Cities in Flight

“I expected only as much stupidity as I got,” he said conversationally. “You can see what I’m holding up there. I can and will drop one or both of them if I’m shot. I may drop them anyhow. I’m tired of your back-cluster ghost town.”

Heldon snorted. “Explosives? Gas? Ridiculous; nothing so small could contain enough energy to destroy the city; and you have no masks. Do you take me for a fool?”

“Events prove you one,” Amalfi said steadily. “The possibility was quite large that you would try to ambush me, once you had me in IMT. I could have forestalled that by bringing a guard with me. You haven’t met my perimeter police; they’re tough boys, and they’ve been off duty so long that they’d love the chance to tangle with your palace crew. Didn’t it occur to you that I left my city without a bodyguard only because I had less cumbersome ways of protecting myself?”

“Eggs,” Heldon said scornfully.

“As a matter of fact, they are eggs; the black color is an analine stain, put on the shells as a warning. They contain chick embryos inoculated with a two-hour alveolytic mutated Terrestrial rickettsialpox—a new airborne strain developed in our own BW lab. Free space makes a wonderful laboratory for that kind of trick; an Okie town specializing in agronomy taught us the techniques a couple of centuries back. Just a couple of eggs—but if I were to drop them, you would have to crawl on your belly behind me all the way back to my city to get the antibiotic shot that’s specific for the disease; we developed that ourselves, too.”

There was a brief silence, made all the more empty by the hoarse breathing of the Proctor. The armed men eyed the black eggs uneasily, and the muzzles of their rifles wavered out of line. Amalfi had chosen his weapon with great care; static feudal societies classically are terrified by the threat of plague—they have seen so much of it.

“Impasse,” Heldon said at last. “All right, Mayor Amalfi. You and your slave have safe-conduct from this chamber—”

“From the building. If I hear the slightest sound of pursuit up the stairs, I’ll chuck these down on you. They burst hard, by the way—the virus generates a lot of gas in chick-embryo medium.”

“Very well,” Heldon said, through his teeth. “From the building, then. But you have won nothing, Mayor Amalfi. If you can get back to your city, you’ll be just in time to be an eyewitness of the victory of IMT—the victory you helped make possible. I think you’ll be surprised at how thorough we can be.”

“No, I won’t,” Amalfi said, in a flat, cold, and quite merciless voice. “I know all about IMT, Heldon. This is the end of the line for the Mad Dogs. When you die, you and your whole crew of Interstellar Master Traders, remember Thor Five.”

Heldon turned the color of unsized paper, and so, surprisingly, did at least four of his riflemen. Then the color began to rise in the Proctor’s plump, fungoid cheeks. “Get out,” he croaked, almost inaudibly. Then, suddenly, at the top of his voice: “Get out; Get out!”

Juggling the eggs casually, Amalfi walked toward the lead radiation lock. Karst shambled after him, cringing as he passed Heldon. Amalfi thought that the serf might be overdoing it, but Heldon did not notice; Karst might as well have been—a horse.

The lead plug swung to, blocking out Heldon’s furious, frightened face and the glint of the fluorescents on the ancient spindizzies. Amalfi plunged one hand into Karst’s pack, depositing one egg in the silicone foam nest from which he had taken it, and withdrew the hand again grasping an ugly Schmeisser acceleration pistol. This he thrust into the waistband of his breeches.

“Up the stairs, Karst. Fast, I had to shave it pretty fine. Go on, I’m right behind you. Where would the controls for those machines be, by your guess? The control lead went up through the roof of that cavern.”

“On the top of the Temple,” Karst said. He was mounting the narrow steps in huge bounds, but it did not seem to cost him the slightest effort. “Up there is Star Chamber, where the Great Nine meets. There isn’t any way to get to it that I know.”

They burst up into the cold stone antechamber. Amalfi’s flash roved over the floor, found the jutting pyramid; Karst kicked it. With a prolonged groan, the tilted slab settled down over the flight of steps and became just another block in the floor. There was certainly some way to raise it again from below, but Heldon would hesitate before he used it; the slab was noisy in motion, noisy enough to tell Amalfi that he was being followed. At the first such squawk, Amalfi would lay a black egg, and Heldon knew it.