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maintain the clean space-lattice curvature it was set for.
"You're sunk," Amalfi told the invisible defenders quietly. "Give up now. and
you'll not be hurt. I'll skip the TDX incident-Dulany was one of my best men,
but -maybe there was some reason on your side, too. Come on over with us, and
you'll have a city to call your own again. This one isn't any good to you any
more, that's obvious."
There was no answer.
Patterns began to'race across the close-pressing black sky. The
nutcrackers-portable generators designed to heterodyne a spindizzy,., field to
the overload point-were being brought to |ear. The single tortured spindizzy
howled with anguish.
"Speak up, up there," Amalfi said. "I'm trying to be fair, but if you force me
to drive you out--"
"Vultures," the cracked voice sobbed.
The window aloft lit up with a searing glare and burst outward. A long tongue
of red flame winnowed out over the street. The spindizzy screen went down at
once, and with it the awful noise from the city's power deck; but it was
several minutes before Amalfi's dazzled eyes could see the stars again.
He stared up at the exploded scar on the side of the building, outlined in
orange heat swiftly dimming. He felt a little sick.
"TDX again," he said softly. "Consistent to the last, the
poor sick idiots."
"Mr. Mayor?"
"Here."
"This is the proxy room. There's a regular stampede going on in the jungle.
The cities are streaming away from the red star as fast as they can tune up.
No discernible order-just a mob, and a panicky mob, too. No signs of anything
being done for the wounded cities; and it looks to me like they're just being
left for Lerner to break up as soon as he gets up enough courage."
Amalfi nodded to himself. "All right, O'Brian, launch the big drone now. I
want that drone to go with those cities and stick with them all the way. Pilot
it personally; it's highly detectable, and there'll probably be several
attempts to destroy it, so be ready to dodge."
"I will, sir. Mr. Hazleton just launched her a moment ago; I'm giving her the
gun right now."
For some reason this did not improve Amalfi's temper in the least.
The Okies set to work rapidly, dismounting the dead city's spindizzies from
their bases and shipping them into storage on board their own city. The one
which had been overdriven in that last futile defense had to be left behind,
of course; like the Twenty-third Street machine, it was hot and could not be
approached, except by a graving dock.
The rest went over as whole units. Hazleton looked more and more puzzled as
the big machines came aboard, but he seemed resolved to ask no questions.
Carrel, however, suffered under no such self-imposed restraints. "What are we
going to do with all these dismounted drivers?" he said. All three men stood
in a sally port at the perimeter of their city, watching the ungainly bulks
being floated across.
"We're going to fly another planet," Hazleton said flatly.
"You bet we are," Amalfi agreed. "And pray to your star gods that we're in
time, Mark."
Hazleton didn't answer..,
Carrel said, "In time for what?"
"That I won't say until I have it right under my nose on a screen. It's a
hunch, and I think it's a good one. In the meantime, take my word for it that
we're in a hurry, like we've never been in a hurry before. What's the word on
that mass chromatography apparatus, Hazleton?"
"It's a reverse-English on the zone-melting process for refining germanium,
boss. You take a big column of metal-which metal doesn't matter, as long as
it's pure- and contaminate one end of it with the stuff you want to separate
out. Then you run a disc-shaped electric field up the column from the
contaminated end, and the contaminants are carried along by resistance heating
and separate out at various points along the bar. To get pure fractions, you
cut the bar apart with a power saw."
"But does it work?"
"Nah," Hazleton said. "It's just what we've seen a thousand times before.
Looks good in theory, but not even the guys who owned this city could make it
go."
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