Earthman, Come Home

III

IMT was a squat city, long rooted in the stony soil, and as changeless as a forest of cenotaphs. Its quietness, too, was like the quietness of a cemetery, and the Proctors, carrying the fanlike wands of their office, the pierced fans with the jagged tops and the little jingling tags, were much like friars moving among the dead.

The quiet, of course, could be accounted for very simply. The serfs were not allowed to speak within the walls of IMT unless spoken to, and there were comparatively few Proctors in the city to speak to them. For Amalfi there was also the imposed silence of the slaughtered millions of Thor V blanketing the air. He wondered if the Proctors could still hear that raw silence.

The naked brown figure of a passing serf glanced furtively at the party, saw Heldon, and raised a finger to its lips in the established gesture of respect. Heldon barely nodded. Amalfi, necessarily, took no overt notice at all, but he thought: Shh, is it? I don’t wonder. But it’s too late, Heldon. The secret is out.

Karst trudged behind them, shooting an occasional wary glance at Heldon from under his tangled eyebrows. His caution was wasted on the Proctor. They passed through a decaying public square, in the center of which was an almost-obliterated statuary group, so weatherworn as to have lost any integrity it might ever have had; integrity, Amalfi mused, is not a characteristic of monuments. Except to a sharp eye, the mass of stone on the old pedestal might have been nothing but a moderately large meteorite, riddled with the twisting pits characteristic of siderites.

Amalfi could see, however, that the spaces sculpted out of the interior of that block of stone, after the fashion of an ancient sculptor named Moore, had once had meaning. Inside that stone there had once stood a powerful human figure, with its foot resting upon the neck of a slighter. Once, evidently, IMT had actually been proud of the memory of Thor V—

“Ahead is the Temple,” Heldon said suddenly. “The machinery is beneath it. There should be no one of interest in it at this hour, but I had best make sure. Wait here.”

“Suppose somebody notices us?” Amalfi said.

“This square is usually avoided. Also, I have men posted around it to divert any chance traffic. If you don’t wander away, you’ll be safe.”

The Proctor strode away toward the big domed building and disappeared abruptly down an alleyway. Behind Amalfi, Karst began to sing, in an exceedingly scratchy voice, but very softly: a folk-tune of some kind, obviously. The melody, which once had had to do with a town named Kazan, was too many thousands of years old for Amalfi to recognize it, even had he not been tune-deaf. Nevertheless, the mayor abruptly found himself listening to Karst, with the intensity of a hooded owl sonar-tracking a field mouse, Karst chanted:

“Wild on the wind rose the righteous wrath of Maalvin, Borne like a brand to the burning of the Barrens. Arms of hands of rebels perished then, Stars nor moons bedecked that midnight, IMT made the sky Fall!”

Seeing that Amalfi was listening to him, Karst stopped with an apologetic gesture. “Go ahead, Karst,” Amalfi said at once. “How does the rest go?”

“There isn’t time. There are hundreds of verses; every singer adds at least one of his own to the song. It is always supposed to end with this one:

“Black with their blood was the brick of that barrow, Toppled the tall towers, crushed to the clay. None might live who flouted Maalvin, Earth their souls spurned spaceward, wailing, IMT made the sky Fair.”

“That’s great,” Amalfi said grimly. “We really are in the soup-just about in the bottom of the bowl, I’d say. I wish I’d heard that song a week ago.”

“What does it tell you?” Karst said, wonderingly. “It is only an old legend.”

“It tells me why Heldon wants his spindizzies fixed. I knew he wasn’t telling me the straight goods, but that old Laputa gag never occurred to me—more recent cities aren’t strong enough in the keel to risk it. But with all the mass this burg packs, it can squash us flat —and we’ll just have to sit still for it!”

“I don’t understand—”

“It’s simple enough. Your prophet Maalvin used IMT like a nutcracker. He picked it up, flew it over the opposition, and let it down again. The trick was dreamed up away before spaceflight, as I recall. Karst, stick close to me; I may have to get a message to you under Heldon’s eye, so watch for—Sst, here he comes.”

The Proctor had been uttered by the alleyway like an untranslatable word. He came rapidly toward them across the crumbling flagstones.

“I think,” Heldon said, “that we are now ready for your valuable aid, Mayor Amalfi.”

Heldon put his foot on a jutting pyramidal stone and pressed down. Amalfi watched carefully, but nothing happened. He swept his flash around the featureless stone walls of the underground chamber, then back again to the floor. Impatiently, Heldon kicked the little pyramid.

This time, there was a protesting rumble. Very slowly, and with a great deal of scraping, a block of stone perhaps five feet long by two feet wide began to rise, as if pivoted or hinged at the far end. The beam of the mayor’s flash darted into the opening, picking out a narrow flight of steps.

“I’m disappointed,” Amalfi said. “I expected to see Jonathan Swift come out from under it. All right, Heldon, lead on.”

The Proctor went cautiously down the steps, holding his skirts up against the dampness. Karst came last, bent low under the heavy pack, his arms hanging laxly. The steps felt cold and slimy through the thin soles of the mayor’s sandals, and little trickles of moisture ran down the close-pressing walls. Amalfi felt a nearly intolerable urge to light a cigar; he could almost taste the powerful aromatic odor cutting through the humidity. But he needed his hands free.

He was almost ready to hope that the spindizzies had been ruined by all this moisture, but he discarded the idea even as it was forming in the back of his mind. That would be the easy way out, and in the end it would be disastrous. If the Okies were ever to call this planet their own, IMT had to be made to fly again.

How to keep it off his own city’s back, once IMT was aloft, he still was unable to figure. He was piloting, as he invariably wound up doing in the pinches, by the seat of his pants.

The steps ended abruptly in a small chamber, so small, chilly and damp that it was little more than a cave. The flashlight’s eye roved, came to rest on an oval doorway sealed off with dull metal—almost certainly lead. So IMT’s spindizzies ran “hot”? That was already bad news; it backdated them far beyond the year to which Amalfi had tentatively assigned them.

“That it?” he said.

“That is the way,” Heldon agreed. He twisted an inconspicuous handle.

Ancient fluorescents flickered into bluish life as the valve drew back, and glinted upon the humped backs of machines. The air was quite dry here—evidently the big chamber was kept sealed—and Amalfi could not repress a fugitive pang of disappointment. He scanned the huge machines, looking for control panels or homologues thereof.

“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.