OKIE

by James Blish

As John Amalfi emerged onto the narrow, worn granite ledge with its gritty balustrade, his memory encountered one of those brief boggles over the meaning of a word which had once annoyed him constantly, like a bubble in an otherwise smoothly blown French horn solo. Such moments of confusion were very rare now, but they were still a nuisance.

This time he found himself unable to decide on a name for where he was going at the moment. Was it a belfry, or was it a bridge?

Amalfi's step across the threshold struck the granite without perceptible interruption. The minute dilemma was familiar: he had been through others of its kind often in the years immediately after the city had taken to the skies. It was hard to decide the terms in which one thought about customary things and places after they had become utterly transformed by space flight. The difficulty was that, although the belfry of City Hall still looked much as it had in 1850, it was now the bridge of a spaceship, so that neither term could quite express what the composite had become.

Amalfi looked up. The skies, too, looked about as they must have in 1850 on a very clear night. The spindizzy screen which completely englobed the flying city was itself invisible, but it would pass only elliptically polarized light, so that it blurred the points which were stars seen from space and took them down in brilliance about three magnitudes to boot. Except for the distant, residual hum of the spindizzies themselves—certainly a much softer noise than the composite traffic roar which had been the city's characteristic tone back in the days before cities could fly—there was no real indication that the city was whirling through the emptiness between stars, a migrant among migrants.

If he chose, Amalfi could remember those days, since he had been mayor of the city—although only for a short time—when the City Fathers had decided that it was time to go aloft. That had been in 3111, decades after every other major city had already left Earth; Amalfi had been less than a century old at the time. The city manager then had been a man named deFord, who for a while had shared Amalfi's amused puzzlement at what you called all the familiar things now that they had turned strange—but deFord had been shot by the City Fathers around 3300 for engineering a flagrant violation of the city's contract with a planet called Epoch; this had put a black mark on the city's police record which the cops still had not forgotten.

The new city manager was a youngster, less than four hundred years old, named Mark Hazleton, who was already as little loved by the City Fathers as deFord had been and for about the same reasons, but who had been born after the city had gone aloft and hence had no difficulty in finding the appropriate words for things. Amalfi was prepared to believe that he himself was the last living man on board the flying city who still had occasional bubbles blown into his stream of consciousness by old Earthbound habits of thinking.

In a way, Amalfi's clinging to City Hall as the center of operations for the city betrayed the mayor's ancient ties to Earth. City Hall was the oldest building on board, and so only a few of the other structures could be seen from it. It wasn't tall enough, and there were too many newer buildings around it. Amalfi didn't care. From the belfry —or bridge, if that was what he had to call it now—he never looked in any direction but straight up, his head tilted all the way back on his bull neck. He had no reason to look at the buildings around Battery Park, after all. He had already seen them.

Straight up, however, was a sun, surrounded by starry sable. It was close enough for its disk to be perceptible, and was becoming slowly larger. While Amalfi watched it, the phone in his hand began to emit its intermittent squawks.

"It looks good enough to me," Amalfi said, lowering his bald head grudgingly a centimeter or two toward the phone. "It's a type G star or near to it, and Jake in Astronomy says two of the planets are Earthlike. And Records says that both of 'em are inhabited. Where there's people, there's work."

The phone quacked anxiously, each syllable evenly weighted, but without any over-all sense of conviction. Amalfi listened impatiently. Then he said:

"Politics."

The way he said it made it sound fit only to be scrawled on sidewalks. The phone was silenced: Amalfi hung it on its hook on the railing, and thudded back down the archaic stone steps which led from the belfry-bridge.

Hazleton was waiting for him in the mayor's office, drumming slim fingers upon the desk top. The current city manager was an excessively tall, slender, disjointed sort of man. Something in the way his limbs were distributed over Amalfi's chair made him also look lazy. If taking devious pains was a sign of laziness, Amalfi was quite willing to call Hazleton the laziest man in the city.

Hazleton said, "Well?"

"Well enough," Amalfi granted. "It's a nice yellow dwarf star, with all the fixings."

"Sure," Hazleton said with a wry smile. "I don't see why you insist on taking a personal look at every star we go by. There are screens right here in the office, and the City Fathers have all the data. We knew even before we could see this sun what it was like."

"I like a personal look," said Amalfi. "I haven't been mayor here for six hundred years for nothing. I can't really tell about a sun until I see it with my own eyes. Then I know. Images don't mean a thing —no feel to 'em."

"Nonsense," Hazleton said, without malice. "And what does your feelership say about this one?"

"It's a good sun; I like it. We'll land."

"All right. Suppose I tell you what's going on out there?"

"I know, I know," Amalfi said. His heavy voice took on a finicky, nervous tone, his own exaggerated version of the mechanical speech of the City Fathers. " 'THE PO-LITICAL SIT-UATION IS VER-Y DISTURBING.' It's the food situation that I'm worried about."

"Oh? Is it so bad, then?"

"It's not bad yet. It will be, unless we land. There's been another mutation in the Chlorella tanks; must have started when we passed through that radiation field near Sigma Draconis. We're getting a yield of about 2200 kg. per acre in terms of fats."

"That's not bad."

"Not bad, but it's dropping steadily, and the rate of decrease is accelerating. If it's not arrested, we won't have any algae crops at all in a month or so. And there's not enough crude-oil reserve to tide us over to the next-nearest star. We'd hit there eating each other."

Hazleton shrugged. "That's a big if, boss," he said. "We've never had a mutation we couldn't get under control before. And it's very nasty on those two planets."

"So they're having a war. We've been through that kind of situation before. We don't have to take sides. We land on the planet best suited—"

"If it were an ordinary interplanetary squabble, O.K. But as it happens, one of those worlds—the third from the sun—is a sort of free-living polyp of the old Hruntan Empire, and the inhabitants of the inner one are survivors of the Hamiltonians. They've been fighting for a century, on and off, without any contact with Earth. Now— Earth's found them."

"And?" Amalfi said.

"And it's cleaning them both out," Hazleton said grimly. "We've just received an official police warning to get the hell out of here."

The invention of Muir's tape-mass engine carried early explorers out as far as Jupiter, while the Blackett-Dirac theory of gravity remained a toy of pure mathematics. Then, abruptly, the theory and the mathematicians had their innings. From the many pages of symbols, and the mumbled discussions of the possible field-strength of a single pole in rotation, the spindizzy sprang as if full-born.

It was amazing that the rusty structure of human society survived that blow at all. For a while, cautiously, the spindizzy was installed only in new spaceships, and there was a brief, a comically brief, era of interstellar exploration. The tottering structure fought to retain its traditional balance.

But the center of gravity had shifted. The waste inherent in using the spindizzy only in a ship could not be disguised. Once antigravity was an engineering reality, it was no longer necessary to design ships specifically for space travel, for neither weight nor aerodynamic lines meant anything any more. The most massive and awkward object could be lifted and hurled off Earth, and carried any distance; the Blackett-Dirac effect was hull and overdrive at once. Whole cities, if necessary, could be moved.

Many were. The factories went first; they toured Earth, from one valuable mineral lie to another, and then went farther aloft. They changed Mars into the Pittsburgh of the Solar System; the spindizzy had lifted the mining equipment and the refining plants bodily to bring life to that lichen-scabbed ball of rust. The blank where Pittsburgh itself had been was a valley of slag and ashes. The great plants of the steel companies gulped meteors and chewed into the vitals of new worlds. Others cruised in search of scarce power metals—

But the social structure did not collapse entirely. The planets had been colonized beforehand; so had many stars. The migrant cities found worlds that refused them landing permits. Others allowed them to land but exploited them mercilessly. The cities fought, but they were not efficient fighting machines. Earth's own police put down the disorders—and then, in self-protection, Earth passed laws protecting the cities.

It was a waste to bottle a spindizzy in so small an object as a spaceship, but a war vessel is meant to waste power. The cities could not afford waste; so the Earth police held their jurisdiction over them. Earth became a garden planet; Pittsburgh Valley bloomed, and rich honeymooners went there to frolic. Old bureaucrats went to Earth to die.

Nobody else went there at all.

Above the city the yellow sun was now very much smaller. The Okie metropolis, skulking out from the two warm, warring worlds under one-quarter drive, crept steadily into hiding within the freezing, blue-green shadow of one of the ruined giant planets of the system. Tiny moons, a quartet of them, circled it in a gelid minuet against the chevrons of ammonia-storms that banded the gas giant.

Amalfi watched the vision screens tensely. This kind of close maneuvering, involving the balancing of the city against a whole series of conflicting gravitational fields, was very delicate, and the kind of thing to which only he had sufficient experience to become accustomed; the city generally gave gas giants a wide berth. His own preternatural "feel" for the spatial conditions in which he spent his life must here be abetted by every electronic resource at his command.

"Too heavy, 23rd Street," he said into the mike. "You've got close to a two-degree bulge on your arc of the screen. Trim it."

"Trying, boss. The machine's acting up."

"I can see that. Trim it."

"Trim, boss."

Amalfi watched the image of the giant planet and its chill handmaidens. A needle tipped gently.

"Cut!"

The whole city throbbed once and went silent. The silence was a little frightening: the distant hum of the spindizzies was a part of the expected environment, and when it was gone one felt a strange shortness of breath, as if the air had gone bad. Amalfi yawned involuntarily, his diaphragm sucking against an illusory shortage of oxygen.

Hazleton yawned, too, but his eyes were glittering. Amalfi knew that the city manager was enjoying himself now; the plan they were following had been his, and so he no longer cared that the city might be in serious danger from here on out. He was taking lazy folks' pains.

"Now we'll sit tight for a week," Hazleton said, his spatulate fingers shooting the cursor of his slide rule back and forth. "Our food will hold out that long. That was a very convincing orbit Jake gave us. The cops will be sure we're well on our way out of this system by now—and there aren't enough of them to take care of the two warring planets and to comb space for us at the same time, anyhow."

"You hope."

"It stands to reason, doesn't it?" Hazleton said, his eyes gleaming. "Sooner or later, within a matter of days, they'll find that one of those two planets is stronger than the other and concentrate their forces on it. When that happens, we'll hightail it for that one. It'll be too busy to prevent our landing, or to block our laying on supplies once we're down."

"Yeah," Amalfi said. "Which involves us directly with the weaker planet, and gives Earth a good excuse to disperse the city."

"Not necessarily," Hazleton insisted. "They can't break us up just for violating a Vacate order. If necessary we can show that the Vacate order was inhumane—and in the meantime, they can't enforce the order while we're under the aegis of an enemy of theirs. We'll—"

The intercom on the flight board emitted a self-deprecatory burp. Amalfi pressed the stud.

"Mr. Mayor?"

"Yep."

"This is Sergeant Anderson at the Cathedral Parkway Lookout. There's a whopping big ship just come into view around the bulge of the gas giant. We're trying to contact her now. A warship."

"Thanks," Amalfi said, shooting a glance at Hazleton. "Put her through to here when you do make contact." He dialed the 'visor until he could see the limb of the giant planet opposite the one into which the city was swinging. Sure enough, there was a tiny sliver of light there. The strange ship was still in direct sunlight, but even so she must have been a whopper to have been visible at all at this distance. The mayor stepped up the magnification, and was rewarded with a look at a tube about the size of his thumb.

"Not making any attempt to hide," he murmured, "but then you couldn't very well hide a thing that size. She must be all of a thousand feet long. Looks like we didn't fool 'em."

Hazleton leaned forward and studied the innocuous-looking cylinder intently. "I don't think that's a police craft," he said. "The police battleships on the cleanup squad are more or less pear-shaped, and have plenty of bumps. This boat has only four turrets and they're faired into the hull—what the ancients used to call 'streamlining.' See?"

Amalfi nodded, thrusting out his lower lip speculatively. "Local stuff, then. Designed for fast atmosphere transit. Archaic equipment—Muir engines, maybe."

The intercom burped again. "Ready with the visiting craft, sir."

The view of the ship and the blue-green planet was wiped away, and a pleasant-faced young man looked out at them from the screen. "How do you do?" he said formally. The question didn't seem to mean anything, but his tone indicated that he didn't expect an answer to it anyhow. "I am speaking to the commanding officer of the… the flying fortress?"

"In effect," Amalfi said. "I'm the mayor here, and this gentleman is the city manager; we're responsible for different aspects of command. Who are you?"

"Captain Savage of the Federal Navy of Utopia," the young man said. "May we have permission to approach your fort or city or whatever it is? We'd like to land a representative."

Amalfi snapped the audio switch and looked at Hazleton. "What do you think?" he said. The Utopian officer politely and pointedly did not watch the movements of his lips.

"It should be safe enough. Still, that's a big ship even if it is a museum piece. They could as easily send their man in a lifecraft."

Amalfi opened the circuit again. "Under the circumstances we'd just as soon you stayed where you are," he said. "You'll understand, I'm sure, Captain. However, you may send a gig if you like; your representative is welcome here. Or we will exchange hostages—"

Savage's hand moved across the screen as if brushing the suggestion away. "Quite unnecessary, sir. We heard the interstellar craft warn you away. Any enemy of theirs must be a friend of ours. We are hoping that you can shed some light on what is at best a confused situation."

"That's possible," Amalfi said. "If that is all for now—"

"Yes, sir. End of transmission."

"Out."

Hazleton arose. "Suppose I meet this emissary. Your office?"

"O.K."

The city manager went out, and Amalfi, after a few moments, followed him, locking up the control tower. The city was in orbit and would be stable until the time came to put it in flight again. On the street, Amalfi flagged a cab.

It was a fairly long haul from the control tower, which was on 34th Street and The Avenue, down to Bowling Green, where City Hall was, and Amalfi lengthened it a bit more by giving the tin cabby a route that would have put folding money into the pocket of a live one of another, forgotten age. He settled back, bit the end off a hydroponic cigar, and tried to remember what he had heard about the Hamiltonians. Some sort of a republican sect they'd been, back in the very earliest days of space travel. There'd been a public furor —recruiting—government disapproval and then suppression— hmmm. It was all very dim, and Amalfi was not at all sure that he hadn't mixed it up with some other event in terrestrial history.

But there had been an exodus of some sort. Shiploads of Hamiltonians, going out to colonize, to set up model planets. Come to think of it, one of the nations then current in the West on Earth had had a sort of Hamiltonianism of its own, something called a timocracy. It had all died down after a while, but it had left traces. Nearly every major political wave after space flight had its vestige somewhere in the inhabited part of the galaxy.

Utopia must have been colonized very early. The Hruntan Imperials, had they arrived first, would have garrisoned both habitable planets as a matter of course.

It was a little easier to remember the Hruntan Empire, since it was of much more recent vintage than the Hamiltonians; but there was less to remember. The outer margins of exploration had spawned gimcrack empires by the dozens in the days when Earth seemed to be losing her grip. Alois Hrunta had been merely the most successful okie of the would-be emperors of space. His territory had expanded as far as the limits of communication would allow an absolute autocracy to spread, and then had been destroyed almost before he was assassinated, when it was broken into duchies by his squabbling sons. Eventually the duchies fell in their turn to the nominal but irresistible authority of Earth, leaving, as the Hamiltonians had left, a legacy of a few remote colonies—worlds where a dead dream was served with meaningless pomp.

The cab began to settle, and the facade of City Hall drifted past Amalfi's cab window. The once-golden city motto—mow your lawn, lady?—looked greener than ever in the light of the giant planet. Amalfi sighed. These political squabbles were dull, and they were guaranteed to make a major project out of the simple matter of earning a square meal.

The first thing that Amalfi noticed upon entering his office was that Hazleton looked uncomfortable. This was practically a millennial event. Seldom had anything disturbed Hazleton before; he was very nearly the perfect citizen of space, resilient, resourceful, and almost impossible to surprise—or bluff. There was nobody else in the office but a girl whom Amalfi did not recognize; probably one of the parliamentary secretaries who handled many of the intramural affairs of the city.

"What's the matter, Mark? Where's the Utopian contact man?"

"There," Hazleton said. He didn't exactly point, but there was no doubt about his meaning. Amalfi felt his eyebrows tobogganing over his broad skull. He turned and studied the girl.

She was quite pretty: black hair, with blue lights in it; gray eyes, very frank, and a little amused; a small body, well-made, somewhat on the sturdy side. She was dressed in the most curious garment Amalfi had ever seen—she had a sort of sack over her head, with holes for her arms and neck, and the cloth was pulled in tightly above her waist. Her hips and her legs down to just below her knees were covered by a big tube of black fabric, belted at the top. Her legs were sheathed in token stockings of some sleazily woven, quite transparent stuff. Little flecks of color spotted the sack, and around her neck she had a sort of scarf—no, it wasn't a scarf, it was a ribbon—what was it, anyhow? Amalfi wondered if even deFord could have named it.

After a moment, the girl began to seem impatient with his inspection, and he turned his head away and continued walking toward his desk. Behind him, her voice said gently: "I didn't mean to cause a sensation, sir. Evidently you didn't expect a woman—?" Her accent was as archaic as her clothes; it was almost Eliotian. Amalfi sat down and collected his scattered impressions.

"No, we didn't," he said. "However, we have women in positions of authority here. I suppose we were misled by Earth custom, which doesn't allow women much hand in the affairs of the military. You're welcome, anyhow. What can we do for you?"

"May I sit down? Thank you. First of all, you can tell us where all these vicious fighting ships come from. Evidently they know you."

"Not personally," Amalfi said. "They know the Okie cities as a class, that's all. They're the Earth police."

The Utopian girl's piquant face dimmed subtly, as though she had expected the answer and had been fighting to believe it would not be given.

"That's what they told us," she said. "We… we couldn't accept it. Why are they attacking us, then?"

"It was bound to happen sooner or later," Amalfi said, as gently as possible. "Earth is incorporating the independent planets as a matter of policy. Your enemies the Hruntans will be taken in, too. I don't suppose we can explain why very convincingly. We aren't exactly in the confidence of Earth's government."

"Oh," the girl said. "Then perhaps you will help us? This immense fortress of yours—"

"I beg your pardon," Hazleton said, smiling ruefully. "The city is no fortress, I assure you. We are only lightly armed. However, we may be able to help you in other ways—frankly, we're anxious to make a deal."

Amalfi looked at him under his eyelids. It was incautious, and unlike Hazleton, to discuss the city's armament or lack of it with an officer who had just come on board from a strange battleship.

The girl said: "What do you want? If you can teach us how those —those police ships fly, and how you keep your city aloft—"

"You don't have the spindizzy?" Amalfi said. "But you must have had it once, otherwise you'd never have got way out here from Earth."

"The secret of interstellar flight has been lost for nearly a century. We still have the first ship our ancestors flew, in our museum, but the motor is a mystery. It doesn't seem to do anything."

Amalfi found himself thinking: Nearly a century? Is that supposed to be a long time? Or do the Utopians lack the anti-agathic drugs, too? But ascomycin was supposed to have been discovered more than half a century before the Hamiltonian exodus. Curiouser and curiouser.

Hazleton was smiling again. "We can show you what the spindizzy does," he said. "It is too simple to yield its secret lightly. As for us— we need supplies, raw materials. Oil most of all. Have you that?"

The girl nodded. "Utopia is very rich in oil, and we haven't needed it in quantity for nearly twenty-five years—ever since we rediscovered molar valence." Amalfi pricked up his ears again. The Utopians lacked the spindizzy and anti-agathics—but they had something called molar valence. The term told its own story: anyone who could modify molecular bonding beyond the usual adhesion effects would have no need for mechanical lubricants like oil. And if the Utopians thought they had only rediscovered such a technique, so much the better.

"As for us, we can use anything you can give us," the girl went on. Abruptly, she looked very weary in spite of her healthy youth. "All our lives we have been fighting these Hrnntan barbarians and waiting for the day when help would arrive from Earth. Now Earth has come—and its hand is against both worlds! Things must have changed a great deal."

"The fault doesn't lie in change," Hazleton said quietly, "but in that you people have failed to change. Traveling away from Earth for us is very like traveling in time: different distances from the home planet have different year dates. Stars remote from Earth, like yours, are historical backwaters. And the situation becomes complicated when the historical periods interpenetrate, as your Hamiltonian era and the Hruntan Empire have interpenetrated. The two cultures freeze each other the moment they come in conflict, and when history catches up with them—well, naturally it's a shock."

"On a more practical subject," Amalfi said, "we'd prefer to pick our own landing area. If we can send technicians to your planet in advance, they'll find a lie for us."

"A lie?"

"A mining site. That's to be permitted, I presume?"

"I don't know," the girl said uncertainly. "We're very short on metals, steel especially. We have to salvage all our scrap—"

"We use almost no iron or steel," Amalfi assured her. "We reclaim what we need, as you do—steel's nearly indestructible, after all. What we're after is germanium and some other rare-earth metals for instruments. You ought to have plenty of those to spare." Amain saw no point in adding that germanium was the base of the present universal coinage. What he had said was true as far as it went, and in dealing with these backward planets there were always five or six facts best suppressed until after the city had left.

"May I use your phone?"

Amalfi moved away from the desk, then had to come back again as the girl dabbed helplessly at the 'visor controls. In a moment she was outlining the conversation to the Utopian captain. Amalfi wondered if the Hruntans here understood English; not that he was worried about the present interchange being overheard—the giant planet would block that most effectively, since the Utopians used ordinary radio rather than ultraphones or Dirac communicators— but it was of the utmost importance, if Hazleton's scheme was to be made workable, that the Hruntans should have heard and understood the warning the Earth police had issued to the city. It was a point that would have to be checked, as unobtrusively as possible.

"It is agreed," the girl said. "Captain Savage suggests that I take your technicians back with me in the gig, to save time. And is there also someone who understands the interstellar drive—?"

"I'll go along," Hazleton said. "I know spindizzies as well as the next man."

"Nothing doing, Mark. I need you here. We've plenty of grease monkeys for that purpose." Amalfi spoke rapidly into the vacated 'visor.

"There; you'll find the proper people waiting at your gig, young lady. If Captain Savage will phone us exactly one week from today and tell us where on Utopia we're to land, we'll be out of occultation with this gas planet and will get the message."

There was a long silence after the Utopian girl had left. At last Amalfi said slowly: "Mark, there is no shortage of women in the city."

Hazleton flushed. "I'm sorry, boss. I knew it was impossible, directly the words were out of my mouth. Still, I think we may be able to do something for them; the Hruntan Empire was a pretty nauseating sort of state, if I remember correctly."

"That's none of our business," Amalfi said sharply. He disliked having to turn the full force of his authority upon Hazleton; the city manager was for Amalfi the next best thing to that son his position had never permitted him to have—for the laws of all Okie cities include elaborate safeguards against the founding of any possible dynasty. Only Amalfi knew how many times this youngster's elusive, amoral intelligence had brought him close to being deposed and shot by the City Fathers.

"Look, Mark, we can't afford to have sympathies. We're Okies. What are the Hamiltonians to us? What are they to themselves, for that matter? I was thinking a minute ago what a disaster it'd be if the Hruntans got a Canceller or some such weapon and blackmailed their way back to a real empire again. But can you see a rebirth of Hamiltonianism any better—in this age? Superficially it would be easier to take, I'll admit, than another Hruntan tyranny—but historically it'd be just as disastrous. These two planets have been fighting each other over two causes that played themselves out half a millennium ago. They aren't either of them relevant anymore."

Amalfi stopped for a breath, taking the mangled cigar out of his mouth and eyeing it with mild surprise. "I knew that the girl was disturbing your judgment the moment I realized that I'd have to read yon the riot act like this. Ordinarily you're the best cultural morphologist I've ever had, and every city manager has to be a good one. If you weren't in a sexual uproar, you'd see that these people are the victims of a pseudomorphosis—dead cultures, both of 'em, going through the pangs of decay, even though they both think it's rebirth."

"The cops don't see it that way," Hazleton said abstractedly.

"How could they? They haven't our point of view. I'm not talking to you as a cop. I'm trying to talk like an Okie. What good does it do you to be an Okie if you're going to mix in on some petty border feud? Mark, you might as well be dead—or back on Earth, it's the same thing in the end."

He stopped again. Eloquence was unnatural to him; it embarrassed him a little. He looked sharply at the city manager, and what he saw choked off the springs of his rare volubility. He felt, not for the first time, the essential loneliness that went with perspective.

Hazleton wasn't listening any more.

There was a battle in progress when the city made its run to Utopia. It was rather spectacular. The Hruntan planet, military in organization and spirit down to the smallest detail of daily living, had not waited for the Earth police to englobe it. The Hruntan ships, though they were nearly of the same vintage as those flown by the Utopians, were being fought to the limit, fought by experienced officers who were unencumbered by any sniveling notions about the intrinsic value of human life. There was not much doubt as to the outcome, but for the time being the police were unhappy.

The battle was not directly visible from the city; the Hruntan planet was nearly forty degrees away from Utopia now. It was the steady widening of the distance between the two planets that had first given Hazleton his idea for a sneak landing. It had also been Hazleton who had dispatched the drones—proxy-robots less than five meters long, which hung invisibly upon the outskirts of the conflict and watched it with avid television eyes.

It was an instructive dogfight. The police craft, collectively, had not engaged in a major battle for decades; individually, few of the Earthmen had ever been involved in anything more dangerous than a pushover. The Hruntans, vastly inferior in equipment, were rich in experience, and their tactics were masterly. They had forced the engagement in a heavily mined area, which was equivalent to picking a fight in the heart of a furnace—except that the Hruntans, having sown the mines, knew where the fire was hottest. Their losses, of course, were terrific—nearly five to one. But they had the numbers to waste, and it was obvious that officers who did not value their own lives would be unlikely to value those of their crews.

The city settled toward Utopia. Outlying police scouts reported the fact—the reports were plainly audible in the city's communications room—and those reports would be exhumed later and acted upon. But now, in the midst of the battle, nobody had time to care what the city did. When they had begun again to care, the city hoped to be gone—or invulnerable.

The question of how Utopia had resisted the Hruntan onslaught for nearly a century remained a riddle. The planet was a deathtrap of radioactivity. There were no cities; there were seething, white-hot pools that would never cool within the lifetime of humanity to show where cities once had stood. One of the continental land masses was not habitable at all. The very air disturbed counters slightly. In the daytime the radioactivity was just below the dangerous limit; at night, when the drop in temperature released the normal, microscopic increase in the radon content—a phenomenon common to the atmospheres of all Earthlike planets—the air was unbreathable.

Utopia had been bombarded with fission bombs and dust canisters at every clash with the Hruntan planet for the past seventy Utopian years. The clashes occurred only once every twelve years—otherwise even the underground life of Utopia would have been impossible.

"How have you kept them off?" Amain asked. "Those boys are soldiers. If they can put up this much of a battle against the police, they should be able to wipe up the floor with you folks."

Captain Savage, perched uncomfortably in the belfry, blinking at the sun, managed a thin smile. "We know all their tricks. They are very fine strategists; I will grant you that. But in some respects they are unimaginative. Necessarily, I suppose; initiative is not encouraged among them." He stirred uneasily. "Are you going to leave your city out here in plain sight? And at night, too?"

"Yes. I doubt that the Hruntans will attack us; they're busy, and besides, they probably know that the police don't love us, and will be too puzzled to call us an enemy of theirs right off the bat. As for the air—we're maintaining a 0.02 spindizzy field. Not enough to be noticeable, but it changes the moment of inertia of our own atmosphere enough to prevent any of your air from getting in."

"I don't think I understand that," Savage said. "But doubtless you know your own resources. I confess, Mayor Amain, that your city is a complete mystery to us. What does it do? Why are the police against you? Are you exiled?"

"No," Amain said. "And the police aren't against us, exactly. We're just rather low in the social scale; we're migratory workers, interstellar hoboes, Okies. The police are as obligated to protect us as they are to protect any other citizen—but our mobility makes us possible criminals by their figuring, so we have to be watched."

Savage's summary of his reaction to this was the woeful sentence Amain had come to think of as the motto of Utopia. "Things have changed so much," the officer said.

"You should set that to music. I can't say that I understand yet how you've held out so long, either. Haven't you ever been invaded?"

"Frequently," Savage said. His voice was half gloomy and half charged with pride. "But you have seen how we live. At best we have beaten them off; at worst, we cannot be found. And the Hruntans themselves have made this planet a difficult place to live. Many of their landing parties succumbed to the results of their own bombing."

"Still—"

"Mob psychology," Savage said, "is something of a science with us—as it is with them, but we have developed it in a different direction. Combined with the subsidiary art of camouflage, it is a powerful weapon. By dummy installations, faked weather conditions, false high-radioactivity areas, we have thus far been able to make the Hruntans erect their invasion camps exactly on the spots we have previously chosen for them. It is a form of chess: one persuades, or lures, the enemy into entering an area where one can dispose of him in perfect safety and with a minimum of effort."

He blinked up at the sun, nibbling at his lower lip. After a while he added, "There is another factor which is the most important of all. It is freedom. We have it. The Hruntans do not. They are defending a system which is ascetic in character—that is, it offers few rewards to the individual even once it has triumphed. We on Utopa are fighting for a system which has personal rewards for us— the rewards of freedom. It makes a difference. The incentive is greater."

"Oh, freedom," Anialfl said. "Yes; that's a great thing, I suppose. Still it's the old problem. Nobody is ever free. Our city is vaguely republican, it might even be Hamiltonian in one sense. But we aren't free of the requirements of our situation and never can be. As for efficiency in warfare being increased by freedom—I question that. Your people are not free now. A wartime political economy has to tend toward dictatorship; that's what killed off the West back on Earth. Your people are fighting for jam tomorrow, not jam today. Well—so are the Hruntans. The difference between you exists as a potential, but—a difference which makes no difference is no difference."

"You are subtle," Savage said, standing up. "I think I can see why you would not understand that part of our history. You have no ties, no faiths. You will have to permit us ours. We cannot afford to be logic-choppers."

He went down the stairs, his shoulders thrown back unnaturally. Amalfi watched him go with a rueful grin. The young man was a character; talking with him was like being brought face to face with a person from a historical play. Except, of course, that a character in a play is ordinarily understandable even at his queerest; Savage had the misfortune to be real, not the product of an artificer with an ax to grind.

Amalfi was reminded abruptly of Hazleton. Where was Hazleton, anyhow? He had gone off hours ago with that girl, upon some patently trumped-up errand. If he didn't hurry, he'd be trapped underground overnight. Amalfi did not mind working alone, but there were managerial jobs in the city which the mayor simply could not handle efficiently—and besides, Hazleton might be committing the city to something inconvenient. Amalfi went down to his office and called the communications room.

Hazleton had not reported in. Grumbling, Amalfi went about the business of organizing the work of the city—the work for which it had been built, but which it found so seldom. It disturbed him that there was no official work contract between the city and Utopia; it was not customary, and if Utopia should turn out, as so many ideals-ridden planets had turned out, to be willing to cheat on an astronomical scale for the sake of its obsession, there would be no recourse under the Earth laws. People with ends in view were quick to justify all kinds of means, and the city, which was nothing but means made concrete and visible, had learned to beware of shortcuts.

The Earth police did not wait for Hazleton, either. Amalfi was mildly appalled to see how rapidly the Earth forces reformed and were reinforced. Their logistics had been much improved since the city had last seen them in action. The sky sparkled with ships driving in on the Hruntan planet.

That was bad, Amalfi had expected to have several days, at least, to build up a food reserve on Utopia before making the run to the Hruntan planet that Hazleton's strategy called for, now that the Hruntans were engaged in battle.

The mayor sent out an emergency warning at once. The thin resistance which the spindizzy field had offered to Utopia's atmosphere became a solid, hard-driven wall. The spindizzies screamed into the highest level of activity they could maintain without snapping the gravitational thread between the city and Utopia. Around the perimeter of that once-invisible field, a flicker of polarization thickened to translucence. Drive fields were building, and only a few light rays, most of them those to which the human eye was least sensitive, got through the fields and out again. To Utopian onlookers the city went dark blood-color and became frighteningly indistinct.

Calls began to come in at once. Amalfi ignored them; his flight board, a compressed analog of the banks in the control tower, was alive with alarm signals, and all the speakers were chattering at once.

"Mr. Mayor, we've just made a strike in that old till, it's lousy with oil-bearing shale—"

"Stow what you have and make it tight."

"Amalfi! How can we get any thorium out of—"

"More where we're going. Damp your stock on the double."

"Com room. Still no word from Mr. Hazleton—"

"Keep trying."

"Calling the flying city! Is there something wrong? Calling the flying—"

Amalfi cut them all off with a brutal swipe at the toggles. "Did you think we'd stay here forever? Stand by!"

The spindizzies screamed. The sparkling of the ships coming to invade and blockade the Hruntan planet became brighter by the minute. It would be a near thing.

"Whoop it up there on 42nd Street! What d'you think you're doing, warming up tea? You've got ninety seconds to get that machine to take-off pitch!"

"Take-off? Mr. Mayor, it'll take at least four minutes—"

"You're kidding me. I can tell. Dead men don't kid. Move!"

"Calling the flying city—"

The sparks spread over the sky like a Catherine-wheel whirling into life. The watery quivering of the single point of light that was the Hruntan planet dimmed among them, shivered, blended into the general glitter. From Astronomy, Jake added his voice to the general complaint.

"Thirty seconds," Amalfi said.

From the speaker which had been broadcasting the puzzled, fearful inquiries of the Utopians, Hazleton's voice said calmly, "Amalfi, are you out of your mind?"

"No," Amalfi said. "It's your plan, Mark. I'm just following through. Twenty-five seconds."

"Conditions change. You're throwing away a tremendous opportunity."

"Sorry." Amalfi saw a bulge in the field and fought with it briefly.

"I don't see any change. Twenty seconds."

"I'm not pleading for myself. I like it here, I think. I've found something here that the city doesn't have. The city needs it—"

A brief constriction made Amalfi's big frame knot up tightly. Nothing emotional; no; nothing to do with Hazleton; probably some spindizzy operator hurrying things. He staggered to his feet and threw up in the little washstand. Hazleton went on talking, but Amalfi could hardly hear him. The clock grinned and rushed on.

"Ten seconds," Amalfi gasped, a little late.

"Amalfi, listen to me!"

"Mark," Amalfi said, choking. "Mark, I haven't time. You made your choice. I… five seconds … I can't do anything about that. If you like it there, go ahead and stay. I wish you, I wish you everything, Mark, believe me. But I have to think of—"

The clock brought its thin palms together piously.

"-the city—"

"Amalfi-"

Spin!

The city vaulted skyward. The sparks whirled in around it.

The flying of the city, normally, was in Hazleton's hands. In his absence—though it had never happened before—a youngster named Carrel took charge. Amalfi's own hand rarely touched the stick except in spots where even the instruments could not be trusted.

Running the Earth blockade to the Hruntan planet was no easy job, especially for a green pilot like Carrel, but Amalfi did not greatly care. He huddled in his office and watched the screens through a gray mist, wondering if he would ever be warm again. The baseboards of the room were pouring out radiant heat, but it didn't seem to do any good. He felt cold and empty.

"Ahoy the Okie city," the ultraphone barked savagely. "You've had one warning. Pay up and clear out of here, or we'll break you up."

Reluctantly, Amalfi tripped the toggle. "We can't," he said uninterestedly.

"What?" the cop said. "Don't give me that. You're in a combat area, and you've already landed on Utopia in defiance of a Vacate order. Pay your fine and beat it, or you'll get hurt."

"Can't," Amalfi said.

"We'll see about that. What's to prevent you?"

"We have a contract with the Hruntans."

There was a long and very dead silence. At last the police vessel said: "You're pretty sharp. All right, proof your contract over on the tape. I suppose you know that we're about to blow the Hruntans to a thin haze."

"Yep."

"All right. Go ahead and land, if you've got a contract. More fool you. Make sure you stay for the full contract period. If you do get off before we reduce the planet, make sure you can pay your fine. If you don't—good riddance, Okie!"

Amalfi managed a ghost of a grin. "Thanks," he said. "We love you too, flatfoot."

The ultraphone growled and stopped transmitting. There was a world of frustration in that final growl. The Earth police accepted officially the Okie cities' status as hoboes—migratory workers—but unofficially and openly the cities were called tramps in the wardrooms of the police cruisers. Opportunities to break up a city did not come very often, and were met with relish; it must have been quite a blow to the cop to find the vanadium-clad, never-varying Contract in his way.

But now there were the Hruntans to cope with. This was the penultimate and most delicate stage of Hazleton's plan—and Hazleton wasn't on deck to administer it. As a matter of fact, if his Utopian friends had heard Amalfi admit to a contract with the Hruntans, Hazleton was probably in the hottest water of his career right now. Amalfi tried not to think about it.

At least the city's stay on Utopia had accomplished some part of its purpose. The oil tanks were a little over half full, and the city's treasury was comfortable, though still not exactly bulging. That left the rare earths and the power metals still to be attended to; collecting and refining them was unavoidably time-consuming, and would take even longer on the Hruntan planet than on Utopia—the imperial world, farther out from its sun than Utopia, had been given a correspondingly smaller allowance of heavy elements.

But there was no help for it. To stay on Utopia while the Hruntans were being conquered—or "consolidated," as it was officially called on Earth—would have left the city completely at the mercy of the Earth forces. Even at best it would have been impossible to leave the system without paying the fine for violating the Vacate order, and Amalfi was constitutionally unwilling to part with the money for which the city had labored. Even at the present state of the treasury it might easily have bankrupted them, for work had been very scarce lately.

The intercom had been modestly calling attention to itself for several minutes. Answered, it said, "Sergeant Anderson, sir. We've got another visitor."

"Yes," Amalfi said. "That would be the Hruntan delegation. Send 'em up."

While he waited, chewing morosely on a dead cigar, he checked the contract briefly. It was standard, requiring payment in germanium "or equivalent"—the giveaway clause which had prevented its use on Utopia. It had been signed by ultraphone—the possession of that tight-beam device alone "placed" the Hruntans as to century— and the work the city was to do was left unspecified. Amalfi hoped devoutly that the Hruntans would in turn give themselves away when it came to being specific on that count.

The buzzer sounded once more and Amalfi pushed the button that released the door. The next instant he was not so sure it had been a wise move. The Hruntan delegation bore an unmistakable resemblance to a boarding party. First of all there were an even dozen soldiers, clad in tight-fitting red leather breeches, gleaming breastplates, and scarlet-plumed casques; the breastplates, too, were emblazoned with a huge scarlet sun. The men snapped to attention in a file of six on each side of the door, bringing to "present arms" weapons which might have been copies of Kammerman's original mesotron rifle.

Between the files, flanked by two lesser lights as gorgeously and unfunctionally clad as macaws, came a giant carved out of gold. His clothing was interwoven with golden threads, his breastplate and helmet were gilded, even his complexion was tanned to a deep golden tone, and he sported a luxuriant golden-blond beard and flowing mustachios. He was altogether a most unlikely-looking figure.

He spoke two harsh-sounding words, and boot heels and weapons slammed against the floor. Amalfi winced and stood up.

"We," the golden giant said, "are the Margraf Hazca, Vice Regent of the Duchy of Gort under his Eternal Eminence, Arpad Hrunta, Emperor of Space."

"Oh," Amalfi said, blinking. "My name's Amalfi; I'm the mayor here. Do you sit down?"

The Margraf said he sat down, and did. The soldiers remained stiffly "at ease," and the two subsidiary nobles posted themselves behind the Margraf's chair. Amalfi subsided behind his desk with a muffled sigh of relief.

"I presume you're here to discuss the contract."

"We are. We are told that you have been among the rabble of the third planet."

"An emergency landing only," Amalfi said.

"No doubt," the Margraf said dryly. "We do not concern ourselves with the doings of the Hamiltonians; we will add them to our serfs in due time, after we have driven off these upstarts from decadent Earth. In the meantime, we have use for you; any enemy of Earth must be friends to us."

"That's logical," Amalfi said. "Just what can we do for you? We have quite a variety of equipment here—"

"The matter of payment comes first," said the Margraf. He got up and began pacing slowly up and down, with enormous strides, his golden cloak streaming out behind him. "We are not prepared to make any payment in germanium; we need all we have for transistors. The contract speaks of equivalents. What counts as equivalent?"

It was remarkable how the regal manner was snuffed out when it got down to honest haggling. Amalfi said cautiously, "Well, you could allow us to mine for germanium ourselves—"

"Do you think this planet's resources will last forever? Give us the equivalent, not some roundabout scheme for being paid in the metal itself!"

"Equipment, then," Amalfi said, "or skills, at a mutually agreed valuation. For instance, what are you using for lubrication?"

The big count's eyes glittered. "Ah," he said softly. "You have the secret of the friction fields, then. That we have long sought, but the generators of the rabble melt when we touch them. Does Earth know this process?"

"No."

"You got it from the Hamiltonians? Excellent." The two minor nobles were beginning to grin wickedly. "We need babble no further of 'mutually agreed valuations,' then." He gestured. Amalfi found himself looking down a dozen rifle barrels. "What's the idea?"

"You are within our defensive envelope," Hazca said with wolfish gusto. "And you are not likely to survive long among the Earthmen, should you by some miracle break free of us. You may call your technicians and tell them to prepare a demonstration of the friction-field generator; also, prepare to land. Graf Nandór here will give you explicit instructions."

He strode toward the door; the soldiers parted deferentially. As Amalfi's hand reached for the button to let him out, the big man whirled. "And you need not attempt to trip any hidden alarms," he growled. "Your city has already been boarded in a dozen places, and is under the guns of four cruisers."

"Do you think you can win technical information by force?" Amalfi said.

"Oh yes," said the Margraf, his eyes shining dangerously. "We are—experts."

Carrel, Hazleton's protege, was a very plausible lecturer, and seemed completely at home in the echoing, barbaric gorgeousness of the Margraf's council chamber. He had attached his charts to the nearest tapestry and had propped his blackboard on the arms of the great chair in which, Amalfi supposed, the Margraf usually sat; his chalk traced swift symbols on the slate and squeaked deafeningly in the groined vault of the room.

The Margraf himself had left; five minutes of Carrel's talk had been enough to arouse his impatience. The Graf Nandór was still there, wearing the suffering expression of a man delegated to do the dirty work. So were four or five other nobles. Three of these were chattering in the back of the room with muffled sniggers, and a raucous laugh broke in upon Carrel's dissertation every so often. The remaining peacocks, evidently of subordinate ranks, were seated, listening with painful, brow-furrowing concentration, like ham actors overregistering Deep Thought.

"This will be enough to show the analogy between atomic and molecular binding energies," Carrel said smoothly. "The Hamiltonians—" he had seen that the word annoyed the peacocks and used it often "—the Hamiltonians have shown, not only that this binding energy is responsible for the phenomena of cohesion, adhesion, and friction, but also that it is subject to a relationship analogous to valence."

The appearance of concentration of the nobles became so grave as to be plain grotesque. "This phenomenon of molar valence, as the Hamiltonians have aptly named it, is intensified by the friction fields which they have designed into a condition analogous to ionization. The surface layers of molecules of two contiguous surfaces come into dynamic equilibrium in the field; they change places continuously and rapidly, but without altering the status quo, so that a shear plane is readily established between the roughest surfaces. It is evident that this equilibrium does not in any sense do away with the binding forces in question, and that a certain amount of drag or friction still remains—but only about a tenth of the resistance which obtains with even the best systems of gross lubrication."

The nobles nodded together. Amalfi gave over watching them; it was the Hruntan technicians who worried him most. There were an even dozen of them, a number of which the Margraf seemed fond. Four were humble, frightened-looking creatures, who seemed to regard Carrel with more than a little awe. They scribbled frantically, fighting to take down every word, even material which was of no conceivable importance, such as Carrel's frequent pats on the back for the Hamiltonians.

All but one of the rest were well-dressed, hard-faced men, who had treated the nobles with only perfunctory deference, and who took no notes at all. This type was also quite familiar in a barbarian milieu: head scientists, directors, entirely committed to the regime, entirely aware of how crucial they were to its successes, and already infected with the aristocratic virus of letting lesser men dirty their hands with actual messy laboratory experiments. Some of them, probably, owed their positions as much to a ruthless skill at court intrigue as to any great scientific ability.

But the twelfth man was of a different order altogether. He was tall, spare, and sparse-haired, and his face as he listened to Carrel was alive with excitement. An active brain, this one, doubtless politically unconscious, hardly caring who ruled it as long as it had equipment and a free hand. The man would be tolerated by the regime for his productivity, but would be under constant suspicion. And he was, by Amalfi's judgment, the only man capable of going beyond what Carrel was saying to what Carrel was leaving unsaid. "Are there any questions?" Carrel said.

There were some, mostly dim-witted, from the technies—how do you build this, and how do you wire that; no one with any initiative would have wanted to be led by the nose in such a fashion. Carrel answered in detail. The hard-faced men left without a word, as did the nobles, who lingered only long enough to save face. The scientist—he was the scientist for Amalfi's money—was left alone to launch into an ardent stammering dispute over Carrel's math. He seemed to consider Carrel as an equal as a matter of course, and Carrel was beginning to look uncomfortable by the time Amalfi summoned him to the back of the hall.

The scientist left, pocketing his few notes and pulling thoughtfully at his nose. Carrel watched him go.

"I can't hide the kicker from that boy long, sir," he said. "Believe me, he's got brains. Give him about two days and he'll have the whole thing worked out for himself. He won't get any sleep tonight for thinking about it; I know the type."

"So do I," Amalfi said. "I also know barbarian council halls—the tapestries have ears. Just pray you weren't overheard, that's all. Come on."

Amalfi was silent until they were safe within the city and in a cab. Then he said, "You have to be careful, Carrel, in dealing with outsiders. You take to it well, but you're inexperienced. Never say anything outside the city, even to me, that doesn't fit your part. Now then—I agree with you about that scientist; I was watching him. And now he knows you, so I can't use you against him. Is there someone in your organization who's done undercover work for Mark who hasn't been outside of the city since we hit Gort? An experienced hand?"

"Sure, four or five, at least. I can put my finger on any one of 'em."

"Good. Find a fairly husky one, a man that could pass for a thug with a minimum of makeup, and send him to Indoctrination for hypnopaedia. In the meantime, you'll have to see that scientist again. Get a picture of him somewhere, a tri-di if they have them here. When you talk to him, answer any questions he asks you."

Carrel looked puzzled. "Any questions?"

"Any technical questions, yes. It won't matter what he knows, very shortly. Here's another lesson in practical public relations for you, Carrel. When on a strange planet, you have to use its social system to the best advantage possible. On a world like this one, where the struggle for power is plenty raw, assassination must be very common—and nine chances to one there's a regular Assassins' Guild, or, at least, plenty of free-lance killers for hire."

"You're going to—have Dr. Schloss assassinated?"

The shocked expression on Carrel's face made Amalfi abruptly sodden with weariness. Training a new city manager up to the point where his election would be endorsed by the City Fathers was a long and heartbreaking task, for so much of the training had to be absorbed the hard way. He felt too old for such a job now, and much too aware of some failure in his methods, the failure which alone had made the job necessary now.

"Yes," he said, "It's a shame, but it has to be done. In other circumstances we'd take the man into the city—he doesn't care who he works for—but the Hruntans would look for him, and find him, too. There has to be an incontestable corpse, and if possible, a local culprit. Your operative, after a suitable course in this Balkanese they speak here, will scout the rivalries among the scientific clique and try to pin the killing on one of those hawk-nosed laboratory chieftains. But the man must be killed, for the survival of the city."

Carrel did not protest, for the final phrase was the be-all and end-all of Okie logic; but it was plain that the waste of intelligence the plot necessitated upset him. Amalfi decided silently to keep Carrel exceptionally busy in the city for a while—at least until the Hruntans had their antifriction installation well under way.

Now, anyhow, was the time to put another needle into the cops; Hazleton's timetable called for it, and although Amalfi had already been forced to abandon much of Hazleton's strategy—Hazleton's timetable, for instance, had called for a treacherous Utopian landing on Gort, with the full force of the Hamiltonians thrown behind delivering the Hruntan planet into the hands of the Earth police— the notion of bargaining with the cops to give them the planet still seemed to have merit.

Dismissing Carrel, Amalfi went to his office, where he took the flexible plastic dust cover off a little-used instrument: the Dirac transmitter. It was the only form of communication which the Hruntans—and, of course, the Hamiltonians—did not have; the want of it had cost them an empire, for it operated instantaneously over any distance. Amalfi thrust a cigar absently between his teeth and sent out a call for the captain of police.

The obsolete model had no screen, but the captain's voice conveyed his feelings graphically. "If you're going to rub my nose in the fact that we're obliged to protect you, because the Hruntans have violated the contract," he snarled, "you can save your breath. I've half a mind to blow up the planet anyhow. Some one of these years the Okie laws are going to be changed, and then—"

"You wouldn't have blown up the planet in any case," Amalfi said tranquilly. "The shock wave would have detonated the local sun and destroyed the whole system, and your superiors would have had your scalp. What I'm trying to do is save you some trouble. If you're interested, make me an offer."

The cop laughed.

"All right," Amalfi said. "Laugh, you jackass. In about ten months you'll be yanked back to patrolling a stratosphere beat on Earth that sees a plane once every two years, and braying about how unjust it all is. As soon as the home office hears that you let the Hruntans and the Hamiltonians join forces, and that the war is going to cost Earth two or three hundred billion dollars and last maybe twenty-five years—"

"You're a bum liar, Okie," the cop said. The bravado behind the pun seemed a little strained, however. "They've been fighting each other a century now."

"Times change," Amalfi said. "In any event the merger will be forcible, because if you don't want the Duchy of Gort I'm going to offer it to Utopia. The combined arsenal will be impressive— each side has some stuff the other hasn't, and we couldn't prevent either of them from learning a few tricks from us. However—"

"Wait a minute," the cop said cautiously. He was quite aware, Amalfi was certain, that this conversation was inevitably being overheard by hundreds and perhaps thousands of Dirac receivers throughout the inhabited galaxy, including those in police headquarters on Earth. That was one of the major characteristics of Dirac transmission—whether you called it a flaw or an advantage depended largely on what use you made of it. "You mean you got the upper hand there already? How do I know you can hold it?"

"You don't risk a thing. Either I deliver the planet to you, or I don't. All I want is for you to rescind the fine against the city, wipe the tape of the earlier Vacate order, and give us a safe-conduct out of this system. If we don't deliver, you don't pay."

"Hmmm." There was a muttering in the background, as though somebody were talking softly over the cop's shoulder. "How'd you pull it off?"

"That," Amalfi said dryly, "would be telling. If you want to play, proof over agreement."

"No soap. You violated the Vacate order and you'll have to pay the fine; that's flat."

That was good enough for Amalfi. The cop certainly was not going to promise to wipe his tape of evidence of a crime while he was talking on the Dirac; that he had picked this particular point to stick on indicated general agreement, however.

"Just send me a safe-conduct under seal, then. I'll put the whole thing in the Margraf Hazca's strong room; you get it back when you get the planet."

After a short silence the cop said, "Well… all right." The tape began to whir at Amalfi's elbow. Satisfied, he broke the contact.

If this coup came off on schedule, it would become legendary— the police would be mighty tight-lipped about it, but the Okie cities would spread the tale all over the galaxy.

Somehow, the desertion of Hazleton made the prospect savorless.

Someone was shaking him. He wanted very badly to awaken, but his sleep was as deep as death, and it seemed that no possible struggle could bring him to the rim of the pit. Shapes and faces whirled about him, and in the blackness he felt the approach of great steel teeth.

"Amalfi! Wake up, man! Amalfi, it's Mark—wake up—"

The steel jaws came together with a terrible snapping report and the wheeling faces vanished. Bluish light spilled into his eyes.

"Who? What is it?"

"It's me," Hazleton said. Amalfi blinked up at him uncomprehendingly. "Quick, quick. There's only a little time."

Amalfi sat up slowly and looked at the city manager. He was too stunned to know whether he was pleased or not, and the oppression of his nightmare was still with him, a persistent emotion lingering after dreamed events he could no longer remember.

"I'm glad to see you," he said. Oddly, the statement seemed untrue: he could only hope it would become true later. "How'd you get through the police cordon? I'd have said it couldn't be clone."

"By force and fraud, the old combination. I'll explain later. But—"

"You nearly didn't make it," Amalfi said, feeling a sudden influx of energy. "Is it still night here? Yes. The big blowup isn't due much before noon, otherwise I wouldn't have been asleep. After that, you'd have found no city here."

"Before noon? That isn't according to the timetable. But that can wait. Get up, boss, there's work waiting."

The door to Amalfi's rooms slid aside suddenly, and the Utopian girl stood at the sill, her face pinched with anxiety. Amalfi reached hastily for his jacket.

"Mark, we must hurry. Captain Savage says he won't wait but fifteen minutes more. And he won't—he hates you underneath, I can tell, he'd love to leave us here with the barbarians!"

"Right away, Dee."

The girl disappeared. Amalfi stared at the prodigal city manager. "Wait a minute," he said. "What's all this, anyhow? Mark, you haven't sold yourself on some idiotic personal rescue mission?"

"Personal? No." Hazleton grinned. "We're getting the whole city out of here. I wanted to get word to you that we were following through as planned, but the Utopians have no Diracs and I didn't want to tip off the cops. Get dressed, that's a good fellow, and I'll explain as we go. These Hamiltonians have been working like demons, installing spindizzies in every available ship. They'd about decided to surrender to the cops—after all, they've more in common with Earth than with the Hruntans—but when I told them what we planned, and showed them how the spindizzy works, it was like giving them all new hearts."

"They believed you as quickly as that?"

Hazleton shrugged. "No, of course not. To be on the safe side, they made up an escape fleet of twenty-five ships—reconverted light cruisers—and sent them out on this mission. They're upstairs now."

"Over the city?"

"Yes. I heard the hijacking of the city—I gather you had the radio on for the benefit of the cops, but it came through pretty clearly on Utopia, too. So I sold them on combining their escape project with a sneak raid to escort the city out. It took some selling, but I convinced them that they'd get out of this system easier if the cops had two things to think about at once. And so here we are, right on schedule." Hazleton grinned again. "The cops had no notion that there were any Utopian ships anywhere near this planet, and they keep a sloppy watch. They know now, of course, but it'll take them a little while to mass here—and by that time we'll be gone."

"Mark, you're a romantic ass," Amalfi said. "Twenty-five light cruisers—archaic ones at that, spindizzies or not!"

"There's nothing archaic about Savage's plans," Hazleton said. "He hates my guts for swiping Dee from him, but he knows space combat. This is a survival fleet, for Hamiltonianism, not just people. As soon as we're attacked, all twenty-five of them are going to take off in different directions, putting up a stiff battle and doing their best to turn the affair into a series of individual dogfights. That ensures the survival of some of them, of their ideology—and of the city."

"I expected something more from you than a gesture out of a bad stereo," Amalfi said. "Napoleonism! Heedless of danger, young hero leads devoted band into enemy stronghold, snatching beloved sovereign from enraged infidel! Pah! The city's staying where it is. If you want to go off with this suicide squadron, go ahead."

"Amalfi, you don't understand—"

"You underestimate me," Amalfi said harshly. He strode across the room to the balcony, Hazleton at his heels. "Sensible Hamiltonians stayed home, that's a cinch. Giving them the spindizzy was a smart idea; it made them fight longer and keep the cops busy when we needed the time. But these people who are trying to escape toward the edge of the galaxy—they're the incurables, the fanatics. Do you know how they'll wind up? You should; and you would if there wasn't a woman in your head addling your brains with a long-handled spoon. After a few generations on the rim none of 'em will remember Hamiltonianism. Making a new planet livable is a job for a carefully prepared, fully manned expedition. These people are the tatters of a military debacle—and you want us to help set up the debacle! No, thanks."

He threw the door to the balcony open so hard that Hazleton had to jump to avoid being hit, and went out. It was a clear night, bitterly cold as always on Gort, and hundreds of stars glared through the glow the city cast upon the sky. The Utopian ships, of course, could not be seen: they were too high, and probably were, as well, as near to being invisible and undetectable, even close up, as Utopian science could make them.

"I'll have a job explaining this to the Hruntans," he said, his voice charged with suppressed rage. "The best I'll be able to do is to claim the Hamiltonians were trying to destroy us before we could finish giving away the friction-field plans. And to do that I'll have to yell to the Hruntans for help right away."

"You gave the Hruntans—"

"Certainly!" Amalfi said. "It was the only weapon we had left after we had to sign a contract with them. The possibility of a Utopian landing in force here vanished the moment the police beat us to the punch. And here you are still trying to use the blunted tool!"

"Mark!" The girl's voice drifted out from the room, frantic with anxiety. "Mark! Where are you?"

"Go along," Amalfi said, without turning his head. "After a while they'll have no time to cherish their ritual beliefs, and you can have a nice frontier home, on the ox-bone plow level. The city is staying here. By noon tomorrow the Utopians who stayed put will be in an excellent position to bargain with Earth for rights, the Hruntans will be hornswoggled, and we'll be on our way."

The girl, evidently having noticed the open door, came through it in time to hear the last two sentences. "Mark!" she cried. "What does he mean? Savage says—"

Hazleton sighed. "Savage is an idiot, and so am I. Amalfi's right; I've been acting like a child. You'd better get aloft while you have the chance, Dee."

She came forward to the railing and took his arm, looking up at him. Her face was so full of puzzlement and hurt that Amalfi had to look away; that look reminded him of too many things best forgotten—some of them not exactly remote. He heard her say, "Do you… do you want me to go, Mark? You're staying with the city?"

"Yes," Hazleton muttered. "I mean, no. I've made a terrific mess of things, it appears. Maybe I can help now, maybe not. But I've got to stay. You'd be better off with your own people—"

"Mayor Amalfi," the girl said. Amalfi turned unwillingly. "You said when I first met you that there was a place for women in this city. Do you remember?"

"I remember," Amalfi said. "But you wouldn't like our politics, I'm sure. This is not a Hamiltonian state. It's stable, self-sufficient, static—a beachcomber by the seas of history. We're Okies. Not a nice name."

The girl said: "It may not always be so."

"I'm afraid it will. Even the people don't change much, Dee. I suspect that you haven't been told this before, but the great majority of them are well over a century old. I myself am over seven hundred. And you would live as long, if you joined us."

Dee's face was a study in mixed shock and incredulity, but she said doggedly: "I'll stay."

The sky began to pale slightly. No one spoke. Aloft, the stars were dimming, and there was no sign to show that a tiny fleet of ships was dwindling away into the boundless universe.

Hazleton cleared his throat. "What's for me to do, boss?" he said hoarsely.

"Plenty. I've been making do with Carrel, but though he's willing, he lacks experience. First of all, make us ready to take off at the very first notice. Then cudgel your brains to think up something to tell the Hruntans about this Utopian fleet. You can fancy up my excuse, or think up one of your own, I don't care. You're better at that kind of thing than I ever was."

"So what's supposed to happen at noon?"

Amalfi grinned. He realized with a subdued shock that he felt good. Getting Hazleton back was like finding a flawed diamond that you'd thought you'd lost—the flaw was still there and would never go away, but still the diamond had been the cleanest-cutting tool in the house, and had had a certain sentimental value.

"It goes like this. Carrel sold the Hruntans on building a master friction-field generator for the whole planet—said it would make their machines consume less power, or some such nonsense. The plans he gave them call for a generator at least twice as powerful as the Hruntans think it is, and with nearly all the controls left off. It will run only one way: full positive. Tomorrow at noon they're scheduled to give it a trial run.

"In the meantime there's a Hruntan named Schloss who probably has the machine tabbed for what it actually is, and we've set up the old 'double-knife' trick to get him out of the picture. It's my guess that this should start a big enough rhubarb among the scientists to keep them from prying until it's too late. Since this whole deal looked as though it would work out the same way that the Utopian landing would have, I also called the cops according to your timetable and got a safe-conduct. Simple?"

Halfway through the explanation, Hazleton was far enough back to normal to begin looking amused. When it was over he was chuckling.

"That's a honey," he said. "Still I can see why you weren't too satisfied with Carrel. Amaifi, you're a prime bluffer. Telling me to go off with Savage in that dramatic fashion! Do you know that your fancy plot isn't going to come off?"

"Why, Mark?" Dee said. "It sounds perfect to me."

"It's clever, but it's full of loose ends. You have to look at these things like a dramatist; a climax that almost comes off is no climax. We'd better—"

In the bedroom, Amalfi's private phone chimed melodiously, and a neon bulb went on over the balcony doorway. Amalfi frowned and flicked a switch on the railing.

"Mr. Mayor?" a concealed speaker said nervously. "Sorry to wake you, but there's trouble. First of all at least twenty ships were over here a while back; we were going to call you for that, but they went away on their own. But now we've got a sort of a refugee, a Hruntan who calls himself Dr. Schloss. He claims the other Hruntans are all out to get him and he wants to work for us. Shall I send him to Psych or what? It might just be true."

"Of course it's true," Hazleton said. "There's your first loose end, Amalfi."

The affair of Dr. Schloss proved difficult to untangle; Amalfi had not studied his man closely enough. Carrel's agent had done a thorough job of counterfeiting local politics. It was always preferable, when the city needed a man's death, to arrange matters so that the actual killing was done by an outsider, and in this case that had proven absurdly easy to arrange. There were separate cliques within the scientific hierarchy of Gort, all of them undercutting each other with fanatical perseverance, like shipmates trying to do for each other by boring holes in the hull. In addition, the court itself did not trust Dr. Schloss, and took sides sporadically when the throat-cutting became overt.

It had been simple enough to set currents in motion which would sweep Dr. Schloss away, but Schloss had declined to be swept. The moment he became aware of any threat, he had come with disconcerting directness to the city.

"The trouble is," Carrel reported, "that he didn't realize what was flying until it was almost too late. He's a peculiarly sane character and would never dream that anybody was 'out to get him' until the knife actually pricked him."

Hazleton nodded. "It's my bet that it was the court itself that finally alarmed him—they wouldn't bother trying to sneak up on him."

"That's correct, sir."

"Which means that we'll have Bathless Hazca and his dandies here looking for him," Amalfi growled. "I don't suppose he bothered to cover his tracks. What are you going to do, Mark? We can't count on their starting the antifriction fields early enough to get us out of this."

"No," Hazleton agreed. "Carrel, does your man still have contact with the group that was going to punch Schloss's ticket?"

"Sure."

"Have him rub out the top man in that group, then. The time is past for delicate measures."

"What do you propose to gain by that?" Amalfi said.

"Time. Schloss has disappeared. Hazca may guess that he's come here, but most of the cliques will think he's been killed. This will look like a vengeance killing by some member of Schloss's group— he has no real clique of his own, of course, but there must be several men who thought they stood to gain by keeping him alive. We'll start a vendetta. Confusion is what counts in a fight like this."

"Perhaps so," Amalfi said. "In that case I'd better tackle Graf Nandór right away with a fistful of accusations and complaints. The more confusion, the more delay—and it's less than four hours to noon now. In the meantime, we'll have to hide Schloss as best we can, before he's spotted by one of Hazca's guards here. That invisibility machine in the old West Side subway tunnel seems like the best place… do you remember the one? The Lyrans sold it to us, and it just whirled and blinked and buzzed and didn't do a thing."

"That was what my predecessor got shot for," Hazleton said. "Or was it for that fiasco on Epoch? But I know where the machine is, yes. I'll arrange to have the gadget do a little whirling and blinking—Hazca's soldiery is afraid of machinery and would never think of looking inside one that's working, even if they did suspect a fugitive was inside it. Which they won't, I'm sure. And… gods of all stars, what was that?"

The long, terrifying metallic roar died away into a mutter. Amalfi was grinning.

"Thunder," he said. "Planets have a phenomenon called weather, Mark; a nasty habit of theirs. I think we're due for a storm."

Hazleton shuddered. "If makes me want to hide under the bed. Well, let's get to work."

He went out, with Dee following. Amalfi, reflecting on the merits of attack as a defensive measure, waved a cab up to the balcony and had himself ferried to the first setback of the midtown theater building. He would have liked to land at the top, where the penthouse was, but the cornices of the building now bristled with pom-poms and mesotron rifles; Graf Nandór was taking no chances.

The elevator operator was not allowed to take Amalfi beyond the seventieth floor. Swearing, he climbed the last five flights of steps; the blue rage he was working up was not going to be counterfeit by the time he reached the penthouse. At every landing he was inspected with insolent suspicion by lounging groups of soldiers.

There was music in the penthouse, and it reeked of the combination of perfume and unwashed bodies which was the personal trademark of Hruntan nobility. Nandór was sprawled in a chair, surrounded by women, listening to a harpist sing a ballad of unspeakable obscenity in a quavering, emotionless voice. In one jeweled hand he held a heavy goblet half-full of fuming Rigellian wine—it must have come from the city's stores, for the Hruntans had had no contact with Rigel for centuries—which he passed back and forth underneath his substantial nose, inhaling the vapors delicately.

He lifted his eyes over the rim of the goblet as Amalfi came in, but did not otherwise bother to acknowledge him. Amalfi felt his blood pressure mounting and his wrists growing cold and numb, and tried to control himself. It was all very well to be properly angry, but he needed some mastery over what he said and did.

"Well?" Nandór said at last.

"Are you aware of the fact that you've just escaped being blown into a rarefied gas?" Amalfi demanded.

"Oh, my dear fellow, don't tell me you've just circumvented an assassination attempt on my behalf," Nandór said. His English seemed to have been picked up from a Liverpudlian—only the men of that Okie city spoke through their adenoids in that strange fashion. "Really, that's a bit thick."

"There were twenty-five Hamiltonian ships over the city," Amalfi said grimly. "We beat 'em off, but it was a close shave. Evidently the whole business didn't even wake you or your bosses up. What good are we going to be to you if you can't even protect us?"

Nandór looked alarmed. He pulled a mike from among the pillows and spoke into it for a moment in his own tongue. The answer was inaudible to Amalfi, but after it came the Hruntan looked less anxious, though his face was still clouded.

"What are you selling me, my man?" he said querulously. "There was no battle. The ships dropped no bombs, did no damage; they have been pursued out as far as the police englobement."

"Does a deaf man recognize an argument?" Amalfi said. "And how do you dazzle a blind man? You people think that all weapons have to go 'bang!' to be deadly. If you'll look at our power boards, you'll see records of a million-megawatt drain for a half hour at dawn— and we don't chew up energy at that rate making soup!"

"That's of no moment," the Graf murmured. "Such records can be faked, and there are a good many ways of consuming energy anyhow—or wasting it. Let us suppose instead that these ships who 'attacked' you landed a spy—eh? And that subsequently a Hruntan scientist, a traitor to his emperor, was taken from your city, perhaps in the hope of carrying him back to Utopia?"

His face darkened suddenly. "You interstellar tramps are childishly stupid. Obviously the Hamiltonian rabble hoped to rescue your city, and were frightened off by our warriors. Schloss may have gone with them—or he may be hiding in the city somewhere. We will have our answer directly."

He waved at the silent women, who crowded hastily out the curtained doorway. "Do you care to tell me now where he is?"

"I keep no tabs on Hruntans," Amalfi said evenly. "Sorting garbage is no part of my duties."

Coolly, Nandór threw the remainder of his wine in Amalfi's face. The fuming stuff turned his eye sockets into fire. With a roar he stumbled forward, groping for the Hruntan's throat. The man's laughter retreated from him mockingly; then he felt heavy hands dragging his arms behind his back.

"Enough," the Graf said. "Hazca's chief questioner will make some underling babble, if we have to hang them all up by their noses." A blast of thunder interrupted him; outside the penthouse, rain roared along the walls like surf, the first such shower the city had experienced in more than thirty years. Through a haze of pain, Amalfi found that he could see the lights again, although the rest of the world was a red blur. "But I think we'd best shoot this one at once—he talks rather more freely than pleases me. Give me your pistol, you there with the lance-corporal's collar."

Something moved across Amalfi's clearing vision, a long shadow with a knot at the end of it—an arm with a pistol. "Any last words?" Nandór said pleasantly, "No? Tsk. Well, then—"

A thousand bumblebees took flight in the room. Amalfi felt his whole body jerk upward. Oddly, there was no pain, and he could still see—things continued to take on definition all around him. The clear sight of the dying?—

"Proszáchá!" Nandór roared. "Egz prá strasticzek Maria, dó—"

The thunder cut him off again. Somewhere in the room one of the soldiers was whimpering with fright. To Amalfi's fire-racked eyes, everyone and everything seemed to be floating in mid-air. Nandór sprawled rigidly, half-erect, his body an inch or so off the cushions, his clothing standing away from him. The pistol was still pointed at Amalfi, but Nandór was not holding it; it hung immobile above the carpet, an inch away from his frozen fingers. The carpet itself was not on the floor, but above it, a sea of fur every filament of which bristled straight up. Pictures had sprung away from the walls and were suspended. The cushions had risen from the chair and moved away from each other a little, then stopped, as if caught by a stroboscopic camera in the first stages of an explosion; the chair itself was an inch above the rug. At the far side of the room, a bookshelf had burst, and the cans of microfilm were ranked neatly in front of the case, evenly spaced, supported by nothing but the empty air.

Amalfi took a cautious breath. His jacket, which like Nandór's had ballooned away from his chest, creaked a little, but the fabric was elastic enough to stretch. Nandór saw the movement and made a frantic snatch for the pistol. His left forearm was glued to its position above the chair and could not be moved at all. The gun retreated from his free hand, then followed it back obediently as Nandór pulled back for another try.

The second try was an even greater fiasco. Nandór's arm brushed one of the arms of the chair, and then it, too, was held firmly, an inch away from the wood. Amalfi chuckled.

"I would advise you not to move any more than you can help," he said. "If you should bring your head too close to some other object, for instance, you would have to spend the rest of your time looking at the ceiling."

"What… have you done?" Nandór said, choking. "When I get free—"

"You can't, not as long as your friends have their friction field in operation," Amalfi said. "The plans we gave you were accurate enough, except in one respect: your generator can be operated only in reverse. Instead of allowing molecular valence full play, it freezes molecular relationships as they stand and creates adherence between all surfaces—not just like surfaces. If you had been able to put full power into that generator, you would have stopped molecular movement in place, and frozen us all to death in a split second—but your power sources are rather puny."

He realized suddenly that his feet were aching violently; the plastic membranes of his shoes were trying to stand away from his flesh and were pressing heavily against his skin. His jaw muscles were aching, too; only the fact that the field traveled over surfaces had protected him from having his teeth jammed away from each other, and even at that it was an effort to part his lips to talk against the pressure.

He inhaled slowly. The jacket creaked again. His ribs ground against his sternum. Then, suddenly, the fabric gave way and the silver belt which had been stitched into it snapped into a tense hoop around his body. His soles hit the straining carpet heavily, and the air puffed out of his shoes.

He swung his arms experimentally, brushing his hands past his thighs. They moved freely. Only the silver belt maintained its implausible position, girdling the keg of his chest like a hoop, soaking up the field.

"Good-by," he said. "Remember not to move. The cops will let you go in a little while."

Nandór was not listening. He was watching with bulging eyes the slow amputation of six of his fingers by the rings he was wearing.

There was now, Amalfi knew, no longer than fifteen minutes before the overdriven friction field would begin to have more serious effects. Normal molecular cohesion could not be disturbed—homogeneous objects, stones, girders, planks, would remain as they were, but things which were made up of fitted parts would soon begin to yield to the pressure, driving them away from each other. After that, structures joined by binders of smaller coherence than the coherence of their parts would begin to give way: older buildings, such as City Hall, would become taller and of greater volume as the ancient bricks pulled away from each other—and would collapse the moment the influence of the friction field was removed. More modern constructions and machines would last only a little longer. By the time the cops inherited Gort, the planet would be a mass of rubble.

And eventually, the human body, assembled of a thousand tubes, tunnels, caverns, and pockets, would strain, and swell, and burst— and only a few city men had the silver belt; there had not been time.

Puffing, Amalfi threw himself down the stairs, dodging among the paralyzed, floating guards. The bumblebee sound was very hard on the nerves. At the seventieth floor he found an unexpected problem; the lights on the elevator board told him that the car had been sealed in the shaft, probably by the action of the safety mechanisms when it had been derailed by the friction field.

Going down by the stairs was out of the question. Even under normal conditions he could never have traveled seventy flights of stairs, and in the influence of the field his feet moved as if in thick mud, for the belt could not entirely protect his extremities. Tentatively he touched the wall. The same nauseating, sucking sensation enfolded his hand, and he pulled it away.

Gravity… the quickest way down—

He entered the nearest office, threading his way among the four suspended, moaning figures who belonged there, and kicked the window out; it was impossible to open it against the field, which had sprung it an inch from its socket. Only the amazing lateral strength of glass had preserved the pane, but against a perpendicular blow it shattered at once. He climbed out.

It was twenty stories down to the next setback. He planted his feet against the metal, and then his hands. As an afterthought, he also laid his forehead against the wall. He began to slide.

The air whispered in his ears, and windows blinked past him. His palms were beginning to feel warm; they were not actually touching the metal, but the reluctant binding energies were exacting a toll. It was the penalty he had to pay for the heightened pull of friction.

As the setback rushed up to him, he flattened his whole body against the side of the building. The impact of the deck was heavy, but it did not seem to break any bones. He staggered to the parapet and climbed over, without allowing a split second for second thoughts. The long whistling slide began again.

For a moment after he fell against the concrete of the sidewalk, he was ready to get up and throw himself over still another cliff. His hands and his forehead were seared as if they had been clipped in boiling oil, and inside his teflon shoes his feet seemed to be bubbling like lumps of fat in a rendering vat. On the solid ground a belated vertigo knotted him helplessly for long valuable minutes.

The building whose flank he had traversed began to groan.

All along the street, men stood in contorted attitudes. It was like the lowest circle of Hell. Amalfi got up, retching, and lurched toward the control tower. The bumblebee sound filled the universe.

"Amalfi! Gods of all stars, what happened to you—"

Someone took Amalfi's arm. Serum from the enormous blister which was his forehead flooded his eyes.

"Mark—"

"Yes, yes. What's the matter—how did you—"

"Get aloft. Get—"

Pain wrenched him into a ringing darkness.

After a while, he felt his head and hands being laved with something cool. The touch was very delicate and soothing. He swallowed and tried to breathe.

"Easy, John. Easy."

John. No one called him that. A woman's voice. A woman's hands.

"Easy."

He managed a croaking sound, and then a word or two. The hands stroked the coolness across his forehead, gently, monotonously. "Easy, John. It's all right."

"Aloft?"

"Yes."

"Who's… that? Mark—"

"No," said the voice. It laughed, surprisingly, a musical sound. "This is Dee, John. Hazleton's girl."

"The Hamiltonian girl." He allowed himself to be silent for a while, savoring the coolness. But there were too many things that needed to be done. "The cops. They should have the planet."

"They have it. They almost had us. They don't keep their bargains very well. They charged us with aiding Utopia; that was treason, they said."

"What happened?"

"Dr. Schloss made the invisibility machine work. Mark says the machine must have been damaged in transit, so the Lyrans didn't cheat you after all. He hid Schloss in it—that was your idea, wasn't it?—and Schloss got bored and amused himself trying to figure out what the machine was for; nobody had told him. He found out. We sailed right through the police ring, and they looked right through us. We're on our way to the next star system."

"Not far enough," Amalfi said, stirring uneasily. "Not if we're charged with technical treason. Cops will detect, follow us. Tell Mark to head for the Rift."

"The Rift. I'll tell him."

"He'll argue. Say it's an order."

"Yes, John. The Rift; it's an order."

Amalfi sighed. The steady, uneventful passage of the cool hands was putting him to sleep. But there was still something—

"Dee?"

"Yes, John."

"You say—we're on our way."

"Yes, John."

"You, too?"

The girl made her fingertips trace a smile upon his forehead. "Me, too," she said. "The Hamiltonian girl."

"No," Amalfi said. "Not any more, Dee. Now you're an Okie."

There was no answer, but the movement of the cool fingers did not stop. The city soared outward into the raw night.