CHAPTER SEVEN: Hern VI

 

But at least it would go approximately where the master space stick directed it to go. That much responsiveness, Amalfi thought, was all that was really necessary- or all that he hoped would be necessary.

Periodically, O'Brian, the proxy pilot, reported on the progress of the March on Earth. The mob had lost quite a few stragglers along the way as it passed attractive-looking systems where work might be found, but the main body was still streaming doggedly toward the mother planet. Though the outsize drone was as obvious a body as a minor moon, so far not a single Okie had taken a pot shot at it. O'Brian had kept it darting through and about the marchers in a double-sine curve in three dimensions, at its top speed and with progressive modulations of the orbit. If the partial traces which it made on any individual city's radar screen were not mistaken for meteor tracks, predicting its course closely enough to lay a gun on it would keep any ordinary computer occupied full time.

It was a superb job of piloting. Amalfi made a mental note to see to it that the task of piloting the city itself was split off from the city manager's job when Hazleton stepped down. Carrel was not a born pilot, and O'Brian was obviously the man Carrel would need.

At the beginning of the Hern VI conversion, the City Fathers had placed E-Day-the day of arrival of the marchers within optical telescope distance of Earth-at one hundred fifty-five years, four months, twenty days. Each report which came in from the big drone's pilot cut this co-ordinate-set back toward the flying present as the migrating jungle lost its laggards and became more and more compact, more and more able to put on speed as a unit. Amalfi consumed cigars faster and drove his men and machines harder every time the new computation was delivered to his desk.

But a full year had gone by since installation had started on Hern VI before O'Brian sent up the report he had been dreading and yet counting upon to arrive sooner or later.

"The march has lost two more cities to greener pastures, Mr. Amalfi," the proxy pilot said. "But that's routine. We've gained a city, too."

"Gained one?" Amalfi said tensely. "Where'd it come from?"

"I don't know. The course I've got the drone on doesn't allow me to look in any one direction more than about twenty-five seconds at a time. I have to take a census every time I pass her through the pack. The last time I went around, there was this outfit on the screen, just as if it had been there all the time. But that isn't all. It's the damnedest looking city I've ever seen, and I can't find anything like it in the files, either."

"Describe it."

"For one thing, it's enormous. I'm not going to have to worry about anybody spotting my drone for a while. This outfit must have every detector in the jungle screaming blue bloody murder. Besides, it's closed up."

"What do you mean b£ that?"

"It's got a smooth hull all around, Mr. Mayor. It isn't the usual platform with buildings on it and a spindizzy screen around both. It's more like a proper spaceship, except for its size."

"Any communication between it and the pack?"

"About what you'd expect. Wants to join the march; the King gave it the okay. I think he was pleased; it's the very first answer he's had to his call for a general mobilization of Okies, and this one really looks like a top-notch city. It calls itself Lincoln-Nevada."

"It would," Amalfi said grimly. He mopped his face. "Give me a look at it, O'Brian."

The screen lit up. Amalfi mopped his face again.

"All right. Back your drone off a good distance from the march and keep that thing in sight from now on. Get 'Lincoln-Nevada' between you and the pack. It won't shoot at your drone; it doesn't know it doesn't belong there."

Without waiting for O'Brian's acknowledgment, Amalfi switched over to the City Fathers. "How much longer is this job going to take?" he demanded.

"ANOTHER SIX YEARS, MR. MAYOR."

"Cut it to four at a minimum. And give me a course from here to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, one that crosses Earth's orbit."

"MR. MAYOR, THE LESSER MAGELLANIC CLOUD IS TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY THOUSAND LIGHT YEARS AWAY FROM THE ACOLYTE CLUSTER!"

"Thank you," Amalfi said sardonically. "I have no intention of going there, I assure you. All I want is a course with those three points on it."

"VERY WELL. COMPUTED."

"When would we have to spin, to cross Earth's orbit on E-Day?"

"FROM FIVE SECONDS TO FIFTEEN DAYS FROM TODAY, FIGURING FROM THE CENTER OF THE CLOUD TO EITHER EDGE."

"No good. We cant start within those limits. Give me a perfectly flat trajectory from here to there."

"THAT ARC INVOLVES NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-EIGHT DIRECT COLLISIONS AND FOUR HUNDRED ELEVEN THOUSAND AND TWO GRAZES AND NEAR-MISSES."

"Use it."

The City Fathers were silent. Amalfi wondered if it were possible for machinery to be stunned. He knew that the City Fathers would never use the crow-flight arc, since it conflicted with their most ineluctable basic directive: Preserve the city first. This was all right with the mayor, He had given that instruction with an eye to the tempo of building on Hern VI; he had a strong hunch that it would go considerably faster after that stunner.

And as a matter of fact, it was just fourteen months later when Amalfi's hand closed on the master space stick for Hern VI, and he said:

"Spin!"

 

The career of Hern VI from its native Acolyte cluster across the center of the galaxy made history-particularly in the field of instrumentation. Hern VI was a tiny world, considerably smaller than Mercury, but nevertheless it was the most monstrous mass ever kicked past the speed of light within the limits of the inhabited galaxy. Except for the planet of He, which had left the galaxy from its periphery and was now well on its way toward Messier 31 in Andromeda, no such body had ever before been flown under spindizzy or any other drive. Its passage left permanent scars in the recording banks of every detecting instrument within range, and the memories of it graven into the brains of sentient observers were no less drastic.

Theoretically, Hern VI was following the long arc laid out for it by Amalfi's City Fathers, an arc leading from the fringe of the Acolyte cluster all the way across the face of the galaxy to the center of the Lesser Megallanic Cloud. (Its mass center, of course; both clouds had emerged too recently from the galaxy as a whole to have developed the definite orbital dead centers characteristic of "spiral" nebulae.) The mean motion of the flying planet followed that arc scrupulously.

But at the speed at which Hern VI was traveling-a velocity which could not be expressed comfortably even in multiples of C, the old arbitrary velocity of light-the slightest variation from that orbit became a careening side jaunt of horrifying proportions before even the microsecond reactions of the City Fathers could effect the proper corrections.

Like other starmen, Amalfi was accustomed enough to traveling at transphotic speeds-in space, a medium ordinarily without enough landmarks to make real velocity very apparent. And, like all Okies, he had traveled on planets in creeping ground vehicles which seemed to be making dangerous speed simply because there were so many nearby reference points to make that speed seem great. Now he was finding out what it was like to move among the stars at a comparable velocity.

For at the velocity of Hern VI, the stars became almost as closely spaced as the girders beside a subway track- with the added hazard that the track frequently swerved enough to place two or three girders in a row between the rails. More than once Amalfi stood frozen on the balcony in the belfry of City Hall, watching a star that had been invisible half a second before cannoning directly at his head, swelling to fill the whole sky with glare—

Blackness.

Amalfi felt irrationally that there should have been an audible whoosh as Hern VI passed that star. His face still tingled with the single blast of its radiation which had bathed him, despite the planet's hard-driven and nearly cross-polarized spindizzy screen, at that momentary perihelion.

There was nothing the matter, of course, with the orbit corrections of the City Fathers. The difficulty was simply that Hern VI was not a responsive enough space craft to benefit by really quick orbital corrections. It took long seconds for the City Fathers' orders to be translated into enough vector thrust to affect the flight of the dead planet over parsecs of its shambling, paretic stride. And there was another, major reason: when all of Hern VI's axial rotation had been converted to orbital motion, .all of a considerable axial libration had also been converted, and there was nothing that could be done about the kinks this put in the planet's course.

Possibly, had Amalfi spotted his own city's spindizzies over the surface of the planet, as he had those of the all-purpose city and the plague city, Hern VI might have been more sensitive to the space stick; at the very least, the libration could have been left as real libration, for it wouldn't have mattered had the planet heeled a little this way and that as long as it kept a straight course. But Amalfi had left the city's drivers undisturbed for the most cogent of all reasons: for the survival of the city. Only one of the machines was participating at all in the flight of Hern VI, that being the big pivot spindizzy at Sixtieth Street. The others, including the decrepit but now almost cool Twenty-third Street machine, rested.

".. . calling the free planet, calling the free planet ... is there anybody alive on that thing? . . . EPSILON CRUCIS, HAVE YOU SUCCEEDED IN RAISING THE BODY THAT JUST PASSED YOU? . . . CALLING THE FREE PLANET! YOU'RE ON COLLISION COURSE WITH US-HELL AND DAMNATION! . . . CALLING ETA PALINURI, THE FREE PLANET JUST GAVE US A HAIRCUT AND IT'S HEADING for you. It's either dead or out of control . . . Calling the free planet, calling the free pla—"

There was no time to answer such frantic calls, which poured into the city from outside like a chain of spring freshets as inhabited systems were by-passed, skirted, overshot, fringed, or actually penetrated. The calls could have been acknowledged but acknowledgment would demand that some explanation be offered, and Hern VI would be out of ultraphone range of the questioner before more than a few sentences could be exchanged. The most panicky inquiries might have been answered by Dirac, but that had two drawbacks: the minor one, that there were too many inquiries for the city to handle, and no real reason to handle them; the major one, that Earth and one other important party would be able to hear the answer.

Amalfi did not care too much about what the Earth heard-Earth was already hearing plenty about the flight of Hern VI; if Dirac transmission could be spoken of as jammed, even in metaphor (and it could, for an infinite number of possible electron orbits in no way presupposes a Dirac transmitter tuned to each one), then Earth Dirac boards were jampacked with the squalls of alarmed planets along Hern VI's arc.

But about the other party, Amalfi cared a great deal.

O'Brian kept that other party steadily in the center of his drone's field of vision, and a small screen mounted on the railing of the belfry showed Amalfi the shining, innocuous-looking globe whenever he cared to look at it. The newcomer to the Okie jungle-and to the March on Earth-had made no untoward or even interesting motion since it had arrived in the Okies' ken. Occasionally it exchanged chitchat with the King of the jungle; less often, it talked with other cities. Boredom had descended on the jungle, so there was now a fair amount of intercity touring; but the newcomer was not visited as far as O'Brian or Amalfi could tell, nor did any gigs leave it. This, of course, was natural: Okies are solitary by preference, and a refusal to fraternize, providing that it was not actively hostile in tone, would always be understood in any situation. The newcomer, in short, was giving a very good imitation of being just another member of the hegira-just one more Birnam tree on the way to Dunsinane. ...

And if anyone in the jungle had recognized it for what it was, Amalfi could see no signs of it.

A fat star rocketed blue-white over the city and Dopplered away into the black, shrinking as it faded out. Amalfi spoke briefly to the City Fathers. The jungle would be within sight of Earth within days-and the uproar on the Dirac was now devoted more and more to the approach of the jungle, less and less to Hern VI. Amalfi had considerable faith in the City Fathers, but the terrifying flight of stars past his head could not fail to make him worry about overshooting E-Day, or undershooting it, however accurate the calculations seemed to be.

But the City Fathers insisted doggedly that Hern VI would cross the solar system of Earth on E-Day, and Amalfi had to be as content as he could manage with the answer. On this kind of problem, the City Fathers had never been known to be wrong. He shrugged uneasily and phoned down to Astronomy.

"Jake, this is the mayor. Ever heard of something called 'trepidation'?"

"Ask me a hard one," the astronomer said testily.

"All right. How do I go about introducing some trepidation into this orbit we're following?"

The astronomer sounded his irritating chuckle. "You don't," he said. "It's a condition of space around suns, and you haven't the mass. The bottom limit, as I recall, is one and five-tenths times ten to the thirtieth power kilograms, but ask the City Fathers to be sure. My figure is of the right order of magnitude, anyhow."

"Damn," Amalfi said. He hung up and took time out to light a cigar, a task complicated by the hurtling stars in the corner of his eye; somehow the cigar seemed to flinch every time one went by. He lit the nervous cheroot and called Hazleton next.

"Mark, you once tried to explain to me how a musician plays the beginning and the end of a piece a little bit faster than normal so that he can play the middle section a little bit slower. Is that the way it goes?"

"Yes, that's tempo rubato—literally, 'robbed time.' "

"What I want to do is introduce something like that into the motion of this rock pile as we go across the solar system without any loss in total transit time. Any ideas?"

There was a moment's silence. "Nothing occurs to me, boss. Controlling that kind of thing is almost purely intuitional. You could probably do it better by personal control than O'Brian could set it up in the piloting section."

"Okay. Thanks."

Another dud. Personal control was out of the question at this speed, for no human pilot, not even Amalfi, had reflexes fast enough to handle Hern VI directly. It was precisely because he wanted to be able to handle the planet directly for a second or so of its flight that he wanted the trepidation introduced; and even then he would be none too sure of his ability to make the one critical, razor-edged alteration in her course which he knew he would need.

"Carrel? Come up here, will you?"

The boy arrived almost instantly. On the balcony, he watched the hurtling passage of stars with what Amalfi suspected was sternly repressed alarm.

"Carrel, you began with us as an interpreter, didn't you? You must have had frequent occasion to use a voice-writer, then."

"Yes, sir, I did."

"Good. Then you'll remember what happens when the carriage of the machine returns and spaces for another line. It brakes a little in the middle of the return, so it won't deform the carriage stop by constantly slamming into it; isn't that right? Well, what I want to know is: How is that done?"

"On a small machine, the return cable is on a cam instead of a pulley," Carrel said, frowning. "But the big multiplex machines "that we use at conclaves are electronically controlled by something called a klystron; how that works, I've no idea." .

"Find out," Amalfi said. "Thanks, Carrel, that's just what I was looking for. I want such an apparatus cut into our present piloting circuit, so as to give us the maximum braking effect as we cross Earth's solar system that's compatible with our arriving at the cloud on time. Can it be done?"

"Yes, sir, that sounds fairly easy." He went below without being dismissed; a second later, a swollen and spotted red giant sun skimmed the city, seemingly by inches.

The phone buzzed. "Mr. Mayor-O'Brian here. The cities are coming up on Earth. Shall I put you through?"

Amalfi started. Already? The city was still megaparsecs away from the rendezvous; it was literally impossible to conceive of any speed which would make arrival on time possible. The mayor suddenly began to find the subway-pillar flashing of the stars reassuring.

"Yes, O'Brian, hook up the big helmet and stand by. Give me full Dirac on all circuits, and have our alternate course ready to plug in. Has Mr. Carrel gotten in touch with you yet?"

"No, sir," the pilot said. "But there's been some activity from the City Fathers in the piloting banks which I assumed was by your orders or one of the city manager's. Apparently we're to be out of computer control at opposition."

"That's right. Okay, O'Brian, put me through." Amalfi donned the big helmet...

... and was back in the jungle.

The entire pack of cities, decelerating heavily now, was entering the "local group"—an arbitrary sphere with a radius of fifty light years, with Earth's sun at its center. This was the galaxy's center of population still, despite the . outward movement which had taken place for the past centuries, and the challenges which were now ringing around the heads of the Okies were like voices from history: 40 Eridani, Procyon, Kruger 60, Sirius, 61 Cygni, Altair, RD-4°4048, Wolf 359, Alpha Centauri ... to hear occasionally from Earth itself was no novelty, but these challenges were almost like being hailed by ancient Greece or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The jungle King had succeeded by now in drumming the hobo cities into a roughly military formation: a huge cone, eighteen million miles along its axis. The cone was pointed by smaller towns unlikely to possess more than purely defensive armament. Just behind the point, which was actually rounded into a paraboloid like the head of a comet, the largest cities rode in the body of the cone. These included the King's own town, but did not include the "newcomer," which, despite its size, was flying far behind, roughly on the rim of the cone—it was this positioning which made it possible for Amalfi's drone to see almost the entire cone in the first place, for O'Brian's orders were to keep the big sphere in view regardless of how much of the jungle he had to sacrifice.

The main wall of the cone was made up mostly of medium-sized heavy-duty cities, again unlikely to be heavily armed, but having the advantage of mounting spindizzy equipment which could be polarized to virtual opacity to any attack but that of a battleship.

All in all, Amalfi thought, a sensible organization of the materials at hand. It suggested power in reserve, plus considerable defensive ability, without at the same time advertising any immediate intention to attack.

He settled the heavy viewing helmet more comfortably on his shoulders and laid one hand on the balcony railing near the space stick. Simultaneously, a voice rang in his ears.

"Earth Security Center calling the Cities," the voice said heavily. "You are ordered to kill your velocity and remain where you are pending an official investigation of your claims."

"Not bloody likely," the King's voice said, "You are further warned that current Rulings in Council forbid any Okie city to approach Earth more closely than ten light years. Current Rulings also forbid gatherings of Okie cities in any numbers greater than four. However, we are empowered to tell you that this latter Ruling will be set aside for the duration of the investigation, provided that the approach limit is not crossed."

"We're crossing it," the King said. "You're going to take a good look at us. We're not going to form another jungle out here-we didn't come this far for nothing."

"Under such circumstances," the speaker at Earth Security continued, with the implacable indifference of the desperate bureaucrat operating by the book, "the law prescribes that participating cities be broken up. The full penalty will be applied in this case as in all cases."

"No it won't, either, any more than it is in ninety-four cases out of a hundred. We're not a raiding force and we aren't threatening Earth with anything but a couple of good loud beefs. We're here because we couldn't hope for a fair deal any other way. All we want is justice."

"You've been warned."

"So have you. You can't attack us. You don't dare to. We're citizens, not crooks. We want justice done us, and we're coming on in to see that it gets done."

There was a sudden click as the City Fathers' Dirac scanner picked up a new frequency. The new voice said: "Attention Police Command Thirty-two, Command HQ speaking for Vice Admiral MacMillan. Blue alert; blue alert. Acknowledge."

Another click, this time to the frequency the King used to communicate with the jungle.

"Pull up, you guys," the King said. "Hold formation, but figure to make camp fifteen degrees north of the ecliptic, in the orbit of Saturn but about ten degrees ahead of the planet. I'll give you the exact coordinates later. If they won't dicker with us there, we'll move on to Mars and really throw a scare into them. But we'll give them a fair chance."

"How do you know they'll give us a fair chance?" someone asked petulantly.

"Go back to the Acolytes if you can't take it here. Damned if I care."

Click.

"Hello Command HQ. Command Thirty-two acknowledging blue alert, for Commander Eisenstein. Command Thirty-two blue alert."

Click.

"Hey, you guys at the base of the cone, pull up! You're piling up on us."

"Not in our tanks, Buda-Pesht."

"Look again, dammit. I'm getting a heavy mass-gain here-—"

Click.

"Attention Police Command Eighty-three, Command

HQ speaking for Vice Admiral MacMillan. Blue alert, blue alert. Acknowledge. Attention Police Command Thirty-two, red alert, red alert. Acknowledge."

"Eisenstein, Command Thirty-two, red alert acknowledged."

Click.

"Calling Earth; Proserpine Two station calling Earth Security. We are picking up some of the cities. Instructions?"

("Where the hell is Prosperine?" Amalfi asked the City Fathers.)

("PROSERPINE IS A GAS GIANT, ELEVEN THOUSAND MILES IN DIAMETER, OUTSIDE THE ORBIT OF PLUTO AT A DISTANCE OF—")

("All right. Shut up.")

"Earth Security. Keep your nose clean, Prosperine Two. Command HQ is handling this situation. Take no action."

Click.

"Hello Commands HQ. Command Eighty-three acknowledging blue alert; for Lieutenant Commander Fiorelli. Command Eighty-three blue alert."

Click.

"Buda-Pesht, they're bracketing us!"

"I know it. Make camp like I said. They don't dare lay a finger on us until we commit an actual aggression, and they know it. Don't let a show of cops bluff you now."

Click.

"Pluto station. We're picking up the vanguard of the cities."

"Sit tight, Pluto."

"You won't get them again until they've made camp- we're in opposition with Prosperine, but Neptune and Uranus are out of the line of flight entirely—"

"Sit tight."

Earth's sun grew gradually in Amalfi's view, growing only with the velocity of the drone, which was the velocity of the jungle. Earth's sun was still invisible from the city itself. In the helmet it was a yellow spark, without detectable disc, like a carbon arc through a lens-system set at infinity.

But it was, inarguably, the home sun. There was a curious thickness in Amalfi's throat as he looked at it. At this moment, Hern VI was screeching across the center of the galaxy, that center where there was no condensation of stars, such as other galaxies possessed, visible from Earth because of the masking interstellar dust clouds; the hurtling planet had just left behind it a black nebula in which every sun was an apparition, and every escape from those a miracle. Ahead was the opposite limb of the Milky Way, filled with new wonder.

Amalfi could not understand why the tiny, undistinguished yellow spark floating in front of him in the helmet made his eyes sting and water so intolerably.

The jungle was almost at a halt now, already down to interplanetary speeds, and still decelerating. In another ten minutes, the cities were at rest with reference to the sun; and from the drone, Amalfi could see, not very far away as he was accustomed to think of spatial distance, something else he had seen only once before: the planet Saturn.

No Earthly amateur astronomer with a new, uncertain, badly adjusted home reflector ever could have seen the ringed giant with fresher eyes. Amalfi was momentarily stupefied. What he saw was not only incredibly beautiful, but obviously impossible. A gas giant with rigid rings! Why had he ever left the Sol system at all, with a world so anomalous in his very back yard? And the giant had another planet circling it, too—a planet more than 3,000 miles through—in addition to the usual family of satellites of Hern VI's order of size.

Click.

"Make camp," the King was saying. "We'll be here for a while. Dammit, you guys at the base are still creeping on us a little. We're going to have to stop here-can't I pound that into your heads?"

"We're decelerating in good order, Buda-Pesht. It's the new city, the big job, that's creeping. He's in some kind of trouble, looks like."

From the drone, the diagnosis seemed accurate. The enormous spherical object had separated markedly from the main body of the jungle, and was now well ahead of the trailing edge of the cone. The whole sphere was wobbling a little as it moved, and every so often it would go dim as if under unexpected and uncontrollable polarization.

"Call him and ask if he needs help. The rest of you, take up orbits."

Amalfi barked, "O'Brian-time!"

"Course time, sir."

"How do I know when this space stick comes alive again?"

"It's alive now, Mr. Mayor," the pilot said. "The City Fathers cut out as soon as you touch it. You'll get a warning buzzer five seconds before our deceleration starts into the deep part of its curve, and then a beep every half second after that to the second inflection point. At the last beep, it's all yours, for about the next two and a half seconds. Then the stick will go dead and the City Fathers will be back in control."

Click.

"Admiral MacMillan, what action do you plan to take now—if any?"

Amalfi took an instant dislike to the new voice on the Dirac. It was flat, twangy, and as devoid as a vodeur of emotion, except perhaps for a certain self-righteousness tinged with Angst. Amalfi decided at once that in a face-to-face meeting the speaker would always look somewhere else than into the face of the man to whom he was speaking. The owner of that voice could not possibly be anywhere on the surface of the Earth, looking aloft for besiegers or going doggedly about his business; he was instead almost surely crouched in some subcellar.

"None, sir, at the moment," said the cops' Command HQ. "They've stopped, and appear to be willing to listen to reason. I have assigned Commander Eisenstein to cover their camp against any possible disturbance."

"Admiral, these cities have broken the law. They're here in defiance of our approach limits, and the very size of their gathering is illegal. Are you aware of that?"

"Yes, Mr. President," Command HQ said respectfully. "If you wish me to order individual arrests—"

"No, no, we can't jail a whole pack of flying tramps. I want action, Admiral. These people need to be taught a lesson. We can't have fleets of cities approaching Earth at will-it's a bad precedent. It indicates a decline of interstellar morality. Unless we return to the virtues of the pioneers, the lights will go out all over Earth, and grass will grow in the space lanes."

"Yes, sir," said Command HQ. "Well spoken, if you will permit me to say so. I stand ready for your orders, Mr. President."

"My orders are to do something. That camp is a festering sore on our heavens. I hold you personally responsible."

"Yes, sir." The Admiral's voice was very crisp. "Commander Eisenstein, proceed with Operation A. Command Eighty-two, red alet, red alert."

"Command Eighty-two acknowledging red alert."

"Eisenstein calling Command HQ."

"Command HQ."

"MacMillan, I'm taping my resignation over to you. The President's instructions don't specify Operation A. I won't be responsible for it."

"Follow orders, Commander," Command HQ said pleasantly. "I will accept your resignation-when the maneuver is completed."

The cities hung poised tensely in their orbits. For seconds, nothing happened.

Then pear-shaped, bumpy police battleships began springing out of nothingness around the jungle. Almost instantly, four cities raved into boiling clouds of gas.

The Dinwiddie pickup in the proxy backed itself hurriedly down the intensity scale until it could see again through the glare. The cities were still hanging there, seemingly stunned-as was Amalfi, for he had not imagined that Earth could have come to such a pass. Only an ideal combination of guilt and savagery could have produced so murderous a response; but evidently the president and MacMillan made up between them the necessary combination ...

Click.

"Fight!" the King's voice roared. "Fight, you lunkheads! They're going to wipe us out! Fight!"

Another city went up. The cops were using Bethe blasters; the Dinwiddie circuit, stopped down to accommodate the hydrogen-helium explosions, could not pick up the pale guide beams of the weapons; it would have been decidedly difficult to follow the King's order effectively.

But the city of Buda-Pesht was already sweeping forward out of the head of the cone, arcing toward Earth. It spat murder back at the police ships, and actually caught one. The mass of incandescent, melting metal appeared as a dim blob in Amalfi's helmet, then faded out again. A few cities followed the King; then a larger number; and then, suddenly, a great wave.

Click.

"MacMillan, stop them! I'll have you shot! They're going to invade-—"

New police craft sprang into being every second. A haze gradually began to define the area of the Okie encampment: a planetary nebula of gas molecules, dust, and condensations of metal and water vapor. Through it the Bethe guide beams played, just on the edge of visibility now, but the sun, too, was acting on the cloud, and the whole mass was beginning to re-radiate, casting a deepening luminous veil over the whole scene, about which the Dinwiddie circuit could do very little. The whole spectacle reminded Amalfi of NGC, 1435 in Taurus, with exploding cities substituting novas for the Pleiades.

But there were more novas than the cities could account for, novas outside the cone of the encampment. The police craft, Amalfi noted with amazement, were beginning to burst almost as fast as they appeared. The swarming, disorganized cities were fighting back; but their inherent inefficiency as fighting machines ruled them out as the prime causes of such heavy police losses. Something else, something new was happening-something utterly deadly was loose among the cops ...

"Command Eighty-two, Operation A sub a-on the double!"

A police monitor blew up with an impossible, soundless flare.

The cities were winning. Any police battleship could handle any three cities without even beginning to breathe hard, and there had been at least five battleships per city when the pogrom had started. The cities hadn't had a chance.

Yet they were winning. They streamed on toward Earth, boiling with rage, and the police ships, with their utterly deadly weapons, exploded all over the sky like milkweed.

And, a little bit ahead of the maddened cities, an enormous silver sphere wallowed toward Earth, apparently out of control.

Amalfi could now see Earth herself as the tiniest of blue-green dots. He did not try to see it any better, though it was growing to a disc with fantastic speed. He did not want to see it. His eyes were already fogged enough with sentimental tears at the sight of the home sun.

But his eyes kept coming back to it. At its pole he caught the shine of ice ...

. . . beep ...

The sound shocked him. The buzzer had already sounded, without his having heard it. The city would cross the solar system within the next two and a half seconds-or less, for he had no idea how many beeps had probed at his ears without response during his hypnotic struggle with the blue-green planet.

He could only guess, with the fullest impact of his intuition, that now was the time ...

Click...

"PEOPLE OF EARTH. US THE CITY OF SPACES CALLS UPON YOU ..."

He moved the space stick out and back in a flat loop about three millimeters long. The City Fathers instantly snatched the stick out of his hand. Earth vanished. So did Earth's sun. Hern VI began to accelerate rapidly, regaining the screeching velocity across the face of the galaxy for which two Okie cities had died.

"... YOUR NATURAL MASTERS TO OKAY, THE MANS OF STARS, WHO THE UNIVERSE-UNDERSTANDING LONG-LIFE-UNDERSTANDING INHERITORS, THE INFERIOR HOMESTAYING DECADENT EARTH PEOPLES THEREOVER, THE NEW RULERS OF, ARE ABOUT TO BE BECOMING. US INSTRUCTS YOU SOON TO PREPARE—"

The mouthy voice abruptly ceased to exist. The blue fleck of light which had been Amalfi's last sight of his ancestral planet had already been gone for long seconds.

The whole of Hern VI lurched and rang. Amalfi was thrown heavily to the floor of the balcony. The heavy helmet fell askew on his head and shoulders, cutting off his view of the battle in the jungle.

But he didn't care. That impact, and the death of that curious voice, meant the real end of the battle in the jungle. It meant the end of any real threat that might have existed for Earth. And it meant the end of the Okie cities-not just those in the jungle, but all of them, as a class, including Amalfi's own.

For that impact, transmitted to the belfry of City Hall thorough the rock of Hern VI, meant that Amalfi's instant of personal control had been fair and true. Somewhere on the leading hemisphere of Hern VI there was now an enormous white-hot crater. That crater, and the traces of metal salts which were dissolved in its molten lining, held the grave of the oldest of all Okie legends:

The Vegan orbital fort.

It would be forever impossible now to know how long the summated, distilled, and purified power of the Vegan military, conquered once only in fact, had been bowling through the galaxy, awaiting this one unrepeatable clear lane to a strike. Certainly no answer to that question could be found on the degenerate planets of Vega itself; the fort was as much a myth there as it had been any-. where else in the galaxy.

But it had been real all the same. It had been awaiting its one chance to revenge Vega upon Earth, not, certainly, in the hope of re-asserting the blue-white glory of Vega over every other star, but simply to smash the average planet of the average sun which had so inexplicably prevailed over Vega's magnificence. Not even the fort could have expected to prevail against Earth by itself-but in the confusion of the Okies' March on Earth, and under the expectation that Earth would hesitate to burn down its own citizen-cities until too late, it had foreseen a perfect triumph. It had swung in from its long, legend-blurred exile, disguised primarily as a city, secondarily as a fable, to make its last bid.

Residual tremors, T-waves, made the belfry rock gently. Amalfi got to his feet, steadying himself on the railing.

"O'Brian, cast us off. The planet goes on as she is. Switch the city to the alternate orbit."

"To the Greater Magellanic?"

"That's right. Make fast any quake damage; pass the word to Mr. Hazleton and Mr. Carrel."

"Yes, sir."

The Vegan fortress had nearly won, at that; only the passage of a forlorn and outcast-piloted little world had defeated it. But the Earth would never know more than a fraction of that, only the fraction which was the passage of Hern VI across the solar system. All the rest of the evidence was now seething and amalgamating in a cooling crater on the leading hemisphere of Hern VI; and Amalfi meant to see to it that Hern VI would be lost to Earth forever...

As the Earth was lost to Okies, from now on.

Everyone was in the old office of the mayor: Dee, Hazleton, Carrel, Dr. Schloss, Sergeant Andersen, Jake, O'Brian, the technics; and, by extension, the entire population of the city, through a city-wide, two-way P.A. hookup; even the City Fathers. It was the first such gathering since the last election; that election having been the one which put Hazleton into office, few present now remembered the occasion very well, except for the city Fathers and they would be the least likely of all to be able to apply that memory fruitfully to the present meeting. Undertones were not their forte.

Amalfi began to speak. His voice was gentle, matter-of-fact, impersonal; it was addressed to everyone, to the city as an organism. But he was looking directly at Hazleton.

"First of all," he said, "it's necessary for everyone to understand our gross physical and astronomical situation. When we cut loose from Hern VI a while back, that planet was well on its way toward the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, which, for those of you who come from the northerly parts of the galaxy, is one of two small satellite galaxies moving away from the main galaxy along the southern limb. Hern Six is still on its way there, and unless something unlikely happens to it, it will go right on to the Cloud, through it, and on into deep intergalactic space.

"We left on it almost all the equipment we had accumulated from other cities while we were in the jungle because we had to. We hadn't the room to take much of it on board our own city; and we couldn't stick with Hern VI because Earth will almost certainly chase the planet, either until the planet leaves the galaxy, or until they're sure we aren't on it any longer."

"Why, sir?" several voices from the G.C. speaker said, almost simultaneously.

"For a long list of reasons. Our flying the planet across the face of the solar system-as well as our flying it through a number of other systems and across main interstellar traffic areas-was a serious violation of Earth laws. Furthermore, Earth has us chalked up as having sideswiped a city as we went by; they don't know the real nature of that 'city.' And incidentally, it's important that they never find out, even if keeping it a secret results in our being written up in the history books as murderers." Dee stirred protestingly. "John, I don't see why we shouldn't take the credit. Especially since it really was a pretty big thing we did for the Earth."

"Because we're not through doing it yet. To you, Dee, the Vegans are an ancient people you first heard about only three centuries ago. Before that, on Utopia, you were cut off from the main stream of galactic history. But the fact is that Vega ruled much of the galaxy before Earth did, and that the Vegans always were, and have just shown us that they still are, dangerous people to get involved with. That fort didn't just exist in a vacuum. It had to touch port now and then, just as we do. And being a military machine, it needed more service and maintenance than it could take care of by itself.

"Somewhere in the galaxy there is a colony of Vega which is still dangerous. That colony must be kept in utter ignorance of what happened to its major weapon. It must be made to live on faith; to believe that the fort failed on its first attempt but may some day be back for another try. It must not know that the fort is destroyed, or it will build another one.

"The second one will succeed where the first one failed. The first one failed because of the nature of the nomadic kind of culture on which Earth has been depending up to now; the Okies defeated it. We happened to have been the particular city to do the job, but it was no accident that we were on hand to do it.

"But for quite a while to come, Okies are not going to be effective or even welcome factors in the galaxy as a whole; and the galaxy, Earth in particular, is going to be as weak as a baby all during that period because of the depression. If the Vegans hear that their fort did strike at Earth, and came within a hair's breadth of knocking it out, they'll be building another fort the same day they get the news. After that...

"No, Dee, I'm afraid we'll have to keep the secret."

Dee, still a little rebellious, looked at Hazleton for support; but he shook his head.

"Our own situation, right now, is neither good nor bad," Amalfi continued. "We still have Hern VI's velocity. It's enough slower than the velocity we hit when we flew the planet of He to make us readily maneuverable, even though clumsily, especially since we're so much less massive than a planet. We will be able to make any port of call which is inside the cone our trajectory would describe if we rotated it. Finally, Earth has figures only on the path of Hern VI; it has none on the present path of the city.

"Cast up against that the fact that our equipment is old and faltering, and will never carry us anywhere again under our own steam.; When we land at the next port of call, we will be landed for good. We have no money to buy new equipment; without new equipment, we can't make money. So it will pay us to pick our next stop with great care. That's why I've asked everybody to sit in on this conference."

One of the technics said", "Boss, are you sure it's as bad as all that? We should be able to make some kind of repairs—"

"THE CITY WILL NOT SURVIVE ANOTHER LANDING," the City Fathers said flatly. The technic swallowed and subsided.

"Our present orbit," Amalfi said, "would lead us eventually out into the greater of the two Magellanic clouds. At our present velocity, that's about twenty years' journey away still. If we actually want to go there, well have to plan on that period stretching on by another six years, since the clip at which we're traveling now is so great that we'd blow out every driver on board if we undertook normal deceleration.

"I propose that the Greater Magellanic Cloud is exactly where we want to go."

Tumult.

The whole city roared with astonishment. Amalfi raised his hand; those actually in the room quieted slowly, but elsewhere in the city the noise went on for quite a while. It did not seem to be a sound of general protest, but rather the angry buzzing of large numbers of people arguing among themselves.

"I know how you feel," Amalfi said when he could be sure most of them could hear him again. "It's a long way to go, and though there are supposed to be one or two colonies on the near side of the Cloud, there can be no real interstellar commerce there, and certainly no commerce with the main body of the galaxy. We would have to settle down-maybe even take to dirt farming; it would be a matter of giving up being an Okie, and giving up being a starman. That's a lot to give up, I know.

"But I want you all to remember that there's no longer any work, or any hope of work, for us anywhere in the main body of the galaxy, even if by some miracle we manage to put our beat-up old city back into good order again. We have no choice. We must find a planet of our own to settle down on, a planet we can claim as our own."

"ESTABLISH THIS POINT," the City Fathers said.

"I'm prepared to do so. You all know what has happened to the galactic economy. It's collapsed completely. As long as the currency was stable in the main commerce lanes, there was some pay we could work for; but that doesn't exist any longer. The drug standard which Earth has rigged up now is utterly impossible for the cities, because the cities have to, use those drugs as drugs, not as money, in order to stay alive long enough to do business at all. Entirely aside from the possibility of plague-and you'll remember, I think, what we saw of that not so long ago-there's the fact that we live, literally, on longevity. We can't trade on it, too.

"And that's only the beginning. The drug standard will collapse, and sooner and more finally than the germanium standard did. The galaxy's a huge place. There will be new monetary standards by the dozens before the economy gets back onto some stable basis. And there will be thousands of local monetary systems in operation before that happens. The interregnum will last at least a century—"

"AT LEAST THREE CENTURIES."

"Very well, three centuries. I was being optimistic. In either case, it's plain that we can't make a living in an economy which isn't at least reasonably stable, and we can't afford to sweat out the waiting period before the galaxy jells again. Especially since we don't know whether the eventual stabilization will have any corner in it for Okies or not.

"Frankly, I don't think the Okies have a prayer of surviving. Earth will be especially hard on them after this 'march,' which I took pains to encourage all the same because I was pretty sure we could suck in the Vegans with it. But even if there had been no march, the Okies would have been made obsolete by the depression. The histories of depressions show that a period of economic chaos is invariably followed by a period of extremely rigid economic controls-during which all the variables, the only partially controllable factors like commodity speculation, unlimited credit, free marketing, and competitive wages get shut out.

"Our city represents nearly the ultimate in competitive labor. Even if it lasts through the interregnum-which it can't-it will be an anachronism in the new economy. It will almost surely be forced to berth down on some planet selected by the government. My own proposition is simply that we select our own berth, long before the government gets around to enforcing its own selection; that we pick a place hundreds of parsecs away from the outermost boundary-surface that government will think to claim; a place which is retreating steadily and at good speed from the center of that government and everything it will eventually want to claim; and that once we get there, we dig in. There's a new imperialism starting where we used to be free; to stay free, we'll have to go out beyond any expectable frontier and start our own little empire. "But let's face it. The Okies are through." Nobody said anything. Stunned faces scanned stunned faces.

Then the City Fathers said calmly, "THE POINT IS ESTABLISHED. WE ARE NOW MAKING AN ANALYSIS OF THE SELECTED AREA, AND WILL HAVE A REPORT FROM THE ASSIGNED SECTION IN FOUR TO FIVE WEEKS."

Still the silence persisted in the big chamber. The Okies were testing it-almost tasting it. No more roaming. A planet of their own. A city at rest, and a sun to come up and go down over it on a regular schedule; seasons; a quietness free of the eternal whirling of gravity fields. No fear, no fighting, no defeat, no pursuit; self-sufficiency- and the stars only points of light forever.

A planetbound man presented with a similar revolution in his habits would have rejected it at once, terrified. The Okies, however, were used to change; change was the only stable factor in their lives. It is the only stable factor in the life of a planetbound man, too, but the planetbound man has never had his nose rubbed in it.

Even so, had they not been in addition virtually immortal-had they been, like the people of the old times before space travel, pinned like insects on a spreading-board to a lifespan of less than a century-Amalfi would have been afraid of the outcome. A short lifespan leads to restlessness; somewhere within the next few years, there has to be some El Dorado for the ephemerid. But the conquest of age had almost eliminated that Faustian frenzy. After three or four centuries, people grew tired of searching for the unnamable; they learned-they began to think of the future not as holding a haven of placidity and riches, but simply as the realm of things that had not happened yet. They became interested in the budding, the unfolding present, and thought about the future only with an attitude of indifferent acceptance toward whatever catastrophe it might bring. They no longer burned out their lives seeking catastrophe, under the name of "security."

In short, they grew a little more realistic, and more than a little tired.

Amalfi waited with calm confidence. The smallest objections, he knew, would come first. He was not anxious to have to cope with them, and the silence had lasted so much longer than he had expected that he began to wonder if his argument had become too abstract toward the end. If so, a note of naive practicality at this point should be proper…

"This solution should satisfy almost everyone," he said briskly. "Hazleton has asked to be relieved of his post, and this will certainly relieve him of it most effectively. It takes us out of the jurisdiction of the cops. It leaves Carrel as city manager if he still wants the post, but it leaves him manager of a grounded city, which satisfies me, since I've no confidence in Carrel as a pilot. It—"

"Boss, let me interrupt a minute."

"Go ahead, Mark."

"What you say is all very well, but it's too damned extreme. I can't see any reason why we have to go so far afield. Granted that the Greater Magellanic is off the course Hern VI is following; granted that it's pretty remote, granted that even if the cops do go looking for us there, it's too big and unpopulated and complex for them to hope to find us. But couldn't we accomplish the same thing without leaving the galaxy? Why do we have to take up residence in a cloud that's moving away from the galaxy at some colossal speed-—"

"THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR MILES PER SECOND."

"Oh, shut up. All right, so that's not very fast. Still and all, the cloud is a long way away-and if you give me the exact figures, I'll bust all your tubes-and if we ever want to get back to the galaxy again, we'll have to fly another planet to do it."

"All right," Amalfi said. "What's your alternative?"

"Why don't we hide out in a big cluster in our own galaxy? Not a picayune ball of stars like the Acolyte cluster, but one of the big jobs like the Great Cluster in Hercules. There must be at least one such in the cone of our present orbit; there might even be a Cepheid cluster where spindizzy navigation would be impossible for anybody who didn't know the local space strains. We'd be just as unlikely, to be traced by the cops, but we'd still be on hand inside our own galaxy if conditions began to look up."

Amalfi did not choose to contest the point. Logically, it should be Carrel, who was being deprived of the effective command of a flying city, who should be raising this objection. The fact that the avowed retired Hazleton had brought it up first was enough for Amalfi.

"I don't care if conditions ever do look up," Dee said, unexpectedly. "I like the idea of our having a planet of our own, and I'd want it to be as far away from the cops as we could possibly make it. If that planet really does become ours, would it make any difference to us whether Okie cities become possible again two or three centuries from now? We wouldn't need to be Okies any longer."

"You'd say that," Hazleton said, "because you haven't lived more than two or three centuries yet, and because you're still used to living on a planet. Some of the rest of us are older; some of the rest of us like wandering. I'm not speaking for myself, Dee, you know that. I'll happy to get off this junk pile. But this whole proposition has a faint smell to me. Amalfi, are you sure you aren't forcing us to set down simply to block a change of administration? It won't, you know."

Amalfi said, "Of course, I know. I'm submitting my resignation along with yours the moment we touch ground. Right now I'm still an officer of this city, and I'm doing the job I've been assigned to do."

"No, I didn't mean that. Let it go. What I still want to know is why we have to go all the way out to the Greater Magellan."

"Because it'll be ours," Carrel said abruptly. Hazleton swung on him, obviously astonished; but Carrel's rapt eyes did not see the older man. "Not only our planet- whichever one we choose-but our galaxy. Both the Magellanics are galaxies in little. I know; I'm a southerner, I grew up on a planet where the Magellanics went across the night sky like tornadoes of sparks. The Greater Magellanic even has its own center of rotation; I couldn't see it from my home planet because we were too close, but from Earth it has a distinct Milne spiral. And both clouds are moving away, taking on their own independence from the main galaxy. Hell, Mark, it isn't a matter of one planet. That's nothing. We won't be able to fly the city, but we can build spaceships. We can colonize. We can settle the economy to suit ourselves. Our own galaxy! What more could you want?"

"It's too easy," Hazleton said stubbornly. "I'm used to fighting for what I want. I'm used to fighting for the city. I want to use my head, not my back; your spaceships, your colonization, those things are going to be preceded by a lot of plain and simple weeding and plowing. There's the core of my objection to this scheme, Amalfi. It's wasteful. It commits us to a situation where most of what we'll have to do will be outside of our experience."

"I disagree," Amalfi said quietly. "There are already colonies in the Greater Magellanic. They weren't set up by spaceships. They were set up by cities. No other mechanism could have made the trip at all in those days."

"So?"

"So there's no chance that we'll be able to settle down placidly and get out our hoes. We'll have to fight to make any part of the Cloud our own. It's going to be the biggest fight we've ever had, because we'll be fighting Okies- Okies who probably have forgotten most of their history and their heritage, but Okies all the same, Okies who had this idea long before we did and who are going to defend their patent."

"As they have a right to do. Why should we poach on them when a giant cluster would serve us just as well? Or nearly as well?"

"Because they are poachers themselves-and worse. Why would a city go all the way to the Greater Magellanic in the old days, when cities were solid citizens of the galaxy? Why didn't they settle down in a giant cluster? Think, Mark! They were bindlestiffs. Cities who had to go to the Greater Magellanic because they had committed crimes that made every star in the main galaxy their enemies. You could name one such city yourself, and one you know must be, out there in that cloud: the Interstellar Master Traders. And not only because Thor Five still remembers it, but because every sentient being in the galaxy burns for the blood of every last man on board it. Where else could it have gone but the Greater Magellanic, even though it starved itself for fifty years to make the trip?"

Hazleton began kneading his hands, slowly, but with great force. His knuckles went alternately white and red as his fingers ground over them.

"Gods of all stars," he said. His lips thinned. "The Mad Dogs. Yes, They went there if they went any place. Now there's an outfit I'd like to meet."

"Bear in mind that you might not, Mark. The Cloud's a big place."

"Sure, sure. And there may be a few other bindlestiffs, too. But if the Mad Dogs are out there, I'd like to meet them. I remember being taken for one of them on Thor Five; that's a taste I'd like to get out of my mouth. I don't care about the others. Except for them, the Greater Magellanic is ours, as far as I'm concerned."

"A galaxy," Dee murmured; almost soundlessly. "A galaxy with a home base, a home base that's ours."

"An Okie galaxy," Carrel said.

The silence sifted back over the city. It was not a contentious silence now. It was the silence of a crowd in which each man is thinking for and to himself.

"HAVE MESSRS. HAZLETON AND CARREL ANY FURTHER ADDITIONS TO THEIR PLATFORMS?" the City Fathers blared, their vodeur-voice penetrating flatly into every cranny of the hurtling city. As Amalfi had expected, the extended discussion of high policy had convinced the City Fathers that the election was for the office of mayor, rather than for that of city manager. "IF NOT, AND IF THERE ARE NO ADDITIONAL CANDIDATES, WE ARE READY TO PROCEED WITH THE TABULATION."

For a long instant, everyone looked very blank. Then Hazleton too recognized the mistake the City Fathers had made. He began to chuckle.

"No additions," he said. Carrel said nothing; he simply grinned, transported.

Ten seconds later, John Amalfi, Okie, was the mayor-elect of an infant galaxy.