The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (13 page)

"Well?" Heldon said harshly. He seemed to be under
considerable strain. It occurred to Amalfi that Heldon's strategy might well be
a personal flier, not an official policy of the Great Nine; in which case it
might go hard with Heldon if his colleagues found him in this particular place
of all places with an Okie. "Aren't you going to make any tests?"

"Certainly," Amalfi said. "I was a little
taken aback at their size, that's all."

"They are old, as you know," said the Proctor.
"Doubtless they are built much larger nowadays."

That, of course, wasn't so. Modern spindizzies ran less than
a tenth the size of these. The comment cast new doubt upon Heldon's exact
status. Amalfi had assumed that the Proctor would not let him touch the
spindizzies except to inspect; that there would be plenty of men in IMT capable
of making repairs from detailed instructions; that Heldon himself, and any
Proctor, would know enough physics to comprehend whatever explanations Amalfi
might proffer. Now he was not so sure—and on this question hung the amount of
tinkering Amalfi would be able to do without being detected.

The mayor mounted a metal stair to a catwalk which ran along
the tops of the generators, then stopped and looked down at Karst. "Well,
stupid, don't just stand there," he said. "Come on up, and bring the
stuff."

Obediently Karst shambled up the metal steps, Heldon at his
heels. Amalfi ignored them to search for an inspection port in the casing,
found one, and opened it. Beneath was what appeared to be a massive rectifying
circuit, plus the amplifier for some kind of monitor-probably a digital
computer. The amplifier involved more vacuum tubes than Amalfi had ever before
seen gathered into one circuit, and there was a separate power supply to
deliver D.C. to their heaters. Two of the tubes were each as big as his fist.

Karst bent over and slung the pack to the deck. Amalfi drew
out of it a length of slender black cable and thrust its double prongs into a
nearby socket. A tiny bulb on the other end glowed neon-red.

"Your computer's still running," he reported.
"Whether it's still sane or not is another matter. May I turn the main
banks on, Heldon?"

"I'll turn them on," the Proctor said. He went
down the stairs again and across the chamber.

Instantly Amalfi was murmuring through motionless lips into
the inspection port. The result to Karst's ears must have been rather weird.
The technique of speaking without moving one's lips is simply a matter of
substituting consonants which do not involve lip movement, such as
"y," for those which do, such as "w." If the resulting
sound is picked up from inside the resonating chamber, as it is with a
throat-mike, it is not too different from ordinary speech, only a bit more
blurred. Heard from outside the speaker's nasopharyngeal cavity, however, it
has a tendency to sound like Japanese Pidgin.

"Yatch Heldon, Karst. See yhich syitch he kulls, an'
nenorize its location. Got it? Good."

The tubes lit. Karst nodded once, very slightly. The Proctor
watched from below while Amalfi inspected the lines.

"Will they work?" he called. His voice was
muffled, as though he were afraid to raise it as high as he thought necessary.

"I think so. One of these tubes is gassing, and there
may have been some failures here and there. Better check the whole lot before
you try anything ambitious. You do have facilities for testing tubes, don't
you?"

Relief spread visibly over Heldon's face, despite his
obvious effort to betray nothing. Probably he could have fooled any of his own
people without effort, but for Amalfi, who like any Okie mayor could follow the
parataxic "speech" of muscle interplay and posture as readily as he
could spoken dialogue, Heldon's expression was as clear as a signed confession.

"Certainly," the Proctor said. "Is that
all?"

"By no means. I think you ought to rip out about half
of these circuits, and install transistors wherever they can be used; we can
sell you the necessary germanium at the legal rate. You've got two or three
hundred tubes to a unit here, by my estimate, and if you have a tube failure in
flight . . . well, the only word that fits what would happen then is
blooey!"

"Will you be able to show us how?"

"Probably," the mayor said. "If you'll allow
me to inspect the whole system, I can give you an exact answer."

"All right," Heldon said. "But don't delay. I
can't count on more than another half-day at most."

This was better than Amalfi had expected—miles better. Given
that much time, he could trace at least enough of the leads to locate the
master control. That Heldon's expression failed totally to match the content of
his speech disturbed Amalfi profoundly, but there was nothing that he could do
that would alter that now. He pulled paper and stylus out of Karst's pack and
began to make rapid sketches of the wiring before him.

After he had a fairly clear idea of the first generator's
set-up, it was easier to block in the main features of the second. It took
time, but Heldon did not seem to tire.

The third spindizzy completed the picture, leaving Amalfi
wondering what the fourth one was for. It turned out to be a booster, designed
to compensate for the losses of the others wherever the main curve of their
output failed to conform to the specs laid down for it by the crude, over-all
regenerative circuit. The booster was located on the backside of the feedback
loop, behind the computer rather than ahead of it, so that all the computer's
corrections had to pass through it; the result, Amalfi was sure, would be a
small but serious "base surge" every time any correction was applied.
The spindizzies of IMT seemed to have been wired together by Cro-Magnon Man.

But they would fly the city. That was what counted.

Amalfi finished his examination of the booster generator and
straightened up, painfully, stretching the muscles of his back. He had no idea
how many hours he had consumed. It seemed as though months had passed. Heldon
was still watching him, deep blue circles under his eyes, but still wide awake
and watchful.

And Amalfi had found no point anywhere in the underground
chamber from which the spindizzies of IMT could be controlled. The control
point was somewhere else; the main control cable ran into a pipe which shot
straight up through the top of the cavern.

. . .
IMT made the sky  Fall
. . .

Amalfi yawned ostentatiously and bent back to fastening the
plate over the booster's observation port. Karst squatted near him, frankly
asleep, as relaxed and comfortable as a cat drowsing on a high ledge. Heldon
watched.

"I'm going to have to do the job for you," Amalfi
said. "It's really major; might take weeks."

"I thought you would say so," Heldon said.
"And I was glad to give you the time to find out. But I do not think we
will make any such replacements."

"You need 'em."

"Possibly. But obviously there is a big factor of
safety in the apparatus, or our ancestors would never have flown the city at
all. You will understand, Mayor Amalfi, that we cannot risk your doing
something to the machines which we cannot do ourselves, on the unlikely
assumption that you are increasing their efficiency. If they will run as they
are, that will have to be good enough."

"Oh, they'll run," Amalfi said. He began,
methodically, to pack up his equipment. "For a while. I'll tell you flatly
that they're not safe to operate, all the same."

Heldon shrugged and went down the spiral metal stairs to the
floor of the chamber. Amalfi rummaged in the pack a moment more. Then he
ostentatiously kicked Karst awake—and kicked hard, for he knew better than to
play-act with a born overseer for an audience—and motioned the serf to pick up
the bundle. They went down after Heldon.

The Proctor was smiling, and it was not a nice smile.
"Not safe?" he said. "No, I never supposed that they were. But I
think now that the dangers are mostly political."

"Why?" Amalfi damanded, trying to moderate his
breathing. He was suddenly almost exhausted; it had taken—how many hours? He
had no idea.

"Are you aware of the time, Mayor Amalfi?"

"About morning, I'd judge," Amalfi said dully,
jerking the pack more firmly onto Karst's drooping left shoulder. "Late,
anyhow."

"Very late," Heldon said. He was not disguising
his expression now. He was openly crowing. "The contract between your city
and mine expired at noon today. It is now nearly an hour after noon; we have
been here all night and morning. And your city is still on our soil, in
violation of the contract, Mayor Amalfi."

"An oversight—"

"No; a victory." Heldon drew a tiny silver tube
from the folds of his robe and blew into it. "Mayor Amalfi, you may
consider yourself a prisoner of war."

The little silver tube had made no audible sound, but there
were already ten men in the room. The mesotron rifles they carried were of an
ancient design, probably pre-Kammerman, like the spindizzies of IMT.

But, like the spindizzies, they looked as though they would
work.

Karst froze; Amalfi unfroze him by jabbing him
surreptitiously in the ribs with a finger, and began to unload the contents of
his own small pack into Karst's.

"You've called the Earth police, I suppose?" he
said.

"Long ago. That way of escape will be cut by now. Let
me say, Mayor Amalfi, that if you expected to find down here any controls that
you might disable—and I was quite prepared to allow you to search for them—you
expected too much stupidity from me."

Amalfi said nothing. He went on methodically repacking the
equipment.

"You are making too many motions, Mayor Amalfi. Put your
hands up in the air and turn around very slowly."

Amalfi put up his hands and turned. In each hand he held a
small black object about the size and shape of an egg.

"I expected only as much stupidity as I got," he
said conversationally. "You can see what I'm holding up there. I can and
will drop one or both of them if I'm shot. I may drop them anyhow. I'm tired of
your back-cluster ghost town."

Heldon snorted. "Explosives? Gas? Ridiculous; nothing
so small could contain enough energy to destroy the city; and you have no
masks. Do you take me for a fool?"

"Events prove you one," Amalfi said steadily.
"The possibility was quite large that you would try to ambush me, once you
had me in the city. I could have forestalled that by bringing a guard with me.
You haven't met my perimeter police; they're tough boys, and they've been off
duty so long that they'd love the chance to tangle with your palace crew.
Didn't it occur to you that I left my city without a bodyguard only because I
had less cumbersome ways of protecting myself?"

"Eggs," Heldon said scornfully.

"As a matter of fact, they
are
eggs; the black
color is an annaline stain, put on the shells as a warning. They contain chick
embryos inoculated with a two-hour alveolytic mutated Terrestrial
rickettsialpox—a new air-borne strain developed in our own BW lab. Free space
makes a wonderful laboratory for that kind of trick; an Okie town specializing
in agronomy taught us the techniques a couple of centuries back. Just a couple
of eggs—but if I were to drop them, you would have to crawl on your belly
behind me all the way back to my city to get the antibiotic shot that's
specific for the disease; we developed that ourselves, too."

There was a brief silence, made all the more empty by the
hoarse breathing of the Proctor. The armed men eyed the black eggs uneasily,
and the muzzles of their rifles wavered out of line. Amalfi had chosen his
weapon with great care; static feudal societies classically are terrified by
the threat of plague—they have seen so much of it.

"Impasse," Heldon said at last. "All right,
Mayor Amalfi. You and your slave have safe-conduct from this chamber—"

"From the building. If I hear the slightest sound of
pursuit up the stairs, I'll chuck these down on you. They burst hard, by the
way— the virus generates a lot of gas in chick-embryo medium."

"Very well," Heldon said, through his teeth.
"From the building, then. But you have won nothing, Mayor Amalfi. If you
can get back to your city, you'll be just in time to be an eyewitness of the
victory of IMT—the victory you helped make possible. I think you'll be
surprised at how thorough we can be."

"No, I won't," Amalfi said, in a flat, cold, and
quite merciless voice. "I know all about IMT, Heldon. This is the end of
the line for the Mad Dogs. When you die, you and your whole crew of
Interstellar Master Traders,
remember Thor V."

Heldon turned the color of unsized paper, and so,
surprisingly, did at least four of his riflemen. Then the blood began to rise
in the Proctor's plump, fungoid cheeks. "Get out," he croaked, almost
inaud-ibly. Then, suddenly, at the top of his voice: "Get out!
Get
out!"

Juggling the eggs casually, Amalfi walked toward the lead
radiation-lock. Karst shambled after him, cringing as he passed Heldon. Amalfi
thought that the serf might be overdoing it, but Heldon did not notice; Karst
might as well have been—a horse.

The lead plug swung to, blocking out Heldon's furious,
frightened face and the glint of the fluorescents on the ancient spindizzies.
Amalfi plunged one hand into Karst's pack, depositing one egg in the
silicone-foam nest from which he had taken it, and withdrew the hand again
grasping an ugly Schmeisser acceleration-pistol. This he thrust into the
waistband of his breeches.

"Up the stairs, Karst. Fast. I had to shave it pretty
fine. Go on, I'm right behind you. Where would the controls for those machines
be, by your guess? The control lead went up through the roof of that
cavern."

"On the top of the Temple," Karst said. He was
mounting the narrow steps in huge bounds, but it did not seem to cost him the
slightest effort. "Up there is Star Chamber, where the Great Nine meets.
There isn't any way to get to it that I know."