The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (10 page)

"Karst, will you return before night?" the woman
cried.

Karst did not answer. Amalfi began to lead the way back
toward the city. Hazleton started down the far side of the rise after them, but
something moved him to look back again at the little scrap of farm. The woman's
head had fallen forward again, the wind stirring the tangled curtain of her
hair. She was leaning heavily into the galling traces, and the plow was again
beginning to cut its way painfully through the stony soil. There was now, of
course, nobody to guide it.

"Boss," Hazleton said into the throat-mike,
"are you listening?"

"I'm listening."

"I don't think I want to snitch a planet from these
people."

Amalfi didn't answer; he knew well enough that there was no
answer. The Okie city would never go aloft again. This planet was home. There
was no place else to go.

The voice of the woman, crooning as she plowed, dwindled
behind them. Her song droned monotonously over unseen and starving children: a
lullaby. Hazleton and Amalfi had fallen from the sky to rob her of everything
but the stony and now unharvestable soil. It was Amalfi's hope to return her
something far more valuable.

It had been the spindizzy, of course, which had scooped up
the cities of Earth—and later, of many other planets—and hurled them into
space. Two other social factors, however, had made possible the roving, nomadic
culture of the Okies, a culture which had lasted more than three thousand
years, and which probably would take another five hundred to disintegrate
completely.

One of these was personal immortality. The conquest of
so-called "natural" death had been virtually complete by the time the
technicians on the Jovian Bridge had confirmed the spindizzy principle, and the
two went together like hand in spacemitt. Despite the fact that the spindizzy
would drive a ship—or a city—at speeds enormously faster than that of light, interstellar
flight still consumed finite time. The vastness of the galaxy was sufficient to
make long flights consume lifetimes even at top spindizzy speed.

But when death yielded to the antiathapic drugs, there was
no longer any such thing as a "lifetime" in the old sense.

The other factor was economic: the rise of the metal
germanium as the jinni of electronics. Long before flight in deep space became
a fact, the metal had assumed a fantastic value on Earth. The opening of the
interstellar frontier drove its price down to a manageable level, and gradually
it emerged as the basic, stable monetary standard of space trade. Coinage in
conductor metals, whose value had always been largely a matter of pressure
politics, became extinct; it became impossible to maintain, for instance, the
fiction that silver was precious, when it lay about in such flagrant profusion
in the rocks of every newly-discovered Earthlike planet. The semiconductor
germanium became the coin of the star-man's realm.

And after three thousand years, personal immortality and the
germanium standard joined forces to destroy the Okies.

It had always been inevitable that the germanium standard
would not last. The time was bound to come when the metal would be synthesized
cheaply, or a substance even more versatile would be found, or some temporary
center of trade would corner a significant fraction of the money in
circulation. It was not even necessary to predict specifically how the crisis
would occur, to be able to predict what it would do to the economy of the
galaxy. Had it happened a little earlier, before the economies of thousands of
star-systems had become grounded in the standard, the effect probably would
have been only temporary.

But when the germanium standard finally collapsed, it took
with it the substrate in which the Okies had been imbedded. The semiconductor
base was relegated to the same limbo which had claimed the conductor-metal
base. The most valuable nonconductors in the galaxy were the antiathapic drugs;
the next currency was based on a drug standard.

As a standard it was excellent, passing all the tests that a
coinage is supposed to meet. The drugs could be indefinitely diluted for small
change; they had never been synthesized, and any other form of counterfeiting
could be detected easily by bio-assay and other simple tests; they were very
rare; they were universally needed; their sources of supply were few enough in
number to be readily monitored.

Unfortunately, the star-cruising Okies needed the drugs
as
drugs.
They could not afford to use them as money.

From that moment on, the Okies were no longer the collective
citizens of a nomadic culture. They were just interstellar bums. There was no
place for them in the galaxy any more.

Outside the galaxy, of course, the Okie commerce lanes had
never penetrated—

The city was old—unlike the men and women who manned it, who
had merely lived a long time, which is quite a different thing. And like any
old intelligence, its past sins lay very near the surface, ready for review
either in nostalgia or in self-accusation at the slightest cue. It was
difficult these days to get any kind of information out of the City Fathers
without having to submit to a lecture, couched in as high a moral tone as was
possible to machines whose highest morality was survival.

Amalfi knew well enough what he was letting himself in for
when he asked the City Fathers for a review of the Violations Docket. He got
it, and in bells—big bells. The City Fathers gave him everything, right down to
the day a dozen centuries ago when they had discovered that nobody had dusted
the city's ancient subways since the city had first gone into space. That had
been the first time the Okies had heard that the city had ever had any subways.

But Amalfi stuck to the job, though his right ear ached with
the pressure of the earphone. Out of the welter of minor complaints and wistful
recollections of missed opportunities, certain things came through clearly and
urgently.

The city had never been officially cleared of its failure to
observe the "Vacate" order the cops had served on it during the
reduction of Utopia. Later, during the same affair, the city had been hung with
a charge of technical treason—not as serious as it sounded, but subject to
inconvenient penalties—while on the neighboring planet of Hrunta, and had left
the scene with the charge still on the docket. There had been a small trick
pulled there, too, which the cops could hardly have forgotten: while it had not
been illegal, it had created laughter at the expense of the cops in every Okie
wardroom in the galaxy, and cops seldom like to be laughed at.

Then there was the moving of He. The city had fulfilled its
contract with that planet to the letter, but unfortunately that could never be
proven; He was now well on its way across the intergalactic gap toward
Andromeda, and could not testify on the city's behalf. As far as the cops knew,
the city had destroyed He, a notion the cops would be no less likely to accept
simply because it was ridiculous.

Worst of all, however, was the city's participation in the
March on Earth. The March had been a tragedy from beginning to end, and few of
the several hundred Okie cities which had taken part in it had survived it. It
had been a product of the galaxy-wide depression which had followed the collapse
of the germanium standard. Amalfi's city —already accused of several crimes in
the star-system where the March had started, crimes which as a matter of fact
the city had actually been forced to commit—had gone along because it had had
no better choice, and had done what it could to change the March from a mutual
massacre to a collective bargaining session; but the massacre had occurred all
the same. No one city, not even Amalfi's, could have made its voice heard above
the long roar of galactic collapse.

There was the redeeming fact that the city, during the
March, had found and extirpated one of the last residues of the Vegan tyranny.

But it could never be proven: like the affair on He, the
city had done so thorough a job that even the evidence was gone irrevocably.

Amalfi sighed. In the end, it appeared that the Earth cops
would remember Amalfi's city for two things only.
One:
The city had a
long Violations Docket, and still existed to be brought to book on it.
Two:
The
city had gone out toward the Greater Magellanic, just as a far older and
blacker city had done centuries before—the city which had perpetrated the
massacre on Thor V, the city whose memory still stank in the nostrils of cops
and surviving Okies alike.

Amalfi shut off the City Fathers in mid-reminiscence and
removed the phone from his aching ear. The control boards of the city stretched
before him, still largely useful, but dead forever in one crucial bloc— the
bank that had once flown the city from star to new star. The city was grounded;
it had no choice now but to accept, and then win, this one poor planet for its
own.

If
the cops would let it.
The Magellanic Clouds were
moving steadily and with increasing velocity away from the home galaxy; the gap
was already so large that the city had had to cross it by using a dirigible
planet as a booster-stage. It would take the cops time to decide that they
should make that enormously long flight in pursuit of one miserable Okie. But
in the end they would make that decision. The cleaner the home galaxy became of
Okies—and there was no doubt but that the cops had by now broken up the
majority of the space-faring cities—the greater the urge would become to track
down the last few stragglers.

Amalfi had no faith in the ability of a satellite starcloud
to outrun human technology. By the time the cops were ready to cross from the
home lens to the Greater Magellanic, they would have the techniques with which
to do it, and techniques far less clumsy than those Amalfi's city had used. If
the cops wanted to chase the Greater Magellanic, they would find ways to catch
it. If—

Amalfi took up the earphone again. "Question," he
said. "Will the need to catch us be urgent enough to produce the necessary
techniques in time?"

The City Fathers hummed, drawn momentarily from their
eternal mulling over the past. At last they said:

"YES, MAYOR AMALFI. BEAR IN MIND THAT WE ARE NOT ALONE
IN THIS CLOUD. REMEMBER THOR V."

There it was: the ancient slogan that had made Okies hated
even on planets that had never seen an Okie city, and could never expect to.
There was only the smallest chance that the city which had wrought the Thor V
atrocity had made good its escape to this Cloud; it had all happened a long
time ago. But even the narrow chance, if the City Fathers were right, would
bring the cops here sooner or later, to destroy Amalfi's own city in expiation
of that still-burning crime.

Remember Thor V.
No city would be safe until that
raped and murdered world could be forgotten. Not even out here, in the virgin
satellites of the home lens.

"Boss? Sorry, we didn't know you were busy. But we've
got an operating schedule set up, as soon as you're ready to look at it."

"I'm ready right now, Mark," Amalfi said, turning
away from the boards. "Hello, Dee. How do you like your planet?"

The former Utopian girl smiled. "It's beautiful,"
she said simply.

"For the most part, anyway," Hazleton agreed.
"This heath is an ugly place, but the rest of the land seems to be
excellent—much better than you'd think it from the way it's being farmed. The tiny
little fields they break it up into here just don't do it justice, and even I
know better cultivation methods than these serfs do."

"I'm not surprised," Amalfi said. "It's my
theory that the Proctors maintain their power partly by preventing the spread
of any knowledge about farming beyond the most rudimentary kind. That's also
the most rudimentary kind of politics, as I don't need to tell you."

"On the politics," Hazelton said evenly,
"we're in disagreement. While that's ironing itself out, the business of
running the city has to go on."

"All right," Amalfi said. "What's on the
docket?"

"I'm having a small plot on the heath, next to the
city, turned over and conditioned for some experimental plantings, and
extensive soil tests have already been made. That's purely a stopgap, of
course. Eventually we'll have to expand onto good land. I've drawn up a
tentative contract of lease between the city and the Proctors, which provides
for us to rotate ownership geographically so as to keep displacement of the serfs
at a minimum, and at the same time opens a complete spectrum of seasonal
plantings to us—essentially it's the old Limited Colony contract, but heavily
weighted in the direction of the Proctors' prejudices. There's no doubt in my
mind but that they'll sign it. Then-"

"They won't sign it," Amalfi said. "They
can't even be shown it. Furthermore, I want everything you've put into your
experimental plot here on the heath yanked out."

Hazleton put a hand to his forehead in frank exasperation.
"Boss," he said, "don't tell me that we're
still
not at
the end of the old squirrel-cage routine—intrigue, intrigue, and then more
intrigue. I'm sick of it, I'll tell you that directly. Isn't two thousand years
enough for you? I thought we had come to this planet to settle down!"

"We did. We will. But as you reminded me yourself
yesterday, there are other people in possession of this planet at the
moment-people we can't legally push out. As matters stand right now, we can't
give them the faintest sign that we mean to settle here; they're already
intensely suspicious of that very thing, and they're watching us for evidence
of it every minute."

"Oh, no," Dee said. She came forward swiftly and
put a hand on Amalfi's shoulder. "John, you promised us after the March
was over that we were going to make a home here. Not necessarily on this
planet, but somewhere in the Cloud. You promised, John."