The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (12 page)

"It will have to do," Heldon grumbled. Amalfi saw
in the Proctor's eyes a gleam of cold satisfaction which he recognized at once,
from having himself looked out through it often—though never in such a poor
state of concealment. 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 do 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
stupid," 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 in 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 set-up 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 potbelly. 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 in
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 them
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 V?"

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."

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 could still hear that raw
silence.

The naked brown figure of a passing serf glanced furtively
at the party, saw Heldon, and raised a finger to its lips in the 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 weatherworn as to have lost any
integrity it might ever have had; integrity, Amalfi mused, is not a
characteristic of monuments. Except to a sharp eye, the mass of stone on the
old pedestal might have been nothing but a moderately large meteorite, riddled
with the twisting pits characteristic of siderites.

Amalfi could see, however, that the spaces sculpted out of
the interior of that block of stone, after the fashion of an ancient sculptor
named Moore, had once had meaning. Inside that stone there had once stood a
powerful human figure, with its foot resting upon the neck of a slighter. Once,
evidently, IMT had actually been
proud
of the memory of Thor V—

"Ahead is the Temple," Heldon said suddenly.
"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."

"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 strode away toward the big domed building and
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 Maalvin, 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 one 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
Fair

"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 we'll 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 spaceflight, 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 word. He came rapidly toward them across the crumbling
flagstones.

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

Heldon put his foot on a jutting pyramidal stone and pressed
down. Amalfi 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 Jonathan Swift come out from under it. 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 in 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 eye
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 backdated 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.