinosaurian sob and plummets on down into the subsonics, ending in frequencies which induce diarrhea and an almost unconquerable urge to bite one’s thumbs.
The noise was coming, of course, from the Twenty-third Street spindizzy, but it permeated the whole city. It was tolerable only so long as the hold which contained the moribund driver was kept sealed. Amalfi knew better
