CHAPTER ONE: New Earth
In these later years it occasionally startled John Amalfi to be confronted by evidence that there was anything in the universe that was older than he was, and the irrationality of his allowing himself to be startled by such a truism startled him all over again. This crushing sensation of age, of the sheer dead weight of a thousand years bearing down upon his back, was in itself a symptom of what was wrong with him-or, as he preferred to think of it, of what was wrong with New Earth.
He had been so startled while prowling disconsolately through the grounded and abandoned hulk of the city, itself an organism many millennia older than he was, but-as befitted such an antiquity-now only a corpse. It was, indeed, the corpse of a whole society; for nobody on New Earth now contemplated building any more space^ cruising cities or in any other way resuming the wandering life of the Okies. Those of the original crew on New Earth, spread very thin among the natives and their own children and grandchildren, now looked back on that entire period with a sort of impersonal, remote distaste, and would certainly recoil from the very idea of returning to it, should anyone have the bad manners to broach such a notion. As for the second and third generations, they knew of the Okie days only as history, and looked upon the hulk of the flying city that had brought their parents to New Earth as a fantastically clumsy and outmoded monster, much as the pilot of an ancient atmospheric liner might have regarded a still more ancient quinquireme in a museum.
No one except Amalfi even appeared to take any interest in what might have happened to the whole of Okie society back in the home lens, the Milky Way galaxy of which the two Magellanics were satellites. To give them credit, finding out what had happened would in any event have been an almost impossible task; all kinds of broadcasts-literally millions of them-could be picked up easily from the home lens if anyone cared to listen, but so much tune had elapsed since the colonization of New Earth that sorting these messages into a meaningful picture would require years of work by a team of experts, and none could be found who would take any interest in so fruitless and essentially nostalgic a chore. Amalfi had in fact come into the city with the vague notion of turning the task over to the City Fathers, that enormous bank of computing and memory-storage machines to which had been entrusted all the thousands of routine technical, operational and governmental problems of the city when it had been in flight. What Amalfi would do with the information when and if he got it he had no idea; certainly there was no possibility of interesting any of the other New Earth-men in it, except in the form of half an hour's idle chatter.
And after all, toe New Earthmen were right. The Greater Magellanic Cloud was drawing steadily away from the home lens, at well over 150 miles per second-a trifling velocity in actuality, only a little greater than the diameter of the average solar system per year, but symbolic of the new attitude among the New Earthmen; people's eyes were directed outward, away from all that ancient history. There was considerably more interest in a nova which had flared into being in intergalactic space, somewhere beyond the Lesser Magellanic, than there was in the entire panoply of the home lens, visibly though the latter dominated the night sky from horizon to horizon during certain seasons of the year. There was, of course, still space flight, for trade with other planets in the little satellite galaxy was a necessity; the trade was conducted for the most part in large cargo hulls, and there were a number of larger units such as mobile processing plants which still needed to be powered by gravitron-polarity generators or "spindizzies"; but for the most part the trend was toward the development of local, self-sufficient industries.
It was while he was setting up the City Fathers for the problem in analysis of the million-fold transmission from the home lens, alone in what had once been his Mayor's Office, that Amalfi had suddenly had thrown at him the fragment from the writings of a man dead eleven centuries before Amalfi had been born. Possibly the uttering of the unexpected fragment had been simply an artifact of the warming-up process-like most computers of their age and degree of complexity, it took the City Fathers two to three hours to become completely sane after they had been out of service for a while-or perhaps Amalfi's fingers, working with sure automatism even after all these years, had been wiser than his head, and without the collusion of Amalfi's consciousness had built into the problem elements of what was really troubling him: the New Earthmen. In either event, the quotation was certainly apposite:
"If this be the whole fruit of victory, we say: if the generations of mankind suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets and martyrs sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, to protract in saecula saeculorum their contented and inoffensive lives-why, at such a rate, better lose than win the battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be saved from so singularly flat a winding-up."
"What was that?" Amalfi barked into the microphone.
"AN EXTRACT FROM 'THE WILL TO BELIEVE,' BY WILLIAM JAMES, MR. MAYOR."
"Well, it's irrelevant; get your bottles and firecrackers back on the main problem. Wait a minute-is this the Librarian?"
"YES, MR. MAYOR."
"What's the date of the work you quoted?"
"1897, MR, MAYOR."
"All right. Switch out and hook into the analytical side of the loop; you've no business at the output end for this problem."
A flowmeter needle bobbed upward as the drain of the library machine on the circuit was discontinued for a moment, then dipped again. He did not proceed with the project for a while, however, but instead simply sat and thought about the fragment that the machines had offered him. There were, he supposed, a few unreconstructed Okies still alive on New Earth, though the only one that he knew personally was John Amalfi. He himself had no special nostalgia qua nostalgia for all the history he had outlived, for he could hardly forget that it had been by his foreplanning that New Earth had been founded. And for a period of perhaps four years there had been plenty to occupy his mind: the discovery that the planet, then unnamed, was at. once the refuge and the feudal fief of a notorious pack of bindlestiffs calling itself Interstellar Master Traders-better known in the home lens simply as "the Mad Dogs"-had raised a considerable obstacle to colonization, the solution of which obviously needed to be drastic, and was. But the destruction of IMT in 3948 in the Battle of the Blasted Heath had left Amalfi at long last without problems and without function, and he had subsequently found himself utterly unable to become used to living in a stable and ordered society. The James quotation almost perfectly summarized his feelings about the Okie citizens who had once been his charges, and their descendants; he had of course to excuse the natives, who knew no better and were finding the problems of self-government an unprecedented challenge after their serfdom under "the Mad Dogs."
Local space travel, he knew very well, was no solution for him; one planet in the Cloud was very like another, and the Cloud itself was only 20,000 light years in diameter-a fact which made the Cloud extremely convenient to organize from one administrative center, but a fact of no significance whatsoever to a man who had once shepherded his city across 280,000 light years in a single flight. What he missed, after all, was not space, but instability itself, the feeling of being on the way to an unknown destination, unable to predict what outlandish surprises might be awaiting him at the next planetfall.
The fact of the matter was that longevity now hung on him like a curse. An indefinitely prolonged life span had been a prerequisite for an Okie society-indeed, until the discovery of the anti-agathic drugs early in the 21st Century, interstellar flight even with the spindizzy had been a physical impossibility; the distances involved were simply too great for a short-lived man to compass at any finite speed-but to be a virtually immortal man in a stable society was to be as uninteresting to one's self, for Amalfi at least, as an everlasting light bulb; he felt that he had simply been screwed into his socket and forgotten.
It was true that most of the other former Okies had seemed able to make the change-over-the youngsters in particular, whose experience of star wandering had been limited, were now putting their long life expectancies to the obvious use: launching vast research or development projects the fruition "of which could not be expected in under five centuries or more. There was, for example, an entire research team now hard at work in New Manhattan on the overall problem of anti-matter. The theoretical brains of the project were being supplied largely by Dr. Schloss, an ex-Hruntan physicist who had-boarded the city back in 3602 as a refugee during the reduction of the Duchy of Gort, a last surviving polyp of the extinct Hruntan Empire; administration of the project was in the hands of a comparative youngster named Carrel, .who not so long ago had been the city's co-pilot and ranking understudy to the City Manager. The immediate objective of the project, according to Carrel, was the elucidation of the theoretical molecular structures possible to anti-material atoms, but it was no secret that most of the young men in the group, with the active support of Schloss himself, were hoping in a few centuries to achieve the actual construction, not only of simple chemical compounds-that might come about in a matter of decades- of this radical type, but a visible, macroscopic artifact composed entirely of anti-matter. Upon the unthinkably explosive object they would no doubt paint, Amalfi surmised, had they by that time also composed an anti-material paint and something to keep it in, the warning Noli me tangere.
That was all very well; but it was equally impossible for Amalfi, who was not a scientist, to participate. It was, of course, perfectly possible for him to end his life; he was not invulnerable, nor even truly immortal; immortality is a meaningless word in a universe where the fundamental laws, being stochastic in nature, allow no one to bar accidents, and where life no matter how prolonged is at bottom only a local and temporary discontinuity in the , Second Law of Thermodynamics. The thought, however, did not occur to Amalfi; he was not the suicidal type. He had never felt less tired, less used-up, less despairing than he felt today; he was simply snarlingly bored, and too confirmed in his millennia-old patterns of thought and emotion to be able to settle for a single planet and a single social order, no matter how Utopian; his thousand years of continuous translation from one culture to another had built up in him an enormous momentum which now seemed to be bearing him irresistibly toward an immovable inertial wall labeled, No PLACE To Go.
"Amalfi! So it's you. I might have guessed."
Amalfi shot the "hold" switch closed convulsively and swung around on his stool. He had, however, recognized the voice at once from centuries of familiarity. He had heard it often since somewhere around 3500, when the city had taken its owner on board as chief of the astronomy section: a testy and difficult little man with a deceptively mild manner who had never been precisely the chief astronomer that the city needed, but who had come through in the pinches often- enough to prevent the City Fathers from allowing him to be swapped to another Okie city during the period when such swaps were still possible for Amalfi's town.
"Hello, Jake," Amalfi said.
"Hello, John," the astronomer said, peering curiously at the set-up board. "The Hazletons told me I might find you prowling around this old hulk, but I confess I'd forgotten about it by the time I decided to come over here. I wanted to use the computation section, but I couldn't get in-the machines were all shuttling back and forth on their tracks and coupling and uncoupling like a pack of demented two-hundred-ton ballet dancers. I thought maybe one of the kids had wandered in up here in the control room and was fooling with the boards. What are you up to?"
It was an extremely pointed question which, up to now, Amalfi had not asked himself. Even to consider answering Jake by describing the message-analysis project was to reject it; not that Jake would care one way or the other, but to Amalfi's inner self the answer would be an obvious blind. He said:
"I don't quite know. I had an urge to look around the place again. I hate to see it going to rust; I keep thinking it must still be good for something."
"It is, it is," Jake said. "After all, there are no computers quite like the City Fathers anywhere else on New Earth, let alone anywhere else in the Magellanics. I call on them pretty frequently when there's anything really complicated to be worked on; so does Schloss, I understand. After all, the City Fathers know a great deal that nobody else around here can know, and old though they are, they're still reasonably fast."
"I think there must be more to it than that," Amalfi said. "The city was powerful, is powerful still; the central pile is good for a million years yet at a minimum, and some of the spindizzies must still be operable-providing that we ever again1 find anything big enough to need all the lifting power we've got concentrated down below in the hold."
"Why should we?" the astronomer said, obviously not very much interested. "That's all past and done with."
"But is it? I keep thinking that no machine of the sophistication .and complexity of the city can ever go quite out of use. And I don't mean just marginal uses, like occasionally consulting the City Fathers, or tapping the pile for some fraction of its total charge. This city was meant to fly, and by God it ought to be flying still."
"What for?"
"I don't know, exactly. Maybe for exploration, maybe for work, the kind of work we used to do. There must be some jobs in the Cloud for which nothing less than a machine of this size is suitable-though obviously we haven't hit such a job yet. Maybe it would be worth cruising and looking for one."
"I doubt it," Jake said. "Anyhow, she's gotten pretty tumbledown since we had our little difference with IMT, what with all those rocket bombs they threw at us-and letting her be rained on steadily ever since hasn't helped, either. Besides, I seemed to remember that that old 23rd St. spindizzy blew for good and all when we landed here. I hardly think she'd stir at all now if you tried to lift her, though no doubt she'd groan a good deal."
"I wasn't proposing to pick up the whole thing, anyhow," Amalfi said. "I know well enough that that couldn't be done. But the city's over-sophisticated for a field of action as small as the Cloud; there's a lot you could leave behind. Besides, we'd have a great deal of difficulty in scaring up anything more than a skeleton crew, but if we could rehabilitate only a part of her, we might still get her aloft again—"
"Part of her?" Jake said. "How do you propose to section a city with a granite keel? Particularly one composed as a unit on that keel? You'd find that many of the units that you most needed in your fraction would be in the outlying districts and couldn't be either cut off or transported inward; that's the way she was built, as a piece."
This of course was true. Amalfi said, "But supposing it could be done? How would you feel about it, Jake? You were an Okie for nearly five centuries; don't you miss it, a little, now?"
"Not a bit," the astronomer said briskly. "To tell you the truth, Amalfi, I never liked it. It was just that there was no place else to go. I thought you were all crazy with your gunning around the sky, your incessant tangles with the cops, and your wars, and the periods of starvation and all the rest, but you gave me a floating platform to work from and a good close look at stars and systems I could never have seen as well from a fixed observatory with any possible telescope, and besides, I got fed. So I was reasonably satisfied. But do it again, now that I have a choice? Certainly not. In fact, I only came over here to get some computational work done on this new star that's cropped up just beyond the Lesser Cloud; it's behaving outrageously-in fact, it's the prettiest theoretical problem I've encountered hi a couple of centuries. I wish you'd let me know when you're through with the boards: I really do need the City Fathers, when they’re available."
"I'm through now" Amalfi said, getting off the stool. As an. afterthought, he turned back to the boards and cleared the instruction circuits of the problem he had been setting up, a problem which he now knew all too well to be a dummy.
He left Jake humming contentedly as he set up his nova problem, and wandered without real intention or direction down into the main body of the city, trying to remember it as it had been as a living and vibrant organism; but the empty streets, the blank windows, the flat quiet of the very air under the blue sky of New Earth, was like an insult. Even the feeling of gravity under his feet seemed in these familiar surroundings a fleeting denial of the causes and values to which he had given most of his life; a smug gravity, so easily maintained by sheer mass, and without the constant distant sound of spindizzies which always before-since his distant, utterly unrememberable youth- had signified that gravity was a thing made by man, and maintained by man.
Depressed, Amalfi quit the streets for the holds of the city. There, at least, his memory of the city as a live entity would not be mocked by the unnaturally natural day. But that in the long run proved to be no better. The empty granaries and cold-storage bins reminded him that there was no longer any need to keep the city stocked for trips that might last as much as a century between planet-falls; the empty crude-oil tanks rang hollowly, not to his touch, but simply to his footfall as he passed them; the empty dormitories were full of those peculiar ghosts which not the dead, but the living leave behind when they pass, still living, to another Kind of life; the empty classrooms, which were, as was quite usual with Okie cities, small, were mocked by the memory of the myriads of children which the Okies were now farrowing on their own planet, New Earth, no longer bound by the need to consider how many children an Okie city needs and can comfortably provide for. And down at the threshold of the keel itself, he encountered the final sign and signal of his forthcoming defeat: the fused masses of two spindizzies ruined beyond repair by the landing of 3944 on the Blasted Heath. New spindizzies, of course, could be built and installed, the old yanked out; but the process would take a long time; there were no graving docks suitable for the job on New Earth, since the cities were extinct. As was the spirit.
Nevertheless, in the cold gloom of the spindizzy hold, Amalfi resolved to try.
"But what on earth do you expect to gain?" Hazleton said in exasperation, for at least the fifth time. "I think you're out of your mind."
There was still no one else on New Earth who would have had the temerity to speak to Amalfi quite like that; but Mark Hazleton had been Amalfi's city manager ever since 3301 and knew his former boss very well. A subtle, difficult, lazy, impulsive and sometimes dangerous man, Hazleton had survived many blunders for which the City Fathers would have had any other city manager shot-as, indeed, they had had his predecessor shot-and there had survived, too, his often unwarranted assumption that he could read Amalfi's mind.
There was surely no other ex-Okie on New Earth who might be as likely to understand Amalfi's present state of mind, but Hazleton was not at the moment giving a very good demonstration of this. For one thing, he and his wife Dee—"the girl from a planet called Utopia who had boarded the city about the same time that Dr. Schloss had, during the reduction of the Duchy of Gort-had perhaps forgotten that an Okie tradition forbade the mayor of an Okie city to marry or have children, and that Amalfi as the mayor of New York since 3089 was conditioned beyond redemption to this state of mind; and in particular would not welcome being surrounded by the children and grandchildren of his city manager at any time, and particularly not when what he most urgently needed was advice from someone who remembered the traditions well enough to understand why another man might still be clinging to them.
It was one of Mark's virtues, however, that at his best he tended to react more like a symbiote than a truly separate entity. When the children made graceful exits soon after dinner, Amalfi knew that it was at Hazleton's behest. He also knew it was not because Hazleton even faintly suspected his friend's discomfiture in the presence of so many fruits of the settling-down process; it was just that the city manager Sad intuited Amalfi's need for a conference and had promptly set one up, scuttling Dee's social time-table without a qualm.
The children charged their unseasonably early departure to the grandchildren's impending bedtimes, although Amalfi knew that when the whole clan came to dinner they customarily made a great occasion of it, and all stayed the night in the adjoining building, a beehive of bedrooms where the Hazletons had raised their numerous family; the current Hazleton dwelling consisted mostly of the huge social room where they had just dined. Now that the meal was over, Amalfi just barely kept from fidgeting while all the procession of big and little Hazletons made their manners. Even the youngest had each to make his farewell speech to the great man, identifying his inconsiderable self; their parents had long since learned in their own childhoods that the busy Mr. Mayor would not trouble himself to remember which was which.
It never occurred to Amalfi to admire the children's concealment of their disappointment at leaving so precipitately, since he did not realize that they were disappointed. He simply listened without listening. One middle-sized boy caught his attention mainly because from the moment he had arrived Amalfi had noticed that the child had kept his eyes riveted on the guest of honor. It was disconcerting. Amalfi suspected he had forgotten to don some essential garment or to doff some trace of his party preparations. When the child who had caused him to rub his chin and smooth his eyebrows and finger his ears to see if there were still soapsuds in them spoke up, Amalfi paid attention.
"Webster Hazleton, sir, and I hope to be seeing you again on a matter of the greatest importance," the boy said. He said it as if ha had been rehearsing it for weeks, with a ringing conviction that almost impelled Amalfi to fix an appointment then and there.
Instead, he growled, "Webster, eh?"
"Yes, sir. I was pit on the Great List to be born when Webster wanted off."
Amalfi was considerably jolted. So long ago as that! Webster had been the pile engineer who had elected to leave the city before the landing on Utopia, around 3600. Of course it had taken a long time to fill up the gaps in the city's roster after the murderous attempt of the bandit cities to prevent fulfillment of their contract on He, and the considerable losses in boarding the plague city in the Acolyte jungle; and then there had been so many girls born at first. Webster had been an unconscionably .long time in coming, though. He could not be more than fourteen, from the looks of him.
Dee intervened. "Actually, John, Web arrived a long time after the Great List was abandoned. It pleases him to have his patron citizen, that's all, just like in the old days."
The boy turned his clear brown eyes on Dee briefly, and then, as if dismissing her from their male universe, he said, "Good night, sir." Amalfi bridled a little. Nobody could write Dee off, not even Amalfi; he knew; once he had tried.
The procession continued while he lapsed back into inattention, and eventually he found himself closeted with Dee and Mark-if closeted was the word in a room so large and echoing with so many strong personalities. The aura of furious domesticity remained behind on the Hazleton hearth, and came between Amalfi and what he was trying to say, so that his exposition was unwontedly stumbling; and it was then that Hazleton had asked him what he expected to gain.
"Gain?" Amalfi said. "I don't expect to gain anything. I'd just like to be aloft again, that's all."
"But, John," Dee said. "Think about it a minute. Suppose you do succeed in persuading a few people from the old days to go in with you. It all doesn't have any meaning any more. You'll just turn yourself into a sort of Flying Dutchman, sailing under a curse, going nowhere and doing nothing."
"Maybe so," Amalfi said. "The picture doesn't frighten me, Dee. As a matter of fact, it gives me a sort of perverse satisfaction if you must know. I shouldn't mind becoming a legend; at least that would fit me back into history again-give me a role to play comparable to roles I've played in the. past. And besides, I'd be aloft again, which is the important thing. I'm beginning to believe that nothing else is important to me any more."
"Does it matter what's important to us?" Hazleton said. "For one thing, such a venture would leave the Cloud without a mayor. I don't know how important that is to you any more-I seem to remember that it was pretty important to you back when we were on our way here- but whether it matters to you any more or not, you ran for the job, you connived for it, you even rigged the election-Carrel and I were supposed to be the only candidates, and the office we were running for was city manager, but you had the City Fathers hornswoggled into believing that it was a mayoralty election, so of course they elected you."
"Do you want the job?" Amalfi said. "Gods of all stare, no! I want you to keep it. You exercised considerable ingenuity to get it, and I'm not alone in expecting you to hold it down now that you've got it. Nobody else is bidding for the job; they expect you to handle it, as you undertook to do."
"Nobody else is running for it because they wouldn't know what to do with it after they got it," Amalfi said steadily. "I don't know what to do with it myself. The office of mayor is an anachronism in this Cloud. Nobody has asked me to do anything or to say anything or to appear anywhere or to be in any other way useful in I don't know how many years. I occupy an honorary office, and that's all. As everybody knows, you are the man that is actually running this Cloud, and that's as it should be. It's high time you took over in name, as well as in fact. I've given everything I could give to the initial organizing job, and my talents are unsuitable to the situation as it now stands; everybody on New Earth knows that, and it would be healthier if they'd put a name to it. Otherwise, Mark, how long could I be allowed to go on in the job? Apparently forever, under your present assumptions. This is a new society; suppose I should go right on being its titular leader for another thousand years, as is entirely possible? A thousand years during which a new society continues to give lip-service to the same old set of attitudes and ideas that I represented when they meant something? That would be insane; and you know it. No, no, it's high time you took over."
Hazleton was silent for quite a long time. At last he said:
"I can see that. In fact, I've thought of it several times myself. Nevertheless, Amalfi, I have to say that this whole proposition distresses me a good deal. I suppose the matter of the mayoralty would settle itself out almost automatically; that wasn't a real objection. What bothers me is the exit you're contriving for yourself, not only because it's dangerous-which it is, but that wouldn't make any difference to you and I suppose it shouldn't make any difference to me-but because it's dangerous to no purpose."
"It suits my purposes," Amalfi said. "I don't see that there are any other purposes to be suited, at this juncture. If I did, I wouldn't go, Mark; you know that; but it seems to me that I am how, for the first time in all my life, a free agent; hence I may now do what I will do."
Hazleton shrugged convulsively. "And so you may," he said. "I can only say that I wish you wouldn't."
Dee bowed her head and said nothing.
And the rest was left unsaid. That Dee and Mark would be personally bereaved if Amalfi persisted on his present course, for their different reasons, was an obvious additional argument which they might have used, but they came no closer to it than that; it was the kind of argument which Hazleton would regard, as pure emotional blackmail, precisely because it was unreasonably powerful, and Amalfi was grateful to him for not bringing it to bear. Why Dee had not was more difficult to fathom; there had been a time when she would have used it without a moment's hesitation; and Amalfi thought he knew her well enough to suspect that she had good reasons for wanting to use it now. She had been waiting for the founding of New Earth for a long time, indeed, almost since she had come on board the city, and anything that threatened it now that she had children and grandchildren should provoke her into using every weapon at her command; yet, she was silent. Perhaps she was old enough now to realize that not even John Amalfi could steal from her an entire satellite galaxy; at any event, if that was what was on her mind, she gave no inkling of it, and the evening in Hazleton's house ended with a stiff formality which, cold though it was, was "far from the worst that Amalfi had expected.
The whole of the residential area to Amalfi's eyes swarmed with pets. Those to whom freedom to run was paramount, frisked and scuttered, in the wide lanes. Few of them ventured onto the wheelways, and those who did were run down instantly, but four-footed animals were a constant and undignified hazard to walkers. By day raffish dogs stopped just short of bowling strangers over, but leaped to brace forepaws on the shoulders of anyone they knew-and everyone, including, seemingly, all the dogs of New Manhattan, knew Amalfi. An occasional svengali from Altair IV-originally a rare specimen in the flying city's zoo, but latterly force-budded in New Earth labs during the full-fertility program of 3950, when every homesteader's bride had her option of a vial of trilby water or a gemmate svengali and frequently wound up with both among the household lares and penates; the half-plant, half-animal, even nowadays a not infrequent pet-took the breeze and hunted in the half-light of dawn or dusk. A svengali lay bonelessly in mid-lane and fixed its enormous eyes on any moving object until something small enough and gelid enough to ingest might blunder near. Nothing suitable ever did, on New Earth. The two-legged victim tended to drift helplessly into that hypnotic stare until the starer got stepped on; then the svengali turned mauve and exuded a protective spray which might have been nauseating on Altair IV, but on New Earth was only euphoric. Sudden friendships, bursts of song, even a brief and deliriously happy crying jag might ensue, after which the shaken svengali would undulate back indoors to rest up and be given, usually, a bowl of jellied soup.
By night in the walkways of New Manhattan, it was cats, catching with sudden claw at floating cloak or fashionable sandal-streamer. Through the air of the town sizable and brightly colored creatures flew and glided: singing birds, squawking birds, talkers and mutes, but pets. every last one of them. Amalfi loathed them all.
When he walked anywhere-and he walked almost everywhere now that the city's aircabs were no more-he more than half-expected to have to free himself from the embraces of a burbling citizen or a barking dog before he got where he was going. The half-century old fad for household pets had arisen after the landing, and after his effectual abdication. What time-wasting quirk had moved so many pioneers' descendants to adopt the damnable svengalis as pets was beyond Amalfi.
He made it home from the Hazletons' without any such encounter; instead, it rained. He wrapped his cloak more tightly around him and hastened, muttering, for his own square uncompromising box of a dwelling before the full force of the storm should be let loose; his house and grounds were sheltered by a 0.02 per cent spindizzy field- the New Earthmen called the household device a "spindilly," a name which Amalfi loathed but put up with for the sake of, as Dee had once put it, "not knowing enough to come out of the rain." He had growled at her so convincingly for that that she had never brought up the subject again, but she had put her finger on it all the same.
Amalfi reached his entrance lane and laid his palm on the induction switch which softened the spindilly field just enough to let him through in a spatter of glistening drops, and noted with the grim dissatisfaction that was becoming natural to him that the storm had slacked off and would be over in minutes. Inside, he made a drink and stood, rubbing his hands, looking about him. If his house was an anachronism, well, he liked it that way, insofar as he liked anything on New Earth.
"What's wrong with me?" he thought suddenly. "People's pets are their own business, after all. If practically everybody else likes weather, what difference does it make if I don't? If Jake doesn't even take an interest, nor Mark either for that matter—"
He heard the distant, endlessly comforting murmur of the modified spindizzy under his feet alter momentarily; someone else had chosen to come in out of the rain. His visitor had never been there at that hour before, and had indeed never been there before alone, but he knew without a moment's doubt who had followed him home.