The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (14 page)

They burst up into the cold stone antechamber. Amalfi's
flash roved over the floor, found the jutting pyramid; Amalfi 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.

"I want you to get out of the city, and take every serf
that you can find with you," Amalfi said. "But it's going to take
timing. Somebody's got to pull that switch down below that I asked you to
memorize, and 1 can't do it; I've got to get into Star Chamber. Heldon will
guess that I'm going up there, and he'll follow me. After he's gone by, Karst,
you have to go down there and open that switch."

Here was the low door through which Heldon had first
admitted them to the Temple. More stairs ran up from it. Strong daylight poured
under it.

Amalfi inched the old door open and peered out. Despite the
brightness of the afternoon, the close-set, chunky buildings of IMT turned the
alleyway outside into a confusing multitude of colored shadows. Half a dozen
leaden-eyed serfs were going by, with a Proctor walking behind them, half
asleep.

"Can you find your way back into that crypt?"
Amalfi whispered.

"There's only one way to go."

"Good. Go back then. Dump the pack outside the door
here; we don't need it any more. As soon as Heldon's crew goes on up these
stairs, get back down there and pull that switch. Then get out of the city;
you'll have about four minutes of accumulated warm-up time from all those tube
stages; don't waste a second of it. Got it?"

"Yes. But-"

Something went over the Temple like an avalanche of gravel
and dwindled into some distance. Amalfi closed one eye and screwed the other
one skyward. "Rockets," he said. "Sometimes I don't know why I
insisted on a planet as primitive as this. But maybe I'll learn to love it.
Good luck, Karst."

He turned toward the stairs.

"They'll trap you up there," Karst said.

"No, they won't. Not Amalfi. But me no buts, Karst.
Git."

Another rocket went over, and far away there was a heavy
explosion. Amalfi charged like a bull up the new flight of stairs toward Star
Chamber.

The staircase was long and widely curving, as well as
narrow, and both its risers and its treads were infuriatingly small. Amalfi
remembered that the Proctors did not themselves climb stairs; they were carried
up them on the forearms of serfs. Such pussy-ant steps made for sure footing,
but not for fast transit.

As far as Amalfi was able to compute, the steps rose gently
along the outside curvature of the Temple's dome, following a one-and-a-half
helix to the summit. Why? Presumably, the Proctors didn't require themselves to
climb long flights of stairs for nothing, even with serfs to carry them. Why
couldn't Star Chamber be under the dome with the spindizzies, for instance,
instead of atop it?

Amalfi was not far past the first half-turn before one good
reason became evident. There was a rustle of voices jostling its way through
the chinks in the dome from below; a congregation, evidently, was gathering. As
Amalfi continued to mount the flat spiral, the murmuring became more and more
discrete, until individual voices could almost be separated out from it. Up there
at what mathematically would be the bottom of the bowl, where the floor of Star
Chamber was, the architect of the Temple evidently had contrived a
whispering-gallery— a vault to which a Proctor might put his ear, and hear the
thinnest syllable of conspiracy in the crowd of suppliants below.

It was ingenious, Amalfi had to admit. Conspirators on
church-bearing planets generally tend to think of churches as safe places for
quiet plotting. In Amalfi's universe—for he had never seen Earth-any planet
which sponsored churches probably had a revolt coming to it.

Blowing like a porpoise, he scrambled up the last arc of the
long Greek-spiral staircase. A solidly-closed double door, worked all over with
phony Byzantine scrolls, stood looking down at him. He didn't bother to stop to
admire it; he hit it squarely under the paired, patently synthetic sapphires
just above its center, and hit it hard. It burst.

Disappointment stopped him for a moment. The chamber was an
ellipse of low eccentricity, monastically bare and furnished only with a heavy
wooden table and nine chairs, now drawn back against the wall. There were no
controls here, nor any place where they could be concealed. The chamber was
windowless.

The lack of windows told him what he wanted to know. The
other, the compelling reason why Star Chamber was on top of the Temple dome was
that it harbored, somewhere, the pilot's cabin of IMT. And that, in as old a
city as IMT, meant that visibility would be all-important—requiring a situation
atop the tallest structure in the city, and as close to 360° visibility as
could be managed. Obviously, Amalfi was not yet up high enough.

He looked up at the ceiling. One of the big stone slabs had
a semicircular cup in it, not much bigger than a large coin. The flat edge was
much worn.

Amalfi grinned and looked under the wooden table. Sure
enough, there it was—a pole with a hooked bill at one end, rather like a
halberd, slung in clips. He yanked it out, straightened, and fitted the bill
into the opening in the stone.

The slab came down easily, hinged at one end as the block
down below over the generator room had been. The ancestors of the Proctors had
not been much given to varying their engineering principles. The free end of
the slab almost touched the table top. Amalfi sprang onto the table and
scrambled up the tilted face of the stone; as he neared the top, the
translating center of gravity which he represented actuated a counterweighing
mechanism somewhere, and the slab closed, bearing him the rest of the way.

This was the control cabin, all right. It was tiny and
packed with panels, all of which were covered with dust. Bull's-eyes of thick
glass looked out over the city at the four compass-points, and there was one
set in overhead. A single green light was glowing on one of the panels. While
he walked toward it, it went out.

That had been Karst, cutting the power. Amalfi hoped that
the peasant would get out again. He had grown to like him. There was something
in his weathered, unmovable, shockproof courage, and in the voracity of his
starved intelligence, that reminded the mayor of someone he had once known.
That that someone was Amalfi as he had been at the age of twenty-five, Amalfi
did not know, and there was no one else who would be able to tell him.

Spindizzies in essence are simple; Amalfi had no difficulty
in setting and locking the controls the way he wanted them, or in performing
sundry small tasks of highly selective sabotage. How he was to conceal what he
had done, when every move left huge smears in the heavy dust, was a tougher
problem. He solved it at length in the only possible way; he took off his shirt
and flailed it at all of the boards. The result made him sneeze until his eyes
watered, but it worked.

Now all he had to do was get out.

There were already sounds below in Star Chamber, but he was
not yet worried about a direct attack. He still had one of the black eggs, and
the Proctors knew it. Furthermore, he also had the pole with the hooked bill,
so that in order to open up the control room at all, the Proctors would have to
climb on each other's shoulders. They weren't in good physical shape for
gymnastics, and besides they would know that men indulging in such stunts could
be defeated temporarily by nothing more complicated than a kick in the teeth.

Nevertheless, Amalfi had no intention of spending the rest
of his life in the control room of IMT. He had only about six minutes to get
out of the city altogether.

After thinking very rapidly for approximately four seconds,
Amalfi stood on the stone slab, overbalanced it, and slid solemnly down onto
the top of the table in Star Chamber.

After a stunned instant, half a dozen pairs of hands grabbed
him at once. Heldon's face, completely unrecognizable with fury and fear, was
thrust into his.

"What have you done? Answer, or I'll order you torn to
pieces!"

"Don't be a lunkhead. Tell your men to let go of me. I
still have your safe-conduct—and in case you're thinking of repudiating it, I
still have the same weapon I had before. Cast off, or—"

Heldon's guards released him before he had finished
speaking. Heldon lurched heavily up onto the table top and began to claw his
way up the slab. Several other robed, bald-headed men jostled after
him—evidently Heldon had been driven by a greater fear to tell some of the
Great Nine what he had done. Amalfi walked backwards out of Star Chamber and
down two steps. Then he bent, deposited his remaining black egg carefully on
the threshold, and took off down the spiral stairs at a dead run.

It would take Heldon a while, perhaps as much as a minute,
after he switched on the controls to discover that the generators had been cut
out while he was chasing Amalfi; and another minute, at best, to get a flunky
down into the basement to turn them on again. Then there would be a warm-up
time of four minutes. After that—IMT would go aloft.

Amalfi shot out into the alleyway and thence into the public
square, caroming off an astounded guard. A shout rose behind him. He doubled
over and kept running.

The street was nearly dark in the twilight of the twin suns.
He kept in the shadows and made for the nearest corner. The cornice of the
building ahead of him abruptly turned lava-white, then began to dim through the
red. He never did hear the accompanying scream of the mesotron rifle. He was
concentrating on something else.

Then he was around the corner. The quickest route to the
edge of the city, as well as he could recall, was down the street he had just
quitted, but that was now out of the question; he had no desire to be burned
down. Whether or not he could get out of IMT in time by any alternate route
remained to be seen.

Doggedly, he kept running. He was fired on once more, by a
man who did not really know on whom he was firing. Here, Amalfi was just a
running man who failed to fit the categories; any first shot at him would be a
reflex of disorientation, and consequently aimed badly.

The ground shuddered, ever so delicately, like the hide of a
monster twitching at flies in its sleep. Somehow, Amalfi managed to run still
faster.

The shudder came again, stronger this time. A long,
protracted groan followed it, traveling in a heavy wave through the bedrock of
the city. The sound brought Proctors and serfs alike boiling out of the
buildings.

At the third shock, something toward the center of the city
collapsed with a sullen roar. Amalfi was caught up in the aimless, terrified
eddying of the crowd, and fought, with hands, teeth and bullet head—

The groaning grew louder. Abruptly, the ground bucked.
Amalfi pitched forward. With him went the whole milling mob, falling in
windrows like stacked grain. There was frantic screaming everywhere, but it was
worse inside the buildings. Over Amalfi's head a window shattered explosively,
and a woman's body came twisting and tumbling through the shuddering air.

Amalfi heaved himself up, spitting blood, and ran again. The
pavement ahead was cracked in great, irregular shards, like a madman's mosaic.
Just beyond, the blocks were tilted all awry, reminding Amalfi irrelevantly of
a breakwater he had seen on some other planet, in some other century-He was
clambering over them before he realized that these could only mark the rim of
the original city of IMT. There were still more buildings on the other side of
the huge, rockfilled trench, but the trench itself showed where the perimeter
of the ancient Okie had been sunk into the soil of the planet. Fighting for air
with saw-edged rales, he threw himself from stone to stone toward the far edge
of the trench. This was the most dangerous ground of all; if IMT were to lift
now, he would be ground as fine as mincemeat in the tumbling rocks. If he could
just reach the marches of the Barrens—

Behind him, the groaning rose steadily in pitch, until it
sounded like the tearing of an endless sheet of metal. Ahead, across the
Barrens to the east, his own city gleamed in the last rays of the twin suns.
There was fighting around it; little bright flashes were sputtering at its
edge. The rockets Amalfi had heard, four of them, were arrowing across the sky,
and black things dropped from them. The Okie city responded with spouts of
smoke.

Then there was an unbearably bright burst. After Amalfi
could see again, there were only three rockets. In another few seconds there
wouldn't be any: the City Fathers never missed.

Amalfi's lungs burned. He felt sod under his sandals. A
twisted runner of furze lashed across his ankle and he fell again.

He tried to get up and could not. The seared turf, on which
an ancient rebel city once had stood, rumbled threateningly. He rolled over.
The squat towers of IMT were swaying, and all around the edge of the city, huge
blocks and clods heaved and turned over, like surf. Impossibly, a thin line of
light, intense and ruddy, appeared above the moiling rocks. The suns were
shining
under the city—

The line of light widened. The old city took the air with an
immense bound, and the rending of the long-rooted foundations was
ear-splitting. From the sides of the huge mass, human beings threw themselves
desperately toward the Barrens; all those Amalfi saw were serfs. The Proctors, of
course, were still trying to control the flight of IMT--

The city rose majestically. It was gaining speed. Amalfi's
heart hammered. If Heldon and his crew could figure out in time what Amalfi had
done to the controls, Karst's old ballad would be re-enacted, and the crushing
rule of the Proctors made safe forever.