Earthman, Come Home Read online

  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.

  “Well?” Heldon said harshly. He seemed to be under considerable strain. It occurred to Amalfi that Heldon’s strategy might well be a personal flier, 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 a separate power supply to deliver D.C. to their heaters. Two 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 set-up, 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 spindizzies 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 from which the spindizzies of IMT could be controlled. The control point was somewhere else; the main control cable ran into a pipe which shot straight up through the top of the cavern.

  …IMT made the sky Fall…

  Amalfi yawned ostentatiously and bent back to fastening the plate
over the booster’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 do not think we will make any such replacements.”

  “You need ’em.”

  “Possibly. But obviously there is a big factor of safety in the apparatus, or our ancestors would never have flown the city at all. You will understand, Mayor Amalfi, that we cannot risk your doing something to the machines which we cannot do ourselves, on the unlikely assumption that you are 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 damanded, trying to moderate his breathing. 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. “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.

  IV

  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 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 masks. Do you take me for a fool?”

  “Events prove you one,” Amalfi said steadily. “The possibility was quite large that you would try to ambush me, once you had me in the city. 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 annaline stain, put on the shells as a warning. They contain chick embryos inoculated with a two-hour alveolytic mutated Terrestrial rickettsialpox—a new air-borne 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 centuries 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 V.”

  Heldon turned the color of unsized paper, and so, surprisingly, did at least four of his riflemen. Then the blood began to rise in the Proctor’s plump, fungoid cheeks. “Get out,” he croaked, almost inaud-ibly. 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 in the silicone-foam 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; Amalfi 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,” Amalfi said. “But it’s g
oing to take timing. Somebody’s got to pull that switch down below that I asked you to memorize, and 1 can’t do it; I’ve got to get into Star 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 colored shadows. 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.

  “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 buts, 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 infuriatingly 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.