Cities in Flight

“You don’t know anything about his no-fuel drive?”

“First I heard of it.”

Amalfi was far from satisfied; he suspected that there was still a short circuit somewhere in the man’s memory. But that was all that could be gotten from him, and Amalfi had to accept the fact. All that remained to be done was to get some assessment of the weapons available to the bindlestiff; on this subject the ex-manic was ignorant, but the city’s neurophysiologist said cautiously that something might be extracted from the catatonic within a month or two; but thus far, he hadn’t even succeeded in capturing the man’s attention.

Amalfi accepted the estimate also, since it was the best he could get. With Moving Day for He coming near, he couldn’t afford to worry overtime about another problem. He had already decided that the simplest answer to vulcanism, which otherwise would be inevitable when the planet’s geophysical balance was changed, would be to reinforce the crust. At two hundred points on the surface of He, drilling teams were now sinking long, thin, slanting shafts, reaching toward the stress-fluid of the world’s core. The shafts interlocked intricately, and thus far only one volcano had been created by the drilling. In general, the lava pockets which had been tapped had already been anticipated, and the flow had been bled off into many intersecting channels without ever reaching the surface. After the molten rock had hardened, the clogged channels were re-drilled, with mesotron rifles set to the smallest possible dispersion.

None of the shafts had yet tapped the stress-fluid; the plan was to complete them all simultaneously. At that point, specific volcanic areas, riddled with channel intersections, would give way, and immense plugs would be forced up toward the crust, plugs of iron, connected by ferrous cantilevers through the channels between. The planet of He would wear a cruel corset, permitting only the slightest flexure—it would be stitched with threads of steel, steel that had held even granite in solution for geological ages.

The heat problem was tougher, and Amalfi was not sure whether or not he had hit upon the solution. The very fact of structural resistance would create high temperatures, and any general formation of shearplanes would cut the imbedded girders at once. The method being prepared to cope with that was rather drastic, and its aftereffects largely unknown.

On the whole, however, the plans were simple, and putting them into effect had seemed heavy but relatively uncomplicated labor. Some opposition, of course, had been expected from the local bandit towns.

But Amalfi had not expected to lose nearly 20 per cent of his crews during the first month after the raid on Fabr-Suithe.

It was Miramon who brought the news of the latest work camp found slaughtered. Amalfi was sitting under a tree fern on high ground overlooking the city, watching a flight of giant dragonflies and thinking about heat transfer in rock.

“You are sure they were adequately protected?” Miramon asked cautiously. “Some of our insects—”

Amalfi thought the insects, and the jungle, almost disturbingly beautiful. The thought of destroying it all occasionally upset him. “Yes, they were,” he said shortly. “We sprayed out the camp areas with dicoumarins and fluorine-substituted residuals. Besides—do any of your insects use explosives?”

“Explosives! There was dynamite used? I saw no evidence—”

“No. That’s what bothers me. I don’t like all those felled trees you describe; that sounds more like TDX than dynamite or high explosive. We use TDX ourselves to get a cutting blast—it has the property of exploding in a flat plane.”

Miramon goggled. “Impossible. An explosion has to expand evenly in all directions that are open to it.”

“Not if the explosive is a piperazohexynitrate built from polarized carbon atoms. Such atoms can’t move in any direction but at right angles to the gravity radius. That’s what I mean. You people are up to dynamite, but not to TDX.”

He paused, frowning. “Of course some of our losses have just been to bandit raids, with missile weapons and ordinary bombs—your friends from Fabr-Suithe and their allies. But these camps where there was an explosion and no crater to show for it—”

He fell silent. There was no point in mentioning the gassed corpses. It was hard even to think about them. Somebody on this planet had a gas which was a regurgitant, a sternutatory, and a vesicant all in one. The men had been forced out of their masks—which had been designed solely to protect them from volcanic gases—to vomit, had taken the stuff into their lungs by convulsive sneezing, and had blistered into great sacs of serum inside and out. That, obviously, had been the multiple-benzene-ring gas Hawkesite; it had been very popular during the days of the warring stellar “empires,” when it had been called “polybathroomfloorine” for no discoverable reason. But what was it doing on He?