The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (9 page)

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 here in the Greater Magellanic was very high, even outside the
clusters—at most 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, consider that the Sixtieth Street spindizzy
had just followed the Twenty-third Street machine into the junkpit—it should be
possible to set interstellar commerce going here by cargoship. 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 much like cruising among the far-scattered,
various civilizations 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 kilo 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 nearby, 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
Mark Hazleton, the city manager, 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, who was
bald, it could make no such difference, but after years of the city's precise
air-conditioning 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 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 tungsten as a by-product 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 raid 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
taut, weathered 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 pay-dirt depth, and they refine
stuff by throwing it into a stew pot. 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 eastward away from the city. "I feel like a walk," he
said. "Like to come along, Mark?"

"A walk?" Hazleton looked puzzled. "Why-sure.
O.K., 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 crabgrass.

"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," Hazleton said, "but there are Okies
now, 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," Hazleton 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 gods from the city?" he said.

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

"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 the same tongue. "What's your name, young
fella?"

"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 woven 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."

"That 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 V."

Karst wiped his calloused palms 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 ruin 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.