graving docks typical of a garage; but every one of those perfectly regular, machinery-ringed craters in the planet’s visible hemisphere turned out to be empty.
“That’s bad,” he heard Hazleton murmur. It was certainly unpromising. The planet turned slowly under his eyes.
Then a city slid up over the horizon. Hazleton’s breath sucked sharply through his teeth. Amalfi could also hear a soft stirring sound, and then footsteps—several of the technicians had come up behind him to peer over his shoulder.
“Posts!” he growled. The technicians scattered like leaves.
On the idle service world, the grounded city was startlingly huge. It thrust up from the ground like an invader —but a naked giant, fallen and defenseless, without its spindizzy screens. There was, of course, every good reason why the screens should not be up, but still, a city without them was a rare and disconcerting sight, like a flayed corpse in a tank. There seemed to be some activity at its perimeter. Amalfi could not resist thinking of that activity as bacterial.
“Doesn’t that answer the question Dee’s way?” Hazleton suggested at last. “There’s an outfit that has dough for repairs, so money from outside the Acolyte area must still be good. It’s having the repairs made, so it can’t be quite hopeless—it thinks it has someplace to go from here. And it’s a cinch to be a smart outfit, well worth consulting. It’s prevented the Acolytes from fleecing it—and some form of Acolyte swindle is the only remaining explanation for the existence of the jungle. We’d best get in touch with it before we land, boss, and find out what to expect.”
“No,” Amalfi said. “Stick to your post, Mark.”
“Why? Surely it can’t do any harm.”
Amalfi didn’t answer. His own psi sense had already told him something that knocked Hazleton’s argument into a cocked helmet, but that something showed on Hazleton’s own instruments, if Hazleton cared to look. The city manager had allowed an extrapolation to carry him off into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.
Abruptly the board began to wink with directional signals. Automatic guides from the control tower on Murphy were waving the city to a readied dock. Amalfi shifted the space stick obediently, awaiting the orange blinker that would announce some living intelligence ready with an opinion as to the desirability of Okies on Murphy.
But neither opinion nor blinker had yet asked for his attention even when Amalfi had begun to float the city for its planting in the unpromising soil below. Evidently business was so poor on Murphy that the garage had lost most of its staff to more “going” projects. In that case, no entities but the automatics in the tower would be on hand to supervise an unexpected landing.
With a shrug, Amalfi cut the City Fathers back in. There was no need for a human being to land a city as long as the landing presented no problem in policy. There were more than enough human uses for human beings; routine operations were the proper province of the City Fathers.
“First planetfall since He,” Hazleton said. He seemed to be brightening a little. “It’ll feel good to stretch our legs.”
“No leg-stretching or any other kind of calisthenics,” Amalfi said. “Not until we get more information. I haven’t gotten a yeep out of this planet yet. For all we know, we may be restricted to our own premises by the local customs.”
“Wouldn’t the tower have said so?”
“No tower would be empowered to deliver a message like that to all comers. It might scare off an occasional legitimate customer. But it could still be so, Mark; you should know that. Let’s do some snooping first.”
Amalfi picked up his mike. “Get me the perimeter sergeant … Anderson? This is the mayor. Arm ten good men from the boarding squad, and meet the city manager and me at the Cathedral Parkway lookout. Station your men at the adjacent sally ports, well out of sight of the localities, if there are any such around …. Yes, that’d be just as well, too …. Right.”
Hazleton said, “We’re going out.”
“Yes. And, Mark—
“I’ll have no difficulty remembering it,” Hazleton said, looking directly at Amalfi with eyes as gray as ice, “seeing that it’s exactly what I told you four days ago. I have my own notions of the proper way to cope with the possibility, and they probably won’t jibe with yours. Four days ago you were explaining to me that I was being excessively defeatist. Now you’ve expropriated my conclusion because something has forced it on you—and I know you better than to expect you to tell me what that something is—and so now you’re telling me to ‘Remember Thor Five’ again. You can’t have it both ways, Amalfi.”
For a second, the two men’s glances remained locked, pupil with pupil.
“You two,” Dee’s voice said, “might just as well be married.”
From the skywalk of the graving dock in which the city rested at last, a walk level with the main deck of the city, the world of Murphy presented to Amalfi the face of a desolate mechanical wilderness.
It was an elephant’s graveyard of cranes, hoists, dollies, spur lines, donkey engines, cables, scaffolding, pallets, half-tracks, camel-backs, chutes, conveyors, bins, tanks, hoppers, pipelines, waldoes, spin-dizzies, trompers, breeders, proxies, ehrenhafts, and half a hundred other devices of as many ages which might at some time be needed in servicing some city.
Much of the machinery was rusty, or fallen in upon itself, or whole on the surface but forever dead inside, with a spurious wholeness that so simple an instrument as the dosimeter every man wore on his left wrist could reveal as submicroscopic scandal. Much of it, too, was still quite usable. But all of it had the look of machinery which no one really expected to use.
On the near horizon, the other city, the one Amalfi had seen from aloft, stood tall and straight. Tiny mechanisms puttered about it.
And far below the skywalk, on the cluttered surface of Murphy, in the shadow of the bulge of Amalfi’s city, a tiny and merely human figure danced and gesticulated.
Amalfi led the way down the tight spiral of the metal staircase, Hazleton and Sergeant Anderson behind him. Their steps were muffled in the thin air. He watched his own carefully; on a low-gravity world it was just as well to temper the use of one’s muscles. The fact that one fell slower on such worlds did not much lessen the thump at the end of the fall, and Amalfi had found long ago that, away from the unvarying one-G field of the city, his bull strength often betrayed him even when he was being normally careful.
The dancing doll proved to be a short, curly-haired technie in a clean but mussed uniform. Possibly he had slept in it; at least it seemed clear that he had never done any work in it. He had a smooth, chubby face, dark of complexion, greasy and stippled with clogged pores. He glared at Amalfi truculently with eyes like beer-bottle ends.
“What the hell?” he said. “How’d you get here?”
“We swam, how else? When do we get some service?”
“I’ll ask the questions, bum. And tell your sergeant to keep his hand off his gun. He makes me nervous, and when I’m nervous, there’s no telling what I’ll do. You’re after repairs?”
“What else?”
“We’re busy,” the garageman said. “No charity here. Go back to your jungle.”
“You’re about as busy as a molecule at zero,” Amalfi roared, thrusting his head forward. The garageman’s shiny, bulbous nose retreated, but not by much. “We need repairs, and we mean to have ’em. We’ve got money to pay, and Lieutenant Lerner of your own local cops sent us here to get ’em. If those two reasons won’t suit you, I’ll have my sergeant put his gun hand to some use—he could probably draw and fire before you tripped over something in this junk yard.”
“Who the hell are you threatening? Don’t you know you’re in the Acolyte stars now? We’ve broken up better— no, now wait a minute, sergeant, let’s not be hasty. I’ve been dealing with bums until they’re coming out of my ears. Maybe you’re all right after all. You did say something about money—I heard you distinctly.”
“You did,” Amalfi said, remaining impassive with difficulty.
“Your City Fathers will vouch for it?”
“Sure. Hazleton—oh, hell, Anderson, what happened to the city manager?”
“He took a branching catwalk farther up,” the perimeter sergeant said. “Didn’t say where he was going.”
It didn’t, after all, pay to be too cautious, Amalfi thought wryly. If his brains hadn’t been concentrating so
