Earthman, Come Home

by James Blish

  But when the germanium standard finally collapsed, it took with it the substrate in which the Okies had been imbedded. The semiconductor base was relegated to the same limbo which had claimed the conductor-metal base. The most valuable nonconductors in the galaxy were the antiathapic drugs; the next currency was based on a drug standard.

  As a standard it was excellent, passing all the tests that a coinage is supposed to meet. The drugs could be indefinitely diluted for small change; they had never been synthesized, and any other form of counterfeiting could be detected easily by bio-assay and other simple tests; they were very rare; they were universally needed; their sources of supply were few enough in number to be readily monitored.

  Unfortunately, the star-cruising Okies needed the drugs as drugs. They could not afford to use them as money.

  From that moment on, the Okies were no longer the collective citizens of a nomadic culture. They were just interstellar bums. There was no place for them in the galaxy any more.

  Outside the galaxy, of course, the Okie commerce lanes had never penetrated—

  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 a dozen centuries ago when they had discovered that nobody had dusted the city’s ancient subways since the city had first gone into space. That had been the first time the 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.

  The city had never been officially cleared of its failure to observe the “Vacate” order the cops had served on it during the reduction of Utopia. Later, during the same affair, the city had been hung with a charge of technical treason—not as serious as it sounded, but subject to inconvenient penalties—while on the neighboring planet of Hrunta, and had left the scene with the charge still on the docket. There had been a small trick pulled there, too, which the cops could hardly have forgotten: while it had not been illegal, it had created laughter at the expense of the cops in every Okie wardroom in the galaxy, and cops seldom like to be laughed at.

  Then there was the moving of He. The city had fulfilled its contract with that planet to the letter, but unfortunately that could never be proven; He was now well on its way across the intergalactic gap toward Andromeda, and could not testify on the city’s behalf. As far as the cops knew, the city had destroyed He, a notion the cops would be no less likely to accept simply because it was ridiculous.

  Worst of all, however, was the city’s participation in the March on Earth. The March had been a tragedy from beginning to end, and few of the several hundred Okie cities which had taken part in it had survived it. It had been a product of the galaxy-wide depression which had followed the collapse of the germanium standard. Amalfi’s city —already accused of several crimes in the star-system where the March had started, crimes which as a matter of fact the city had actually been forced to commit—had gone along because it had had no better choice, and had done what it could to change the March from a mutual massacre to a collective bargaining session; but the massacre had occurred all the same. No one city, not even Amalfi’s, could have made its voice heard above the long roar of galactic collapse.

  There was the redeeming fact that the city, during the March, had found and extirpated one of the last residues of the Vegan tyranny.

  But it could never be proven: like the affair on He, the city had done so thorough a job that even the evidence was gone irrevocably.

  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.

  If the cops would let it. The Magellanic Clouds were moving steadily and with increasing velocity away from the home galaxy; the gap was already so large that the city had had to cross it by using a dirigible planet as a booster-stage. 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 in the ability of a satellite starcloud 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 those Amalfi’s city had used. If the cops wanted to chase the Greater Magellanic, they would find ways to catch it. If—

  Amalfi took up the earphone 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 their 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 V.”

  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 the Thor V atrocity had made good its escape to 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,” Amalfi said, turning away from the boards. “Hello, Dee. How do you like your planet?”

  The former Utopian 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,” Amalfi 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,” Hazelton said evenly, “we’re in disagreement. While that’s ironing itself out, the business of running the city has to go on.”

  “All right,” Amalfi 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 stopgap, 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 weighted 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. “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 two 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 that forbade the mayor of an Okie city any permanent alliance with a woman—and the vein of iron loyalty in Amalfi that would have compelled him to act by that law even had it never existed. Until the sudden crisis far back in the Acolyte cluster which had forced Amalfi to reveal to Hazleton the existence of that love, neither of the two youngsters had suspected it over a period of nearly nine decades.

  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.

  “Of course I promised,” Amalfi said. “I’ve delivered on my promises for nearly two thousand years, and I’ll continue to do so. The blunt fact is that the City Fathers would have me shot if I didn’t—as they nearly had Mark shot on more than one occasion. 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, plus 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, surprised. “Come to think of it, I remember once during the tipping of He when the same thought occurred to me. In retrospect the problem doesn’t seem large.”

  “Boss, you’d better give us some substitute courses of action,” the city manager’s voice cut in, a little coldly. “With the possible exception of yourself, every man and 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’ve given 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,” Amalfi said. “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, and so on.”

  “That won’t work,” Hazleton said. “It may fool the Proctors, Amalfi, but how can you fool our own people? What are you going to do with the perimeter police, for instance? Sergeant Paterson’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 start dirt-farming. What am I to do with them?”

  “Send ’em out to your experimental potato 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 he turned back.

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

  “The Proctors have asked for the standard work-contract,” Amalfi said. “They know what it is, 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, either inside or outside the contract period. But we’ll have to pretend that we’re going to leave, up to the last possible minute.”

  Hazleton looked stunned. 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 earphone again, “I don’t yet know. I’m trying to find out. But this much I do know:

  “The Proctors have already called the cops.”

  II

  Under the gray, hazy light in the schoolroom, 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.

  Superimposed upon the indefinite outlines of the schoolroom, cities soared across Amalfi’s vision, cities aloft, in flight, looking for work, cracking their food from oil, burrowing for ores the colonial planets could not reach without help, and leaving again to search for work; sometimes welcomed grudgingly, sometimes driven out, usually underpaid, often potential brigands, always watched jealously by the police of hegemon Earth; spreading, ready to mow any lawn, toward the limits of the galaxy-He waved a hand annoyedly before his eyes 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 server, 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 five hundred 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 counterpointing, subaudible 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 var
ious reasons of policy, but such planets 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 V, 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 already had 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 perfectible, 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 could 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 metal 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.