"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 Tbhemical, 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, h^ knew, lying next to the word "fun-gle"—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 wis 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,,. Lem-minkainen ... t '

Amalfl 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 coining 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."

CHAPTER SIX: The Jungle

THE cities drifted along their sterile orbits around the little red sun. Here and there, a few showed up on the screen by their riding lights, but most of them could not spare even enough power to keep riding lights going. The

lights were vital in such close-packed quarters, but power to maintain spindizzy screens was more important still.

Only one city glowed—not with its riding lights, which were all out, but by street lighting.

That city had power to waste, and it wanted the fact known. And it wanted it known, too, that it preferred to waste the power in sheer bragging to the maintenance of such elementary legalities as riding lights.

Amalfi looked soberly at the image of the bright city. It was not a very clear image, since the bright city was in a preferred position close to the red dwarf, where that sun's natural and unboundable gravitational field strained the structure of space markedly. The saturation of the intervening area with the smaller screens of the other Okies made the seeing still worse, since Amalfi's own city had been unable to press through the pack beyond eighteen AU's from the sun, a distance about equivalent to that from Sol to Uranus. For Amalfi, consequently, the red dwarf was visually only a star of the tenth magnitude— the G0 star four liglit years away seemed much closer.

But obviously, three hundred-odd Okie cities could not all huddle close enough to a red dwarf to derive any warmth from it. Somebody had to be on the outside. It was equally obvious, and expectable, that the city with the most power available to it should be the one drawn up the most cosily to the dull stellar fire, while those who most needed to conserve every erg shivered in the outer blackness.

What was surprising was that the bright city should be advertising its defiance of local law and common sense alike—while police-escorted Acolyte ships were shoving their way into the heart of the jungle.

Amalfi looked up at the screen banks. For the second time within the year, he was in a chamber of City Hall which was almost never used. This one was the ancient reception hall, which had been fitted with a screen system of considerable complexity about five hundred and eighty years ago, just after the city had first taken to space. It was called into service only when the city was approaching a heavily developed, highly civilized star system, in order to carry on the multiple negotiations with various diplomatic, legal, and economic officials which had to be gone through before an Okie could hope to deal with such a system. Certainly Amalfl had never expected to have any use for the reception hall in a jungle.

There was a lot, he thought grimly, that he didn't know about living in an Okie jungle. *•

One of the screens'"came alight. It showed the full-length figure of a woman in sober clothing of an old style, utilitarian in cut, but obviously made of perishable materials. The woman inside the clothes was hard-eyed, but not hard of muscle; an Acolyte trader, evidently.

"The assignment," the trader said in a cold voice, "is a temporary development project on Hern Six, as announced previously. We can take six cities there, to be paid upon a per-job basis."

"Attention, Okies."

A third screen faded in. Even before the image had stabilized in the locally distorted space-lattice, Amalfi recognized its outlines. The general topology of a cop can seldom be blurred by distortion of any kind. He was only mildly surprised to find, when the face came through, that the police spokesman was Lieutenant Lerner, the man whose bribe had turned to worthless germanium in his hands.

"If there's any disorder, nobody gets hired," Lerner said. "Nobody. Understand? You'll present your offers to the lady in proper fashion, and she'll take or leave your bids as she sees fit. Those of you who are wanted outside the jungle will be held accountable if you leave the jungle— we're offering no immunities this trip. And if there's any damn insolence——"

Lieutenant Lerner's image drew its forefinger across its throat in a gesture that somehow had never lost its specificity. Amalfi growled and switched off the audio; Lerner was still talking, as was the trader, but now another screen was coming on, and Amalfi had to know what words were to come from it. The speeches of the trader and the cop could be predicted almost positively in advance—as a matter of fact, the City Fathers had already handed Amalfi the predictions, and he had listened to the actual speeches only long enough to check them for barely possible unknowns.

But what the bright city near the red dwarf—the jungle's boss, the king of the hobos—would say ...

Not even Amalfi, let alone the City Fathers, could know that in advance. Lieutenant Lerner and the trader worked

their mouths soundlessly while the wavering shadow on the fourth screen jelled. A slow, heavy, brutally confident voice was already in complete possession of the reception hall.

"Nobody takes any offer less than sixty," it said. "The class A cities will ask one hundred and twenty-four for the Hern Six job, and grade B cities don't get to underbid them until the goddam trader has all the A's she'll take. If she picks all six from the A\ that's tough.

No C's are to bid at all on the Hern Six deal. We'll take care of anybody that breaks ranks, either right away . .."

The image came through. Amalfi goggled at it.

". . . or after the cops leave. That's all for now."

The image faded. The twisted, hairless man in the ancient metal-mesh cape stood in Amalfi's memory for quite a while afterwards.

The Okie King was a man made of lava. Perhaps he had been born at one time, but now he looked like a geological accident, a column of black stone sprung from a fissure and contorted roughly into the shape of a man.

And his face was shockingly disfigured and scarred by the one disease that still remained unconquered, unsolved, though it no longer killed.

Cancer.

A voice murmured inside Amalfi's head, coming from the tiny vibrator imbedded in the mastoid bone behind the mayor's right ear. "That's just what the City Fathers said he would say," Hazleton commented softly from his post uptown in the control tower. "But he can't be as nai've as all that. He's an old-timer; been aloft since back before they knew how to polarize spindizzy screens against cosmic radiation. Must be eight hundred years old at a minimum."

"You can lay up a lot of cunning in that length of time," Amalfi agreed in a similarly low voice. He was wearing throat mikes under a high military collar. As far as the screens were concerned, he was standing motionless, silent, and alone; though he was an expert at talking without moving his lips, he did not try to do so now, for the fuzziness of local transmission conditions made it unlikely that his murmuring would be detected. "It doesn't seem likely that he means what he says. But we'd best sit tight for the moment."

He glanced into the auxiliary battle tank, a three-dimensional chart in which color-coded points of lights moved, showing each city, the nearby sun, and the Acolyte vessels, not to scale, but in their relative positions. The tank was camouflaged as a desk and could be seen into only from behind;" hence it was out of sight of any eye but Amalfi's. In it the Acolyte force showed itself to consist of one trader's ship and four police craft; one of the latter was a command cruiser, very probably Ler-ner's, and the others were light cruisers.

It was not much of a force, but then, there was no real need for a full squadron here. With a minimum of organization, the Okies could run Lerner and his ward out of the jungle, even at some cost to their own numbers—but where would the Okies run to after Lerner had yelled for navy support? The question answered itself.

A string of twenty-three small "personal" screens came on now, high up along the curve of the far wall. Twenty-three faces looked down at Amalfi—the mayors of all but one of the class A cities in the jungle; Amalfi's own city was the twenty-fourth. Amalfi valved the main audio gain back up again.

"Are we ready to begin?" the Acolyte woman said. "I've got codes here for twenty-four cities, and I see you're all here. Small courage among Okies these days— twenty-four out of three hundred of you for a simple job like this! That's the attitude that made Okies of you in the first place. You're afraid of honest work."

"We'll work," the King's voice said. His screen, however, remained gray-green. "Look over the codes and take your pick."

The trader looked for the voice. "No insolence," she said sharply. "Or I'll ask for volunteers from the grade B's. It would save me money, anyhow."

There was no reply. The trader frowned and looked at the code list in her hand. After a moment, she called off three numbers, and then, with greater hesitation, a fourth. Four of the screens above Amalfi went blank, and in the tank, four green flecks began to move outward from the red dwarf star.

"That's all we need for Hern Six except for a pressure job," the woman said slowly.

"There are eight cities listed here as pressure specialists. You there—who are you, anyhow?"

"Bradley-Vermont," one of the faces above Amalfi said.

"What would you 'ask for a pressure job?"

"One hundred and twenty-four," Bradley-Vermont's mayor said sullenly.

"O-ho! You've a high opinion of yourself, haven't you? You may as well float here and rot for a while longer, until you learn something more about the law of supply and demand.

You—you're Dresden-Saxony, it says here. What's your price? Remember, I only need one."

Dresden-Saxony's mayor was a slight man with high cheekbones and glittering black eyes. He seemed to be enjoying himself, despite his obvious state of malnutrition; at least, he was smiling a little, and his eyes glittered over the dark shadows which made them look large.

"We ask one hundred 'and twenty-four," he said with malicious indifference.

The woman's lids slitted. "You do, eh? That's a coincidence, isn't it? And you?"

"The same," the third mayor said, though with obvious reluctance.

The trader swung around and pointed directly at Amalfi. In the very old cities, such as the one the King operated, it would be impossible to tell who she was pointing at, but probably most of the cities in the jungle had compensating tri-di. "What's your town?"

"We're not answering that question," Amalfi said. "And we're not pressure specialists anyhow."

"I know that, I can read a code. But you're the biggest Okie I've ever seen, and I'm not talking about your belly either; and you're modern enough for the purpose. The job is yours for one hundred—no more."

"Not interested."

"You're a fool as well as a fat man. You just came into this hell-hole and there are charges against——"

"Ah, you know who we are. Why did you ask?"

"Never mind that. You don't know what a jungle is like until you've lived in it. You'd be smart to take the job and get out now while you can. You'd be worth one hundred and twelve to me if you could finish the job under the estimated time."

"You've denied us immunity," Amalfi said, "and you needn't bother offering it, either.

We're not interested in pressure work for any price."

The woman laughed. "You're a liar, too. You know as well as I do that nobody arrests Okies on jobs. And you

take on the volunteer before interviewing the others might be—resented.

"Keep out of this," the voice of the King said, so much more slowly and heavily than before that its weight was almost tangible upon the air. "Let the lady do her own picking.

She's got no use for a class C outfit."

'We'll take the job. We're a mining town from way back, and we can refine the stuff, too, by gaseous diffusion, mass spectrography, mass chromatography, whatev-er's asked.

We can handle it. And we've got to have it."

"So do the rest," the King said, coldly unimpressed. 'Take your turn."

"We're dying out here! Hunger, cold, thirst, disease!"

"Others are in the samevstate. Do you think any of us like it here? Wait your turn!"

"All right," the woman said suddenly. "I'm sick of being told who I do and who I don't want.

Anything to get this over with. File your coordinates, whoever that is out there, and———"

"File your coordinates and we'll have a Dirac torpedo there before you've stopped talking!" the King roared. "Acolyte, what are you paying for this rock-heaving? Nobody here works for less than sixty—that's flat."

"We'll go for fifty-five."

The woman smiled an unpleasant smile. "Apparently somebody in this pest area is glad of a chance to do some honest work for a change.Who's next?"

"Hell, you don't need to take a class C city," one of the rejected class A's blurted. "We'll go for fifty-five. What can we lose?"

"Then we'll take fifty," the outsider whispered immediately.

"You'll take a bolt in the teeth! As for you—you're Coquilhatville-Congo, eh?—you're going to be sorry you ever had a tongue to flap."

There was already a stir among the green dots in the tank. Some of the larger cities were leaving their orbits. The woman began to look vaguely alarmed.

"Hazleton!" Amalfi murmured quickly. "This is going to get worse before it gets better. Set us up, as fast as you canuto move into one of the vacated orbits close to the red ttar the moment I give the word."

"We won't be able to put on any speed——"

"I wouldn't want us to if we could. It'll have to be done wouldn't find it difficult to leave the job once it's finished. Here now—I'll give you one hundred and twenty. That's my top offer, and it's only four less than the pressure experts are asking. Fair enough?"

"It may be fair enough," Amalfi said. "But we don't do pressure work; and we've already gotten in reports from the proxies we sent to Hern Six as soon as Lieutenant Lerner said that was where the job was. We don't like the look of it. We don't want it. We won't take it at one hundred and twenty, we won't take it at one hundred and twenty-four—and we won't take it at all. Understand?"

"Very well," the woman said with concentrated vicious-ness. "You'll hear from me again, Okie."

The King was looking at Amalfi with an unreadable, but certainly unfriendly, expression.

If Amalfi's guess was right, the King thought Amalfi was somewhat overdoing Okie solidarity. It might also be occurring to him that the expression of so much independence mipht be a bid for power within the jungle itself. Yes, Amalfi was sure that that, at least, had occurred to the King.

The hiring of the class B cities was now all that remained, but nevertheless it took quite a while to get started. The woman, it emerged, was more than a trader; she was an entrepreneur of some importance. She wanted the cities, twenty of them, each for the same identical piece of dirty work: working low-grade carnotite lies on a small planet too near a hot star. Twenty mining cities working upon such a planet would reduce it to as small and sculptured a lump of trash as a meteorite before very many months. The method, obviously, was to get the work done fast without paying more than a pittance for it.

Then, startlingly, while the woman was still making up her mind, the voice came through.

It was weak and indistinct, and without any face to go with it.

"We'll take the job. Take us."

There was a murmuring from the screens, and across some of the faces there the same shadow seemed to run. Amalfi checked the tank, but it told him little. The signal had been too weak. All that could be made certain was that the voice belonged to some city far out on the periphery of the jungle—a city desperate for energy.

The Acolyte woman seemed momentarily nonplussed. Even in a jungle, Amalfi thought grimly, some crude rules had to be observed; evidently the woman realized that to slowly enough so that it won't be apparent in any tank that we're moving counter to the general tendency. Also, get me a fix on that outfit on the outside that broke ranks if you possibly can. If , you can't do it without attracting attention, drop the project at once."

"Right."

"By Hadjjii's nightshirt you've got a lesson coming!" the woman was exclaiming. "The whole deal is off for today. No jobs, not for anybody. I'll come back in a week. Maybe by then you'll have some common sense back. Lieutenant, let's get the hell out of here."

That, however, proved to be a difficult assignment. There was a sort of wave front of heavy-duty cities between the Acolyte ships and open space, expanding outward into the darkness where the weaklings shivered. In that second frigid shell most of the class C cities were panicking; and, still farther out, the brilliant green sparks of the cities whose promised jobs had just been written off were plunging angrily back toward the main cloud.

The reception hall was a bedlam of voices, mostly those of mayors trying to establish that they had not been responsible for the break in the wage line. Somewhere several cities were still attempting to shout new bids to the Acolyte woman under cover of the confusion. Through it all the voice of the King whirled like a bull-roarer.

"Clear the sky!" Lerner shouted. "Clear it up out there, by——"

As if in response, the tank suddenly crackled with hair-thin sapphire tracers. The static of the scattered mesotron rifle fire rattled audio speakers, cross-hatched the desperate, shouting faces on the screens. Terror, the terror of a man who finds suddenly that the situation he is in has always been deadly, turned Lieutenant Lerner's features rigid.

Amalfi saw him reach for something.

"All right, Hazleton, spin!"

The defective spindizzy sobbed, and the city moved painfully. Lerner's elbow jerked back toward his midriff, and from his ship came the pale guide light of a Bethe blaster.

Seconds later, something went up in the white agony of a fusion explosion—something so far off from the center of the riot that Amalfi first thought, with a shock of fury, that Lerner had undertaken to destroy Okie cities unselec-tively, simply to terrorize. Then the look on Lerner's face

told him that the "shot had been fired at random. Lerner was as taken aback as Amalfi, and seemingly for much the same reasons, at the death of the unknown bystander.

The depth of the response surprised Amalfi anew. Perhaps there was hope for Lerner yet.

Some incredible fool of an Okie was firing on the cop now, but the shots fell short; mesotron rifles were not primarily military instruments, and the Acolytes had almost worked free of the jungle. For a moment Amalfi was afraid that Lerner would fling a few vindictive Beth6 blasts back into the pack, but evidently the cop was recovering the residue of his good sense; at least, no more shots came from the command cruiser. It was possible that he had realized that any further exchange of fire would turn the incident from a minor brawl to a mob uprising which would make it necessary to call in the Acolyte navy.

Not even the Acolytes could want that, for it would end in cutting off their supply of skilled labor.

The city's spindizzies cut out. Lurid, smoky scarlet light leaked down the stone stairwell which led out of the reception hall to the belfry;

"We're parked near the stinking little star, boss. We're less than a million miles out from the orbit of the King's own city."

"Good work, Mark. Break out a gig. We're going calling."

"All right. Anything special in the way of equipment?"

"Equipment?" Amalfi said, slowly. "Well—no. But you'd best bring Sergeant Anderson along. And Mark——"

"Yes?"

"Bring Dee, too."

The center of government of the King's city was enormously impressive: ancient, stately, marmoreal. It was surrounded on a lower level by a number of lesser structures of equally heavy-handed beauty. One of these was a heavy, archaic cantilever bridge for which Amalfi could postulate no use at all; it spanned an enormously broad avenue which divided the city in two, an avenue which was virtually untraveled; the bridge, too, carried only foot traffic now, and not much of that.

He decided finally that the bridge had been retained only out of respect to history. These seemed to be no other

sentiment which fitted it, since the normal mode of transportation in the King's city, as in every other Okie city, was by aircab. Like the City Hall, the bridge was beautiful; possibly that had spoken for its retention, too.

The cab rocked sli|hlly and grounded. "Here we are, gentlemen," the Ti'n Cabby said.

"Welcome to Buda-Pesht."

Amalfi followed Dee and Hazleton out onto the plaza. Other cabs, many of them, dotted the red sky, homing on the palace and settling near by.

"Looks like a conclave," Hazleton said. "Guests from outside, not just managerial people inside this one city; otherwise, why the welcome from the cabby?"

"That's my guess, too, and I think we're none too early for it, either. It's my theory that the King is in for a rough time from his subjects. This shoot-up with Lerner, and the loss of jobs for everybody, must have lowered his stock considerably. If so, it'll give us an opening."

"Speaking of which," Hazleton said, "where's the entrance to this tomb, anyhow?

Ah—that must be it."

They hurried through the shadows of the pillared portico. Inside, in the foyer, hunched or striding figures moved past them toward the broad, ancient staircase, or gathered in small groups, murmuring urgently in the opulent dimness. This entrance hall was marvelous with chandeliers; they did not cast much light, but they shed glamour like a molting peacock.

Someone plucked Amalfi by the sleeve. He looked down. A slight man with a worn Slavic face and black eyes which looked alive with suppressed mischief stood at his side.

"This place makes me homesick," the slight man said, "although we don't go in for quite so much sheer mass on my town. I believe you're the mayor who refused all offers, on behalf of a city with no name. I'm correct, am I not?"

"You are," Amalfi said, studying the figure with difficulty in the ceremonial dimness. "And you're the mayor of Dresden-Saxony: Franz Specht. What can we do for you?"

"Nothing, thank you. I simply wanted to make myself known. It may be that you will need to know someone, inside." He nodded in the direction of the staircase. "I admired your stand today, but there may be some who resent it. Why is your city nameless, by the way?"

"It isn't," Amalfi" said. "But we sometimes need to use our name as a weapon, or at least as a lever. We hold it in reserve as such."

"A weapon! Now that is something to ponder. I will see you later, I hope." Specht slipped away abruptly, a shadow among shadows. Hazleton looked at Amalfi with evident puzzlement.

"What's his angle, boss? Backing a longshot, maybe?"

"That would be my guess. Anyhow, as he says, we can probably use a friend in this mob.

Let's go on up."

In the great hall, which had been the throne room of an empire older than any Okie, older even than space flight, there was already a meeting in progress. The King himself was standing on the dais, enormously tall, bald, scarred, terrific, as shining black as anthracite. Ancient as he was, his antiquity was that of some, featureless, eventless, an antiquity without history against the rich backdrop of his city. He was anything but an expectable mayor of Buda-Pesht; Amalfi strongly suspected that there were recent bloodstains on the city's log.

Nevertheless, the King held the rebellious Okies under control without apparent effort.

His enormous gravelly voice roared down about their heads like a rockslide, overwhelming them all with its raw momentum alone. The occasional bleats of protest from the floor sounded futile and damned against it, like the voices of lambs objecting to the inevitable avalanche.

"So you're mad!" he was thundering. "You got roughed up a little and now you're looking for somebody to blame it on! Well, I'll tell you who to blame it on! I'll tell you what to do about it, too. And by God, when I'm through telling you, you'll do it, the whole pack of you!"

Amalfi pushed through the restive, close-packed mayors and city managers, putting his bull shoulders to good use. Hazleton and Dee, hand in hand, tailed him closely. The Okies on the floor grumbled as Amalfi shoved his way forward; but they were so bound up in the King's diatribe, and in their own fierce, unformulated resistance to the King's battering-ram leadership tactics, that they could spare nothing more than a moment's irritation for Amalfi's passage among them.

"Why are we hanging around here now, getting pushed around by these Acolyte hicks?"

the King roared. "You're fed with it. All right, I'm fed with it, too. I wouldn't take it from the beginning! When I came here, you guys were bidding each other5 down to peanuts. When the bidding was over, the city that got the job lost money on it every time.

It was me that showed you how to organize. It was me that showed yc|u,'how to stand up for your rights. It was me that showed you how to form a wage line, and how to hold one.

And it's going to be me that'll show you what to do when a wage line breaks up."

Amalfi reached behind him, caught Dee's hand, and drew her forward to stand beside him. They were now in the front row of the crowd, almost up against the dais. The King saw the movement; he paused and looked down. Amalfi felt Dee's hand tighten spasmodically upon his. He returned the pressure.

"All right," Amalfi said. When he was willing to let his voice out, he could fill a considerable space with it. He let it out. "Show, or shut up."

The King, who had been looking directly down at them, made a spasmodic movement—almost as if he had been about to take one step backwards. "Who the hell are you?" he shouted.

'Tin the mayor of the only city that held the line today," Amalfi said. He did not seem to be shouting, but somehow his voice was no smaller in the hall than the King's. A quick murmur went through the mob, and Amalfi could see necks craning in his direction.

"We're the newest—and the biggest—city here, and this is the first sample we've seen of the way you run this wage bidding. We think it stinks. We'll see the Acolytes in hell before we take their jobs at any of the prices they offer, let alone the low pay levels you set."

Someone near by turned and looked at Amalfi slantwise. "Evidently you folks can eat space," the Okie said dryly.

"We eat food. We won't eat slops," Amalfi growled. "You up there on the platform—let's hear this great plan for getting us out of this mess. It couldn't be any worse than the wage-line system—that's a cinch."

The King began to pace. He whirled as Amalfi finished speaking, arms akimbo, feet apart, his shiny bald cranium thrust forward, gleaming blankly against the faded tapestries.

"I'll let you hear it," he roared. "You bet I'll let you hear it. Let's see what your big talk comes to after you

know what it is. -You can stay behind and try to work boom-time wages out of the Acolytes if you want; but if you've guts, you'll go with us." "Where to?" Amalfi said calmly.

"We're going to march on Earth." There was a brief, stunned silence. Then a composite roar began to grow in the hall.

Amalfi grinned. The sound of the response was not exactly friendly.

"Wait!" the King bellowed. "Wait, dammit! I ask you— what's the sense in our fighting the Acolytes? They're just local trash. They know just as well as we do that they couldn't get away with their slave-market tactics and their private militia and their-shoot-ups if Earth had an eye on 'em."

"Then why don't we holler for the Earth cops?" someone demanded.

"Because they wouldn't come here. They can't. There must be Okies all over the galaxy that are taking stuff from local systems and clusters, stuff like what we're taking. This depression is everywhere, and there just aren't enough Earth cops to be all over the place at once.

"But we don't have to take it. We can go to Earth and demand our rights. We're citizens, every one of us—unless there are any Vegans here. You a Vegan, buddy?"

The scarred face stared down at Amalfi, smiling grue-somely. A nervous titter went through the hall.

"The rest of us can go to Earth and demand that the government bail us out. What else is government for, anyhow? Who produces the money that kept the politicians fat all through the good centuries? What would the government have to govern and tax and penalize if it weren't for the Okies? Answer me that, you with the orbital fort under your belt!"

The laughter was louder and sounded more assured now. Amalfi, however, was quite used to gibes at his pod; such thrusts were for him a sure sign that his current opponent had run out of pertinent things to say. He returned coldly: "More than half of us had charges against us when we came here—not local charges, but violations of Earth orders of one kind or another. Some of us have been dodging being brought back on our Violations dockets for decades. Are you going to offer yourselves to the Earth cops on a platter?"

The King did not appear to be listening with more than half an ear. He had Brought up a broad grin at the second wave of laughter, and had been looking back down at Dee for admiration.

"We'll send out s&c&ll on the Dirac," he said. "To all Okies, everywhere. 'We're all going back to Earth,' we'll say. 'We're going home to get an accounting. We've done Earth's heavy labor all over the galaxy, and Earth's paid us by turning our money into waste paper. We're going home to see that Earth does something about it'—we'll set a date—'and any Okie with starman's guts will follow us.' How does that sound, eh?"

Dee's grip on Amalfi's hand was now tighter than any pressure he would have believed she could exert. Amalfi did not speak to the King; he simply looked back at him, his eyes metallic.

From somewhere fairly far back in the throne room, a newly familiar voice called, "The mayor of the nameless city has asked a pertinent luestion. From the point of view of Earth, we're a dangerous collection of potential criminals at worst. At best we're discontented jobless people, and "undesirable in large numbers anywhere near the home planet."

Hazleton pushed up to the front row, on the other side of Dee, and glared belligerently up at the King. The King, however, had looked away again, over Hazleton's head.

"Anybody got a better idea?" the immense black man said dryly. "Here's good old Vega down here; he's full of ideas. Let's hear his idea. I'll bet it's colossal. I'll just bet he's a genius, this Vegan."

"Get up there, boss," Hazleton hissed. "You've got "em!"

Amalfi released Dee's hand—he had some difficulty in being gentle about it—bounded clumsily but without real effort onto the dais, and turned to face the crowd.

"Hey there, mister," someone shouted. "You're no Vegan!"

The crowd laughed uneasily.

"Never said I was," Amalfi retorted. Hazleton's face promptly fell. "Are you all a pack of children? No mythical fort is going to bail you out of this. Neither is any fool mass flight on Earth. There isn't any easy way out. There is one tough way out, if you've got the guts for it."

"Let's hear it."

"Speak up!"

"Let's get it over with."

"All right," Amalfi said. He walked back to the immense throne of the Hapsburgs and sat down in it, catching the King flatfooted. Standing, Amalfi, despite his bulk, was a smaller man than the King, but on the throne he made the King look not only smaller but also quite irrelevant. From the back of the dais, his voice boomed out as powerfully as before.

"Gentlemen," he said, "our germanium is worthless now. So is our paper money. Even the work we do doesn't seem to be worth while now, on any standard. That's our trouble, and there isn't much that Earth can do about it—they're caught in the cqllapse, too."

"A professor," the King said, his seamed lips twisting.

"Shaddap. You asked me up here. I'm staying up here until I've had my say. The commodity we all have to sell is labor. Hand labor, heavy work, isn't worth anything.

Machines can do that. But brainwork can't be done with anything but brains; art and pure science are beyond the compass of any machine.

"Now, we can't sell art. We can't produce it; we aren't artists and aren't set up as such; there's an entirely different segment of galactic society that supplies that need. But brainwork in pure science is something we can sell, just as we've always sold brainwork in applied sciences. If we play our cards right, we can sell it anywhere, for any price we ask, regardless of the money system involved. It's the ultimate commodity, and in the long run it's a commodity which no one but the Okies could merchandise successfully.

"Selling that commodity, we could take over the Acolytes or any other star system. We could do it better in a general depression than we could ever have done it before, because we can now set any price on it that we choose." "Prove it," somebody called.

"That's easy. We have here around three hundred cities. Let's integrate and use their accumulated knowledge. This is the first time in history that so many City Fathers have been gathered together in one place, just as it's the first time that so many big organizations specializing in different sciences have ever been gathered together. If we were to consult with each other, pool our intellectual resources, we'd come out technologically at least a thousand years ahead of the rest of the galaxy. Individual experts can be bought for next to nothing now, but no individual expert— nor any individual city or planet— could match what we'd have.

"That's the pricelesp (Jfoin, gentlemen, the universal coin: human knowledge. Look now: there are eighty-five million undeveloped worlds in this galaxy ready to pay for knowledge of the current vintage, the kind we all share right now, the kind that runs about a century behind Earth on the average. But if we were to pool our knowledge, then even the most advanced planets, even Earth itself, would see their coinages crumble in the face of their eagerness to buy what we would have to offer."

"Question!"

"You're Dresden-Saxony back there, right?" Amalfi said. "Go ahead, Mayor Specht."

"Are you sure accumulated technology is the answer? You yourself said that straight techniques are the province of machines. The ancient Godel-Church theorems show that no machine or set of machines can score significant advances on human thought.

The designer has to precede the machine, and has to have achieved the desired function before the machine can even be built."

"What is this, a seminar?" the King demanded. "Let's

"Let's hear it," someone called.

"After that mess today——"

"Let 'em talk—they make sense!"

Amalfi waited a moment and then said, "Yes, Mayor Specht. Go ahead."

"I had about made my point. The machines can't do the job you offer as the solution to our troubles. This is why mayors have authority over City Fathers, rather than the other way around."

"That's quite true," Amalfi said. "And I don't pretend that a completely cross-connective hookup among all our City Fathers would automatically bail us out. For one thing we'd have to set the hookup pattern very carefully as a topological problem, to be sure we didn't get a degree of connectivity which would result in the disappearance of knowledge instead of its accumulation. There's an example of just the kind of thing you were talking about: machines can't handle topology because it isn't quantitative.

"I said that this was the hard way of solving the

problem, and I meant just that. After we'd pooled our machine-accumulated knowledge, furthermore, we'd have to interpret it before we could put it to some use.

"That would take time. Lots of time. Technicians will have to check the knowledge-pooling at every stage; they'll have to check the City Fathers to be sure they can take in what's being delivered to them—as far as we know, they have no storage limits, but that assumption hasn't ever been tested before on the practical level. They'll have to assess what it all adds up to in the end, run the assessments through the City Fathers for logical errors, assess the logic for supralogical bugs beyond the logics that the City Fathers use, check all the assessments for new implications needing complete rechecks—of which there will be thousands....

"It'll take more than two years, and probably closer to five years, to do even a scratch job.

The City Fathers will do their part of it in a few hours, and the rest of the time will be consumed by human brainwork. While that part of it's going on, we'll have it thin. But we've got it damn thin already, and when it's all over, we'll be able to write our own tickets, anywhere in the galaxy."

"A very good answer," Specht said. He spoke quietly, but each word whistled through the still, sweat-humid air like a thin missile. "Gentlemen, I believe the mayor of the nameless city is right."

"The hell he is!" the King howled, striding to the front of the dais and trying to wipe the air out of his way as he walked. "Who wants to sit for five years making like a pack of scientists while the Acolytes have us all digging ditches?"

"Who wants to be dispersed?" someone countered shrilly. "Who wants to pick a fight with Earth? Not me. I'll stay as far away from the Earth cops as I can. That's common sense for Okies."

"Cops!" the King shouted. "Cops look for single cities. What if a thousand cities marched on Earth? What cop would bother with one city on one disorderly conduct charge? If you were a cop and you saw a mob coming down at you, would you try to bust it up by pinching one man in it who'd run out on a Vacate order, or shaded a three per cent fruit-freezing contract? If that's common sense for Okies, I'll eat it.

"You guys are chicken, that's your trouble. You got

knocked around today and you hurt. You're tender. But you know damn weft that the law exists to protect you, not scum like the Acolytes. It's a cinch we can't call the Earth cops here to project us—the cops are too few for that, we're too fewji and besides, we would get nabbed individually for whatever we've got written against us. But in a march of thousands of Okies—a peaceful march, to ask Earth to give you what belongs to you—you couldn't be touched individually. But you're scared! You'd rather squat in a jungle and die by pieces!"

"Not us!"

"Us neither!"

"When do we start?"

"That's more like it," the King said.

Specht's voice said, "Buda-Pesht, you're trying to drum up a stampede. The question isn't closed yet."

"All right," the King agreed. "I'm willing to be reasonable. Let's take a vote."

"We aren't ready for a vote yet. The question is still open."

"Well?" said the King. "You there on the overstaffed potty—you got anything more to say? Are you as afraid of a vote as Specht is?"

Amalfi got up with deliberate slowness.

"I've made my points, and I'll abide by the voting," he said, "if it's physically possible for us to do so—our spindizzy equipment wouldn't tolerate an immediate flight to Earth if the voting goes that way. I've made my point. A mass flight to Earth would be suicide."

"One moment," Specht's voice cut in again. "Before we vote, I for one want to know who it is that has been advising us. Buda-Pesht we know. But— who are you?"

There was instant dead silence in the throne room.

The question was loaded, as everyone in the hall knew. Prestige among Okies depended, in the long run, upon only two things: time aloft and coups recorded by the interstellar grapevine." Amalfl's city stood high on both tallies; he had only to identify his city, and he would stand at least an even chance of carrying the voting. Even while nameless, for that matter, the city had earned considerable kudos in the jungle.

Evidently Hazleton thought so, too, for Amalfi could see the frantic covert hand signals he was making. Tell 'em, boss. It can't miss. Tell 'em!

After a long, suspended heartbeat, the mayor said, "My name is John Amalfi, Mayor Specht."

A single broad comber of contempt rolled through the hall.

"Asked and answered," the King said, showing his ragged teeth. "Glad to have you aboard, Mister Amalfi. Now if you'll get the hell off the platform, we'll get on with the voting. But don't be in any hurry to leave town, Mister Amalfi. I want to talk to you, man to man. Understand?"

"Yeah," Amalfi said. He swung his huge bulk lightly to the floor of the hall, and walked back to where Dee and Hazleton were standing, band in hand.

"Boss, why didn't you tell 'em?" Hazleton whispered, his face hard. "Or did you want to throw the whole show away? You had two beautiful chances, and you muffed 'em both!"

"Of course I muffed them. I came here to muff them. I came here to dynamite them, as a matter of fact. Now you and Dee had Btetter get out of here before I have to give Dee to the King in order to get back to our city at all."

"You staged that, too, John," Dee said. It was not an accusation; it was simply a statement of fact.

"I'm afraid I did," Amalfi said. "I'm sorry, Dee; it had to be done, or I wouldn't have done it.

I was also sure that I could fox the King on that point, if that's any consolation to you. Now move, or you will be sunk. Mark, make plenty of noise about getting away." "What about you?" Dee said. "I'll be along later. Git!"

Hazleton stared at Amalfi a moment longer. Then he turned and pushed back through the crowd, the frightened, reluctant girl at his heels. His method of being very noisy was characteristic of him: he was so completely silent that everyone within sight of him knew that he was making a getaway; even his footsteps made no sound at all. In the surging hall his noiselessness was as conspicuous as a siren in church.

Amalfi stood his ground long enough to let the King see that the principal hostage was still on hand, still obeying the letter of the King's order. Then, the moment the King's attention was distracted, he faded, moving with the local current in the crowd, bending his knees slightly to

reduce his height, tipping his head back to point his conspicuous baldness away from the dias, and making only the normal amount of soupd as he moved—becoming, in short, effectively invisible,

By this time the voeng was in full course, and it would be five minutes at the least before the King could afford to interrupt it long enough to order the doors closed against Amalfl.

After Hazleton's and Dee's ostentatiously alarmed exists, an emergency order in the middle of the voting would have made it painfully obvious what the King was after.

Of course, had the King had the foresight to equip himself with a personal transmitter before mounting the dais, the outcome might have been different. The King's failure to do so strengthened Amalfi's conviction that the King had not been mayor of Buda-Pesht long, and that he had not won the post by the usual processes.

But Dee and Hazleton would get out all right. So would Amalfl. On this limited subject, Amalfl had been six jumps ahead of the King all the way.

Amalfi drifted toward the part of the crowd from where, roughly, he estimated that the voice of the mayor of Dresden-Saxony had been coming. He found the worn, birdlike Slav without difficulty.

"You keep a tight holster-flap on your weapons," Specht said in a low voice.

"Sorry to disappoint you, Mayor Specht. You set it up beautifully. It might cheer you up a bit to know that the question was just the right one, all the same, and many thanks for it.

In return I owe you the answer; are you good at riddles?"

"Riddles?"

"Raetseln," Amalfi translated.

"Oh—conundrums. No, but I can try."

"What city has two names twice?"

Evidently Specht did not need to be good at riddles to come up with the answer to that one. His jaw dropped. "You're N——" he began.

Amalfi held up his hand in the conventional Okie FYI sign: "For your information only."

Specht gulped and nodded. With a grin, Amalfi drifted on out of the palace.

There was a lot of hard work still ahead, but from now on it should be all downhill. The

"march" on Earth would be carried in the voting.

Nothing essential remained to be done now in the jungle but to turn the march into a stampede.

By the time he reached his own city, Amalfi found he was suddenly intensely tired. He berthed the second gig Hazleton had had the perimeter sergeant send for him and went directly to his room, where he ordered his supper sent up.

This last move, he was forced to conclude, had been a mistake. The city's stores were heavily diminished, and the table that was set for him—set, as it would have been for anyone else in the city, by the City Fathers with complete knowledge of his preferences—was meager and uninteresting. It included fuming Rigellian wine, which he despised as a drink for Barbarians; such a choice could only mean that there was nothing else to drink in the city but water.

His weariness, the solitude, the direct transition from the audience hall of the Hapsburgs to his bare new room under the mast in the Empire State Building—it had been an elevator-winch hocusing until the city had converted to friction-fields—and the dullness of the meal combined to throw him into a rare and deep state of depression. What he thought he could see of the future of Okie cities did not exactly cheer him, either.

It was at this point that the door to his room irised open, and Hazleton stalked silently through it, hooking his chromoclav back into his belt.

They looked at each other stonily for a moment. Amalfi pointed to a chair.

"Sorry, boss," Hazleton said, without moving. "I've never used my key before except in an emergency, you know that. But I think maybe this is an emergency. We're in a bad way—and the way you're dealing with the problem strikes me as crazy. For the survival of the city, I want to be taken into your confidence."

"Sit down," Amalfi said. "Have some Rigel wine."

Hazleton made a wry face and sat down.

"You're in my confidence, as always, Mark. I don't leave you out of my plans except where I think you might shoot from the hip if I didn't. You'll agree that you've done that occasionally—and don't throw up the Thor Five situation again, because there I was on your side; it was the City Fathers that objected to that particular Hazleton gimmick."

"Granted." 3

"Good," Amalfl said. "Tell me what you want to know, then."

"Up to a point I understand what you're out to do," Hazleton said without preamble. "Your use of Dee as a safe-conduet in and out of the meeting was a shrewd trick. Considering the political threat we represented to the King, it was probably the only thing you could have done. Understand, I resent it personally and I may yet pay you off for it. But it was necessary, I agree."

"Good," the mayor said wearily. "But that's a minor point, Mark."

"Granted, except on the personal level. The main thing is that you threw away the whole chance you schemed so hard to get. The knowledge-pooling plan was a good one, and you had two major chances to put it across. First of all, the King set you up to claim we were Vegan—nobody has ever actually seen that fort, and physically you're enough unlike the normal run of humanity to pass for a Vegan without much trouble. Dee and I don't look Vegan, but we might be atypical, or maybe renegades.

"But you threw that one away. Then the mayor from Dresden-Saxony set you up to swing almost everybody our way by letting them know our name. If you'd followed through, you would have carried the voting. Hell, you'd probably have wound up king of the jungle to boot.

"And you threw that one away, too."

Hazleton took his slide rule out of his pocket and moodily pushed the slide back and forth in it. It was a gesture frequent enough with him, but ordinarily it preceded or followed some use of the rule. Tonight it was obviously just nervous play.

"But Mark, I didn't want to be king of the jungle," Amalfi said slowly. "I'd much rather let the present incumbent hold that responsibility. Every crime that's ever been committed, or will be committed in the near future, in this jungle, will be laid at his door eventually by the Earth cops. On top of that, the Okies here will hold him personally responsible for every misfortune that comes their way while they're in the jungle. I never did want that job; I only wanted the King to think that I wanted it.... Incidentally, did you try to raise that city out on the perimeter, the one that said it had mass chromatography?"

"Sure," Ha/leton said. "They don't answer."

"Okay. Now, about this knowledge-pooling plan: it wouldn't work, Mark. First of all, you couldn't keep a pack of Okies working at it long enough to get any good out of it. Okies aren't philosophers, and they aren't scientists except in a limited way. They're engineers and merchants; in some respects they're adventurers, too, but they don't think of themselves as adventurers. They're practical— that's the word they use. You've heard it."

"I've used it," Hazleton said edgily. "So have I. There's a great deal of meaning packed into it It means, among other things, that if you get Okies involved in a major analytical project, they'll get restive. They want sets of, applications of principles, not principles pure and useless; And it isn't in their natures to sit still in one place for long. If you convince them that they should, they'll try, and the whole thing will wind up in a terrific explosion.

"But that's only point one. Mark, have you any idea of the real scope of the knowledge-pooling project? I'm not trying to put you oil the spot, believe me. I don't think anybody in that hall realized it. If they had, they'd have laughed me off the platform.

There again, Okies aren't scientists, and their outlook is too impatient to let them carry a really long chain of reasoning to a.conclusion."

"You're an Okie," Hazleton pointed out. "You carried it to a conclusion. You told them how long it would take."

"I'm an Okie. I told them it would take from two to five years to do even a scratch job. As an Okie, I'm an expert at half-truths. It would take from two to five years even to get the project set up! And the rest of the job, Mark, would take centuries." "For a scratch job?"

"No such thing as a scratch job in this universe of discourse," Amalfi said, reaching for the fuming wine and reconsidering at the last minute. "Those cities out there represent the accumulated scientific knowledge of all the high-technical-level cultures they've ever encountered. Even allowing for the usual information gaps, that's about five thousand planets-full of data, at a minimum estimate. Sure, we could pool all that knowledge—just as I said at the meeting, the City Fathers could take it all in, and classify it, in only a little over an hour— after we'd spent two to five years setting them up to do it. And then we'd have to integrate it. And you've got to integrate it, Mark; you've got to know it thoroughly enough to be able to make it do something. You couldn't offer it for sale unless you-did that. Would you like the job?"

"No," Hazleton said''slowly, but at once. "But Amalfi, am I ever going to know what you're doing if you persist in proceeding like this? You didn't go to that meeting just to waste time; I can trust you that far. So I have to assume that the whole maneuver was a trick, designed to force the March on Earth, rather than to defeat it. You gave the cities a clearly defined, superficially sound, and less-attractive alternative. Once they had rejected the alternative, they had committed themselves to the King's tactics, without knowing it."

"That's quite right."

"If that's right," Hazleton said, looking up suddenly with a flat flash of almost-violet eyes,

"I think it's stupid. I think it's stupid even though it was marvelously devious. There's such a thing as outsmarting yourself."

Amalfi said, "That could be. In any event, if the choice had been limited to marching on Earth versus staying in the jungle, the cities would have stayed hi the jungle. Would it have been sensible to allow that?"

"We can't afford to stay in the jungle, anyhow."

"Of course we can't. And by the same token, we couldn't leave it by ourselves. The only way we could get free of this star cluster is in the middle of a mass movement. What else could I have been shooting for?"

"I don't know," Hazleton said. "But there's something else besides that in the back of your head."

"And your complaint is that you don't know about it in advance. I know why you don't know. You know, too."

"Dee?"

"Certainly," Amalfi said. "You weren't asking yourself the right question. You were emotionally driven to ask why I wanted Dee along. The question was pertinent enough, but it wasn't exactly central. If you had stood back a little further from the whole problem, you'd have seen why I wanted the March on Earth to go through, too."

"Ill keep trying," Hazleton said grimly. "Though I'd have preferred to be told. You and I are getting further apart every year, boss. It used to be that we thought very much alike; and it was then that you developed your habit

of not telling me the whole story. It was a training device, I think now. The more I was made to worry about the total plan, the more I was required to think the thing out for myself—which meant trying to figure you out—the more training I got in thinking like you.

And of course, to be a proper city manager, I had to think like you. You had to be sure that any decisions I made in your absence would be the decisions you would have made had you been around.

"All this hit me after our tangle with the Duchy of Gort. That incident was the first time that you and I had been out of touch with each other long enough for a situation of really major proportions to develop—a situation about which I knew Very little until I could get back to the city from Utopia and get briefed.

"When I got back, I found that I was damn lucky not to have thought like you. My first failure to comprehend your whole plan—and your training method of leaving me to puzzle things out alone—apparently had doomed me in your mind. You had* written me off, and you were training Carrel as my successor."

"All this is accurate reportage," Amalfi said. "If you mean to accuse me of keeping a bard school——" "——a fool will learn in no other?" "No. A fool won't learn at all. But I don't deny keeping a hard school. Go on."

"I haven't far to go, now. I learned in the Gort-Utopia system that thinking the way you think can sometimes be deadly for me. I got off Utopia by thinking my way, not yours.

The confirmation came when we hit He; had I been thinking entirely like you in that situation, we'd still be on the planet."

"Mark, you still haven't made your point. I can tell. It's perfectly true that we often relied on your plans, and precisely because they come from a mind most unlike my own. What of it?"

"This of it. You're now out to rub out whatever trace of originality I have. You used to value it, as you say. You used to use it for the city, and defend it against the City Fathers when they had an attack of conservatism. But now you've changed, and so have I.

"These days, I seem to be tending toward thinking more and more like a human being, with human concerns. I don't feel like Hazleton the master conniver any more, except in flashes. The opposite change is taking place in you. You're becoming more and more alienated from human concerns. When you look at people, you see—machines. After a little,,more of this, we won't be able to tell you from the Cit^Fathers."

Amalfi tried to think about it. He was very tired, and he felt old. It was not yet time for his anti-agathic shot, not by more than a decade, but knowing that he would probably not get it made the centuries he had already traversed weigh heavily upon his back.

"Or maybe I'm beginning to think that I'm a god," he said. "You. accused me of that on Murphy. Have you ever tried to imagine, Mark, how completely crippling it is to any man's humanity to be the mayor of an Okie city for hundreds of years? I suppose you have-—your own responsibilities aren't lighter than mine, only a little different. Let me ask you this, then: isn't it obvious- that this change in you dates from the day when Dee first came on board?"

"Of course it's obvious," Hazleton said, looking up sharply. "It dates from the Utopia-Gort affair. That's when Dee came on board; she was a Utopian. Are you about to tell me that she's to blame?"

"Shouldn't it also be obvious," Amalfi continued, with weary implacability, "that the converse change in me dates from the same event? Gods of all stars, Mark, don't you know that I love Dee, too?"

Hazleton froze and went white. He looked rigidly with suddenly blind eyes at the remains of Amalfi's miserable supper. After a long time, he laid his slide rule on the table as delicately as if it were made of spun sugar.

"I do know," he said, at long last. "I did know. But I didn't—want to know that I knew."

Amalfi spread his big hands in a gesture of helplessness he had not had to use for more than half a century. The city manager did not seem to notice.

"That being the case," Hazleton resumed, his voice suddenly much tighter, "that being so, Amalfi, I——"

He stopped.

"You needn't rush, Mark. Actually it doesn't change things much. Take your time."

"Amalfi—/ want off."

Each evenly spaced word struck Amalfi like the strokes of a mallet against a gong, the strokes which, timed exactly to the gong's vibration period, drive it toward shattering. Amalfi had expected anything but those three words. They told him that he had had no real idea of how helpless he had become.

/ want off was the traditional formula by which a starman renounced the stars. The Okie who spoke them cut himself off forever from the cities, and from the long swooping lines of the ingeodesics that the cities followed through space-time. The Okie who spoke them became planet-bound.

And—it was entirely final. The words were seared into Okie law. / want off could never be refused—nor retracted.

"You have it," Amalfi said. "Naturally. I won't tax you with being hasty, since it's-too late."

"Thanks."

"Well, where do you want it? On the nearest planet, or at the city's next port of call?"

These, too, were merely the traditional alternatives, but Hazleton didn't seem to relish either of them. His lips were white, and beseemed to be trembling slightly.

"That," he said, "depends on where you're planning to go next. You haven't yet told me."

Hazleton's disturbance disturbed Amalfi, too, more than he liked to recognize.

Mechanically, it would almost surely be possible for the ex-city manager to withdraw his decision; and mechanically, it would be possible to make the suggestion to Hazleton.

Those three words had been neither overheard nor recorded as far as Amalfi knew, except —a small chance—by the treacher, the section of the City Fathers which handled tablewaiting. Even there, however, the City Fathers wouldn't be likely to scan the treacher's memory bank more than once every five years. The treacher had nothing interesting to remember but the eating preference patterns of the Okies, and such patterns change slowly and, for the most part, insignificantly. No, the City Fathers need not know that Hazleton had resigned, not for a while yet.

But allowing the city manager to back down did not even occur to Amalfi; the mayor was too thoroughly an Okie for that. Had it been proposed to him, Almalfi would have objected that'the uttering of those three words had put Hazleton as totally under Amalfi's smallest command as was a private in the city's perimeter police; and he could have shown reasons why subservience of that kind

was now required of Hazleton. He could also have shown that those three words could never be actually revoked, however closely they were kept a secret between Hazleton and himself; if pressed, be could have shown that he could never forget them, aid''that Hazleton couldn't either. He might have explained that, every time Amalfl decided against a plan of Hazleton's, the city manager would put it down to secret rancor against that smothered resignation. Or, being Amalfl, he might merely have noted that the conflict between the two men had already been deep-running, and that after Hazleton had said, "I want off," it would become outright pathological.

Actually, however, no one of these things entered his mind. Hazleton had said, "I want off." Amalfi was an Okie, and for an Okie, "I want off" is final.

"No," the mayor said, at once. "You've asked for off, and that's the end of it. You're no longer entitled to any knowledge of city policy or plans, except for what reaches you in the form of directives. Now's the time when you can use your training in thinking like me, Mark— obviously you'll have no difficulty in thinking like the City Fathers—because it'll be your only source of information on policy from now on."

"I understand," Hazleton said formally. He stood silent a moment longer. Amalfi waited.

"At the next port of call, then," Hazleton said.

"All right. Until then, you're outgoing city manager. Put Carrel back into training as your successor, and begin feeding the City Fathers predisposing data toward him now. I don't want any more fuss from them when the election is held than we had when you were elected."

Hazleton's expression became slightly more set. "Right."

"Secondly, get the city moving toward the perimeter to intersect the town you couldn't raise. I'll want an orbit that gives us logarithmic acceleration, with all the real drive concentrated at the far end. On the way, ready two work teams: one for a fast spindizzy assessment, the other to run up whatever's necessary on the mass chromatogra-phy equipment, whatever that may be. Include medium-heavy dismounting tools, below the graving dock size, but heavy enough to handle any job less drastic."

"Right."

"Also, ready Sergeant Andersen's squad, in case that city isn't quite as dead as it sounds." "Right," Hazleton said again. "That's it," Amalfi said.

Hazleton nodded stiffly, and made as if to turn. Then, astonishingly, his stiff face exploded into a torrential passion of speech.

"Boss, tell me this before I go," he said, clenching his fists. "Was all this to push me into asking for off? Couldn't you think of any way of keeping your plans to yourself but kicking me out—or making me kick myself out? I don't believe this love story of yours, damned if I do. You know I'll take Dee with me when I disembark. And the Great Renunciation is just slop, just pure fiction, especially coming from you. You aren't any more in love with Dee than I am with you——"

And then Hazleton turned so white that Amalfi thought for a moment that the man was about to faint.

"Score one for you, Mark," Amalfi said. "Evidently I'm not the only one who*s staging a Great Renunciation." "Gods of all stars, Amalfi!"

"There are none," Amalfi said. "I can't do anything more, Mark. I've said good-by to you a hell of a lot of times, but this has to be the last time—not by my election, but by yours. Go and get the jobs done."

Hazleton said, "Right." He spun and strode out. The door reached full dilation barely in time.

Amalfi sighed as deeply as a sleeping child. Then he nipped the treacher switch from set to clear. The treacher said, "Will that be all, sir?"

"What do you want to do, poison me twice at the same meal?" Amalfi growled. "Get me an ultraphone line."

The treacher's voice changed at once. "Communications," it said briskly.

"This is the mayor. Raise Lieutenant Lerner, Forty-fifth Acolyte Border Security Group.

Don't give up too easily; that was his last address, but he's been upgraded since. When you get him, tell him you're speaking for me. Tell him also that the cities in the jungle are organizing for some sort of military action, and that if he can get a squadron in here fast enough, he can break it up. Got it?" "Yes, sir." The Communications man read it back. "If you say so, Mayor Amalfi."

"Who else would say so? Be sure Lerner doesn't get a fix on us. Send it pulse-modulated if you can."

"Can't, boss. Mr. Hazleton just put us under way. But there's a powerful Acplyte AM

ultraphone station somewhere near by. I cato'get our message into synch with it, and make the cop's detectors focus on the vector. Is that good enough?"

"Better, even," Amalfi said. "Hop to it."

"There's one other thing, boss. That big drone you ordered last year is finally finished, and the shop says that it has Dirac equipment mounted in it and ready to go. I've inspected.it and it looks fine, except that it's as big as a lifeship and just as detectable."

"All right, good; but that can wait. Get the message out."

"Yes, sir."

The voice cut out entirely. The incinerator chute gaped suddenly, and the dishes rose from the table and soared toward the opening in solemn procession. The goblet of wine left behind a miasmic trail, like a miniature comet.

At the last minute, Amalfi jerked out of his reverie and made a wild grab in mid-air; but he was too late. The chute gulped down that final item and shut again with a satisfied slam.

Hazleton had left his slide rule upon the table^

The space-suited party moved cautiously and with grim faces through the black, dead streets of the city on the periphery. At the lead, Sergeant Anderson's hand torch flashed into a doorway and flicked out again at once.

No other lights whatsoever could be seen in the dark city, nor had there been any response to calls. Except for a weak spindizzy field, no power flowed in the city at all, and even the screen was too feeble to maintain the city's air pressure above four pounds per square inch—hence the space suits.

Inside Amalfi's helmet O'Brian's voice was saying, "The second phase is about to start in the jungle, Mr. Mayor. Lerner moved in on them with what looks from here like all of the Acolyte navy he dared to pull out of the cluster itself. There's an admiral's flagship in the fleet, but all the big brass is doing is relaying Lerner's suggestions in the form of orders; he seems to have no ideas of his own."

"Sensible setup,"• Amalfi said, peering ahead unsuccessfully in the gloom.

"As far as it goes, sir. The thing is, the squadron itself is far too big for the job. It's unwieldly, and the jungle detected it well in advance; we stood ready to give the alarm to the King as you ordered, but it didn't prove necessary. The cities are drawing up in a rough battle formation now. It's quite a sight, even through the proxies. First time in history, isn't it?" "As far as I know. Does it look like it'll work?" "No, sir," the proxy pilot said promptly. "Whatever organization the King's worked out, it's functioning only partially, and damn sloppily. Cities are too clumsy for this kind of work even under the best hand, and his is a long way from the best, I'd judge. But we'll soon see for ourselves."

"Right. Give me another report in an hour." Anderson held up his hand and the party halted. Ahead was a huge pile of ultimately solid blackness, touched deceptively here anfl there with feeble stars where windows threw back reflections. Far aloft, however, one window glowed softly with its own light.

The boarding-squad men deployed quickly along opposite sides of the street while the technics took cover. Amalfi sidled along the near wall to where the sergeant was crouching.

"What do you think, Anderson?"

"I don't like it, Mr. Mayor. It stinks of mouse traps. Maybe everybody's dead and the last man didn't have the strength to turn out the light. On the other hand, just one light left burning for that reason, in the whole city?"

"I see what you mean. Dulany, take five men down that side street where the facsimile pillar is, follow it until you're tangent to the corner of this building up ahead, and stick out a probe. Don't use more than a couple of micro-volts, or you might get burned."

"Yessir." Dulany's squad—the man himself might best be described as a detector-detector—slipped away soundlessly, shadows among shadows.

"That isn't all I stopped us for, Mr. Mayor," Anderson said. "There's a grounded aircab just around the corner here. It's got a dead passenger in it. I wish you'd take a

look at him."

Amalfi took the proffered torch, covered its lens with

the mitten of his suit so that only a thin shred of light leaked through and played it for half a second through the cab's window. He felt his spine going rigid.

Wherever the light touched the flesh of the hunched corpse, it—glistened. I •'

"Communications 1'*

"Yes, sir!"

"Set up the return port for decontamination. Nobody gets back on board our town until he's been boiled alive— understand? I want the works."

There was a brief silence. Then: "Mr. Mayor, the city manager already has that in the works."

Amalfi grimaced wryly in the darkness. Anderson said, "Pardon me, sir, but—how did Mr.

Hazleton guess?"

"Why, that's not too hard to see, at least after the fact, sergeant. This city we're on was desperately poor. And being poor under the new money system means being low on drugs. The end result, as Mr. Hazleton saw, and I should have seen, is—plague."

"The sons of bitches," the sergeant said bitterly. The epithet seemed intended to apply to every non-Okie ifl the universe.

At the same moment, a lurid scarlet glare splashed over his face and the front of his suit, and red lanes of light checkered the street. There was an almost-simultaneous flat crash, without weight in the thin air, but ugly-sounding.

"TDX!" Anderson shouted, involuntarily.

"Dulany? Dulany! Damn it all, I told the man to take it easy with that probe. Whoever survived on that squad, report!"

Underneath the ringing in Amalfi's ears, someone began to laugh. It was as ugly a sound as the TDX explosion had been. There was no other answer.

"All right, Anderson, surround this place. Communications, get the rest of the boarding squad and half the security police over here on the double."

The nasty laughter got louder.

"Whoever you are that's putting out that silly giggle, you're going to learn how to make another kind of noise when I get my hands on you," Amalfi added viciously. "Nobody uses TDX on my men, I don't care whether he's an Okie or a cop. Get me? Nobody!"

The laughter stopped. Then a cracked voice said, "You lousy damned vultures."

"Vultures, is it?" Amalfi snapped. "If you'd answered our calls in the first place, there'd have been no trouble. Why don't you come to your senses? Do you want to die of the pestilence?"

"Vultures," the voice repeated. It carried an overtone of sinister idiocy. "Eaters of carrion.

The gods of all stars will boil your bones for soup." The cackling began again.

Amalfi felt a faint chill. He switched to tight-beam. "Anderson, keep your men at a respectable distance, and wait for the reinforcements. This place is obviously mined to the teeth, and I don't .know what other surprises our batty friend has for us."

"I could lob a gas grenade through that window——"

"Don't you suppose they're wearing suits, too? Just ring the place and sit tight."

"Check."

Amalfi squatted down upon his hams behind the aircab, sweating. There just'? might be enough power left in the accumulators here to put up a Bethe fender around the building, but that wasn't the main thing on his mind. This business of boarding another Okie city was easily the hardest operation he had ever had to direct. Every move went against the grain. The madman's accusation had hit him in his most vulnerable spot.

After what seemed like a whole week, his helmet ultra-phone said, "Proxy room. Mr.

Mayor, the jungle beat off Lerner's first wave. I didn't think they could do it. They got in one good heavy lick at the beginning—blew two heavy cruisers right out of the sky—and the Acolytes act scared green. The admiral's launch has run out completely, and left Lerner holding the bag."

"Losses?"

"Four cities definitely wiped out. We haven't enough proxies out to estimate cities damaged with any accuracy, but Lerner had a group of about thirty towns enfiladed when the first cruiser got it."

"You haven't got the big drone out there, have you?" the mayor said in sudden alarm.

"No, sir; Communications ordered that one left berthed. I'm waiting now to see when the next Acolyte wave gets rolling; I'll call you as———"

The proxy pilot's yoice snapped off, and the stars went out.

There was a shout of alarm from some technie in the party. Amalfl got up, cautiously and looked overhead. The single window in thelbig building which had shown a light was blacked out now, too.

"What the hell happened, Mr. Mayor?" Anderson's voice said quietly.

"A local spindizzy screen, at at least half-drive. Probably they've dropped their main screen entirely. Everybody keep to cover—there may be flares."

The laughter began again.

"Vultures," the voice said. "Little mangy vultures in a big tight cage."

Amalfl cut back in on the open radio band. "You're going to wreck your city," he said steadily. "And once you tear this section of it loose, your power will fail and your screen will go down again. You can't win, and you know it."

The street began to tremble. It was only a faint trembling now, but there was no telling how long the basic structure of the dead city could hold this one small area in place against the machine that was trying to fling it away into space. Hazleton, of course, would rush over a set of portable nutcrackers as soon as he had seen what had happened—but whether this part of the city would still be here when the nutcrackers arrived was an open question.

In the meantime, there was exactly nothing Amalfi could do about it. Even his contact with his own city was cut off.

"It isn't your city," the voice said, suddenly deceptively reasonable. "It's our city. You're hijacking us. But we won't let you."

"How were we supposed to know any of you were still alive?" Amalfi demanded angrily.

"You didn't answer our calls. Is it our fault if you didn't hear them? We thought this town was open for salvage——"

His voice was abruptly obliterated by a new one, enormous yet familiar! which came slamming into his helmet as if it intended to drive him out of his suit entirely.

"EARTH POLICE AA EMERGENCY ACOLYTE CLUSTER CONDENSATION XIII ARM BETA," it thundered. "SYSTEM

UNDER ATTACK BY MASS ARMY OF TRAMP CITIES. POLICE AID URGENTLY

NEEDED. LERNER LIEUTENANT FORTY-FIFTH

BORDER SECURITY GROUP ACTING COMMANDER CLUSTER DEFENSE FORCES. ACKNOWLEDGE."

Amalfl whistled soundlessly through his teeth. There was evidently a Dirac transceiver in operation somewhere inside the close-drawn spindizzy screen, or his helmet phones wouldn't have caught Lerner's yell for help; Diracs were too bulky for the usual proxy, let alone for a space suit. By the same token, everybody else in the galaxy possessing Dirac equipment had heard that yell—it had been the instantaneous propagation of Dirac pulses that had dealt the death blow to the West's hypercomplex relativity theories millennia ago.

And if a Dirac sender was open inside this bubble ...

"LERNER ACOLYTE DEFENSE FORCES YOUR MESSAGE IN. SQUADRON ASSIGNED YOUR

CONDENSATION ON WAY. HANG ON. BETA ARM COMMAND EARTH."

. . . then Amalfi could use it. He flipped the chest switch and shouted, "Hazleton, are your nutcrackers rolling?"

"Rolling, boss," Hazleton shot back instantly. "Another ninety seconds and-*——"

"Too late, this sector will tear loose before then. Tune up our own screen to twenty-four per cent and hold———"

He realized suddenly that he was shouting into a dead mike. The Okies here had caught on belatedly to what was happening, and had cut the power to their Dirac. Had that last, crucial, incomplete sentence gotten through, even a fragment of it? Or ...

Deep down under Amalfi's feet an alarming sound began to rise. It was part screech, part monstrous rockslide, part prolonged and hollow groan. Amalfi's teeth began to itch in their sockets, and his bowels stirred slightly. He grinned.

The message had gotten through—or enough of it to enable Hazleton to guess the rest.

The one spindizzy holding this field was going sour. Against the combined power of the nearby drivers of Amalfi's city, it could no longer maintain the clean space-lattice curvature it was set for.

"You're sunk," Amalfi told the invisible defenders quietly. "Give up now. and you'll not be hurt. I'll skip the TDX incident—Dulany was one of my best men, but -maybe there was some reason on your side, too. Come on over with us, and you'll have a city to call your own again. This one isn't any good to you any more, that's obvious."

There was no answer.

Patterns began to'race across the close-pressing black sky. The nutcrackers—portable generators designed to heterodyne a spindizzy,., field to the overload point—were being brought to |ear. The single tortured spindizzy howled with anguish.

"Speak up, up there," Amalfi said. "I'm trying to be fair, but if you force me to drive you out——"

"Vultures," the cracked voice sobbed.

The window aloft lit up with a searing glare and burst outward. A long tongue of red flame winnowed out over the street. The spindizzy screen went down at once, and with it the awful noise from the city's power deck; but it was several minutes before Amalfi's dazzled eyes could see the stars again.

He stared up at the exploded scar on the side of the building, outlined in orange heat swiftly dimming. He felt a little sick.

"TDX again," he said softly. "Consistent to the last, the poor sick idiots."

"Mr. Mayor?"

"Here."

"This is the proxy room. There's a regular stampede going on in the jungle. The cities are streaming away from the red star as fast as they can tune up. No discernible order—just a mob, and a panicky mob, too. No signs of anything being done for the wounded cities; and it looks to me like they're just being left for Lerner to break up as soon as he gets up enough courage."

Amalfi nodded to himself. "All right, O'Brian, launch the big drone now. I want that drone to go with those cities and stick with them all the way. Pilot it personally; it's highly detectable, and there'll probably be several attempts to destroy it, so be ready to dodge."

"I will, sir. Mr. Hazleton just launched her a moment ago; I'm giving her the gun right now."

For some reason this did not improve Amalfi's temper in the least.

The Okies set to work rapidly, dismounting the dead city's spindizzies from their bases and shipping them into storage on board their own city. The one which had been overdriven in that last futile defense had to be left behind, of course; like the Twenty-third Street machine, it was hot and could not be approached, except by a graving dock.

The rest went over as whole units. Hazleton looked more and more puzzled as the big machines came aboard, but he seemed resolved to ask no questions.

Carrel, however, suffered under no such self-imposed restraints. "What are we going to do with all these dismounted drivers?" he said. All three men stood in a sally port at the perimeter of their city, watching the ungainly bulks being floated across.

"We're going to fly another planet," Hazleton said flatly.

"You bet we are," Amalfi agreed. "And pray to your star gods that we're in time, Mark."

Hazleton didn't answer..,

Carrel said, "In time for what?"

"That I won't say until I have it right under my nose on a screen. It's a hunch, and I think it's a good one. In the meantime, take my word for it that we're in a hurry, like we've never been in a hurry before. What's the word on that mass chromatography apparatus, Hazleton?"

"It's a reverse-English on the zone-melting process for refining germanium, boss. You take a big column of metal—which metal doesn't matter, as long as it's pure— and contaminate one end of it with the stuff you want to separate out. Then you run a disc-shaped electric field up the column from the contaminated end, and the contaminants are carried along by resistance heating and separate out at various points along the bar. To get pure fractions, you cut the bar apart with a power saw."

"But does it work?"

"Nah," Hazleton said. "It's just what we've seen a thousand times before. Looks good in theory, but not even the guys who owned this city could make it go."

"Another Lyran invisibility machine—or no-fuel drive," the mayor said, nodding. "Too bad; a process like that would be useful. Is the equipment massive?"

"Enormous. The area it occupies is twelve city blocks on a side."

"Leave it there," Amalfi decided at once. "Obviously this outfit was bragging from desperation when it offered the technique for the Acolyte woman's job. If she'd taken them up on it, they wouldn't have been able to deliver— and I don't care to lead us into any such temptation."

"In this case the knowledge is as good as the equipment," Hazleton said. "Their City Fathers will have all the

information we coyld possibly worry out of the apparatus itself."

"Would somebody give me the pitch on this exodus of cities from the jungle,?" Carrel put in. "I wasn't along on your trip to the King's city, and I still think the whole idea of a March on Earth is crazy."

Amalfl remained silent. After a moment, Hazleton said, "It is and it isn't. The jungle doesn't dare stand up to a real Earth force and slug it out, and everybody knows now that there's an Earth force on its way here. The cities want to be somewhere else in a hurry.

But they still have some hope of getting Earth protection from the Acolyte cops and similar local organizations if they can put their case before the authorities outside of a trouble area."

"That," Carrel said, "is just what I don't see. What hope do they have of getting a fair shuffle? And why don't they just contact Earth on the Dirac, as Lerner did, instead of making this long trip? It's sixty-three hundred or so light years from here to Earth, and they aren't organized well enough to make such a long haul without a lot of hardship."

"And they'll do all their talking with Earth over the Dirac even after they get there," Amalfi added. "Partly, of course, this march is sheer theatricalism. The King hopes that such a big display of cities will make an impression on the people he'll be talking to. Don't forget that Earth is a quiet, rather idyllic world these days—a skyful of ragged cities will create a lot of alarm there.

"As for getting a square shuffle: the King is relying on a tradition of at least moderately fair dealing that goes back many centuries. Don't forget, Carrel, that for the last thousand years the Okie cities have been the major unifying force in our entire galactic culture."

"That's news to me," Carrel said, a little dubiously.

"But it's quite true. Do you know what a bee is? Well, it's a little Earth insect that sucks nectar from flowers. While it's about it, it picks up pollen and carries it about; it's a prime factor in cross-fertilization of plants. Most habitable planets have similar insects. The bee doesn't know that he's essential to the ecology of his world—all he's out to do is collect as much honey as he can—but that doesn't make him any less essential.

"The cities have been like the bee for a long time. The governments of the advanced planets, Earth in particular,

know it, even if the cities generally don't. The planets distrust the cities, but they also know that they're vital and must be protected. The planets are tough on bindlestiffs for the same reason. The bindlestiffs are diseased bees; the taint that they carry gets fastened upon innocent cities, cities that are needed to keep new techniques and other essential information on the move from planet to planet. Obviously, cities and planets alike have to protect themselves from criminal outfits, but there's the culture as a whole to be considered, as well as the safety of an individual unit; and to maintain that culture, the free passage of legitimate Okies throughout the galaxy has to be maintained."

"The King knows this?" Carrel said. "Of course he does. He's eight hundred years old; how could he help but know it? He wouldn't put it like this, but all the same, it's the essence of what he's depending upon to carry through his March on Earth."

"It still sounds risky to me," Carrel said dubiously. "We've all been cdnditioned almost from birth to distrust Earth, and Earth cops especially——"

"Only because the cops distrust us. That means that the cops are conditioned to be strict with cities about the smallest violations; so, since small violations of local laws are inevitable in a nomadic life, it's smart for an Okie to steer clear of cops. But for all the real hatred that exists between Okies and cops, we're both on the same side. We always have been."

On the underside of the city, just within the cone of vision of the three men, the big doors to the main hold swung slowly shut.

"That's the last one," Hazleton said. "Now I suppose we go back to where we left the all-purpose city we stole from Murphy, and relieve it of its drivers, too."

"Yes, we do," Amalfi said. "And after that, Mark, we go on to Hern Six. Carrel, ready a couple of small fission bombs for the Acolyte garrison there—it can't be large enough to make us much trouble, but we've no time left to play patty-cake."

"Is Hern Six the planet we're going to fly?" Carrel said.

"It has to be," Amalfi said, with a trace of impatience.

"It's the only one available. Furthermore, this time we're going to have to control the flight, not just let the planet scoot off anywhere its natural converted rotation wants it

to go. Being carried clean out of the galaxy once is once too often for me."

"Then I'd better put a crack team to work op the control problem with the City Fathers,"

Hazleton said. "Since we didn't havl them to consult with on He, we'll have to screen every scrap of pertinent information they have in stock. No wonder you've been so hot on this project for corralling knowledge from other cities. I only wish we could have gotten started on integrating it sooner."

"I haven't had this in mind quite that long," Amalfi said. "But,, believe me, I'm not sorry now that it turned out this way."

Carrel said, "Where are we going?"

Amalfi turned away toward the airlock. He had heard the question before, from Dee, but this was the first time that he had had an answer.

"Home," he said.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Hern VI

MOUNTING Hern VI—as desolate and damned a slab of rock as Amalfi had ever set down upon—for guided spindizzy flight was incredibly tedious work. Drivers had to be spotted accurately at every major compass point, and locked solidly to the center of gravity of the planetoid; and then each and every machine had to be tuned and put into balance with every other. And there were not enough spindizzies to set up a drive for the planet as a whole which would be fully dirigible when the day of flight came. The flight of Hern VI, when all the work was finally done, promised to be giddy and erratic.

But at least it would go approximately where the master space stick directed it to go. That much respon-siveness, 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!"

iS

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 Magallanic 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 |he 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 JU$T

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 arrive^ Jn 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 Dop-plered 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," Am|dfi' 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.