Earthman, Come Home Page 5

  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 discrete, 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—for he had never seen Earth-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 situation 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 the ceiling. One of the big stone slabs had a semicircular 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 counterweighing 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 covered with dust. Bull’s-eyes of thick glass looked out over the city at the four compass-points, and there was one set in 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, unmovable, 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 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 one of the black eggs, 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, 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, deposited his remaining black egg carefully on the threshold, 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.

  Amalfi shot out into the alleyway and thence into the public square, caroming off an astounded guard. 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 consequently aimed 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 f
orward. With him went the whole milling mob, falling in windrows like stacked grain. There was frantic screaming everywhere, but it was worse 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, rockfilled trench, but the trench itself showed where the perimeter of the ancient Okie 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 to the east, 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 blocks and clods heaved and turned over, like surf. Impossibly, a thin line of light, intense and ruddy, appeared above the moiling rocks. The suns were shining under the city—

  The line of light widened. The old city took the air with an immense bound, and the rending of the long-rooted foundations was ear-splitting. From the sides of the huge mass, human beings threw themselves desperately toward the Barrens; all those 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 hammered. 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 the 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 people. 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.”

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  Document creation date: 11.06.2011

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