announced previously. We can take six cities there, to be paid upon a per-job basis.”
“Attention, Okies.”
A third screen faded in. Even before the image had stabilized in the locally distorted space-lattice, Amalfi recognized its outlines. The general topology of a cop can seldom be blurred by distortion of any kind. He was only mildly surprised to find, when the face came through, that the police spokesman was Lieutenant Lerner, the man whose bribe had turned to worthless germanium in his hands.
“If there’s any disorder, nobody gets hired,” Lerner said. “Nobody. Understand? You’ll present your offers to the lady in proper fashion, and she’ll take or leave your bids as she sees fit. Those of you who are wanted outside the jungle will be held accountable if you leave the jungle—we’re offering no immunities this trip. And if there’s any damn insolence—”
Lieutenant Lerner’s image drew its forefinger across its throat in a gesture that somehow had never lost its specificity. Amalfi growled and switched off the audio; Lerner was still talking, as was the trader, but now another screen was coming on, and Amalfi had to know what words were to come from it. The speeches of the trader and the cop could be predicted almost positively in advance—as a matter of fact, the City Fathers had already handed Amalfi the predictions, and he had listened to the actual speeches only long enough to check them for barely possible unknowns.
But what the bright city near the red dwarf—the jungle’s boss, the king of the hobos—would say …
Not even Amalfi, let alone the City Fathers, could know that in advance. Lieutenant Lerner and the trader worked their mouths soundlessly while the wavering shadow on the fourth screen jelled. A slow, heavy, brutally confident voice was already in complete possession of the reception hall.
“Nobody takes any offer less than sixty,” it said. “The class A cities will ask one hundred and twenty-four for the Hern Six job, and grade
The image came through. Amalfi goggled at it.
“… or after the cops leave. That’s all for now.”
The image faded. The twisted, hairless man in the ancient metal-mesh cape stood in Amalfi’s memory for quite a while afterwards.
The Okie King was a man made of lava. Perhaps he had been born at one time, but now he looked like a geological accident, a column of black stone sprung from a fissure and contorted roughly into the shape of a man.
And his face was shockingly disfigured and scarred by the one disease that still remained unconquered, unsolved, though it no longer killed.
Cancer.
A voice murmured inside Amalfi’s head, coming from the tiny vibrator imbedded in the mastoid bone behind the mayor’s right ear. “That’s just what the City Fathers said he would say,” Hazleton commented softly from his post uptown in the control tower. “But he can’t be as naive as all that. He’s an old-timer; been aloft since back before they knew how to polarize spindizzy screens against cosmic radiation. Must be eight hundred years old at a minimum.”
“You can lay up a lot of cunning in that length of time,” Amalfi agreed in a similarly low voice. He was wearing throat mikes under a high military collar. As far as the screens were concerned, he was standing motionless, silent, and alone; though he was an expert at talking without moving his lips, he did not try to do so now, for the fuzziness of local transmission conditions made it unlikely that his murmuring would be detected. “It doesn’t seem likely that he means what he says. But we’d best sit tight for the moment.”
He glanced into the auxiliary battle tank, a three-dimensional chart in which color-coded points of lights moved, showing each city, the nearby sun, and the Acolyte vessels, not to scale, but in their relative positions. The tank was camouflaged as a desk and could be seen into only from behind; hence it was out of sight of any eye but Amalfi’s. In it the Acolyte force showed itself to consist of one trader’s ship and four police craft; one of the latter was a command cruiser, very probably Lerner’s, and the others were light cruisers.
It was not much of a force, but then, there was no real need for a full squadron here. With a minimum of organization, the Okies could run Lerner and his ward out of the jungle, even at some cost to their own numbers— but where would the Okies run to after Lerner had yelled for navy support? The question answered itself.
A string of twenty-three small “personal” screens came on now, high up along the curve of the far wall. Twenty-three faces looked down at Amalfi—the mayors of all but one of the class
“Are we ready to begin?” the Acolyte woman said. “I’ve got codes here for twenty-four cities, and I see you’re all here. Small courage among Okies these days—twenty-four out of three hundred of you for a simple job like this! That’s the attitude that made Okies of you in the first place. You’re afraid of honest work.”
“We’ll work,” the King’s voice said. His screen, however, remained gray-green. “Look over the codes and take your pick.”
The trader looked for the voice. “No insolence,” she said sharply. “Or I’ll ask for volunteers from the grade B’s. It would save me money, anyhow.”
There was no reply. The trader frowned and looked at the code list in her hand. After a moment, she called off three numbers, and then, with greater hesitation, a fourth. Four of the screens above Amalfi went blank, and in the tank, four green flecks began to move outward from the red dwarf star.
“That’s all we need for Hern Six except for a pressure job,” the woman said slowly. “There are eight cities listed here as pressure specialists. You there—who are you, anyhow?”
“Bradley-Vermont,” one of the faces above Amalfi said.
“What would you ask for a pressure job?”
“One hundred and twenty-four,” Bradley-Vermont’s mayor said sullenly.
“O-ho! You’ve a high opinion of yourself, haven’t you? You may as well float here and rot for a while longer, until you learn something more about the law of supply and demand. You—you’re Dresden-Saxony, it says here. What’s your price? Remember, I only need one.”
Dresden-Saxony’s mayor was a slight man with high cheekbones and glittering black eyes. He seemed to be enjoying himself, despite his obvious state of malnutrition; at least, he was smiling a little, and his eyes glittered over the dark shadows which made them look large.
“We ask one hundred and twenty-four,” he said with malicious indifference.
The woman’s lids slitted. “You do, eh? That’s a coincidence, isn’t it? And you?”
“The same,” the third mayor said, though with obvious reluctance.
The trader swung around and pointed directly at Amalfi. In the very old cities, such as the one the King operated, it would be impossible to tell who she was pointing at, but probably most of the cities in the jungle had compensating tri-di. “What’s your town?”
“We’re not answering that question,” Amalfi said. “And we’re not pressure specialists anyhow.”
“I know that, I can read a code. But you’re the biggest Okie I’ve ever seen, and I’m not talking about your belly either; and you’re modern enough for the purpose. The job is yours for one hundred—no more.”
“Not interested.”
“You’re a fool as well as a fat man. You just came into this hellhole and there are charges against—”
“Ah, you know who we are. Why did you ask?”
“Never mind that. You don’t know what a jungle is like until you’ve lived in it. You’d be smart to take the job and get out now while you can. You’d be worth one hundred and twelve to me if you could finish the job under the estimated time.”
“You’ve denied us immunity,” Amalfi said, “and you needn’t bother offering it, either. We’re not interested in pressure work for any price.”
The woman laughed. “You’re a liar, too. You know as well as I do that nobody arrests Okies on jobs. And you wouldn’t find it difficult to leave the job once it’s finished. Here now—I’ll give you one hundred and twenty. That’s my top offer, and it’s only four less than the pressure experts are asking. Fair enough?”
“It may be fair enough,” Amalfi said. “But we don’t do pressure work; and we’ve already gotten in reports from the proxies we sent to Hern Six as soon as Lieutenant Lerner said that was where the job was. We don’t like the look of it. We don’t want it. We won’t take it at one hundred and twenty, we won’t take it at one hundred and
