CHAPTER FIVE: Murphy

 

A SPINDIZZY going sour makes the galaxy's most unnerving noise. The top range of the sound is inaudible, but it feels like a multiple toothache. Just below that, there is a screech like metal tearing, which blends smoothly into a composite cataract of plate glass, slate, and boulders; this is the middle register. After that, there is a painful gap in the sound's spectrum, and the rest of the noise comes into one's ears again with a hollow round dinosaurian sob and plummets on down into the subsonics, ending in frequencies which induce diarrhea and an almost unconquerable urge to bite one's thumbs.

The noise was coming, of course, from the Twenty-third Street spindizzy, but it permeated the whole city. It was tolerable only so long as the hold which contained the moribund driver was kept sealed. Amalfi knew better than to open that hold. He surveyed the souring machine via instruments, and kept the audio tap prudently closed. The sound fraction which was thrumming through the city's walls was bad enough, even as far up as the control chamber.

Hazleton's hand came over his left shoulder, stabbing a long finger at the recording thermocouple.

"She's beginning to smoke now. Damned if I know how she's lasted this long. The model was two hundred years old when we took it aboard-and the repair job I did on He was only an emergency rig."

"What can we do?" Amalfi said. He did not bother to look around; the city manager's moods were his own second nature. They had lived together a long time-long enough to learn what learning is, long enough to know that, just as habit is second nature, so nature-the seven steps from chance to meaning-is first habit. The hand which rested upon Amalfi's right shoulder told him all he needed to know about Hazleton at this moment. "We can't shut her down."

"If we don't, she'll blow for good and all. That hold's hot already."

"Hot and howling. .. . Let me think a minute."

Hazleton waited. After another moment, Amalfi said, "We'll keep her shoving. If the City Fathers can push this much juice through her, maybe they can push just a little more. Maybe enough to get us down to a reasonable cruising speed. Besides-we couldn't jury-rig that spindizzy again. It's radiating all up and down the line. The City Fathers could shut her down if we ordered it, but it'd take human beings to repair her and re-tune the setup stages. And it's too late for that."

"It'll be a year before anything alive can go into that hold," Hazleton agreed gloomily. "All right. How's our velocity now?"

"Negligible, with reference to the galaxy as a whole. But as far as the Acolyte stars proper are concerned- we'd shoot through the whole cluster at about eight times the city's top speed if we stopped decelerating now. It's going to be damned tight, that's for sure, Mark."

"Excuse me," Dee's voice said behind them. She was hesitating just beyond the threshold of the lift shaft. "Is there something wrong? If you're busy—"

"No busier than usual," Hazleton said. "Just wondering about our usual baby."

"The Twenty-third Street machine. I could tell by the curvature of your spines. Why don't you have it replaced and get it over with?"

Amalfi and the city manager grinned at each other, but the mayor's grin was short-lived.

"Well, why not?" he said suddenly.

"My gods, boss, the cost," Hazleton said with incredulity. "The City Fathers would impeach you for suggesting it." He donned the helmet. "Treasury check," he told the microphone.

"They've never had to run her all by themselves under max overdrive before now. I predict that they'll emerge from the experience clamoring to have her replaced, even if we don't eat for a year to pay for it. Besides, we should have the money, for once. We dug a lot of germanium while we were setting up He to be de-wobbled. Maybe the time really has come when we can afford a replacement."

Dee came forward swiftly, motes of light on the move in her eyes. "John, can that be true?" she said. "I thought we'd lost a lot on the Hevian contract."

"Well, we're not rich. We would have been, I'm still convinced, if we'd been able to harvest the anti-agathics on a decent scale."

"But we didn't," Dee said. "We had to run away."

"We ran away. But in terms of germanium alone, we can call ourselves well off. Well enough off to buy a new spindizzy. Right, Mark?"

Hazleton listened to the City Fathers a moment more, and then took off the bone-mikes. "It looks that way," he said. "Anyhow, we can easily cover the price of an overhaul, or maybe even of a reconditioned second-hand machine of a later model. Depends on whether or not the Acolyte stars have a service planet, and what the garage fees are there."

"The fees should be low enough to keep us solvent," Amalfi said, thrusting his lower lip out thoughtfully. "The Acolyte area is a backwater, but it was settled originally by refugees from an anti-Earth pogrom in the Malar system-an aftermath of the collapse of Vega, as I recall. There's a record of the pogrom in the libraries of most planets-you reminded me of it, Mark: the Night of Hadjji-which means that the Acolytes aren't far enough away from normal trading areas to be proper frontier stars."

He paused, and his frown deepened. "Now that I come to think of it, the Acolytes were an important minor source of power metals for part of this limb of the galaxy at one time. They'll have at least one garage planet, Mark, depend on it. They may even have work for the city to do."

"Sounds good," Hazleton said. "Too good, maybe. Actually, we've got to sit down in the Acolytes, boss, because that Twenty-third Street machine won't carry us beyond them at anything above a snail's pace. I asked the City Fathers that while I was checking the treasury. This is the end of the line for that gadget."

He sounded tired. Amalfi looked at him.

"That's not what's worrying you, Mark," he said. "We've always had that problem waiting for us somewhere in the future, and it isn't one that's difficult of solution. What's the real trouble? Cops, maybe?"

"All right, it's cops," Hazleton said, a little sullenly. "I know we're a long way away from any cops that know us by name. But have you any idea of the total amount of unpaid fines we're carrying? And I don't see how we can assume that any amount of distance is 'too great' for the cops to follow us if they really want us-and it seems that they do."

"Why, Mark?" Dee said. "After all, we've done nothing serious."

"It piles up," Hazleton said. "We haven't been called on our Violations docket in a long time. When we're finally caught, we'll have to pay in full, and if that were to happen now, we'd be bankrupt."

"Pooh," Dee said. Like anyone more or less recently naturalized, her belief in the capacities of her adopted city-state was as finite as it was unbounded. "We could find work and build up a new treasury. It might be hard going for a while, but we'd survive it. People have been broke before, and come through it whole."

"People, yes; cities, no," Amalfi said. "Mark is right on that point, Dee. According to the law, a bankrupt city must be dispersed. It's essentially a humane law, in that it prevents desperate mayors and city managers from taking bankrupt cities out again on long job-hunting trips, during which half of the Okies on board will die just because of the stubbornness of the people in charge."

"Exactly," Hazleton said.

"Even so, I think it's a bogey," Amalfi said gently. "I'll grant you your facts, Mark, but not your extrapolation. The cops can't possibly follow us from He's old star to here. We didn't know ourselves that we'd wind up among the Acolytes. I doubt that the cops were even able to plot He's course, let alone our subsequent one. Isn't that so?"

"Of course. But—"

"And if the Earth cops alerted every local police force in the galaxy to every petty offender," Amalfi continued with quiet implacability, "no local police force would ever be able to do any policing. They'd be too busy, recording and filing and checking new alerts coming in constantly from a million inhabited planets. Their own local criminals would mostly go free, to become a burden upon the filing systems of every other inhabited area.

"So, believe me, Mark, the cops around here have never even heard of us. We're approaching a normal situation, that's all. The Acolyte cops haven't the slightest reason to treat us as anything, but just another wandering, law abiding Okie city-and after all, that's really all we are."

"Good," Hazleton said, his chest collapsing to expel a heavy sigh

Amalfi heard neither the word nor the sigh.

At the same instant, the big master screen, which had been showing the swelling, granulating mass of the Acolyte star cluster, flashed blinding scarlet over its whole surface, and the scrannel shriek of a police whistle made the air in the control room seethe.

The cops swaggered and stomped on board the Okie city, and into Amalfi's main office in City Hall, as if the nothingness of the marches of the galaxy were their personal property. Their uniforms were not the customary dress coveralls-actually, space-suit liners-of the Earth police, however. Instead, they were flashy black affairs, trimmed with silver braid, Sam Browne belt, and shiny boots. The blue-jowled thugs who had been jammed into these tight-fitting creations reminded Amalfi of a period which considerably antedated the Night of Hadjji-or any other event in the history of space flight.

And the thugs carried meson pistols. These heavy, cumbersome weapons could be held in one hand, but two hands were needed to fire them. They were very modern side arms to find in a border star cluster. They were only about a century out of date. This made them thoroughly up-to-date as far as the city's own armament was concerned.

The pistols told Amalfi several other things that he needed to know. Their existence here could mean only one thing: that the Acolytes had had a recent contact with one of those pollinating bees of the galaxy, an Okie city. Furthermore, the probability was not high that it had been the sole Okie contact the Acolytes had had for a long time, as Amalfi might otherwise have assumed.

It took years to build up the technology to mass produce meson pistols so that ordinary cops could pack them. It took more years still, years spent in fairly frequent contact with other technologies, to make adoption of the pistol possible at all. The pistol, then, confirmed unusually frequent contact with other Okies, which, in turn, meant that there was a garage planet here, as Amalfi had hoped.

The pistol also told Amalfi something else, which he did not much like. The meson pistol was not a good antipersonnel weapon.

It was much more suitable for demolition work.

The cops could still swagger in Amalfi's office, but they could not stomp effectively. The floor was too thickly carpeted. Amalfi never used the ancient, plushy office, with its big black mahogany desk and other antiques, except for official occasions. The control tower was his normal on-duty habitat, but that was closed to non-citizens.

"What's your business?" the police lieutenant barked at Hazleton. Hazleton, standing beside the desk, said nothing, but merely jerked his head toward where Amalfi was seated, and resumed looking at the big screen back of the desk.

"Are you the mayor of this burg?" the lieutenant demanded.

"I am," Amalfi said, removing a cigar from his mouth and looking the lieutenant over with lidless eyes. He decided that he did not like the lieutenant. His rump was too big. If a man is going to be barrel-shaped, he ought to do a good job of it, as Amalfi had. Amalfi had no use for top-shaped men.

"All right, answer the question, Fatty. What's your business?"

"Petroleum geology."

"You're lying. You're not dealing with some isolated, type Four-Q podunk now, Okie. These are the Acolyte stars."

Hazleton looked with pointedly vague puzzlement at the lieutenant, and then back to the screen, which showed no stars at all within any reasonable distance.

The by-play was lost on the cop. "Petroleum geology isn't a business with Okies," he said. "You'd all starve if you didn't know how to mine and crack oil for food. Now give me a straight answer before I decide you're a vagrant and get tough."

Amalfi said evenly, "Our business is petroleum geology. Naturally we've developed some side lines since we've been aloft, but they're mostly natural outgrowths of petroleum geology-on which subject we happen to be experts. We trace and develop petroleum sources for planets which need the material." He eyed the cigar judiciously and thrust it back between his teeth. "Incidentally, Lieutenant, you're wasting your breath threatening us with a vagrancy charge. You know as well as we do that vagrancy laws are specifically forbidden by article one of the Constitution."

"Constitution?" the cop laughed. "If you mean the Earth Constitution, we don't have much contact with Earth out here. These are the Acolyte stars, see? Next question: have you any money?"

"Enough."

"How much is enough?"

"If you want to know whether or not we have operating capital, our City Fathers will give you the statutory yes or no answer if you can give them the data on your system that they'll need to make the calculation. The answer will almost assuredly be yes. We're not required to report our profit pool to you, of course."

"Now look," the lieutenant said. "You don't need to play the space lawyer with me. All I want to do is get off this town. If you've got dough, I can clear you-that is, if you got it through legal channels."

"We got it on a planet called He, some distance from here. We were hired by the Hevians to rub out a jungle which was bothering them. We did it by regularizing their axis."

"Yeah?" the cop said. "Regularized their axis, eh? I guess that must have been some job."

"It was," Amalfi said gravely. "We had to setacetus on He's left-hand frannistan."

"Gee. Will your City Fathers show me the contract? Okay, then. Where are you going?"

"To garage; we've a bum spindizzy. After that, out again. You people look like you're well past the stage where you've much use for oil."

"Yeah, we're pretty modernized here, not like some of these border areas you hear about. These are the Acolyte stars." Suddenly it seemed to occur to him that he had somehow lost ground; his voice turned brusque again. "So maybe you're all right, Okie. I'll give you a pass through. Just be sure you go where you say you're going, and don't make stopovers, understand? If you watch your step, maybe I can lend you a hand here and there."

Amalfi said, "That's very good of you, Lieutenant. We'll try not to have to bother you, but just in case we do have to call on you, who shall we ask for?"

"Lieutenant Lerner, Forty-fifth Border Security Group."

"Good. Oh, before you go, I collect medal ribbons- every man to his hobby, you know. And that royal violet one of yours is quite unusual-I speak as a connoisseur. Would you consent to sell it? It wouldn't be like giving up the medal itself-I'm sure your corps would issue you another ribbon."

"I don't know," Lieutenant Lerner said doubtfully. "It's against regs—"

"I realize that, and naturally I'd expect to cover any possible fine you might incur. (Mark, would you call down for a check for five hundred Oc dollars?) No sum I could offer you would really be sufficient to pay for a medal for which you risked your life, but five hundred Oc is all our City Fathers will allow me for hobbies this month. Could you do me the favor of accepting it?"

"Yeah, I guess so," the lieutenant said. He detached the bar of faded, dismal purple from over his pocket with clumsy eagerness and put it on the desk. A second later, Hazleton silently handed him the check, which he pocketed without seeming to notice it at all. "Well, be sure you keep a straight course, Okie. C'mon, you guys, let's get back to the. boat."

The three thugs eased themselves tentatively into the lift shaft and slithered down out of sight through the friction-field wearing expressions of sternly repressed alarm. Amalfi grinned. Quite obviously the principle of molar valence, and frictionators and other gadgets using the principle, were still generally unknown.

Hazleton walked over to the shaft and peered down. Then he said, "Boss, that damn thing is a good-conduct ribbon. The Earth cops issued them by the tens of thousands about three centuries ago to any rookie who could get up out of bed when the whistle blew three days running. Since when is it worth five hundred Oc?"

"Never, until now," Amalfi said tranquilly. "But the lieutenant wanted to be bribed, and it's always wise to appear to be buying something when you're bribing someone. I put the price so high because he'll have to split it with his men. If I hadn't offered the bribe, I'm sure he'd have wanted to look at our Violations docket."

"I figured that; and ours is none too clean, as I've been pointing out. But I think you wasted the money, Amalfi.

The Violations docket should have been the first thing he asked to see, not the last. Since he didn't ask for it at the beginning, he wasn't interested in it."

"That's probably exactly so," Amalfi admitted. He put the cigar back and pulled on it thoughtfully. "All right, Mark, what's the pitch? Suppose you tell me."

"I don't know yet. I can't square the maintenance of an alert guard, so many parsecs out from the actual Acolyte area, with that slob's obvious indifference to whether or not we might be on the shady side of the law-or even be bindlestiff. Hell, he didn't even ask who we were."

"That rules out the possibility that the Acolytes have been alerted against some one bindlestiff city."

"It does," Hazleton agreed. "Lerner was far too easily bribed, for that matter. Patrols that are really looking for something specific don't bribe, even in a fairly corrupt culture. It doesn't figure."

"And somehow," Amalfi said, pushing a toggle to off, "I don't think the City Fathers are going to be a bit of help. I had the whole conversation up to now piped down to them, but all I'm going to get out of them is a bawling out for spending money, and a catechism about my supposed hobby. They never have been able to make anything out of voice tone. Damn! We're missing something important, Mark, something that would be obvious once it hit us. Something absolutely crucial. And here we are plunging on toward the Acolytes without the faintest idea of what it is!"

"Boss," Hazleton said.

The cold flatness of his voice brought Amalfi swiveling around in his chair in a hurry. The city manager was looking up again at the big screen, on which the Acolyte stars had now clearly separated into individual points. "What is it, Mark?"

"Look there-in the mostly dark area on the far side of the cluster. Do you see it?"

"I see quite a lot of star-free space there, yes." Amalfi looked closer. "There's also a spectroscopic double, with a red dwarf standing out some distance from the other components—"

"You're warm. Now look at the red dwarf." There was also, Amalfi began to see, a faint smudge of green there, about as big as the far end of a pencil. The screen was keyed to show Okie cities in green, but no city could possibly be that big. The green smudge covered an area that would blank out an average Sol-type solar system.

Amalfi felt his big square front teeth beginning to bite his cigar in two. He took the dead object out of his mouth.

"Cities," he muttered. He spat, but the bitterness in his mouth did not seem to be tobacco juice after all. "Not one city. Hundreds."

"Yes," Hazleton said. "There's your answer, boss, or part of it. It's a jungle."

"An Okie jungle."

Amalfi gave the jungle, a wide berth, but he had O'Brian send proxies as soon as the city was safely down below top speed. Had he released the missiles earlier, they would have been left behind and lost, for they were only slightly faster than the city itself. Now they showed a fantastic and gloomy picture.

The empty area where the hobo cities had settled was well out at the edge of the Acolyte cluster, on the side toward the rest of the galaxy. The nearest star to the area, as Hazleton had pointed out, was a triple. It consisted of two type Go stars and a red dwarf, almost a double for the Soy-Alpha Centauri system. But there was one difference: the two Go stars were quite close to each other, constituting a spectroscopic doublet, separable visually only by the Dinwiddie circuits even at this relatively short distance; while the red dwarf had swung out into the empty area, and was now more than four light years away from its companions.

Around this tiny and virtually heatless fire, more than three hundred Okie cities huddled. On the screen they passed in an endless, boundaryless flood of green specks, like a river of fantastic asteroids, bobbing in space and passing and repassing each other in their orbits around the dwarf star. The concentration was heaviest near the central sun, which was so penurious of its slight radiation that it had been masked almost completely by the Dinwiddie code lights when Hazleton first spotted the jungle. But there were late comers in orbits as far out as three billion miles-spindizzy screens do not take kindly to being thrust into close contact with each other.

"It's frightening," Dee said, studying the screen intently.

"I knew there were other Okie cities, especially after we hit the bindlestiff. But so many! I could hardly have imagined three hundred in the whole galaxy."

"A gross underestimate," Hazleton said indulgently. "There were about 4ignteen thousand cities at the last census, weren't there, boss?"

"Yes," Amalfi said. He was as unable to look away from the screen as Dee. "But I know what Dee means. It scares the hell out of me, Mark. Something must have caused an almost complete collapse of the economy around this part of the galaxy. No other force could create a jungle of that kind. These bastardly Acolytes evidently have been exploiting it to draw Okies here, in order to hire the few they need on a competitive basis."

"At the lowest possible wages, in other words," Hazleton said. "But what for?"

"There you have me. Possibly they're trying to industrialize the whole cluster, to make themselves self-sufficient before the depression or whatever it is hits them. About all we can be sure of at this juncture is that we'd better get out of here the moment the new spindizzy gets put in. There'll be no decent work here."

"I'm not sure I agree," Hazleton said, redeploying his lanky, apparently universal-jointed limbs over his chair. "If they're industrializing here, it could mean that the depression is here, not anywhere else. Possibly they've overproduced themselves into a money shortage, especially if their distribution setup is as creaking, elaborate, and unjust as it usually is in these backwaters. If they're using a badly deflated dollar, we'll be sitting pretty."

Amalfi considered it. It seemed to hold up.

"We'll have to wait and see," he said. "You could well be right. But one cluster, even at its most booming stage, could never have hoped to support three hundred cities. The waste of technology involved would be terrific-and you don't attract Okies to a money-short area, you draw them from one."

"Not necessarily. Suppose there's an oversupply outside? Remember back in the Nationalist Era on Earth, artists and such low-income people used to leave the big Hamiltonian state, I've forgotten its name, to live in much smaller states where the currency was softer?"

"That was different. They had mixed coinage then—"

"Boys, may I break in on this bull session?" Dee said hesitantly, but with a trace of mockery in her voice. "It's getting a little over my head. Suppose this whole end of this star-limb has had its economy wrecked. How, I'll leave to you two; on Utopia, our economy was frozen at a fixed rate of turnover, and had been for as long as any of us could remember; so maybe I can be forgiven for not understanding what you're talking about. But in any case, inflation or deflation, we can always leave when we have our new spindizzy."

Amalfi shook his head heavily. "That," he said, "is what scares me, Dee. There are a hell of a lot of Okies in that jungle, and they can't all be suffering from defects in their driving equipment. If there were someplace they could go where times are better, why haven't they gone there? Why do they congregate in a jungle in this Godforsaken star cluster, for all the universe as if there were no place else where they could find work? Okies aren't sedentary, or sociable, either."

Hazleton began drumming his fingers lightly on the arm Of his chair, and hi$ eyes closed slightly. "Money is energy," he said. "Still, I can't say that I like that any better. The more I look at it, the more I think this is one fix we won't get out of by any amount of cute tricks. Maybe we should have stuck with He."

"Maybe."

Amalfi turned his attention back to the controls. Hazleton was subtle; but one consequence of his subtlety was that he intended to expend unnecessary amounts of time speculating about situations the facts of which would soon become evident in any case.

The city was now approaching the local garage world, which bore the unlikely name of Murphy, and maneuvering among the close-packed stars of the cluster was a job delicate enough to demand the mayor's own hand upon the space stick. The City Fathers, of course, could have' teetered the city through the conflicting gravitic fields to a safe landing on Murphy, but they would have taken a month at the job. Hazleton would have gone faster, but the City Fathers would have monitored his route all the way, and snatched control from him at the slightest transgression of the margins of error they had calculated. They were not equipped to respect short cuts.

Of course, they were also unequipped to appreciate the direct intuition of spatial distances and mass pressures which made Amalfi a master pilot. But over Amalfi they had no authority, except the ultimate authority of the revocation of his office.

As Murphy grew on the screen, technicians began to file into the control room, activating with personal keys desks which had been disconnected for more than three centuries-ever since the last new spindizzy had been brought on board. Readying the city's drive machinery for new equipment was a major project. Every other spindizzy on board would have to be retuned to the new machine. In the present case, the job would be further complicated by the radioactivity of the defective unit. While the garage-men should have special equipment to cope with that problem-de-gaussing, for instance, was the usual first step-no garage would know the machinery involved as well as the Okies who used it. Every city is unique.

Murphy, as Amalfi saw it on his own screen, was a commonplace enough world. It was just slightly above the size of Mars, but pleasanter to live on, since it was closer to its primary by a good distance.

But it looked deserted. As the city came closer, Amalfi could see the twenty-mile pockmarks which were the 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-this star cluster may well be the last stop that we'll ever make. Will you remember that?"

"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, halftracks, camel-backs, chutes, conveyors, bins, tanks, hoppers, pipelines, waldoes, spindizzies, 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 techie 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 exclusively on his feet, he would have detected the fact that only one other pair of feet was with him as soon as Hazleton had begun to catfoot it away.

"He'll be back-I hope," Amalfi said. "Look, friend, what we need is repair work. We've got a bad spindizzy in a hot hold. Can you haul it out and give us a replacement, preferably the newest model you've got?"

The garageman considered it. The problem seemed to appeal to him; his whole expression changed, so thoroughly that he looked almost friendly in his intimate ugliness.

"I've got a Six-R-Six in storage that might do, if you've got the refluxlaminated pediments to mount it on," he said slowly. "If you haven't, I've also a reconditioned B-C-Seven-Seven-Y that hums as sweetly as new. But I've never done any hot hauling before-didn't know spindizzies ever hotted up enough to notice. Anybody on board your burg that can give me a hand on decontamination?"

"Yes, it's all set up and ready to ride. Check the color of our money, and let's get on it."

"It'll take a little time to get a crew together," the garageman said. "By the way, don't let your men wander around. The cops don't like it.",

"I'll do my best."

The garageman scampered away, dodging in and out among the idle, rust-tinted machines. Amalfi watched him go, marveling anew at how quickly the born technician can be gulled into forgetting who he's working for, let alone how his work is going to be used. First you mention money-since techies are usually underpaid; you then cap that with a tough and inherently interesting problem- and you have your man. Amalfi was always happy when he met a pragmatist in the enemy's camp.

"Boss—"

Amalfi spun. "Where the hell have you been? Didn't you hear me say that this planet is probably taboo to tourists? If you'd been on hand when you were needed, you'd have heard the 'probably' knocked out of that statement-to say nothing of speeding matters considerably!"

"I'm aware of that," Hazleton said evenly. "I took a calculated risk-something you seem to have forgotten how to do, Amalfi. And it paid off. I've been over to that other city, and found out something that we needed to know. Incidentally, the graving docks around here are a mess. This one, and the one the other city is in, must be the only ones in operation for hundreds of miles. All the rest are nearly full or sand and rust and flaked concrete."

"And the other city?" Amalfi said very quietly.

"It's been garnisheed; there's no doubt about it. It's shabby and deserted. Half of it is being held up by buttressing, and it's got huts pitched in the streets. It's nearly a hulk. There's a crew over there putting it in some sort of operating order, but they're in no hurry, and they aren't doing a damn thing to make the city habitable-all they want it to do is run. It's not the city's own complement, obviously. Where they are, I'm afraid to think."

"There's considerable thinking you haven't done," Amalfi said. "The original crew is obviously in debtor's prison. The garage is putting the city in order for some kind of dirty job that they don't expect it to outlast-and that no city still free could be hired to do at any price."

"And what would that be?"

"Setting up a planethead on a gas giant," said Amalfi. "They want to work some low-density, ammonia-methane world with an ice core, a Jupiter-type planet, that they can't conquer any other way. It's my guess that they hope to use such a planethead as an inexhaustible source of poison gas."

"That's not your only guess," Hazleton said, his lips thinned. "I expect to be disciplined for wandering off, Amalfi, but I'm a big boy, and won't have rationalizations palmed off on me just to keep the myth of your omniscience going."

"I'm not omniscient," Amalfi said mildly. "I looked at the other city on the screen. And I looked at the instruments. You didn't. The instruments alone told me that almost nothing was going on in that city that was normal to Okie operation. They also told me that its spindizzies were being turned to produce a field which would burn them-out within a year, and they told me what that field was supposed to do-what kind of conditions it was supposed to resist.

"Spindizzy fields will bounce any fast-moving large aggregate of molecules. They won't much impede the passage of gases by osmosis. If you so drive a field as to exclude the smallest possible molecular exchange, even under a pressure of more than a million atmospheres, you destroy the machine. That set of conditions occurs only in one kind of situation, a situation no Okie would ever commit himself to for an instant: setting down on a gas giant. Obviously then, since the city was being readied for that kind of job, it had been garnisheed-it was now state property, and nobody cares about wasting state property."

"Once again," Hazleton said, "you might have told me that in time to prevent my taking my side jaunt. However, this time it's just as well you didn't, because I still haven't come to the main thing I discovered. Do you know the identity of that city?"

"No."

"Good for you for admitting it. I do. It's the city we heard about when it was in the building three centuries ago; the so-called all-purpose city. Even under all the junk and decay, the lines are there. These Acolytes are letting it rot where it makes a real difference, just to hot-rod it for one job only. We could take it away from them if we tried. I studied the plans when they were first published, and—"

He stopped. Amalfi turned toward where Hazleton was .looking. The garageman was coming back at a dead run. He had a meson pistol in one hand.

"I'm convinced," Amalfi said swiftly. "Can you get over there again without being observed? This looks to me like trouble."

"Yes, I can. There's a—"

"'Yes' is enough for now. Tune our City Fathers to theirs, and set up Standard Situation N in both. Cue it to our 'spin' key-straight yes-no signal."

"Situation JV? Boss, that's a-—"

"I know what it is. I think we need it now. Our bum spindizzy prevents us from making any possible getaway without the combined knowledge of the two sets of City Fathers; we just aren't fast enough. Git, before it's too late."

The garageman was almost upon them, emitting screams of fury each time he hit the ground at the end of a leap, as if the sounds were jolted out of him by the impact. In the thin atmosphere of Murphy, the yells sounded like toots on a toy whistle.

Hazleton hesitated a moment more, then sprinted up the stairway. The garageman ducked around a trunnion and fired. The meson pistol howled at the sky and flew backwards out of his hand. Evidently he had never fired one before.

"Mayor Amalfi, shall I-—"

"Not yet, sergeant. Cover him, that's all. Hey, you! Walk over here. Nice and slow, with your hands locked behind your head. That's it. ... Now then: what were you firing at my city manager for?"

The dark-complected face was livid now. "You can't get away," he said thickly. "There's a dozen police squads on the way. They'll break you up for fair. It'll be fun to watch."

"Why?" Amalfi asked, in a reasonable one. "You shot at us first. We've done nothing wrong."

"Nothing but pass a bum check! Around here that's a crime worse than murder, brother. I checked you with Lerner, and he's frothing at the mouth. You'd damn well better pray that some other squad gets to you before his does!"

"A bum check?" Amalfi said. "You're blowing. Our money's better than anything you're using around here, by the looks of you. It's germanium-solid germanium."

"Germanium?" the dockman repeated incredulously.

"That's what I said. It'd pay you to clean your ears more often."

The garageman's eyebrows continued to go higher and higher, and the corners of his mouth began to quiver. Two fat, oily tears ran down his cheeks. Since he still had his hands locked behind his head, he looked remarkably like a man about to throw a fit.

Then his whole face split open.

"Germanium!" He howled. "Ho, haw, haw, haw! Germanium! What hole in the plenum have you been living in, Okie? Germanium-haw, haw!" He emitted a weak gasp and took his hands down to wipe his eyes. "Haven't you any silver, or gold, or platinum, or tin, or iron? or something else that's worth something? Clear out, bum. You're broke. Take it from me as a friend, clear out; I'm giving you good advice."

He seemed to have calmed down a little, Amalfi said. "What's wrong with germanium?"

"Nothing," the dockman said, looking at Amalfi over his incredible nose with a mixture of compassion and vindictiveness, "It's a good, useful metal. But it just isn't money any more, Okie. I don't see how you could have missed finding that out. Germanium is trash now-well, no, it's still worth something, but only what it's actually worth, if you get me. You have to buy it; you can't buy other things with it.

"It's no good here as money. It's no good anywhere else, either. Anywhere else. The whole galaxy is broke. Dead broke.

"And so are you."

He wiped his eyes again. Overhead a siren groaned, softly but urgently.

Hazleton was ready, and had sighted the incoming cops.

Amalfi found it impossible to understand what happened when he closed the "spin" key. He did not hope to understand it at any time in the future, either; and it would do no good to ask the City Fathers, who would simply refuse to tell him-for the very good reason that they did not know. Whatever they had had in reserve for Standard Situation N-that ultimate situation which every Okie city must expect to face eventually, the situation wherein what is necessary to prevent total destruction is only and simply to get away fast-it was drastic and unprecedented. Or it had become so when the City Fathers had been given the chance to pool their knowledge with that of the City Fathers of the all-purpose city.

The city snapped from its graving dock on Murphy to a featureless coordinate-set space. The movement took no time and involved no detectable display of energy. One moment the city was on Murphy; Amalfi closed the key, and Murphy had vanished, and Jake was demanding to know where in space the city was. He was told to find out.

The cops had come up on Murphy in fair order, but they had not been given the chance to fire a single shot. When Jake had managed to find Murphy again, O'Brian sent a proxy out to watch the cops, who by that time were shooting back and forth across the planet's sky like belated actors looking for a crucial collar button.

An hour later, without the slightest preliminary activity, the all-purpose city snapped out of existence on Murphy. By the time the garagemen had recovered enough to sound another alarm, the cops were scattered in all directions, still hunting something that they had had no prior idea could turn up missing: Amalfi's own town. By the time they managed to reform their ranks sufficiently to trace the all-purpose city, it had stopped operating, and thus had become undetectable?.

It was floating now in an orbit half a million miles away from Amalfi's city. Its screens were down again. If there had been any garagemen on it when it took off, they were dead now; the city was airless.

And the City Fathers honestly did not know how all this had been accomplished; or, rather, they no longer knew. Standard Situation N was keyed in by a sealed and self-blowing circuit. It had been set up that way long ago, to prevent incompetent or lazy city administrators from calling upon it at every minor crisis. It could never be used again.

And Amalfi knew that he had called it into use, not only for his own city, but for the other one as well, in a situation which had not really been the ultimate extreme, had not really been Situation N. He had squandered the final recourse of both cities.

He was still equally certain that neither city would ever need that circuit again.

The two cities, linked only by an invisible ultraphone tight-beam, were now floating free in the starless area three light years away from the jungle, and eight parsecs away from Murphy. The dim towers of the dead city were not visible to Amalfi, who stood alone on the belfry of City Hall; but they floated in his brain, waiting for him to tell them to come to life.

Whether or not his act of extreme desperation in the face of a not ultimately desperate situation had in actuality murdered that city was a question he could not decide. In the face of the galactic disaster, the question seemed very small.

He shelved it to consider what he had learned about his own bad check. Germanium never had had the enormous worth in real terms that it had had as a treasure metal. It did have properties which made it valuable in many techniques: the germanium lattice would part with an electron at the urging of a comparatively low amount of energy; the p-n boundary functioned as a crystal detector; and so on. The metal found its way into uncountable thousands of electronic devices-and, it was rare.

But not that rare. Like silver, platinum, and iridium before it, germanium's treasure value had been strictly artificial-an economic convention, springing from myths, jewelers' preferences, and the jealousy of statal monopolies. Sooner or later, some planet or cluster with a high technology-and a consequently high exchange rate- would capture enough of the metal to drive its competitors, or, more likely, its own treasury, off the germanium standard; or someone would learn to synthesize or transmute the element cheaply. It hardly mattered which had happened now.

What mattered was the result. The actual metallic germanium on board the city now had only an eighth of its former value at current rates of sale. Much worse, however, was the fact that most of the city's funds were not metal, but paper: Oc dollars, issued against government-held metal back on Earth and a few other administrative centers. This money, since it did not represent any metallic germanium that belonged to the city, was now unredeemable-valueless.

The new standard was a drug standard. Had the city come away from He with the expected heavy surplus of anti-agathics, it would now have been a multibillionaire. Instead, it was close to being a pauper.

Amalfi wondered how the drug standard had come about. To Okies, cut off for the most part from the main stream of history, such developments frequently seemed like the brainstorms of some unknown single genius; it was hard to think of them as evolving from a set of situations when none of the situations could now be intimately known. Still, however it had arisen, the notion had its point. Drugs can be graded exactly as to value by then: therapeutic effect and their availability. Drugs that could be made synthetically in quantity at low cost would be the pennies and nickels of the new coinage-and those that could not, and were rare and always in heavier demand than the supply could meet, would be the hundred-dollar units.

Further, even expensive drugs could be diluted, which would make debt payment flexible; drugs could be as amenable to laboratory test for counterfeit as metal had been; and finally, drugs became outmoded rapidly enough to make for a high-velocity currency which could not be hoarded or cornered, even by the most predatory measures.

It was a good standard. Since it would be impossible to carry on real transactions in terms of fractions of a cubic centimeter of some chemical, just as it had been impractical to carry a ton and a half of germanium about in order to pay one's debts, there would still be a paper currency.

But on the drug standard, the city was poor. It had none of the new paper money at all, though it would, of course, sell all its metallic germanium at once to get a supply. Possibly its germanium-based paper money might also be sold, against Earth redemption, at about a fifth of the' current market value of the metallic equivalent if the Acolytes cared to bother with redeeming it.

The actual drugs on board the city could not be traded against. They were necessary to maintain the life of the city. Amalfi winced to think of the size of the bite medical care was going to take out of every individual's budget under the new economy. The anti-agathics, in particular, would pose a terrifying dilemma: shall I use my anti-agathic credits now, as money, to relieve my current money miseries, or shall I continue to live in poverty in order to prolong my life? ...

Remorselessly, Amalfi drove one consequence after an- · other through the stony corridors of his skull, like a priest wielding the whip behind lowing sacrifices. The city was poor. It could find no work among the Acolyte stars at a rate which would make the work justifiable. It could look for work nowhere else without a new spindizzy.

That left only the jungle. There was no place else to go.

Amalfi had never set down in a jungle before, and the thought made him wipe the palms of his hands unconsciously upon his thighs. The word in his mind-it had always been there, he knew, lying next to the word "fungle"-was never. The city must always pay its own way, it must always come whole out of any crisis, it must always pull its own weight...

Those emblems of conduct were now cliches, which never had turned out to be a time, like any other time- one that had implicit in it the inevitable timeword: Now.

Amalfi picked up the phone which hung from the belfry railing.

"Hazleton?"

"Here, boss. What's the verdict?"

"None yet,' Amalfi said. "Supposedly we snitched the city next door for some purpose; now we need to know what the chances are of abandoning ship at this point and getting out of here with it. Get some men in suits over there and check on it."

Hazleton did not answer for a moment. In that moment, Amalfi knew that the question was peripheral, and that the verdict was already in. A line by the Earth poet Theodore Roethke crept across the floor of his brain like a salamander: The edge cannot eat the center.

"Right," Hazleton's voice said.

Half an eternal hour later, it added: "Boss, that city is worse off than we are, I'm afraid. It's got good drivers still, but of course they're all tuned wrong. Besides, the whole place seems to be structurally unsound on a close look; the garagemen really did a thorough job of burrowing around in it. Among other things, the keel's cracked-the Acolytes must have landed it, not the original crew."

It would, of course, be impossible to claim foreknowledge of any of this, with Hazleton's present state of mind teetering upon the edge of some rebellion Amalfi hoped he did not yet understand. It was possible that Hazleton, despite all the mayor's precautions, had divined the load of emotional guilt which had been accumulating steadily upon Amalfi-or perhaps that suspicion was only the guilt itself speaking. In any event, Amalfi had allowed himself to be stampeded into stealing the other city by Hazleton, even in the face of the foreknowledge, to keep peace in the family. He said instead, "What's your recommendation, Mark?"

"I'd cast loose from it, boss. I'm only sorry I advocated snitching it in the first place. We have the only thing it had to give us that we could make our own: our City Fathers now know everything their City Fathers knew. We couldn't take anything else but a new spindizzy, and that's a job for a graving dock."

"All right. Give it a point thirty-four per cent screen to clinch its present orbit, and come on back. Make sure you don't give it more than that, or those overtimed spindizzies will advertise its position to anyone coming within two parsecs of it, and interfere with our own operation to boot."

"Right."

And now there were the local cops to be considered. They had chalked up against Amalfi's city, not only the issuing of a bad check, but the theft of state property, and the deaths of Acolyte technicians on board the other city.

Only the jungle was safe, and even the jungle was safe only temporarily. In the jungle, at least for the time being, one city could lose itself among three hundred others- many of which would be better armed than Amalfi's city had ever been.

There might even be a chance, in such a salmon-pack of cities, that Amalfi would see at last with his own eyes the mythical Vegan orbital fort-the sole non-human construction ever to go Okie, and now the center of an enormous saga of exploits woven about it by the starmen. Amalfi was as fascinated by the legend as any other Okie, though he knew the meager facts well: the fort had circled Vega until the smashing of the Confederacy's home planet, and then-unexpectedly, since the Vegans had never been given to flying anything bigger than a battleship-had taken off for parts unknown, smashing its way through the englobement of police cruisers almost instantly. Nothing had ever been heard of it since, although the legend grew and grew.

The Vegans themselves had been anything but an attractive people, and it was difficult to say why the story of the orbital fort was so beloved with the Okies. Of course, Okies generally disliked the cops and said that they had no love for Earth, but this hardly explained why the legend of the fort was so popular among them. The fort was now said to be invulnerable and unlimited; it had done miracles in every limb of the galaxy; it was everywhere and nowhere; it was the Okies' Beowulf, their Cid, their Sigurd, Gawaine, Roland, Cuchulainn, Prometheus... Lemminkainen ...

Amalfi felt a sudden chill. The thought that had just come to him was so outrageous that he had almost stopped thinking it in the middle, out of sheer instinct. The fort-probably it had been destroyed centuries ago. But if it did still exist, certain conclusions emerged implacably, and certain actions could be taken on them. . . .

Yes, it was possible. It was possible. And definitely worth trying....

But if it actually worked ...

Having made the decision, Amalfi put the idea resolutely aside. In the meantime, one thing was sure: as long as the Acolytes continued to use the jungle as a labor pool, their cops would not risk smashing things up indiscriminately only in order to search out one single "criminal" city. To the Acolyte's way of thinking, all Okies were lawbreakers, by definition.

Which, Amalfi thought, was quite correct as far as his own city was concerned. The city was not only a bum now, but a bindlestiff to boot-by definition.

The end of the line.

"Boss? I'm coming in. What's the dodge? We'll need to pull it soon, or—"

Amalfi looked up steadily at the red dwarf star above the balcony.

"There is no dodge," he said. "We're licked, Mark. We're going to the jungle."