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

"No, sir," the pilot said. "But there's been some activity from the City Fathers in the piloting banks which I assumed was by your orders or one of the city manager's.

Apparently we're to be out of computer control at opposition."

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

... and was back in the jungle.

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

challenges were almost like being hailed by ancient Greece or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You've been warned."

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

There was a sudden click as the City Fathers' Dirac scanner picked up a new frequency.

The new voice said: "Attention Police Command Thirty-two, Command HQ speaking for Vice Admiral MacMillan. Blue alert; blue alert. Acknowledge."

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

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

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

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

Click.

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

Click.

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

"Not in our tanks, Buda-Pesht."

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

Click.

"Attention Police Command Eighty-three, Command

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

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

Click.

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

("Where the hell is Prosperine?" Amalfi asked the City Fathers.) ("PROSERPINE IS A GAS GIANT, ELEVEN THOUSAND MILES IN DIAMETER, OUTSIDE THE ORBIT OF PLUTO AT^A DISTANCE OF——"

("All right. Shut up.")

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

Click.

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

Click.

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

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

Click.

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

"Sit tight, Pluto."

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

"Sit tight."

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

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

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

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

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

Click.

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

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

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

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

Amalfi barked, "O'Brian—time!"

"Course time, sir." *

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

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

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

Amalfi took an instant dislike to the new voice on the Dirac. It was flat, twangy, and as devoid as a vodeur of emotion, except perhaps for a certain self-righteousness tinged with Angst. Amalfi decided at once that in a face-to-face meeting the speaker would always look somewhere else than into the face of the man to whom he was speaking.

The owner of that voice could not possibly be anywhere on the surface of the Earth, looking aloft for besiegers or going doggedly about his business; he was instead almost surely crouched in some subcellar.

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

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

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

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

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

"My orders are to do something. That camp is a fester-

ing sore on our heavens. I hold you personally responsible." *

"Yes, sir." The Admiral's voice was very crisp. "Commander Eisenstein, proceed with Operation A. Command Eighty-two, red ale|t;.Ted alert."

"Command Eighty-two acknowledging red alert."

"Eisenstein calling Command HQ."

"Command HQ."

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

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

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

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

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

Click.

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

Fight!"

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

But the city of Buda-Pesht was already sweeping forward out of the head of the cone, arcing toward Earth. It spat murder back at the police ships, and actually caught one.

The mass of incandescent, melting metal appeared as a dim blob in Amalfi's helmet, then faded out again. A few cities followed the King; then a Jarger number; and then, suddenly, a great wave.

Click.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . beep ...

The sound shocked him. The buzzer had already sounded, without his havulg .heard it.

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

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

Click. .

"PEOPLE OF EARTH. US THE CITY OF SPACES

CALLS UPON YOU ..."

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

"... YOUR NATURAL MASTERS TO OKAY, THE MANS OF STARS, WHO THE

UNIVERSE-UNDERSTANDING LONG-LIFE-UNDERSTANDING INHERITORS, THE

INFERIOR HOMESTAYING DECADENT EARTH PEOPLES THEREOVER, THE NEW

RULERS OF, ARE ABOUT TO BE BECOMING. US INSTRUCTS YOU SOON TO

PREPARE——"

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

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

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

For that impact, transmitted to the belfry of City Hall thorough the rock of Hern VI, meant that Amalfi's instant of personal control had been fair and true. Somewhere on the leading hemisphere of Hern VI there was now an

enormous white-hot crater. That crater, and the traces of metal salts which were dissolved in its molten lining, held the grave of the oldest of all Okie legends: The Vegan orbital fort.

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

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

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

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

"To the Greater Magellanic?"

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

Carrel."

"Yes, sir."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

shouldn't take the credit. Especially since it really was a pretty big thing we did for the Earth."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Our own situation, right now, is neither good nor bad," Amalfi continued. "We still have Hern VI's velocity. It's enough slower than the velocity we hit when we flew the planet of He to make us readily maneuverable, even though clumsily, especially since we're so much less massive than a planet. We will be able to make any port of call which is inside the cone our trajectory would describe

if we rotated it. Finally, Earth has figures only on the path of Hern VI; it has ndne on the present path of the city.

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

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

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

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

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

Tumult.

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

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

"But I want you all to remember that there's no longer any work, or any hope of work, for us anywhere in the

main body of the galaxy, even if by some miracle we manage to put our beat-up old city back into good order again. We have no choice. We must find a planet of our own to settle down on, a planet we can claim as our own."

"ESTABLISH THIS POINT," the City Fathers said.

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

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

"AT LEAST THREE CENTURIES."

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

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

tion, unlimited credit, free marketing, and competitive wages get shut out. -•

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

Then the City Fathers said calmly, "THE POINT IS ESTABLISHED. WE ARE NOW

MAKING AN ANALYSIS OF THE SELECTED AREA, AND WILL HAVE A REPORT

FROM THE ASSIGNED SECTION IN FOUR TO FIVE WEEKS."

Still the silence persisted in the big chamber. The Okies were testing it—almost tasting it.

No more roaming. A planet of their own. A city at rest, and a sun to come up and go down over it on a regular schedule; seasons; a quietness free of the eternal whirling of gravity fields. No fear, no fighting, no defeat, no pursuit; self-sufficiency— and the stars only points of light forever.

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

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

"security."

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

Amalfi waited with calm confidence. The smallest objections, he knew, would come first.

He was not anxious to have to cope with them, and the silence had lasted so much longer than he had expected that he began to wonder if his argument had become too abstract toward the end. If so, a note of naive practicality at this point should be proper..

?.

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

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

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

"Oh, shut up. All right, so that's not very fast. Still and all, the cloud is a long way away—and if you give me the

exact figures, I'll bust all your tubes—and if we ever want to get back to the galaxy again, we'll have to fly another planet to do it."

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

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

Amalfi did not choose to contest the point. Logically, it should be Carrel, who was being deprived of the effective command of a flying city, who should be raising this objection.

The fact that the avowed retired Hazleton had brought it up first was enough for Amalfi.

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

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

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

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

"Because it'll be ours," Carrel said abruptly. Hazleton swung on him, obviously astonished; but Carrel's rapt eyes

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

Our own galaxy! What more could you want?*

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

"I disagree," Amalfi said quietly. "There are already colonies in the Greater Magellanic.

They weren't set up by spaceships. They were set up by cities. No other mechanism could have made the trip at all in those days."

"So?"

"So there's no chance that we'll be able to settle down placidly and get out our hoes.

We'll have to fight to make any part of the Cloud our own. It's going to be the biggest fight we've ever had, because we'll be fighting Okies— Okies who probably have forgotten most of their history «nd their heritage, but Okies all the same, Okies who had this idea long before we did and who are going to defend their patent."

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

"Because they are poachers themselves—and worse. Why would a city go all the way to the Greater Magellanic in the old days, when cities were solid citizens of the galaxy?

Why didn't they settle down in a giant cluster? Think, Mark! They were bindlestiffs. Cities who had to go

to the Greater Magellanic because they had committed crimes that made every star in the main galaxy their enemies. You could name one such city yourself, and one you know must be, out there in that cloud: the Interstellar Master Traders. An'd not only because Thor Five still remembers it, but because every sentient being in the galaxy burns for the blood of every last man on board it. Where else could it have gone but the Greater Magellanic, even though it starved itself for fifty years to make the trip?"

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

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

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

big place."

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

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

"An Okie galaxy," Carrel said.

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

"HAVE MESSRS. HAZLETON AND CARREL ANY FURTHER ADDITIONS TO THEIR

PLATFORMS?" the City Fathers blared, their vodeur-voice penetrating flatly into every cranny of the hurtling city. As Amalfi had expected, the extended discussion of high policy had convinced the City Fathers that the election was for the office of mayor, rather than for that of city manager. "IF NOT, AND IF THERE ARE NO ADDITIONAL

CANDIDATES, WE ARE READY TO PROCEED WITH THE TABULATION."

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

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

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

CHAPTER EIGHT: IMT

THE city hovered, and then settled silently through the early morning darkness toward the broad expanse of heath which the planet's Proctors had designated as its landing place. At this hour, the edge of the misty acres of diamonds which were the Lesser Magellanic Cloud was just beginning to touch the western horizon; the whole cloud covered nearly »3 5° of the sky. The cloud would set at 0512; at 0600 the near edge of the home galaxy would rise, but during the summer, the suns rose earlier.

All of which was quite all right with Amalfi. The fact that no significant amount of the home galaxy could begin to show in the night sky for months to come was one of the reasons why he had chosen this planet to settle on. The situation confronting the dying city now, and its citizens, too, posed problems enough without its being recomplicated by an unsatisfiable homesickness.

The city grounded, and the last residual hum of the spindizzies stopped. From below there came a rapidly rising and more erratic hum of human activity, and the clank and roar of heavy equipment getting under way. The geology team was losing no time, as usual.

Amalfi, however, felt no disposition to go down at once. He remained on the balcony of City Hall looking at the thickly set night sky. The star-density in the Greater Magellanic was very high, even outside the clusters— often, the distances between stars were matters of light months rather than light years. Even should it prove impossible to move the city itself again—which was inevitable, considering that the Sixtieth Street spindizzy had just followed the Twenty-third Street machine into the junk pit—it should be possible to set interstellar commerce

going here by cargo ship. The city's remaining drivers, ripped out and remounted on a one-per-hull basis, would provide the nucleus of quite a respectable little fleet.

It would not be jpuch like cruising among the far-scattered, various clvi"zations of the Milky Way had been, but it would be commerce of a sort, and commerce was the Okies'

oxygen.

He looked down. The brilliant starlight showed that the blasted heath extended all the way to the horizon in the west; in the east it stopped about a mile away and gave place to land regularly divided into tiny squares. Whether each of-these minuscule fields represented an individual farm he could not tell, but he had his suspicions. The language the Proctors had used in giving the city permission to land had had decidedly feudal overtones.

While he watched, the black skeleton of some tall structure erected itself swiftly near by, between the city and the eastern stretch of the heath. The geology team already had its derrick in place. The phone at the balcony's rim buzzed, and Amalfi picked it up.

"Boss, we're going to drill now," the voice of Hazleton said. "Coming down?"

"Yes. What do the soundings show?" "Nothing very hopeful, but we'll know for sure shortly. This does look like oil land, I must say."

"We've been fooled before," Amalfi grunted. "Start boring; I'll be right down."

He had barely hung up the phone when the burring roar of the molar drill violated the still summer night, echoing calamitously among the buildings of the city. It was almost certainly the first time any planet in the Greater Magellanic had heard the protest of collapsing molecules, though the technique had been a century out of date back in the Milky Way.

Amalfi was delayed by one demand and another all the way to the field, so that it was already dawn when he arrived. The test bore had been sunk and the drill was being pulled up again; the team had put up a second derrick, from the top of which Hazleton waved to him. Amalfi waved back and went up in the lift.

There was a strong, warm wind blowing at the top, which had completely tangled Hazleton's hair under the earphone clips. To Amalfi, it could make no such difference, but after years-of the city's precise airconditioning, it did obscure things to his emotions.

"Anything yet, Mark?"

"You're just in time. Here she comes."

The first derrick rocked as the long core sprang from the earth and slammed into its side girders. There was no answering black fountain. Amalfi leaned over the rail and watched the sampling crew rope in the cartridge and guide it back down to the ground. The winch rattled and choked off, its motor panting.

"No soap,'" Hazleton said disgustedly. "I knew we shouldn't have trusted the damned Proctors."

"There's oil under here somewhere all the same," Amalfi said. "We'll get it out. Let's go down."

On the ground, the senior geologist had split the cartridge and was telling his way down the boring with a mass-pencil. He shot Amalfi a quick reptilian glance as the mayor's blocky shadow fell across the table.

"No dome," he said succinctly.

Amalfi thought about it. Now that the city was permanently cut off from the home galaxy, no work that it could do for money would mean a great deal to it; what was needed first of all was oil, so that the city could eat. Work that would yield good returns in the local currency would have to come much later. Right now the city would have to work for payment in drilling permits.

At the first contact that had seemed to be easy enough. This planet's natives had never been able to get below the biggest and most obvious oil-domes, so there should be plenty of oil left for the city. In turn, the city could throw up enough low-grade molybdenum and wolfram as a byproduct of drilling to satisfy the terms of the Proctors.

But if there was no oil to crack for food ...

"Sink two more shafts," Amalfi said. "You've got an oil-bearing till down there, anyhow.

We'll pressure jellied gasoline into it and split it. Ride along a Number Eleven gravel to hold the seam open. If there's no dome, we'll boil the oil out."

"Steak yesterday and steak tomorrow," Hazleton murmured. "But never steak today."

Amalfi swung upon the city manager, feeling the blood charging upward through his thick neck. "Do you think you'll get fed any other way?" he growled. "This planet is going to be home for us from now on. Would you rather

take up farming like the natives? I thought you outgrew that notion after the i'aid on Gort."

"That isn't what I meant," Hazleton said quietly. His heavily space-tanned face could not pale, but it blued a little under the tauf, leathered bronze. "I know just as well as you do that' we're here for good. It just seemed funny to me that settling down on a planet for good should begin just like any other job."

"I'm sorry," Amalfi said, mollified. "I shouldn't be so jumpy. Well, we don't know yet how well off we are. The natives never have mined this planet to anything like paydirt depth, and they refine stuff by throwing it into a stewpot. If we can get past this food problem, we've still got a good chance of turning this whole Cloud into a tidy corporation."

He turned his back abruptly on the derricks and began to walk slowly away from the city.

"I feel like a walk," he said. "Like to come along, Mark?"

"A walk?" Hazleton looked puzzled. "Why—sure. Okay, boss."

For a while they trudged in silence over the heath. The going was rough; the soil was clayey and heavily gullied, particularly deceptive in the early morning light. Very little seemed to grow on it: only an occasional bit of low, starved shrubbery, a patch of tough, nettlelike stalks, a few clinging weeds like crab grass.

"This doesn't strike me as good farming land," Hazleton said. "Not that I know a thing about it."

"There's better land farther out, as you saw from the city," Amalfi said. "But I agree about the heath. It's blasted land. I wouldn't even believe it was radiologically safe until I saw the instrument readings with my own eyes."

"A war?"

"Long ago, maybe. But I think geology did most of the damage. The land was let alone too long; the topsoil's all gone. It's odd, considering how intensively the rest of the planet seems to be farmed."

They half-slid into a deep arroyo and scrambled up the other side. "Boss, straighten me out on something," Hazleton said. "Why did we adopt this planet, even after we found that it had people of its own? We passed several others that would have done as well.

Are we going to push

the local population out? We're not too well set up for that, even if it were legal or just."

"Do you think there are Earth cops in the Greater Magellanic, Mark?"

"No," Hazelton said. "But there are Okies, and if I wanted justice, I'd go to Okies, not to cops. What's the answer, Amalfi?"

"We may have to do a little judicious pushing," Amalfi said, squinting ahead. The double suns were glaring directly in their faces. "It's all in knowing where to push, Mark. You heard the character some of the outlying planets gave this place when we spoke to them on the way in."

"They hate the smell of it," Hazelton said, carefully removing a burr from his ankle. "It's my guess that the Proctors made some early expeditions unwelcome. Still—"

Amalfi topped a rise and held out one hand. The city manager fell silent almost automatically, and clambered up beside him.

The cultivated land began only a few meters away. Watching them were two—creatures.

One, plainly, was a man—a naked man, the color of chocolate, with matted blue-black hair. He was standing at the handle of a single-bladed plow, which looked to be made of the bones of some large animal. The furrow that he had been opening stretched behind him beside its fellows, and farther back in the field there was a low hut. The man was standing, shading his eyes, evidently looking across the dusky heath toward the Okie city. His shoulders were enormously broad and muscular, but bowed even when he stood erect, as now.

The figure leaning into the stiff leather straps which drew the plow also was human—a woman. Her head hung down, as did her arms, and her hair, as black as the man's but somewhat longer, fell forward and hid her face.

As Hazleton froze, the man lowered his head until he was looking directly at the Okies.

His eyes were blue and unexpectedly piercing. "Are you the men from the city?" he said.

Hazleton's lips moved. The serf could hear nothing; Hazleton was speaking into his throat mikes, audible only to the receiver imbedded in Amalfi's right mastoid process.

"English, by the gods of all stars! The Proctors speak Interlingua. What's this, boss? Was the Cloud colonized that far back?" *

Amalfi shook his head. "We're from the city," the mayor said aloud, in tthe same tongue.

"What's your name, young fella?" I •*

"Karst, lord."

"Don't call me 'lord.' I'm not one of your Proctors. Is this your land?"

"No, lord. Excuse—I have no other word——"

"My name is Amalfi."

"This is the Proctors' land, Amalfi. I work this land. Are you of Earth?"

Amalfi shot a swift sidelong glance at Hazleton. The city manager's face was expressionless.

"Yes," Amalfi said. "How did you know?"

"By the wonder," Karst said. "It is a great wonder, to raise a city in a single night. IMT

itself took nine men of hands of thumbs of suns to build, the singers say. To raise a second city on the Barrens overnight—such a thing is beyond words."

He stepped away from the plow, walking with painful, hesitant steps, as if all his massive muscles hurt him. The woman raised her head from the traces and pulled the hair back from her face. The eyes that looked forth at the Okies were dull, but there were phosphorescent stirrings of alarm behind them. She reached out and grasped Karst by the elbow.

"It—is nothing," she said.

He shook her off. "You have built a city over one of night," he repeated. "You speak the Engh tongue, as we do on feast days. You speak to such as me, with words, not with the whips with the little tags. You have fine clothes, with patches of color of fine-woven cloth."

It was beyond doubt the longest speech he had ever made in his life. The clay on his forehead was beginning to streak with the effort.

"You are right," Amalfi said. "We are from Earth, though we left it long ago. I will tell you something else, Karst. You, too, are of Earth."

"This is not so," Karst said, retreating a step. "I was born here, and all my people. None claim Earth blood——"

"I understand," Amalfi said. "You are of this planet.

But you are an Earthman. And I will tell you something

else. I do not think the Proctors are Earthmen. I think

they lost the right to call themselves Earthmen long ago, on another planet, a planet named Thor Five."

Karst wiped his callused palm against his thighs. "I want to understand," he said. "Teach me."

"Karst!" the woman said pleadingly. "It is nothing. Wonders pass. We are late with the planting."

"Teach me," Karst said doggedly. "All our lives we furrow the fields, and on the holidays they tell us of Earth. Now there is a marvel here, a city raised by the hands of Earthmen, there are Earthmen in it who speak to us——" He stopped. He seemed to have something in his throat.

"Go on," Amalfi said gently.

"Teach me. Now that Earth has built a city on the Barrens, the Proctors cannot hold knowledge for their own any longer. Even when you go, we will learn from your empty city before it is ruined by wind and rain. Lord Amalfi, if we are Earthmen, teach us as Earthmen are teached."

"Karst," said the'^woman. "It is not for us. It is a magic of the Proctors. All magics are of the Proctors. They mean to take us from our children. They mean us to die on the Barrens. They tempt us."

The serf turned to her. There was something indefinably gentle in the motion of his brutalized, crackle-skinned, thick-muscled body.

"You need not go," he said, in a slurred Interlingua patois which was obviously his usual tongue. "Go on with the plowing, does it please you. But this is no thing of the Proctors.

They would not stoop to tempt slaves as mean as we are. We have obeyed the laws, given our tithes, observed the holidays. This is of Earth."

The woman clenched her horny hands under her chin and shivered. "It is forbidden to speak of Earth except on holidays. But I will finish the plowing. Otherwise our children will die."

"Come, then," Amalfi said. "There is much to learn."

To his complete consternation, the serf went down on both knees. A second later, while Amalfi was still wondering what to do next, Karst was up again, and climbing up onto the Barrens toward them. Hazleton offered him a hand, and was nearly hurled like a flat stone through the air when Karst took it; the serf was as solid and strong as a pile driver, and as sure on his stony feet.

"Karst, will you return before night?"

Karst did not answer. Amalfl began to lead the way back toward the city. Hazleton started down the far side of the rise after them, but something moved him to look back again at the litjle/scrap of farm. The woman's head had fallen forward again, the wind stirring the tangled curtain of her hair. She was leaning heavily into the galling traces, and the plow was again beginning to cut its way painfully through the stony soil. There was now, of course, nobody to guide it.

"Boss," Hazleton said into the throat mike. "Are you listening, or are you too busy playing Messiah?"

"I'm listening."

"I don't think I want to snitch a planet from these people. As a matter of fact, I'm damned if I will!"

Amalfi didn't answer; he knew well enough that there was no answer. The Okie city would never go aloft again. This planet was home. There was no place else to go.

The voice of the woman, crooning as she plowed, dwindled behind them. Her song droned monotonously over unseen and starving children: a lullaby. Hazleton and Amalfi had fallen from the sky to rob her of everything but the stony and now unharvestable soil.

The city was old—unlike the men and women who manned it, who had merely lived a long time, which is quite a different thing. And like any old intelligence, its past sins lay very near the surface, ready for review either in nostalgia or in self-accusation at the slightest cue. It was difficult these days to get any kind of information out of the City Fathers without having to submit to a lecture, couched in as high a moral tone as was possible to machines whose highest morality was survival.

Amalfi knew well enough what he was letting himself in for when he asked the City Fathers for a review of the Violations docket. He got it, and in bells—big bells. The City Fathers gave him everything, right down to the day six hundred years ago when they had discovered that nobody had dusted the city's ancient subways since the managership of deFord. That had been the first time the younger Okies had heard that the city had ever had any subways.

But Amalfi stuck to the job, though his right ear ached with the pressure of the earphone.

Out of the welter of

minor complaints "and wistful recollections of missed opportunities, certain things came through clearly and urgently.

Amalfi sighed. In the end, it appeared that the Earth cops would remember Amalfi's city for two things only. One: The city had a long Violations docket, and still existed to be brought to book on it. Two: The city had gone out toward the Greater Magellanic, just as a far older and blacker city had done centuries before—the city which had perpetrated the massacre on Thor V, the city whose memory still stank in the nostrils of cops and surviving Okies alike.

Amalfi shut off the City Fathers in mid-reminiscence and removed the phone from his aching ear. The control boards of the city stretched before him, still largely useful, but dead forever in one crucial bloc—the bank that had once flown the city from star to new star. The city was grounded; it had no choice now but to accept, and then win, this one poor planet for its own.

// the cops woidd let it. The Magellanic Clouds' were, of course, moving steadily and with increasing velocity away from the home galaxy. It would take the cops time to decide that they should make that enormously long flight in pursuit of one miserable Okie. But in the end they would make that decision. The cleaner the home galaxy became of Okies—and there was no doubt but that the cops had by now broken up the majority of the space-faring cities—the greater the urge would become to track down the last few stragglers.

Amalfi had no faith hi the ability of a satellite star cloud to outrun human technology. By the time the cops were ready to cross from the home lens to the Greater Magellanic, they would have the techniques with which to do it, and techniques far less clumsy than Amalfi's city had used. If the cops wanted to chase the Greater Magellanic, they would find ways to catch it. If ...

Amalfi put the earphone on again. "Question," he said. "Will the need to catch us be urgent enough to produce the necessary techniques in time?"

The City Fathers hummed, drawn momentarily from then- eternal mulling over the past.

At last they said:

"YES, MAYOR AMALFI. BEAR IN MIND THAT WE ARE NOT ALONE IN THIS CLOUD.

REMEMBER THOR FIVE."

There it was: the ancient slogan that had made Okies hated even on planets that had never seen an Okie city, and could never expect to. There was only the smallest chance that the city which had wrought that atrocity had made good its escapf 0 this Cloud; it had all happened a long time ago. But even the narrow chance, if the City Fathers were right, would bring the cops here sooner or later, to destroy Amalfi's own city in expiation of that still-burning crime.

Remember Thor V. No city would be safe until that raped and murdered world could be forgotten. Not even out here, in the virgin satellites of the home lens.

"Boss? Sorry, we didn't know you were busy. But we've got an operating schedule set up, as soon as you're ready to look at it."

"I'm ready right now, Mark," Amain said, turning away frop- the boards. "Hello, Dee. How do you like your plan.t?"

The girl smiled. "It's beautiful," she said simply.

"For the most part, anyway," Hazleton agreed. "This heath is an ugly place, but the rest of the land seems to be excellent—much better than you'd think it from the way it's being farmed. The tiny little fields they break it up into here just don't do it justice, and even I know better cultivation methods than these serfs do."

"I'm not surprised," Amalfl said. "It's my theory that the Proctors maintain their power partly by preventing the spread of any knowledge about farming beyond the most rudimentary kind. That's also the most rudimentary kind of politics, as I don't need to tell you."

"On the politics," Hazleton said evenly, "we're in disagreement. While that's ironing itself out, the business of running the city has to go on."

"All right," Amain said. "What's on the docket?"

"I'm having a small plot on the heath, next to the city, turned over and conditioned for some experimental plantings, and extensive soil tests have already been made. That's purely a stop gap, of course. Eventually we'll have to expand onto good land. I've drawn up a tentative contract of lease between the city and the Proctors, which provides for us to rotate ownership geographically so as to keep displacement of the serfs at a minimum, and at the same time opens a complete spectrum of seasonal plantings to us—essentially it's the old Limited Colony contract, but heavily Weighed in the direction of the Proctors' prejudices. There's no doubt in my mind but that they'll sign it. Then——"

"They won't sign it," Amalfi said. "They can't even be shown it. Furthermore, I want everything you've put into your experimental plot here on the heath yanked out."

Hazleton put a hand to his forehead in frank exasperation. "Oh, hell, boss," he said.

"Don't tell me that we're still not at the end of the old squirrel-cage routine— intrigue, intrigue, and then more intrigue. I'm sick of it, I'll tell you that directly. Isn't a thousand years enough for you? I thought we had come to this planet to settle down!"

"We did. We will. But as you reminded me yourself yesterday, there are other people in possession of this planet at the moment—people we can't legally push out. As matters stand right now, we can't give them the faintest sign that we mean to settle here; they're already intensely suspicious of that very thing, and they're watching us for evidence of it every minute."

"Oh no," Dee said. She came forward swiftly and put a hand on Amalfi's shoulder. "John, you promised us after the March was over that we were going to make a home here. Not necessarily on this planet, but somewhere in the Cloud. You promised, John."

The mayor looked up at her. It was no secret to her, or to Hazleton either, that he loved her; they both knew, as well, the cruelly just Okie law—and the vein of iron loyalty in Amalfi that would have compelled him to act by that law even if it had never existed. Until the crisis in the jungle had forced Amalfi to reveal to Hazleton the existence of that love, neither of the two youngsters had more than suspected it over a period of nearly three centuries.

But Dee was comparatively new to Okie mores, and was, in addition, a woman. Only to know that she was loved had been unable to content her long. She was already beginning to put the knowledge to work.

She was certainly not old enough yet to realize that the crisis had passed, leaving behind only a residuum of devotion useless to her and to Amalfi alike. She could not know that the person who had replaced her in Amalfi's mind was Karst; .that Amalfi was now hearing from the lips of the serf the innocent and vastly touching questions which Dee had once asked; that Amalfi had realized that

his thousand years of;, adult life had fitted him to answer not one question, but a thousand. Had anyone suggested to her that Amalfi was only just now coming into his full maturity, she would .not have understood; possibly, she might have laughed. Jkmalfi had himself smiled when the realization had come to him.

"Of course I promised," he said. "I've delivered on my promises for a millennium now, and I'll continue to do so. This planet will be our home if you'll give me just the minimum of help in winning it. It's the best of all the planets we passed on the way in, for a great many reasons —including a couple that won't begin to show until you see the winter constellations here, and a few more that won't become evident for a century yet. But there's one thing I certainly can't give you, and that's immediate delivery."

"All right," Dee said. She smiled. "I trust you, John, you know that. But it's hard to be patient."

"Is it?" Amalfi said, not much surprised. "Come to think of it, I remember when the same thought occurred to me, back on He. In retrospect the problem doesn't seem large."

"Boss, you'd better give us some substitute courses of action," Hazleton cut in, a little coldly. "With the possible exception of yourself, every man, woman, and alley cat in the city is ready to spread out all over the surface of this planet the moment the starting gun is fired. You gave us every reason to think that that would be the way it would happen. If there's going to be a delay, you have a good many idle hands to put to work."

"Use straight work-contract procedure all the way down the line. No exploiting of the planet that we wouldn't normally do during the usual stopover for a job. That means no truck gardens or any other form of local agriculture; just refilling the oil tanks, re-breeding the Chlorella strains from local sources for heterosis, making up our water losses, and so on. The last I heard, we were still using the Tx 71105 strain of Chlorella pyrenoidosa; that's too high-temp an alga for a planet with a winter season, like this one."

"That won't work," Hazleton said. "It may fool the Proctors, Amalfi, but how can you fool your own people? What are you going to do with the perimeter police, for instance?

Sergeant Andersen's whole crew knows that it

won't ever again have to make up a boarding squad or defend the city or take up any other military duty. Nine-tenths of them are itching to throw off their harness for good and all and start dirt farming. What am I going to tell them?"

"Send 'em out to your experimental patch on the heath," Amalfi said, "on police detail.

Tell 'em to pick up everything that grows."

Hazleton started to turn toward the lift shaft, holding out his hand to Dee. Then, characteristically, he had a third thought and turned back.

"But why, boss?" he said plaintively. "What makes you think the Proctors suspect us of squatting? And what could they do about it if we did?"

"The Proctors have asked for the standard work contract," Amalfi said. "They knew what it was, they got it, and they insist upon its observation, to the letter— including the provision that the city must be off this planet by the date of termination. As you know, that's impossible; we can't leave this planet at all. But we'll have to pretend that we're going to leave up to the last possible minute."

Hazleton looked stubborn. Dee took his hand reassuringly, but it didn't seem to register.

"As for what the Proctors themselves can do about it," Amalfi said, picking up the earphones again, "I don't know. I'm trying to find out. But this much I do know:

"The Proctors have already called the cops."

Under the gray, hazy light in the schoolroom, neutral light which seemed cast like a cloak along the air rather than to illuminate it, voices and visions came thronging even into the conscious and prepared mind of the visitor, pouring from the memory cells of the City Fathers. Amalfi could feel their pressure, just below the surface of his mind; it was vaguely unpleasant, partly because he already knew what they sought to impart, so that the redoubled impressions tended to shoulder forward into the immediate attention, nearly with the vividness of immediate experience.

He waved a hand before his eyes in annoyance and looked for a monitor, found one standing at his elbow, and wondered how long he had been there—or, conversely, how long Amalfi himself had been lulled into the learning trance.

"Where's Karst?" he said brusquely. "The first serf we brought in? I need him."

"Yes, sir. He's in ]a /chair toward the front of the room." The monitor—whose function combined the duties of classroom supervisor and nurse—turned away briefly to a nearby wall treacher, which opened and floated out to him a tall metal tumbler. The monitor took it, and led the way through the room, threading his way among the scattered couches.

Usually most of these were unoccupied, since it took less than 500 hours to bring the average child through tensor calculus and hence to the limits of what he could be taught by passive inculcation alone. Now, however, every couch was occupied, and few of them by children.

One of the eounterpointing, sub-audible voices was murmuring: "Some of the cities which turned bindlestiff did not pursue the usual policy of piracy and raiding, but settled instead upon faraway worlds and established tyrannical rules. Most of these were overthrown by the Earth police; the cities were not efficient fighting machines. Those which withstood the first assault sometimes were allowed to remain in power for various reasons of policy, but such cases were invariably barred from commerce. Some of these involuntary empires may still remain on the fringes of Earth's jurisdiction. Most notorious of these recrudescences of imperialism was the reduction of Thor Five, the work of one of the earliest of the Okies, a heavily militarized city which had already earned itself the popular nickname of 'the Mad Dogs.' The epithet, current among other Okies as well as planetary populations, of course referred primarily..."

"Here's your man," the monitor said in a low voice. Amalfi looked down at Karst. The serf had already undergone a considerable change. He was no longer a distorted and worn caricature of a man, chocolate colored with sun, wind, and ground-in dirt, so brutalized as to be almost beyond pity. He was, instead, rather like a fetus as he lay curled on the couch, innocent and still perfectable, as yet unmarked by any experience which counted.

His past—and there could hardly have been much of it, for although he had said that his present wife, Eedit, had been his fifth, he was obviously scarcely twenty years old—had been so completely monotonous and implacable that, given the chance, he had sloughed it off as easily and totally as one throws away a single garment. He was, Amalfi realized, much more essentially a child than any Okie infant would ever be.

The monitor touched Karst's shoulder and the serf stirred uneasily, then sat up, instantly awake, his intense blue eyes questioning Amalfi. The monitor handed him the anodized aluminum tumbler, now beaded with cold, and Karst drank from it. The pungent liquid made him sneeze, quickly and without seeming to notice that he had sneezed, like a cat.

"How's it coming through, Karst? Amalfi said.

"It is very hard," the serf said. He took another pull at the tumbler. "But once grasped, it seems to bring everything into flower at once. Lord Amalfi, the Proctors claim that IMT

came from the sky on a cloud. Yesterday I only believed that. Today I think I understand it."

"I think you do," Amalfi said. "And you're not alone. We have serfs by scores in the city now, learning—just look around you and you'll see. And they're learning more than just simple physics or cultural morphology. They're learning freedom, beginning with the first one—freedom to hate."

"I know that lesson," Karst said, with a profound and glacial calm. "But you awakened me for something."

"I did," the mayor agreed grimly. "We've got a visitor we think you'll be able to identify: a Proctor. And he's up to something that smells damned funny to me and Hazleton both, but we can't pin down what it is. Come give us a hand, will you?"

"You'd better give him some time to rest, Mr. Mayor," the monitor said disapprovingly.

"Being dumped out of hypnopaedic trance is a considerable shock; he'll need at least an hour."

Amalfi stared at the monitor incredulously. He was about to note that neither Karst nor the city had the hour to spare when it occurred to him that to say so would take ten words where one was plenty. "Vanish," he said.

The monitor did his best.

Karst looked intently at the judas. The man on the screen had his back turned; he was looking into the big operations tank in the city manager's office. The indirect light beamed on his shaved and oiled head. Amalfi watched over Karst's left shoulder, his teeth sunk firmly in a new cigar.

"Why, the man's as bald as I am," the mayor said. "And he can't be i£u#h past his adolescence, judging by his skull; he's forty-five at the most. Recognize him, Karst?"

"Not yet," Karst said. "All the Proctors shave their heads. If he would only turn around—ah. Yes. That's Heldon. I have seen him myself only once, but he is easy to recognize. He is young, as the Proctors go. He is the stormy petrel of the Great Nine—some think him a friend of the serfs. At least he is less quick with the whip than the others."

"What would he be wanting here?"

"Perhaps he will tell us." Karst's eyes remained fixed upon the Proctor's image.

"Your request puzzles me," Hazleton's voice said, issuing smoothly from the speaker above the judas. The city manager could not be seen, but his expression seemed to modulate the sound of his voice almost specifically: the tiger mind masked behind a pussy-cat purr as behind a pussy-cat smile. "We're glad to hear of new services we can render to a client, of course. But we certainly never suspected that antigravity mechanisms even existed in IMT."

"Don't think me stupid, Mr. Hazleton," Heldon said. "You and I know that IMT was once a wanderer, as your city is now. We also know that your city, like all Okie cities, would like a world of its own. Will you allow me this much intelligence, please?"

"For discussion, yes," Hazleton's voice said.

"Then let me say that it's quite evident to me that you're nurturing an uprising. You have been careful to stay within the letter of the contract, simply because you dare not breach it, any more than we; the Earth police protect us from each other to that extent. Your Mayor Amalfi was told that it was illegal for the serfs to speak to your people, but unfortunately it is illegal only for the serfs, not for your citizens. If we cannot keep the serfs out of your city, you are under no obligation to do it for us."

"A point you have saved me the trouble of making," Hazleton said.

"Quite so. I'll add also that when this revolution of

yours comes, I have no doubt that you'll win it. I don't know what kinds of weapons you can put into the hands of our serfs, but I assume that they are better than anything we can muster. We haven't your technology. My fellows disagree with me, but I am a realist."

"An interesting theory," Hazleton's voice said. There was a brief pause. In the silence, a soft pattering sound became evident Hazleton's fingertips, Amalfi guessed, drumming on the desk top, as if with amused impatience. Heldon's face remained impassive.

"The Proctors believe that they can hold what is theirs," Heldon said at last "If you overstay your contract, they will go to war against you. They will be justified, but unfortunately Earth justice is a long way from here. You will win. My interest is to see that we have a way of escape."

"Via spindizzy?"

"Precisely." Heldon permitted a stony smile to stir the corners of his mouth. "I'll be honest with you, Mr. Hazleton. If it comes to war, I will fight as hard as any other Proctor to hold this world of ours. I come to you only because you can repair the spindizzies of IMT. You needn't expect me to enter into any extensive treason on that account."

Hazleton, it appeared, was being obdurately stupid. "I fail to see why I should lift a finger for you," he said.

"Observe, please. The Proctors will fight because they believe that they must. It will probably be a hopeless fight, but it will do your city some damage all the same. As a matter of fact, it will cripple your city beyond repair, unless your luck is phenomenal. Now then: none of the Proctors except one other man and myself know that the spindizzies of IMT are still able to function. That means that they won't try to escape with them; they'll try to knock you out instead. But with the machines in repair, and one knowledgeable hand at the controls——"

"I see," Hazleton said. "You propose to put IMT into flight while you can still get off the planet with a reasonably whole city. In return you offer us the planet and the chance that our own damages will be minimal. Hmm. It's interesting, anyhow. Suppose I take a look at your spin-dizzies, and see if they're in operable condition. It's been a good many years, without doubt, and untended machinery

has a way of gumming up. If they can still be operated at all, we'll talk about a" deal. All right?"

"It will have to do," Heldon grumbled. Amalfi saw in the Proctor's eyes a gleam of cold satisfaction which he recognized at once, §frbm having himself looked out through it often—though never concealing it so poorly. He shut off the screen.

"Well?" the mayor said. "What's he up to?" "Trouble," Karst said slowly. "It would be very foolish to give or trade him any advantage. His stated reasons are not his real ones."

"Of course not," Amalfi said. "Whose are? Oh, hello, Mark. What did you make of our friend?"

Hazleton stepped out of the lift shaft, bouncing lightly once on the resilient concrete of the control-room floor. "He's a dummox," the city manager said, "but he's dangerous. He knows that there's something he doesn't know. He also knows that we don't know what he's driving at, and he's on his home grounds. It's a combination I don't care for."

"I don't like it myself," Amalfi said. "When the enemy starts giving away information, look out! Do you think the majority of the Proctors really don't know that IMT has operable spindizzies?"

"I am sure they do not," Karst offered tentatively. Both men turned to him. "The Proctors do not even believe that you are here to capture the planet. At least, they do not believe that that is what you intend, and I'm sure they don't care, one way or the other."

"Why not?" Hazleton said. "I would." "You have never owned several million serfs," Karst said, without rancor. "You have serfs working for you, and you are paying them wages.

That hi itself is a disaster for the Proctors. And they cannot stop it. They know that the money you are paying is legal, with the power of the Earth behind it. They cannot stop us from earning it. To do so would cause an uprising at once."

Amalfi looked at Hazleton. The money the city was handing out was the Oc dollar. It was legal here—but back in the galaxy it was just so much paper. It was only germanium-backed. Could the Proctors be that naive? Or was IMT simply too old to possess the instantaneous Dirac transmitters which would have told it of the economic collapse of the home lens?

"And the spindizzies?" Amalfi said. "Who else would know of them among the Great Nine?"

"Asor, for one," Karst said. "He is the presiding officer, and the religious fanatic of the group. It is said that he still practices daily the full thirty yogas of the Semantic Rigor, even to chinning himself upon every rung of the Abstraction Ladder. The prophet Maalvin banned the flight of men forever, so Asor would not be likely to allow IMT to fly at this late date."

"He has his reasons," Hazleton said reflectively. "Religions rarely exist in a vacuum.

They have effects on the societies they reflect He's probably afraid of the spindizzies, in the last analysis. With such a weapon it takes only a few hundred men to make a revolution—more than enough to overthrow a feudal setup like this. IMT didn't dare keep its spindizzies working."

"Go on, Karst," Amalfi said, raising his hand impatiently at Hazleton. "How about the other Proctors?"

"There is Bemajdi, but he hardly counts," Karst said. "Let me think. Remember, I have never seen most of these men. The only one who matters, it seems to me, is Larre. He is a dour-faced old man with a pot belly. He is usually on Heldon's side, but seldom travels with Heldon all the way. He will worry less about the money the serfs are earning than will the rest. He will contrive a way to tax it away from us—perhaps by declaring a holiday, in honor of the visit of Earthmen to our planet. The collection of tithes is a duty of his."

"Would he allow Heldon to put IMT's spindizzies hi shape?"

"No, probably not," Karst said. "I believe Heldon was telling the truth when he said that he would have to do that in secret."

"I don't know," Amalfi said. "I don't like it. On the surface, it looks as though the Proctors hope to scare us off the planet as soon as the contract expires, and then collect all the money we've paid the serfs—with the cops to back them up. But when you look closely at it, it's crazy. Once the cops find out the identity of IMT—and it won't take long—they'll break up both cities and be glad of the chance."

Karst said. "Is this because IMT was the Okie city that did—what was done—on Thor Five?"

Amalfi suddenly found that he was having difficulty in-

keeping his Adam's apple where it belonged. "Let that pass, Karst," he growled. "We're not going to import that story into the Cloud. That should have been cut from your learning tape."

"I know it now|" /Karst said calmly. "And I am not surprised. The Proctors never change."

"Forget it. Forget it, do you hear? Forget everything. Karst, can you go back to being a dumb serf for a night?"

"Go back to my land?" Karst said. "It would be awkward. My wife must have a new man by now——"

"No, not back to your land. I want to go with Heldon and look at his spindizzies as soon as he says the word. I'll need to take some heavy equipment, and I'll need some help.

Will you come along?"

Hazleton raised his eyebrows. "You won't fool Heldon, boss."

"I think I will. Of course he knows that we've educated some of the serfs, but that's not a thing he can actually see when he looks at it; his whole background is against it. He just isn't accustomed to thinking of serfs as intelligent. He knows we have thousands of them here, and yet he isn't really afraid of that idea. He thinks we may arm them, make a mob of them. He can't begin to imagine that a serf can learn something better than how to handle a sidearm—something better, and far more dangerous."

"How can you be sure?" Hazleton said.

"By analogue. Remember the planet of Thetis Alpha called Fitzgerald, where they used a big beast called a horse for everything—from pulling carts to racing? All right: suppose you visited a place where you had been told that a few horses had been taught to talk.

While you're working there, somebody comes to give you a hand, dragging a spavined old plug with a straw hat pulled down over its ears and a pack on its back. (Excuse me, Karst, but business is business.) You aren't going to think of that horse as one of the talking ones. You aren't accustomed to thinking of horses as being able to talk at all."

"All right," Hazleton said, grinning at Karst's evident discomfiture. "What's the main strategy from here on out, boss? I gather that you've got it set up. Are you ready to give it a name yet?"

"Not quite," the mayor said. "Unless you like long titles. It's still just- another problem in political pseudomorphism."

Amalfi caught sight of Karst's deliberately incurious face and his own grin broadened.

"Or," he said, "the fine art of tricking your opponent into throwing his head at' you."

CHAPTER NINE: Home

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

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

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

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

Amalfi could see, however, that the spaces sculpted out of the interior of that ,,block of black stone, after the fashion of an ancientl Etarth sculptor named Moore, had once had meaning. Inside the stone there had once stood a powerful human figure, with its foot resting upon the neck of a slighter figure; both surrounded by matter, but cut into space.

Heldon, too, stopped and looked at the monument. There was some kind of struggle going on inside of him. Amalfi did- not know what it was, but he had a good guess.

Heldon was a young man; hence, as a Proctor, he was probably recently elected. Karst's testimony had made it clear that most of the other members of the Great Nine—Asor, Bemajdi, and the rest—had been members of the Great Nine from the beginning. They were, in short, not the descendants of the men who had ravaged Thor V, but those very same men, preserved by a jealous hoarding of anti-agathics right down to the present.

Heldon looked at the monument. The figures inside it made it clear that once upon a time IMT had actually been proud of the memory of Thor V, and the ancients of the Great Nine, while they might not still be proud, were still guilty. Heldon, who had not himself committed that crime, was choosing whether or not to associate himself with it in fact, as he had already associated himself by implication, by being a Proctor at all....

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

No one of interest: that meant the serfs. Heldon had decided; he was of the Proctors; he had taken Thor V into his pigeon's bosom.

"Suppose somebody notices us?" Amalfi said. "This square is usually avoided. Also, I have men posted around it to divert any chance traffic. If you don't wander away, you'll be safe."

The Proctor gathered in his shirts and strode away toward the big domed building, where he disappeared abruptly down an alleyway. Behind Amalfi, Karst began to sing, in an exceedingly scratchy voice, but very softly— a folk tune of some kind, obviously. The melody, which

once had had to do" with a town named Kazan, was too many thousands of years old for Amalfi to recognize it, even had he not been tune deaf. Nevertheless, the mayor abruptly found himself listening to Karst, with the intensity of a hooded owl sonar-tracking a field mouse. Karst chanted:

"Wild on the wind rose the righteous wrath of Maal-

vin,

Borne like a brand to the burning of the Barrens. Arms of hands of rebels perished then, Stars nor moons bedecked that midnight. IMT made the sky , Fall!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't understand——"

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

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

"I think," Heldon said, "that we are now ready for your valuable aid, Mayor Amajfi."

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

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

"I'm disappointed," Amalfi said. "I expected to see Jules Verne come out from under it—or Dean Swift. All right, Heldon, lead on."

The Proctor went cautiously down the steps, holding his skirts up against the dampness.

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

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

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

The steps ended abruptly in a small chamber so small, chilly, and damp that it was little more than a cave. The

flashlight's eyes roved, came to rest on an oval doorway sealed off with dull metal—almost certainly lead. So IMT's spindizzies ran "hot"? That was already bad news; it back-dated them far beyond the year to which Amalfi had tentatively assigned them.

"That it?" he said.

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

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

"Well?" Heldon said harshly. He seemed to be under considerable strain. It occurred to Amalfi that Heldon's strategy might well be a personal flyer, not an official policy of the Great Nine; in which case it might go hard with Heldon if his colleagues found him in this particular place of all places with an Okie. "Aren't you going to make any tests?"

"Certainly," Amalfi said. "I was a little taken aback at their size, that's all."

"They are old, as you know," said the Proctor. "Doubtless they are built much larger nowadays."

That, of course, wasn't so. Modern spindizzies ran less than a tenth the size of these.

The comment cast new doubt upon Heldon's exact status. Amalfi had assumed that the Proctor would not let him touch the spindizzies except to inspect; that there would be plenty of men in IMT capable of making repairs from detailed instructions; that Heldon himself, and any Proctor, would know enough physics to comprehend whatever explanations Amalfi might proffer. Now he was not so sure—and on this question hung the amount of tinkering Amalfi would be able to do without being detected.

The mayor mounted a metal stair to a catwalk which ran along the tops of the generators, then stopped and looked down at Karst. "Well, stupid, don't just stand there," he said.

"Come on up, and bring the stuff."

Obediently Karst shambled up the metal steps, Heldon at his heels. Amalfi ignored them to search for an inspection port in the casing, found one, and opened it. Beneath was what appeared to be a massive rectifying circuit, plus the amplifier for some kind of monitor—probably a digital computer. The amplifier involved more vacuum tubes than Amalfi had ever before seen gathered into one circuit, and there was % separate power supply to deliver DC to their heaters. Twd of the tubes were each as big as his fist.

Karst bent over and slung the pack to the deck. Amalfi drew out of it a length of slender black cable and thrust its double prongs into a nearby socket. A tiny bulb on the other end glowed neon-red.

"Your computer's still running," he reported. "Whether it's still sane or not is another matter. May I turn the main banks on, Heldon?"

"I'll turn them on," the Proctor said. He went down the stairs again and across the chamber.

instantly Amalfi was murmuring through motionless lips into the inspection port. The result to Karst's ears must have been rather weird. The technique of speaking without moving one's lips is simply a matter of substituting consonants which do not involve lip movement, such as y, for those which do, such as w. If the resulting sound is picked up from inside the resonating chamber, as it is with a throat mike, it is not too different from ordinary speech, only a bit more blurred. Heard from outside the speaker's nasopharyngeal cavity, however, it has a tendency to sound like Japanese Pidgin.

"Yatch Heldon, Karst. See yhich syitch he kulls, an' nenorize its location. Got it? Good."

The tubes lit. Karst nodded once, very slightly. The Proctor watched from below while Amalfi inspected the lines.

"Will they work?" he called. His voice was muffled, as though he were afraid to raise it as high as he thought necessary.

"I think so. One of these tubes is gassing, and there may have been some failures here and there. Better check the whole lot before you try anything ambitious. You do have facilities for testing tubes, don't you?"

Relief spread visibly over Heldon's face, despite his obvious effort to betray nothing.

Probably he could have fooled any of his own people without effort, but for Amalfi, who, like any Okie mayor, could follow the parataxic "speech" of muscle interplay and posture as readily as he

could spoken dialogue, Heldon's expression was as clear as a signed confession.

"Certainly," the Proctor said. "Is that all?" "By no means. I think you ought to rip out about half of these circuits, and install transistors wherever they can be used; we can sell you the necessary germanium at the legal rate. You've got two or three hundred tubes to a unit here, by my estimate, and if you have a tube failure in flight—well, the only word that fits what would happen then is blooey!"

"Will you be able to show us how?" "Probably," the mayor said. "If you'll allow me to inspect the whole system, I can give you an exact answer." •".'•

"All right," Heldon said. "But don't delay. I can't count on more than another half-day at most."

This was better than Amalfi had expected—miles better. Given that much time, he could trace at least enough of the leads to locate the master control. That Heldon's expression failed totally to match the content of his speech disturbed Amalfi profoundly, but there was nothing that he could do that would alter that now. He pulled paper and stylus out of Karst's pack and began to make rapid sketches of the wiring before him.

After he had a fairly clear idea of the first generator's setup, it was easier to block in the main features of the second. It took time, but Heldon did not seem to tire.

The third spindizzy completed the picture, leaving Amalfi wondering what the fourth one was for. It turned out to be a booster, designed to compensate for the losses of the others wherever the main curve of their output failed to conform to the specs laid down for it by the crude, over all regenerative circuit. The booster was located on the backside of the feedback loop, behind the computer rather than ahead of it, so that all the computer's corrections had to pass through it; the result, Amalfi was sure, would be a small but serious "base surge" every time any correction was applied. The spindiz-zies of IMT seemed to have been wired together by Cro-Magnon Man.

But they would fly the city. That was what counted. Amalfi finished his examination of the booster generator and straightened up painfully, stretching the muscles of his back. He had no idea how many hours he had consumed. It

seemed as though months had passed. Heldon was still watching him, deep* blue circles under his eyes, but still wide awake and watchful.

And Amalfi had found no point anywhere in the underground chamber frqjni%hich the spindizzies of IMT could be controlled. The dontrol point was somewhere else; the main control cable ran into a pipe which shot straight up through the roof of the cavern.

. .. IMT made the sky/ Fall...

Amalfi yawned ostentatiously and bent back to fasten the plate over the booster-generator's observation port. Karst squatted near him, frankly asleep, as relaxed and comfortable as a cat drowsing on a high ledge. Heldon watched.

"I'm going to have to do the job for you," Amalfi said. "It's really major; might take weeks."

"I thought you would say so," Heldon said. "And I was glad to give you the time to find out. But I don't think we'll make any such replacements."

"You need 'em."

"Possibly. But obviously there is a big factor of safety in the apparatus, or we would never have been able to fly the city at all." (Not, Amalfi noticed, "our ancestors," but "we"; Heldon had identified himself with the crime. He would pay.) "You will understand, Mayor Amalfi, that we cannot risk your doing something to the machines that we can't do ourselves, on the unlikely assumption that you're increasing their efficiency. If they will run as they are, that will have to be good enough."

"Oh, they'll run," Amalfi said. He began, methodically, to pack up his equipment. "For a while. I'll tell you flatly that they're not safe to operate, all the same."

Heldon shrugged, and went down the spiral metal stairs to the floor of the chamber.

Amalfi rummaged in the pack a moment more. Then he ostentatiously kicked Karst awake—and kicked hard, for he knew better than to play-act with a born overseer for an audience—and motioned the serf to pick up the bundle. They went down after Heldon.

The Proctor was smiling, and it was not a nice smile. "Not safe?" he said. "No, I never supposed that they were. But I think now that the dangers are mostly political."

"Why?" Amalfi demanded, trying to moderate his Dreathing. He was suddenly almost exhausted; it had taken—how many hours? He had no idea.

"Are you aware of the time, Mayor Amalfi?"

"About morning, I'd judge," Amalfi said dully, jerking the pack more firmly onto Karst's drooping left shoulder. "Damn late, anyhow."

"Very late," Heldon said. He was not disguising his expression now. He was openly crowing. "The contract between your city and mine expired at noon today. It is now nearly an hour after noon; we have been here all night and morning. And your city is still on our soil, in violation of the contract, Mayor Amalfi."

"An oversight——"

"No; a victory." Heldon drew a tiny silver tube from the folds of his robe and blew into it.

"Mayor Amalfi, you may consider yourself a prisoner of war."

The little silver tube had made no audible sound, but there were already ten men in the room. The mesotron rifles they carried were of an ancient design, probably pre-Kammerman, like the spindizzies of IMT.

But, like the spindizzies, they looked as though they would work.

Karst froze; Amalfi unfroze him by jabbing him surreptitiously in the ribs with a finger, and began to unload the contents of his own small pack into Karst's.

"You've called the Earth police, I suppose?" he said.

"Long ago. That way of escape will be cut off by now. Let me say, Mayor Amalfi, that if you expected to find down here any controls that you might disable—and I was quite prepared to allow you to search for them—you expected too much stupidity from me."

Amalfi said nothing. He went on methodically repacking the equipment.

"You are making too many motions, Mayor Amalfi. Put your hands up in the air and turn around very slowly."

Amalfi put up his hands and turned. In each hand he held a small black object about the size and shape of an egg.

"I expected only as much stupidity as I got," he said conversationally. "You can see what I'm holding up there. I can and will drop one or both of them if I'm shot. I may drop them anyhow. I'm tired of your back-cluster ghost town."

Heldon snorted. "Explosives? Gas? Ridiculous; nothing so small could contain enough energy to destroy the city; and you have no ma$ks-.' Do you take me for a fool?"

"Events prove ydu one," Amalfi said steadily. "The possibility was quite large that you would try to ambush me, once you had me in IMT. I could have forestalled that by bringing a guard with me. You haven't met my perimeter police; they're tough boys, and they've been off duty so long that they'd love the chance to tangle with your palace crew.

Didn't it occur to you that I left my city without a bodyguard only because I had less cumbersome ways of protecting myself?"

"Eggs," Heldon said scornfully.

"As a matter of fact, they are eggs; the black color is an analine stain, put on the shells as a warning. They contain chick embryos inoculated with a two-hour alveo-lytic mutated Terrestrial rickettsialpox—a new airborne strain developed in our own BW lab. Free space makes a wonderful laboratory for that kind of trick; an Okie town specializing in agronomy taught us the techniques a couple of centures back. Just a couple of eggs—but if I were to drop them, you would have to crawl on your belly behind me all the way back to my city to get the antibiotic shot that's specific for the disease; we developed that ourselves, too."

There was a brief silence, made all the more empty by the hoarse breathing of the Proctor. The armed men eyed the black eggs uneasily, and the muzzles of their rifles wavered out of line. Amalfi had chosen his weapon with great care; static feudal societies classically are terrified by the threat of plague—they have seen so much of it.

"Impasse," Heldon said at last. "All right, Mayor Amalfi. You and your slave have safe-conduct from this chamber——"

"From the building. If I hear the slightest sound of pursuit up the stairs, I'll chuck these down on you. They burst hard, by the way—the virus generates a lot of gas in chick-embryo medium."

"Very well," Heldon said, through his teeth. "From the building, then. But you have won nothing, Mayor Amalfi. If you can get back to your city, you'll be just in time to be an eyewitness of the victory of IMT—the victory you helped make possible. I think you'll be surprised at how thorough we can be."

"No, I won't," Amalfi said, in a flat, cold, and quite merciless voice. "I know all about IMT, Heldon. This is the end of the line for the Mad Dogs. When you die, you and your whole crew of Interstellar Master Traders, remember Thor Five."

Heldon turned the color of unsized paper, and so, surprisingly, did at least four of his riflemen. Then the color began to rise in the Proctor's plump, fungoid cheeks. "Get out,"

he croaked, almost inaudibly. Then, suddenly, at the top of his voice: "Get out; Get out!"

Juggling the eggs casually, Amalfi walked toward the lead radiation lock. Karst shambled after him, cringing as he passed Heldon. Amalfi thought that the serf might be overdoing it, but Heldon did not notice; Karst might as well have been—a horse.

The lead plug swung to, blocking out Heldon's furious, frightened face and * the glint of the fluorescents on the ancient spindizzies. Amalfi plunged one hand into Karst's pack, depositing one egg hi the siliconefoam nest from which he had taken it, and withdrew the hand again grasping an ugly Schmeisser acceleration pistol. This he thrust into the waistband of his breeches.

"Up the stairs, Karst. Fast. I had to shave it pretty fine. Go on, I'm right behind you.

Where would the controls for those machines be, by your guess? The control lead went up through the roof of that cavern."

"On the top of the Temple," Karst said. He was mounting the narrow steps in huge bounds, but it did not seem to cost him the slightest effort. "Up there is Star Chamber, where the Great Nine meets. There isn't any way to get to it that I know."

They burst up into the cold stone antechamber. Amalfi's flash roved over the floor, found the jutting pyramid; Karst kicked it. With a prolonged groan, the tilted slab settled down over the flight of steps and became just another block in the floor. There was certainly some way to raise it again from below, but Heldon would hesitate before he used it; the slab was noisy in motion, noisy enough to tell Amalfi that he was being followed. At the first such squawk, Amalfi would lay a black egg, and Heldon knew it.

"I want you to get out of the city, and take every serf that you can find with you," Amalfl said. "But it's going to take timing. Somebody's got to pull that switch down below that I asked Y.OU to memorize, and I can't do it; I've got to get into Stafl Chamber. Heldon will guess that I'm going up there, and he'll follow me. After he's gone by, Karst, you have to go down there and open that switch."

Here was the low door through which Heldon had first admitted them to the Temple.

More stairs ran up from it. Strong daylight poured under it.

Amalfi inched the old door open and peered out. Despite the brightness of the afternoon, the close-set, chunky buildings of IMT turned the alleyway outside into a confusing multitude of twilights. Half a dozen leaden-eyed serfs were going by, with a Proctor walking behind them, half asleep.

"Can you find your way back into that crypt?" Amalfi whispered, leaving the door ajar.

"There's only one way to go."

"Good. Go back, then. Dump the pack outside the door here; we don't need it any more.

As soon as Heldon's crew goes on up these stairs, get back down there and pull that switch. Then get out of the city; you'll have about four minutes of accumulated warm-up time from all those tube stages; don't waste a second of it. Got it?"

"Yes, but——"

Something went over the Temple like an avalanche of gravel and dwindled into some distance. Amalfi closed one eye and screwed the other one skyward. "Rockets," he said.

"Sometimes I don't know why I insisted on a planet as primitive as this. But maybe I'll learn to love it. Good luck, Karst."

He turned toward the stairs.

"They'll trap you up there," Karst said.

"No, they won't. Not Amalfi. But me no huts, Karst. Git."

Another rocket went over, and far away there was a heavy explosion. Amalfi charged like a bull up the new flight of stairs toward Star Chamber.

The staircase was long and widely curving, as well as narrow, and both its risers and its treads were inf uriatingly small. Amalfi remembered that the Proctors did not themselves climb stairs; -they were carried up them on the forearms of serfs. Such pussy-ant steps made for sure footing, but not for fast transit.

As far as Amalfi was able to compute, the steps rose gently along "the outside curvature of the Temple's dome, following a one-and-a-half helix to the summit. Why? Presumably, the Proctors didn't require themselves to climb long flights of stairs for nothing, even with serfs to carry them. Why couldn't Star Chamber be under the dome with the spindizzies, for instance, instead of atop it?

Amalfi was not far past the first half-turn before one good reason became evident. There was a rustle of voices jostling its way through ,the chinks in the dome from below; a congregation, .evidently, was gathering. As Amalfi continued to mount the flat spiral, the murmuring became more and more discreet, until individual voices could almost be separated out from it. Up there at what mathematically would be the bottom of the bowl, where the floor of Star Chamber was, the architect of the Temple evidently had contrived a whispering gallery—a vault to which a Proctor might put his ear and hear the thinnest syllable of conspiracy in the crowd of suppliants below.

It was ingenious, Amalfi had to admit. Conspirators on church-bearing planets generally tend to think of churches as safe places for quiet plotting. In Amalfi's universe any planet which sponsored churches probably had a revolt coming to it.

Blowing like a porpoise, he scrambled up the last arc of the long Greek-spiral staircase.

A solidly-closed double door, worked all over with phony-Byzantine scrolls, stood looking down at him. He didn't bother to stop to admire it; he hit it squarely under the paired, patently synthetic sapphires just above its center, and hit it hard. It burst.

Disappointment stopped him for a moment. The chamber was an ellipse of low eccentricity, monastically bare and furnished only with a heavy wooden table and nine chairs, now drawn back against the wall. There were no controls here, nor any place where they could be concealed. The chamber was windowless.

The lack of windows told him what he wanted to know. The other, the compelling reason why Star Chamber was on top of the Temple dome was that it harbored, somewhere, the pilot's cabin of IMT. And that, in as old a city

as IMT, meant that visibility would be all-important— requiring a situation8 atop the tallest structure in the city, and as close to 360° visibility as could be managed. Obviously, Amalfi was not yet up high enough.

He looked up at|he ceiling. One of the big stone slabs had a semi-circular cup in it, not much bigger than a large coin. The flat edge was much worn.

Amalfi grinned and looked under the wooden table. Sure enough, there it was—a pole with a hooked bill at one end, rather like a halberd, slung in clips. He yanked it out, straightened, and fitted the bill into the opening in the stone.

The slab came down easily, hinged at one end as the block down below over the generator room had been. The ancestors of the Proctors had not been much given to varying their engineering principles. The free end of the slab almost touched the table top. Amalfi sprang onto the table and scrambled up the tilted face of the stone; as he neared the top, the translating center of gravity which he represented actuated a counterweighting mechanism somewhere, and the slab closed, bearing him the rest of the way.

This was the control cabin, all right. It was tiny and packed with panels, all of which were thick in dust. Bull's-eyes of thick glass looked out over the city at the four compass points, and there was one set overhead, A single green light was glowing on one of the panels. While he walked toward it, it went out.

That had been Karst, cutting the power. Amalfi hoped that the peasant would get out again. He had grown to like him. There was something in his weathered, immovable, shockproof courage, and in the voracity of his starved intelligence, that reminded the mayor of someone he had once known. That that someone was Amalfi as he had been at the age of twenty-five, Amalfi did not know, and there was no one else alive who would be able to tell him.

Spindizzies in essence are simple; Amalfi had no difficulty in setting and locking the controls the way he wanted them, or in performing sundry small tasks of highly selective sabotage. How he was to conceal what he had done, when every move left huge smears in the heavy dust, was a tougher problem. He solved it at length in the only possible way: he took off his shirt and flailed it at all of

the boards. The result made him sneeze until his eyes watered, but it worked.

Now all he had to do was get out.

There were already sounds below in Star Chamber, but he was not yet worried about a direct attack. He still had a black egg, and the Proctors knew it. Furthermore, he also had the pole with the hooked bill, so that in order to open up the control room at all, the Proctors would have to climb on each other's shoulders. They weren't in good physical shape for gymnastics, and besides, they would know that men indulging in such stunts could be defeated temporarily by nothing more complicated than a kick in the teeth.

Nevertheless, Amalfi had no intention of spending the rest of his life in the control room of IMT. He had only about six minutes to get out of the city altogether.

After thinking very rapidly for approximately four seconds, Amalfi stood on the stone slab, overbalanced it, and slid solemnly down onto the top of the table in Star Chamber.

*

After a stunned instant, half a dozen pairs of hands grabbed him at once. Heldon's face, completely unrecognizable with fury and fear, was thrust into his.

"What have you done? Answer, or I'll order you torn to pieces."

"Don't be a lunkhead. Tell your men to let go of me. I still have your safe-conduct—and in case you're thinking of repudiating it, I still have the same weapon I had before. Cast off, by God, or——"

Heldon's guards released him before he had finished speaking. Heldon lurched heavily up onto the table top and began to claw his way up the slab. Several other robed, bald-headed men jostled after him—evidently Heldon had been driven by a greater fear to tell some of the Great Nine what he had done. Amalfi walked backwards out of Star Chamber and down two steps. Then he bent, desposited his remaining black egg carefully on the threshold, thumbed his nose at the furious soldiery, and took off down the spiral stairs at a dead run.

It would take Heldon a while, perhaps as much as a minute after he switched on the controls, to discover that the generators had been cut out while he was chasing Amalfi; and another minute, at best, to get a flunky down

into the basement to turn them on again. Then there would be a warm-up* time of four minutes. After that— IMT would go aloft.

Amain1 shot out intojthe alleyway and thence into the street, caroming off %ri*

astounded Proctor. A shout rose behind him. He doubled over and kept running.

The street was nearly dark in the twilight of the twin suns. He kept in the shadows and made for the nearest corner. The cornice of the building ahead of him abruptly turned lava-white, then began to dim through the red. He never did hear the accompanying scream of the mesotron rifle. He was concentrating on something else.

Then he was around the corner. The quickest route to the edge of the city, as well as he could recall, was down the street he had just quitted, but that was now out of the question; he had no desire to be burned down. Whether or not he could get out of IMT in time by any alternate route remained to be seen.

Doggedly, he kept running. He was fired on once more, by a man who did not really know on whom he was firing. Here, Amalfi was just a running man who failed to fit the categories; any first shot at him would be a reflex of disorientation, and aimed accordingly badly....

The ground shuddered, ever so delicately, like the hide of a monster twitching at flies in its sleep. Somehow Amalfi managed to run still faster.

The shudder came again, stronger this time. A long, protracted groan followed it, traveling in a heavy wave through the bedrock of the city. The sound brought Proctors and serfs alike boiling out of the buildings.

At the third shock, something toward the center of the city collapsed with a sullen roar.

Amalfi was caught up in the aimless, terrified eddying of the crowd, and fought with hands, teeth, and bullet head....

The groaning grew louder. Abruptly, the ground bucked. Amalfi pitched forward. With him went the whole milling mob, falling in wind-rows like stacked grain. There was frantic screaming everywhere, but it was worst inside the buildings. Over Amalfi's head a window shattered explosively, and a woman's body came twisting and tumbling through the shuddering air.

Amalfi heaved himself up, spitting blood, and ran again. The pavement ahead was cracked in great, irregular

shards, like a madman's mosaic. Just beyond, the blocks were tilted all awry, reminding Amalfi irrelevantly of a breakwater he had seen on some other planet, in some other century....

He was clambering over them before he realized that these could only mark the rim of the original city of IMT. There were still more buildings on the other side of the huge, rock-filled trench, but the trench itself showed where the perimeter of the ancient Okie city had been sunk into the soil of the planet. Fighting for air with saw-edged rales, he threw himself from stone to stone toward the far edge of the trench. This was the most dangerous ground of all; if IMT were to lift now, he would be ground as fine as mincemeat in the tumbling rocks. If he could just reach the marches of the Barrens....

Behind him, the groaning rose steadily in pitch, until it sounded like the tearing of an endless sheet of metal. Ahead, across the Barrens, his own city gleamed in the last rays of the twin suns. There was fighting around it; little bright flashes were sputtering at its edge. The rockets Amalfi had heard, four of them, were arrowing across the sky, and black things dropped from them. The Okie city responded with spouts of smoke.

Then there was an unbearably bright burst. After Amalfi could see again, there were only three rockets. In another few seconds there wouldn't be any: the City Fathers never missed.

Amalfi's lungs burned. He felt sod under his sandals. A twisted runner of furze lashed across his ankle, and he fell again.

He tried to get up and could not. The seared turf, on which an ancient rebel city once had stood, rumbled threateningly. He rolled over. The squat towers of IMT were swaying, and all around the edge of the city, huge Mocks and clods heaved and turned over, like surf.

Impos-«bly, a thin line of light, intense and ruddy, appeared above the moiling rocks. The suns were shining under the ory...

The line of light widened. The old city took the air with

•n immense bound, and the rending of the long-rooted foundations was ear-splitting.

From the sides of the huge

•ass, human beings threw themselves desperately toward

the Barrens; most of them, Amalfi saw, were serfs. The Proctors, of course, were still trying to control the flight of IMT....

The city rose majestically. It was gaining speed. Amalfi's heart hsfenmered. If Heldon and his crew could figure out in time what Amalfi had done to the controls, Karst's old ballad would be re-enacted; and the crushing rule of the Proctors made safe forever.

But Amalfi had done his work well. The city of IMT did not stop rising. With a profound, visceral shock, Amalfi realized that it was already nearly a mile up, and still accelerating.

The air would be thinning up there, and the Proctors had forgotten too much to know what to do. ...

A mile and a half.

Two miles.

It grew smaller, At five miles it was just a wavery ink blot, lit on one side. At seven miles it was a point of dim light.

A bristle-topped head and a pair of enormous shoulders lifted cautiously from a nearby gully. It was Karst. He continued to look aloft for a moment, but IMT at ten miles was invisible. He looked down to Amalfi.

"Can—can it come back?" he said huskily.

"No," Amalfi said, his breathing gradually coming under control. "Keep watching, Karst. It isn't over yet. Remember that th'e Proctors had called the Earth cops At that same moment, the city of IMT reappeared—in a way. A third sun flowered in the sky. It lasted for three or four seconds. Then it dimmed and died.

"The cops were warned," Amalfi said softly, "to watch for an Okie city trying to make a getaway. They found it, and they dealt with it. Of course they got the wrong city, but they don't know that. They'll go home now—and now we're home, and so are you and your fellow men. Home on Earth, for good."

Around them^ there was a murmuring of voices, hushed with disaster, and with something else, too—something so old, and so new, that it hardly had a name on the planet that IMT had ruled. It was called freedom. ,

"On Earth?" Karst repeated. He and the mayor climbed painfully to their feet. "What do you mean? This is not Earth——"

Across the Barrens, the Okie city glittered—the city that had pitched camp to mow some lawns. A cloud of stars was rising behind it.

"It is now," Amalfi said. "We're all Earthmen, Karst. Earth is more than just one little planet, buried in another galaxy than this. Earth is much more important than that.

"Earth isn't a place. It's an idea."