James Blish - Cities in Flight

“The situation is too fluid to permit that, Mr. Mayor,” Amalfi said. “At present I’m making rounds of the perimeter stations in the old city. Off-duty Warriors are trying to sightsee here, and of course with so much live machinery—”

“Who is that?” another voice said, farther in the background. Amalfi recognized it; it was the authoritative voice that had spotted the open phone when the Warriors had first arrested Hazleton. “We can’t permit that!”

“It’s the Commissioner of Public Safety, a man named de Ford,” Hazleton said. Amalfi grinned tightly. De Ford had in actuality been Hazleton’s predecessor as city manager; he had been shot seven centuries ago. “And of course we can’t permit that. Besides all the loose energy there is about the old city, much of it is derelict. De Ford, I thought you knew that the Warriors’ own general put the city off limits.”

“I tell them that,” Amalfi said, in a tone of injured patience. “They just laugh and say they’re not Warriors on their own time.”

“What!” said the heavy voice.

“That’s what they say,” Amalfi said doggedly. “Or else they say that they’re nobody’s man but their own, and that in the long run nobody owns anybody else. They sound like they’ve been sitting with some Village Stochastic, though they’ve got it pretty garbled. I suppose the philosophers don’t try to teach the pure doctrine in the provinces.”

“That’s beside the point,” Mark said sternly. “Keep them out of the city—that’s imperative.”

“I’m trying, Mr. Mayor,” Amalfi said. “But there’s a limit to what I can do. Half of them are toting spindillies, and you know what would happen if one of those things were fired over here, even once. I’m not going to risk that.”

“Be sure you don’t; but keep trying. I’ll see what can be done about it from this end. There’ll be further instructions; where can I reach you?”

“Just leave the call in the perimeter sergeant’s office,” Amalfi said. “I’ll pick it up on my next round.”

“Very good,” Hazleton said, and clicked out. Amalfi set up the necessary line from the perimeter station to the control tower and sat back, satisfied for the moment, though with a deeper uneasiness that would not go away. The seed had been planted, and there was no doubt that Hazleton had understood the move and would foster it. It was highly probable that Jorn the Apostle had already ordered an inquiry made of his officers on Earth, questioning the substance of Amalfi’s claims; they would of course report back that they had had no trouble of that kind, but the inquiry itself would sensitize them to the subject

Amalfi turned on the tower’s FM receiver and tuned for New Earth’s federal station. The next step would be stiffer off-limits orders to Warriors on leave, and he wanted to be sure he heard the texts. Unless Jorn’s officers phrased those orders with an unlikely degree of sophistication, they would result in some actual sightseers in the city—and of course there were no longer any perimeter sergeants, nor was there even a definable perimeter except in the minds of the City Fathers. Somebody was bound to get hurt.

That would be one incident “de Ford” would not report: “I didn’t hear about it. I’m sorry, but I can’t be everywhere at once. I’ve been trying to fend these boys off from the City Fathers—they want to ask them a lot of questions about the history of ideas that would tie the machines up for weeks. I’ve been telling the boys that I don’t know how to operate the City Fathers, but if one of them points a spindilly at me and says ‘Put me through, or else’—well—”

That speech would necessarily mark the demise of the “Commissioner of Public Safety,” since it would almost surely result in the posting of a uniformed, on-duty Warrior patrol around or in the Okie city itself; Amalfi would then have to go underground, and the rest would be up to Mark. What, specifically, Hazleton would do could not be anticipated, nor did Amalfi want to know about it when it happened. One of the defects of the program was the fact that it was, as Jorn had suspected, based on a lie, whereas a good deception ought to contain some fundamental stone of truth to stub the toes of the sane and the suspicious. To put the matter with brutal directness, there was no possibility that the local Warriors would be corrupted by Stochasticism, and there never had been. Even if the program succeeded and Jorn withdrew his men, he would interrogate them closely before he gave Amalfi back his hostages; and if everything that he found out bore Amalfi’s stamp it would be too consistent to be convincing. That was why Hazleton’s improvisations had to be his own from here on out, and as unknown to Amalfi as possible until it was too late for Amalfi to undo them even had he wished to.

It was indeed a poor piece of fiction upon which to hang the lives of Dee and Web and Estelle; but he had to make do with what he had.

It appeared to be working. Within the week, all Warrior leaves were cancelled in favor of special “orientation devotions” at which attendance was mandatory. Though there was no direct way to tell whether or not the Warriors resented the cancellation of their leaves to secure their faith, the predicated accident inside the city happened the next day, and the “Commissioner of Public Safety” was promptly taxed by Hazleton to explain how he had allowed it to happen; Amalfi trotted forth the prepared lie, and retreated to an ancient communications sub-station deep in the bowels of the City Fathers themselves.

The Warrior patrol was roving through the Okie city the very next day, and Amalfi was isolated; the rest had to be up to Hazleton.

By the end of that week, the Warriors had been ordered to turn in their spindillies for regulation police stun-guns, and Amalfi knew that he had won. When a conquering army is disarmed by its own officers, it is through; in a while it will begin to tear itself apart, with very little help from outside. When that order of the day got back to Jorn, he would act, and act rapidly; Hazleton had evidently been a little too thorough as was his custom. But there was nothing that Amalfi could do now but wait.

The last Warrior blockade ship had barely touched down before Web and Estelle were scrambling out of the airlock and making straight for Amalfi.

“We have a message for you,” Estelle said, out of breath, her eyes preternaturally wide. “From Jorn the Apostle. The ship’s captain said to bring it to you right away.”

“All right, there’s not that much hurry,” Amalfi growled, to hide his apprehension. “Are you all right? Did they take proper care of you?”

“They didn’t hurt us,” Web said. “They were so proper and polite, I wanted to kick them. They kept us in a stateroom and gave us tracts to read. It got pretty boring after a while, just reading tracts and playing tic-tac-toe on them with grandmother.” Suddenly, he could not help grinning at Estelle; obviously he had gotten away with something in those quarters, all the same.

Amalfi felt a vague emotional twinge, though he was unable to identify just what kind of emotion it was; it passed too quickly. “All right, good,” he said to Estelle. “Where’s the message?”

“Here.” She passed over a yellow flimsy, torn from the ship’s Dirac printer. It said:

XXX CMNDR SSG GABRIEL SPG

32 JOHN AMALFI N EARTH V HSTGS RPT 32

I AM GIVING YOU BENEFIT OF DOUBT, RPT DOUBT. YOU ALONE KNOW TRUTH. IF THIS DEFEAT SOLELY YOUR INVENTION BE SURE THE END IS NOT YET. BUT IT WILL BE SOON.

JORN APOSTLE OF GOD

Amalfi crumpled the flimsy and dropped it onto the flaked concrete of the spaceport.

“And so it will,” he said.

Estelle looked down at the wad of yellow paper, and then back at Amalfi’s somber face. “Do you know what he means?” she said.