than to open that hold. He surveyed the souring machine via instruments, and kept the audio tap prudently closed. The sound fraction which was thrumming through the city’s walls was bad enough, even as far up as the control chamber.
Hazleton’s hand came over his left shoulder, stabbing a long finger at the recording thermocouple.
“She’s beginning to smoke now. Damned if I know how she’s lasted this long. The model was two hundred years old when we took it aboard—and the repair job I did on He was only an emergency rig.”
“What can we do?” Amalfi said. He did not bother to look around; the city manager’s moods were his own second nature. They had lived together a long time—long enough to learn what learning is, long enough to know that, just as habit is second nature, so nature—the seven steps from chance to meaning—is first habit. The hand which rested upon Amalfi’s right shoulder told him all he needed to know about Hazleton at this moment. “We can’t shut her down.”
“If we don’t, she’ll blow for good and all. That hold’s hot already.”
“Hot and howling …. Let me think a minute.”
Hazleton waited. After another moment, Amalfi said, “We’ll keep her shoving. If the City Fathers can push this much juice through her, maybe they can push just a little more. Maybe enough to get us down to a reasonable cruising speed. Besides—we couldn’t juryrig that spindizzy again. It’s radiating all up and down the line. The City Fathers could shut her down if we ordered it, but it’d take human beings to repair her and re-tune the setup stages. And it’s too late for that.”
“It’ll be a year before anything alive can go into that hold,” Hazleton agreed gloomily. “All right. How’s our velocity now?”
“Negligible, with reference to the galaxy as a whole. But as far as the Acolyte stars proper are concerned— we’d shoot through the whole cluster at about eight times the city’s top speed if we stopped decelerating now. It’s going to be damned tight, that’s for sure, Mark.”
“Excuse me,” Dee’s voice said behind them. She was hesitating just beyond the threshold of the lift shaft. “Is there something wrong? If you’re busy—”
“No busier than usual,” Hazleton said. “Just wondering about our usual baby.”
“The Twenty-third Street machine. I could tell by the curvature of your spines. Why don’t you have it replaced and get it over with?”
Amalfi and the city manager grinned at each other, but the mayor’s grin was short-lived.
“Well, why not?” he said suddenly.
“My gods, boss, the cost,” Hazleton said with incredulity. “The City Fathers would impeach you for suggesting it.” He donned the helmet. “Treasury check,” he told the microphone.
“They’ve never had to run her all by themselves under max overdrive before now. I predict that they’ll emerge from the experience clamoring to have her replaced, even if we don’t eat for a year to pay for it. Besides, we should have the money, for once. We dug a lot of germanium while we were setting up He to be de-wobbled. Maybe the time really has come when we can afford a replacement.”
Dee came forward swiftly, motes of light on the move in her eyes. “John, can that be true?” she said. “I thought we’d lost a lot on the Hevian contract.”
“Well, we’re not rich. We would have been, I’m still convinced, if we’d been able to harvest the anti-gathics on a decent scale.”
“But we didn’t,” Dee said. “We had to run away.”
“We ran away. But in terms of germanium alone, we can call ourselves well off. Well enough off to buy a new spindizzy. Right, Mark?”
Hazleton listened to the City Fathers a moment more, and then took off the bone-mikes. “It looks that way,” he said. “Anyhow, we can easily cover the price of an overhaul, or maybe even of a reconditioned second-hand machine of a later model. Depends on whether or not the Acolyte stars have a service planet, and what the garage fees are there.”
“The fees should be low enough to keep us solvent,” Amalfi said, thrusting his lower lip out thoughtfully. “The Acolyte area is a backwater, but it was settled originally by refugees from an anti-Earth pogrom in the Malar system—an aftermath of the collapse of Vega, as I recall. There’s a record of the pogrom in the libraries of most planets—you reminded me of it, Mark: the Night of Hadjjii—which means that the Acolytes aren’t far enough away from normal trading areas to be proper frontier stars.”
He paused, and his frown deepened. “Now that I come to think of it, the Acolytes were an important minor source of power metals for part of this limb of the galaxy at one time. They’ll have at least one garage planet, Mark, depend on it. They may even have work for the city to do.”
“Sounds good,” Hazleton said. “Too good, maybe. Actually, we’ve
He sounded tired. Amalfi looked at him.
“That’s not what’s worrying you, Mark,” he said. “We’ve always had that problem waiting for us somewhere in the future, and it isn’t one that’s difficult of solution. What’s the real trouble? Cops, maybe?”
“All right, it’s cops,” Hazleton said, a little sullenly. “I know we’re a long way away from any cops that know us by name. But have you any idea of the total amount of unpaid fines we’re carrying? And I don’t see how we can assume that any amount of distance is ‘too great’ for the cops to follow us if they really want us—and it seems that they do.”
“Why, Mark?” Dee said. “After all, we’ve done nothing serious.”
“It piles up,” Hazleton said. “We haven’t been called on our Violations docket in a long time. When we’re finally caught, we’ll have to pay in full, and if that were to happen now, we’d be bankrupt.”
“Pooh,” Dee said. Like anyone more or less recently naturalized, her belief in the capacities of her adopted city-state was as finite as it was unbounded. “We could find work and build up a new treasury. It might be hard going for a while, but we’d survive it. People have been broke before, and come through it whole.”
“People, yes; cities, no,” Amalfi said. “Mark is right on that point, Dee. According to the law, a bankrupt city must be dispersed. It’s essentially a humane law, in that it prevents desperate mayors and city managers from taking bankrupt cities out again on long job-hunting trips, during which half of the Okies on board will die just because of the stubbornness of the people in charge.”
“Exactly,” Hazleton said.
“Even so, I think it’s a bogey,” Amalfi said gently. “I’ll grant you your facts, Mark, but not your extrapolation. The cops can’t possibly follow us from He’s old star to here. We didn’t know ourselves that we’d wind up among the Acolytes. I doubt that the cops were even able to plot He’s course, let alone our subsequent one. Isn’t that so?”
“Of course. But—”
“And if the Earth cops alerted every
“So, believe me, Mark, the cops around here have never even heard of us. We’re approaching a normal situation, that’s all. The Acolyte cops haven’t the slightest reason to treat us as anything but just another wandering, law abiding Okie city—and after all, that’s really all we are.”
“Good,” Hazleton said, his chest collapsing to expel a heavy sigh.
Amalfi heard neither the word nor the sigh.
At the same instant, the big master screen, which had been showing the swelling, granulating mass of the Acolyte star cluster, flashed blinding scarlet over its whole surface, and the scrannel shriek of a police whistle made the air in the control room seethe.
The cops swaggered and stomped on board the Okie city, and into Amalfi’s main office in City Hall, as if the nothingness of the marches of the galaxy were their personal property. Their uniforms were not the customary dress coveralls—actually, space-suit liners—of the Earth police, however. Instead, they were flashy black affairs, trimmed with silver braid, Sam Browne belt, and shiny boots. The blue-jowled thugs who had been jammed into
