by James Blish
He broached the latter question to Hazleton. “If we were dealing with an ordinary problem, I’d say the energy would show up as velocity,” he pointed out. “In which case we’d be in for an involuntary junket. But this is no ordinary case. The mass involved is … well, it’s planetary, that’s all. What do you think, Mark?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Hazleton admitted. “The equations only give us general solutions, and only quanticised solutions at that—and this whole problem is a classical field problem. When we move the city, we change the magnetic moment of its component electrons; but the city itself is a low-mass body with no spin of its own, and doesn’t have a gross magnetic moment.”
“That’s what stuck me. I can’t cross over from probability into tensors any more than poor old Einstein could. As far as I know, nobody’s ever really faced up to the discontinuity between what the spindizzy does to the electron and what happens to a body of classical mass in a spindizzy field.”
“Still—we could control velocity, or even ignore it out here. Suppose the energy reappears as heat, instead? There’d be nothing left of He but a cloud of gas.”
Amalfi shook his head. “I think that’s a bogey. The gyroscopic resistance may show up as heat, sure, but not the magnetogravitic. I think we’d be safest to assume that it’ll appear as velocity, just as in ordinary flight. Use the standard transformation and see what you get.”
Hazleton bent over his slide rule, the sweat standing out along his forehead and above his mustache in great heavy droplets. Amalfi could understand the eagerness of the Hevians to get rid of the jungle and its eternal humidity. His own clothing, sparse though it was, had been sopping ever since the city had landed here.
“Well,” the city manager said finally, “unless I’ve made a mistake somewhere, the whole kit and kaboodle, the planet itself, will go shooting away from here at about twice the speed of light. That’s not too bad—just about coasting speed for us. We could always loop around and bring the planet back to its orbit.”
“Ah, but could we? Remember, we don’t control it! The vector appears automatically when we turn on the spindizzies. We don’t even know in which direction that arrow is going to point. The planet could throw itself into the sun within the first second as far as we know. We can’t predict the direction.”
“Yes, we can,” Hazleton objected. “Along the axis of spin, of course.”
“Cant? And torque?”
“No problem—no, yes, there is. I keep forgetting that we’re dealing with a planet instead of electrons.” He applied the slipstick again. “No soap. Too many substitutions. Can’t be answered in time without the City Fathers—and torque might hype the end-velocity substantially. But if we can figure a way to control the flight, it won’t matter in the end. Of course there’ll be perturbations of the other planets when this one goes massless, whether it actually moves or not—but nobody lives on them anyhow.”
“All right, Mark, go figure a control system. I’ll see what can be done on the geology end—”
The door slid back suddenly, and Amalfi looked back over his shoulder. It was Sergeant Anderson. The perimeter sergeant was usually blasé in the face of all possible wonders, unless they threatened the city. “What’s the matter?” Amalfi said, alarmed.
“Mr. Mayor, we’ve gotten an ultracast from some outfit claiming to be refugees from another Okie city—they claim they hit a bindle-stiff and got broken up. They’ve crash-landed on this planet up north, and they’re being mobbed by one of the local bandit towns. They were holding ’em off and yelling for help, and then they stopped transmitting. I thought you ought to know.”
Amalfi heaved himself to his feet almost instantly. “Did you get a bearing on that call?” he demanded.
“Yes sir.”
“Give me the figures. Come on, Mark. That’s our life craft from the city with the no-fuel drive. We need those boys.”
Amalfi and Hazleton grabbed a cab to the edge of the city, and went the rest of the way to the Hevian town on foot, across the supersonics-cleared strip of bare turf which surrounded the walls. The turf felt rubbery. Amalfi suspected that some rudimentary form of friction-field was keeping the mud in a state of stiff gel. He had visions of foot soldiers sinking suddenly into slowly-folding ooze as the fields were turned off, and quickened his pace.
Inside the gates, the Hevian guards summoned a queer, malodorous vehicle which seemed to be powered by the combustion of hydrocarbons, and the Okies were roared through the streets toward Miramon. Throughout the journey, Amalfi clung to a cloth strap in an access of nervousness. Traveling right on a surface at any good speed was a rare experience for him, and the way things zipped past the windows made him jumpy.
“Is this bird out to smash us up?” Hazleton demanded petulantly. “He must be doing all of four hundred kilos an hour.”
“I’m glad you feel the same way,” Amalfi said, relaxing a little. “Actually, I’ll bet he’s doing less than two hundred. It’s just the way the—”
The driver, who had been holding his car down to a conservative fifty out of deference to the strangers from the Great Age, wrenched the machine around a corner and halted it neatly before Miramon’s door. Amalfi got out, his knees wobbly. Hazleton’s face was a delicate puce.
“I’m going to figure out a way to make our cabs operate outside the city,” he muttered. “Every time we make a new planetfall, we have to ride on ox carts, the backs of bull kangaroos, in hot air balloons, steam-driven air-screws, things that drag you feet first and face down through tunnels, or whatever else the natives think is classy transportation. My stomach won’t stand much more.”
Amalfi grinned and raised his hand to Miramon, whose expression suggested laughter smothered with great difficulty.
“What brings you here?” the Hevian said. “Come in. I have no chairs, but—”
“No time,” Amalfi said. “Listen closely, Miramon, because this is going to be complex to explain, and I’m going to have to give it to you fast. You already know that our city isn’t the only one of its type. Well, the fact is that we aren’t even the first Okie city to enter the Rift; there were two others ahead of us. One of them, a criminal city that we call a bindlestiff, attacked and destroyed the other; we were too far away to prevent it. Do you follow me?”
“I think so,” Miramon said. “This bindlestiff is like our bandit cities—”
“Yes, precisely. And as far as we know, it’s still in the Rift, somewhere. Now the city that the ’stiff destroyed had something that we want very badly, and that we must have before the ’stiffs get it. We know that the dead city put off some life craft, and that one of those craft has just landed on your world—and has fallen afoul of one of your own bandit cities. We’ve got to rescue them. They’re the sole survivors of the dead city as far as we know, and it’s vital for us to question them. We need to know what they know about the thing we want—the no-fuel drive—and what they know about where the bindlestiff is now.”
“I see,” Miramon said thoughtfully. “Will this—this bindlestiff follow them to He?”
“We think it will. And it’s powerful—it packs all the stuff we have and more besides. We have to pick up these survivors first, and work out some way to defend ourselves and you people against the ’stiff when it gets here. And above all, we must prevent the ’stiff from getting the secret of that fuelless drive!”
“What would you like me to do?” Miramon said gravely.
“Can you locate the Hevian town that’s holding these people prisoner? We have a fix on it, but only a blurred one. If you can, we’ll be able to get them out of there ourselves.”
Miramon went back into his house—actually, like all the other living quarters in the town, it was a dormitory housing twenty-five men of the same trade or profession—and returned with a map. The map-making conventions of He were anything but self-explanatory, but after a while Hazleton was able to figure out the symbolism involved. “There’s your city, and here’s our
s,” he said to Miramon, pointing. “Right? And this peeled-orange thing is a butterfly grid. I’ve always claimed that it was a lot more faithful to spherical territory than our Geographic projection, boss.”
“Easier still to express what you want to remember as a topological relationship,” Amalfi said impatiently. “Nobody ever confuses a table of symbols with the territory. Show Miramon where the signals came from.”
“Up here, on this wing of the butterfly.”
Miramon frowned. “There is only one city there—Fabr-Suithe. A very bad place to approach, even in the military sense. But if you insist on trying, we will help you. Do you know what the end result will be?”
“We’ll rescue our friends, I hope. What else?”
“The bandit cities will come out in force to hinder the Great Work. They oppose it; the jungle is their life.”
“Then why haven’t they impeded us before now?” Hazleton said. “Are they scared?”
“No. They fear nothing—we think they take drugs—but they have seen no way to attack you without huge losses, and their reasons for attacking you have not been sufficiently compelling to make them take the risk up to now. But if you attack one of them, that will give them reason enough. They learn hatred very quickly.”
“I think we can handle them,” Hazleton said coldly.
“I am sure you can,” Miramon said. “But you should be warned that Fabr-Suithe is the leader of all the bandit cities. If Fabr-Suithe attacks you, so will they all.”
Amalfi shrugged. “We’ll chance it. We’ll have to: we must have those men. Maybe we can make it quick enough to crush resistance before it starts. We can pick our own town up and go calling on Fabr-Suithe; if they don’t want to deliver up these Okies—”
“Boss—”
“Eh?”
“How are you going to get us off the ground?”
Amalfi could feel his ears turning red, and swore. “I forgot that Twenty-third Street machine. Miramon, we’ll have to have a task force of your own rockets. Hazleton, how are we going to work this? We can’t fit anything really powerful into a Hevian rocket plane—a pile would go into one easily enough, but a frictionator or a naval-size mesotron rifle wouldn’t, and there’d be no point in taking popguns. Do you suppose we could gas Fabr-Suithe?”
“You couldn’t carry enough gas in a Hevian rocket either. Or carry enough men to make a raid in force.”
“Excuse me,” Miramon said, “but it is not even certain that the priests will authorize the use of our planes against Fabr-Suithe. We had best drive directly over to the temple and ask them for permission.”
“Belsen and bebop!” Amalfi said. It was the oldest oath in his repertoire.
Talk, even with electronic aids, was impossible inside the little rocket. The whole machine roared like a gigantic tam-tam to the vibration of the Venturis. Morosely Amalfi watched Hazleton connecting the mechanism in the nose of the plane with the power-leads from the pile—no mean balancing feat, considering the way the craft pitched in its passage through the tortured Hevian crosswinds. The pile itself, of course, was simple enough to handle; it consisted only of a tank about the size of a glass brick, filled with a fine white froth: heavy water containing uranium 235 hexafluoride in solution, damped by bubbles of cadmium vapor. Most of its weight was shielding and the peripheral capillary network of the heat-exchanger.
There had been no difficulty with the priests about the little rocket task force itself; the priests had been delighted at the proposal that the emissaries from the Great Age should teach an apostate Hevian city the errors of its ways. Amalfi suspected that the straight-faced Miramon had invented the need for priestly permission just to get the two Okies back into the smelly ground car again and watch their faces during the drive to the temple. Still, the discomforts of that ride had been small compared to this one.
The pilot shifted his feet on the treadles, and the deck pitched. A metal trap rushed back under Amalfi’s nose, and he found himself looking through misty air at a crazily canted jungle. Something long, thin, and angry flashed over it and was gone. At the same time there was a piercing, inhuman shriek, sharp enough to dwarf for a long instant the song of the rocket.
Then there were more of the same: ptsouiiirrr! ptsouiiirrr! ptsouiiirrr! The machine jerked to nearly every one and then shook itself violently, twisting and careening across the jungle top. Amalfi had never felt so helpless before in his life. He did not even know what the noise was; he could only be sure that it was ill-tempered. The coarse blaam of high explosive, when it began, was recognizable—the city had often had occasion to blast on jobs—but nothing in his experience went kerchowkerchowkerchowkerchow, like a demented vibratory drill, and the invisible thing that screamed its own pep yell as it flew— eeeeeeeeyokKRCHackackarackarackaracka— seemed wholly impossible.
He was astonished to discover that the hull around him was stippled with small holes, real holes with the slip-stream fluting over them. It took him what seemed to be three weeks to realize that the whooping and cheerleading which meant nothing to him was riddling the ship and threatening to kill him at any second.
Someone was shaking him. He lurched to his knees, trying to unfreeze his eyeballs.
“Amalfi! Amalfi!” The voice, although it was breathing on his ear, was parsecs away. “Pick your spot, quick! They’ll have us shot down in a—”
Something burst outside and threw Amalfi back to the deck. Doggedly he crawled to the trap and peered down through the now-shattered glass. The bandit Hevian city swooped past, upside down. The mayor felt a sudden wave of motion sickness, and the city was lost in a web of tears. The second time it came by, he managed to see which building in it had the heaviest guard, and pointed, choking.
The rocket threw its tailfeathers over the nearest cloud and bored beak-first for the ground. Amalfi hung on to the edge of the suddenly blank trap, his own blood spraying back in a fine mist into his face from his cut fingers.
“Now!”
Nobody heard, but Hazleton saw his nod. A blast of pure light blew through the upended cabin, despite the shielding between it and the pile. Even through the top of his head, the violet-white light of that soundless blast nearly blinded Amalfi, and he could feel the irradiation of his shoulders and chest. He would develop no allergies on this planet, anyhow—every molecule of histamine in his blood must have been detoxified in that instant.
The rocket yawed wildly, and then came under control again. The ordnance noises had already quit, cut off at the moment of the flash.
The bandit Hevian city was blind.
The sound of the jets cut off, and Amalfi understood for the first time what an “aching void” might be. The machine fell into a steep glide, the air howling dismally outside it. Another rocket, under the guidance of Carrel, dived down before it, scything a narrow runway in the jungle with portable mesotron rifles—for the bandit towns kept no supersonic no-plant’s-land between themselves and the rank vegetation.
The moment the rocket stopped moving, Amalfi and a hand-picked squad of Okies and Hevians were out of it and slogging through the muck. From inside Fabr-Suithe drifted a myriad of screams—human screams now, screams of rage and grief, from men who thought themselves blinded for life. Amalfi did not doubt that many of them were. Certainly anyone who had had the misfortune to be looking at the sky during that instant when the entire output of the pile had been converted to visible light would never see again.
But the laws of chance would have protected most of the renegades, so speed was vital. The mud built up heavy pads under his shoes, and the jungle did not thin out until they hit the town’s wall itself.
The gates had been rusted open years ago, and were choked with greenery. The Hevians hacked their way through it with practiced knives and cunning.
Inside, the going was still almost as thick. Fabr-Suithe proper presented a depressing face of proliferating despair. Most of the buildings were completely enshrouded in vines, and many were halfway toward ruins. Iron
-hard tendrils had thrust their way between stones, into windows, under cornices, up drains and chimney funnels. Poison-green succulent leaves plastered themselves greedily upon every surface, and in shadowed places there were huge blood-colored fungi which smelled like a man six days dead; the sweetish taint hung heavily in the air. Even the paving blocks had sprouted—inevitably, since, whether by ignorance or laziness, most of the recent ones had been cut from green wood.
The screaming began to die into whimpers. Amalfi did his best to keep himself from inspecting the stricken inhabitants. A man who believes he has just been blinded permanently is not a pretty sight, even when he is wrong. Yet it was impossible not to notice the curious mixture of soiled finery with gleamingly clean nakedness. It was as if two different periods had mixed in the city, as if a gathering of Hruntan nobles had been sprinkled with Noble Savages. Possibly the men who had given in completely to the jungle had also slid back enough to discover the pleasures of bathing. If so, they would shortly discover the pleasures of the mud-wallow, too, and would not look so noble after that.
“Amalfi, here they are—”
The mayor’s suppressed sympathy for the blinded men evaporated when he got a look at the imprisoned Okies. They had been systematically mauled to begin with, and after that sundry little attentions had been paid to them which combined the best features of savagery and decadence. One of them, mercifully, had been strangled by his comrades early in the “questioning.” Another, a basket case, should have been rescued, for he could still talk rationally, but he pleaded so persistently for death that Amalfi had him shot in a sudden fit of sentimentality. Of the other three men, all could walk and talk, but two were mad. The catatonic was carried out on a stretcher, and the manic was bound, gagged, and led gingerly away.
“How did you do it?” asked the rational man in Russian, the dead universal language of Earth. He was a human skeleton, but he radiated an amazing personal force. He had lost his tongue early in the “questioning,” but had already taught himself to talk by the artificial method—the result was weird, but it was intelligible. “The savages were coming down to kill us as soon as they heard your rockets. Then there was a sort of flash, and they all started screaming—a pretty sound, let me tell you.”