CHAPTER FIVE: Jihad

But there was so much to be done that he managed to forget about it after Dee and the children had left on the recall ship. He was not, however, allowed to forget about it for long-only, in fact, for three weeks.

The discussion of the forthcoming catastrophe had at last entered the stage where it was no longer possible to avoid coming to grips with the contrary entropy gradients, and hence had entered an area where words alone no longer sufficed-in fact, could seldom be called upon at all. This had had the effect of driving those participants who were primarily engineers or administrators or both, like Miramon and Amalfi, or primarily philosophers, like Gifford Bonner, into the stance of bystanders; so that the discussions now had been shifted to Retma's study. Amalfi stuck with them whenever he could, for he never knew when Retma, Jake or Schloss might drop back out of the symbolic stratosphere and say something he could comprehend and use.

It was being heavy weather in the study today, however. Retma was saying:

"The problem as I see it is that time in our experience is not retrodictable. We write a diffusion equation like this, for instance." He turned to his blackboard-the immemorial "research instrument" of theoretical physicists everywhere-and wrote:

Over Retina's head, for Jake's benefit, a small proxy fixed its television eye on the precise chalkmarks. "In this situation a-squared is a real constant, so it is predictive only for a future time t, but not for an earlier time t, because the retrodictive expression diverges."

"An odd situation," Schloss agreed. "It means that in any thermodynamic situation we have better information about the future than we do about the past. In the anti-matter universe it has to be the other way around- but only from our point of view; a hypothetical observer living under their laws and composed of their energies, I assume, couldn't tell the difference."

"Can we write a convergent retrodictive equation?" Jake's voice said. "One which describes what their situation is as we would see it, if we could? If we can't, I don't see how we can design instruments to detect any difference."

"It can be done," Retma said. "For instance." He turned to the blackboard and the symbols flowed squeakily:

"Ah-ha," Schloss said. "Thus giving us an imaginary constant in place of a real one. But your second equation isn't a mirror of your first; parity is not conserved. Your first equation is an equalization process, but this one is oscillatory. Surely the gradient on the other side doesn't pulsate!"

"Parity is not conserved anyhow in these weak reactions," Jake said. ''But I think the objection may be well taken all the same. If Equation Two describes anything at all, it can't be the other side. It has to be both sides-the whole vast system, providing that it is cyclical, which we don't know yet. Nor do I see any way to test it, it's as ultimately and finally unprovable as the Mach Hypothesis—"

The door opened quietly and a young Hevian beckoned silently to Amalfi. He got up without too much reluctance; the boys were giving him a hard time today, and he found that he missed Estelle, It had been her function to remind the group of possible pitfalls in Retma's notation: here, for instance, Retma was using the d which in Amalfi's experience was an increment in calculus, as simply an expression for a constant; he was using the G which to Amalfi was the gravitational constant, to express a term in thermodynamics Amalfi was accustomed to seeing written with the greek capital letter; and could Schloss be sure that Retma's i was equivalent to the square root of minus one, as it was in New Earth math? Doubtless Schloss had good reason to feel that agreement on that very simple symbol had been established between the New Earthmen and Retma long since, but without Estelle it made Amalfi feel uncomfortable. Besides, though he knew intellectually that all the important battles against a problem in physics are won in such blackboard sessions as this, he was not temperamentally fitted to them. He liked to see things happening.

They began to happen forthwith. As soon as the door was decently closed on the visible and invisible physicists, the young Hevian said:

"I am sorry to disturb you, Mr. Amalfi. But there is an urgent call for you from New Earth. It is Mayor Hazleton."

"Helleshin!" Amalfi said. The word was Vegan; no one now alive knew what it meant. "All right, let's go."

"Where is my wife?" Hazleton demanded without preamble. "And my grandson, and Jake's daughter? And where have you been these past three weeks? Why didn't you call in? I've been losing my mind, and the Hevians gave me the Force Four blowaround before they'd let me through to you at all—"

"What are you talking about, Mark?" Amalfi said.

"Stop sputtering long enough to let me know what this is all about."

"That's what 7 want to know. All right. I'll begin again. Where is Dee?"

"I don't know," Amalfi said patiently. "I sent her home three weeks- ago. If you can't find her, that's your problem."

"She never got here."

"She didn't? But—"

"Yes, but. That recall ship never landed. We never heard from it at all. It just vanished, Dee, children and all. I've been phoning you frantically to find out whether or not you ever sent it; now I know that you did. Well, we know what that means, "You'd better give up dabbling in physics, Amalfi, and get back here on the double."

"What can I do?" Amalfi said. "I don't know any more about it than you do."

"You can damn well come back here and help me out of this mess."

"What mess?"

"What have you been doing the past three weeks?" Hazleton yelled. "Do you mean to tell me that you haven't heard what's been happening?"

"No," Amalfi said. "And stop yelling. What did you mean, 'We know what that means'? If you think you know what's happened, why aren't you doing something about it, instead of jamming the Dirac raising me? You're the mayor; I've got work of my own to do."

"I'll be the mayor about two days longer, if my luck holds," Hazleton said in a savage voice. "And you're directly responsible, so you needn't bother trying to duck. Jorn the Apostle began to move two weeks ago. He has a navy now, though where he raised it is beyond me. His main body's nowhere near New Earth, but he's about to take New Earth all the same-the whole planet is swarming with farm kids with fanatical expressions and dismounted spindillies. As soon as they get to me, I'm going to surrender out of hand-you know as well as I do what one of those machines can do, and the farmers are using them as side-arms. I'm not going to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives just to maintain my administration; if they want me out, they can have me out."

"And this is my fault? I once told you the Warriors of God were dangerous."

"And I didn't listen. All right. But they'd never have moved if it hadn't been for the fact that you and Miramon didn't censor what you're up to. It's given Jorn his cause; he's telling his followers that you're meddling with the pre-ordained Armageddon and jeopardizing their chances of salvation. He's proclaimed a jihad against the Hevians for instigating it, and the jihad includes New Earth because we're working with the Hevians—"

Over the phone came four loud, heavy strokes of fist upon metal.

"Gods of all stars, they're here already," Hazleton said. "I'll leave the line open as long as I can-maybe they won't notice. ..." His voice faded. Amalfi hung on grimly, straining to hear every sound.

"Sinner Hazleton," a young and desperately frightened voice said, almost at once, "you have been found out. By the Word of Jorn, you-you are ordered to corrective discipline. Are you gone-tuh-will you submit humbly?"

"If you fire that thing in here," Hazleton's voice said, quite loudly-he was obviously projecting for the benefit of the mike—"you'll uproot half the city. What good will that do you?"

"We will die in the Warriors," the other voice said. It was still tense, but now that it spoke of dying it seemed more self-assured. "You will go to the flames."

"And all the other people-?"

"Sinner Hazleton. we do not threaten," a deeper, older voice said. "We think there is some good in everyone. Jorn commands us to redeem, and that we will do. We have hostages for your good conduct."

"Where are they?"

"They were picked up by the Warriors of God," the deep voice said. "Jorn in his blessedness was kind enough to grant us a cordon sanitaire for this Godless world. Will you yield, for the salvation of this woman and these two helpless children? I advise you, Sinner-hey, what the hell, that phone's open! Jody, smash that switch, and fast! What did I ever do to be saddled with a cadre of lousy yokels—"

The speaker began a thin howl and went dead before the cry was properly born.

For a moment, Amalfi sat stunned. He had gotten too much information too fast; and he was much older now than he had been on like occasions in the past. He had never expected that such an occasion would arise again- but here it was.

A jihad against-He? No, not likely-at least, not directly. Jorn the Apostle would be wary of tackling a world so completely mysterious to him, especially with forces more mob than military. But New Earth was wholly vulnerable; it was a logical first step to invest that planet. And now Jorn had Dee and the children.

Move!

How to move was another matter; it needed to be done in a vessel which no possible Warrior cordon would have the strength to attack, but no such vessel existed on He. The only other alternative was a very small, very fast ship with a low detectability index; but that was equally impossible across so long a distance, since there is a minimum size for even one spindizzy. Or was there? Carrel was on He, and Carrel had had considerable experience in designing relatively small spindizzy-powered proxies; one such had followed the March of Earth all the way, without anybody's paying the slightest attention to it. Of course the proxy had been magnificently, noisily detectable by ordinary standards, and only Carrel's piloting of it had kept the massed cities from distinguishing between the traces that it made and the traces that were made adventitiously by ordinary interstellar matter. .. .

"Can you do that again, Carrel? Remember that this time you won't have a flock of massive cities to confuse the issue. The gamut you'll have to run will be one thin shell of orbiting warships, around one planet-and we don't know how many of them there are, what arms they mount, how careful a watch they keep—"

"Assume the worst," Carrel said. "They caught the recall ship, after all, and they didn't even know we'd sent it. I can do it, Mr. Amalfi, if you'll let me do the maneuvering when the chips are down; otherwise I think you'll be caught, no matter how small the ship is."

"Helleshin!" But there was no way around it; Amalfi would have to subject himself to at least two days of Carrel's violent evasive-confusive maneuvers, without once touching the space-stick himself. It was going to be a rough do for an old man, but Carrel was quite right, there was no other available course.

"All right," he said. "Just make sure I'm alive when I touch down."

Carrel grinned. "I've never lost a cargo," he said.

"Providing it's been properly secured. Where do you want to land?"

That was not easy question either. In the long run, Amalfi settled for a landing in Central Park, in the heart of the old Okie city. ;This was perhaps dangerously close to the Warriors' center of operations, but Amalfi did not want to be forced to trek across a thousand miles of New Earth just for a meeting with Hazleton; and there was a fair chance that the old city would be taboo for the bumpkins, or at least avoided instinctively. Jorn the Apostle would not have overlooked patrolling such an obvious rallying-point for the ousted, but presumably Jorn was somewhere at the other end of the Cloud with his main body.

Since there is, even with spindizzies, a limit to the amount of power that can be stored in a small hull, the trip was more than long enough for Amalfi to catch up, via ultraphone, on the Cloud events he had closeted himself away from on He. The picture Mark had given him had been accurate, if perhaps a little distorted in emphasis. Jorn the Apostle's real Concerns were still far away from New Earth, and his jihad had been announced against unbelievers everywhere, not just against the Hevians. The Hevians were simply the article in the indictment which applied specifically to New Earth-that, and New Earth's unannounced but unconcealed intention of plumbing the end of time, which was blasphemy. It was Amalfi's guess that the uprising on New Earth and the seizure of the central government there had been an unplanned byproduct of the proclamation of which Jorn was unprepared to take full advantage. Had he been planning on it, or militarily able to capitalize on it, he would have rushed in his main body on the double; as matters stood he had only-and belatedly-set up a token blockade. If his followers' coup stuck, all well and good; if it did not, he would withdraw the blockade in a hurry, to save ships and men for another, more auspicious day.

Or so Amalfi reasoned; but he was uncomfortably aware that in Jorn the Apostle he was for the first time dealing with an enemy whose thought-processes might be utterly unlike his, from first to last.

The ship shifted abruptly from spindizzy to ion-blast drive. Amalfi stopped thinking entirely and just hung on.

Once in the atmosphere, the craft was back in Amalfi's hands; back on Ha, Carrel had relinquished his remote Dirac control over the space-stick. Amalfi was able to make a thistledown nightside landing in south Central Park, in a broad irregular depression which legend said had once been a lake. The landing was without incident; apparently it had been undetected. In the morning the abandoned proxy might be spotted by a Warrior flyer, but the old city was littered with such ambiguous mechanical objects; one had to be a student of the city, as knowledgeable as Schliemann was about the nine Troys, to know which was new and which was not. Amalfi was confident enough of this to leave the proxy behind without an attempt to camouflage it.

Now the problem was, How to get in touch with Mark? Presumably he was still under arrest, or the next thing to it; "corrective discipline" was what the Warrior voice Amalfi had overheard had said. Did that mean that they were going to make the lazy, cerebral Hazleton make beds, sweep floors and pray six hours a day? Not very likely, especially the prayer part. Then what-?

Suddenly, trudging south along a moonlit, utterly deserted Fifth Avenue toward the city's control tower, Amalfi was sure he had it. Running a galaxy, even a small and mostly unexplored satellite galaxy like this one, is not simply a matter of taking papers out of the "IN" tray and transferring them to the "OUT" tray. It requires centuries of experience and a high degree of familiarity with the communications, data-filing and other machines which must do 98 per cent of the donkey-work. In the Okie days, for instance, it sometimes happened-though not very often-that a mayor was swapped to another city under the "rule of discretion" after he had lost an election; and generally it took him five to ten years to get used to running the new one, even in such a subordinate post as assistant to the city manager. It was not an art that a bumpkin, no matter how divinely inspired, could master in a week.

Mark's most likely theater of "corrective discipline," then, would be his own office. He would be running the Cloud for the Warriors-and no doubt doing a far worse job of it than they would detect, even were they sensible enough, as they surely were, to suspect such sabotage. Amalfi, himself a master of making the wherfs run backwards when necessary, would yield precedence in that art to Hazleton at any time; Hazleton had been known to work the trick on his friends, just to keep his hand in, or perhaps just out of habit.

Very good; then the problem of getting in touch with Mark was solved, clearing the way for the hard questions: How to discombobulate, and, if possible, oust the Warriors; and how to-get Dee and the children back unharmed?

It would be difficult to decide which of these two hard questions was the harder. As Mark had pointed out, the uprooted spindillies in the hand of the rank-and-file Warriors were considerably more dangerous than muskets or pitchforks. Used with precision, the machine could degravitate a single opponent and send him shrieking skyward under the centrifugal thrust of New Earth's rotation on its axis; or the same effect could be used against a corner or a wall of a building, if one wanted to demolish a strong point. But the menace lay in the fact that in the hands of a plowboy the spindilly would not be used with precision. It had been designed, not as a weapon, but as an adjunct to home weather control, and was somewhat larger, heavier and more ungainly than a Twentieth-Century home oil-burner. Considering the difficulties involved in toting this object at all, especially on foot, the temptation would be almost overwhelming to set it at maximum output before it was even unbolted from its cement pedestal in the cellar, and leave it set there, so that the strained arm and back muscles of the bearer would thereafter have to do nothing with it to make it function but point it-more or less-and push the starter button. This meant that every time one of the plowboys lost his temper or detected heresy in some casual remark, or fired nervously at a shadow or a sudden unfamiliar sound or a svengali, he might level two or three city blocks before he remembered where the "kill" button was; or the machine, dropped and abandoned in panic, might go on to level two or three more blocks before it discharged its accumulators and shut itself off of its own accord.

Saving Dee and the children was certainly highly important, but disarming the Warriors would have to take precedence.

He caught himself bouncing a little as he stepped out of the spindizzy lift shaft onto the resilient concrete floor of the control room, and grinned ruefully. He felt alive again, after far too many years of grousing, browsing, vegetating. This was the kind of problem he had been formed for, the kind he approached with the confidence born of gusto. The end of time was certainly sizable enough as a problem; he would never find a bigger, and he was grateful for that; but it provided him with nobody with whom to negotiate and, if possible, swindle a little.

It had been a long time; he had better be on his guard against overconfidence. That had been known to trip him now and then even when he had been in practice. In particular, it was suspiciously easy to see what steps ought to be taken in the present situation; that was not the test; it was his ancient skill as a cultural historian-in short, as a diagnostician-which would stand or fall by what he did now ... and just incidentally, he might lose or save from three to a quarter of a million lives, one of them Estelle's. Gently then, gently-but precisely and with decision, like a surgeon confronted with cardiac arrest. Waste no time debating alternate courses; you have four minutes to save the patient's life, if you are lucky; the bone-saw is whining in your hand-slash open the rib-cage, and slash it quick.

The City Fathers were already warmed up. He told them: "Communications. Get me Jorn the Apostle-for the survival of the city."

It would take a little while for the City Fathers to reach Jorn; though they would scan the possibilities in under a minute and select out only those worlds with high probability ratings for Jorn's presence, the chances of their getting him on the first call were not very high. Amalfi regretted that it would be then necessary to talk to Jorn on the Dirac communicator, since it would make anyone who was listening anywhere in the Cloud-or anywhere else in the known universe where the apparatus existed, for that matter-privy to the conversations; but over interstellar distances the ultraphone was out of the question for two-way exchanges, since its velocity of information propagation was only 125 per cent of the speed of light, and even this was achieved only by a trick called negative phase velocity, since the carrier wave was electromagnetic and moved at light speed and no faster.

While he waited, Amalfi ticked over the possibilities. This was all in all developing into a most curious affair, quite unlike anything he had ever been involved in before. It thus far consisted mostly of interludes and transitions, with only a small scatter of decision-points upon which action might be possible. In this sense even the events which most recalled to him the events of his earlier life seemed to be reshaping themselves into the pattern of his old age, not only allowing for but requiring a much greater exercise of reflection and an intensive weighing of values. Reflexive action ^as out of the question; it was possible only from some fixed guiding principle, such as "the survival of the city"; such an axiom, if it persists and dominates for a long time, allows many decisions to be reached via the reflex arc with almost no intervening intellection-one automatically jumped in the right direction, like a cat turning itself over in mid-air. No such situation existed now; the values to be weighed were mutually contradictory.

It had to be assumed, first of all, that Jorn did not know the situation on New Earth in detail; he had simply reacted as a good strategist should to capitalize upon an unexpected victory in an unexpected quarter, and almost surely did not know that his blockading fleet was holding three hostages, let alone who those hostages were. It would be impossible to intimidate him on this matter; it would be wiser not to give him the information at all. After all, the first intent of the call was to get the bumpkin army disbanded and the dismounted spindillies out of action; but it would not do to convince him out of hand that his coup on New Earth could not possibly stick, since that would result in his withdrawing his blockade and the hostages with it. Better to serve both ends, if it could be swung that way: to convince Jorn that the putsch had better be abandoned forthwith, but not so thoroughly as to alarm him into thinking he might lose part of his navy if he took his time about calling the putsch off.

It looked like a large order. It meant that the danger which Jorn the Apostle would have to be made to suspect would have to be as much ideological as it was military. As a military commander of considerable proven ability, Jorn could not but be familiar with the corruption of an occupying force by the standards and customs of the nation that it occupies-and jihads and crusades were particularly subject to this kind of corrosion. Whether he was wholly a believer in the brand of Fundamentalism he preached, or not, he would not want his followers to lose faith in the doctrine under which he had sailed so successfully thus far; that was the hold over them that he had chosen to exercise, so that if they lost that, he himself would have nothing left, regardless of what his personal beliefs might be.

Unhappily, there was no ideology available on New Earth which looked capable of corrupting the Warriors of God; they would doubtless indulge in a good deal of wristwatch collecting, a very ancient term for a timeless syndrome of a peasant army holding a territory relatively rich in consumer goods, but Jorn would anticipate that and discount it; but there was no idea inherent in the culture of New Earth which seemed strong enough to sway the Warriors from their simple, direct and centrally oriented point of view. One would have to be manufactured; at least there was no lack of raw materials.

One apparent pitfall in QMS course was that of taking Jorn the Apostle at his own public valuation and attempting to reach into and alarm that part of his mind where his real religion lived, Amalfi had no way of knowing whether this would work or not, and prudence dictated that it not be tried; he had to assume instead that a man as successful as Jorn had been in the world of affairs was a sophisticated man on most subjects, whether he was sophisticated as a theologian or not. The latter was even beside the point; wherever the truth lay, he would be quick to detect any attempt to push his religious buttons, since he had proven that he knew the art himself.

And, Amalfi thought suddenly, if Jorn were to turn out to be exactly as devout in his back-cluster superstitions as his public utterances suggested, pushing that button might well result in a genuine disaster. With such people, that button is a demolition button; if you touch it successfully, you shatter the man. Of course it would be necessary to treat Jorn pro forma as if every public word Jorn had uttered had been uttered in the utmost sincerity and out of the deepest kind of belief, not only because Jorn too would know that unknown numbers of others might be listening in, but to avoid attacking the man's image of himself irrelevantly and to no purpose. The forms had no bearing on the final outcome; it would be dangerous to assume that Jorn was identical personally with his public self only in the substance of Amalfi's approach to him. There would be no harm in acknowledging to him, implicitly, his claim to be every inch a Fundamentalist; but it would be fatal to expect him to panic if he got a Dirac-cast claiming to be from Satan-

"READY WITH JORN THE APOSTLE, MR. MAYOR."

Amalfi suddenly found himself thinking at emergency speed; the City Fathers' excusable lapse-doubtless nobody had bothered to help them that Amalfi had not been Mayor since the problem of the Ginnangu-Gap had arisen-reminded him that he had failed to decide whether or not to identify himself to Jorn. There was a small possibility that Jorn came of the peasant stock which the Okies had found sweating under the tyranny of the bindle-stiff city of IMT; a slightly larger possibility that he was a descendant of the rulers of IMT itself; but by far the greatest likelihood was that he was a child or grandchild of Amalfi's own people and so would know very well indeed who Amalfi was. To identify himself, then, would give Amalfi a certain leverage, but it would also present . certain disadvantages-

However, the die was already cast; the City Fathers had called him the Mayor on the circuit, so Jorn had better be told at once that it was not Hazleton he was talking to. Bluff it out? Possible; but there lay the danger of using the Dirac: the instrument made it possible for any listener to tell Jorn, now or later, whatever facts Amalfi attempted for strategic reasons to withhold-

"READY, MR. MAYOR."

Well, there was no help for that now. Amalfi said into the microphone:

"Go ahead."

Immediately, the screen came alight. He was getting old; he had forgotten to tell the City Fathers to limit the call to audio only, so in actuality he had never had the option of withholding his identity. Well, regret was futile; and in fact he watched the face of Jorn the Apostle swimming into view before him with the keenest curiosity.

It was, startlingly, a very old face, narrow, bony and deeply lined, with bushy white eyebrows emphasizing the sunken darkness of the eyes. Jorn had been off the anti-agathics for at least fifty years, if indeed he had ever taken one. The realization was a profound and unexpected visceral shock.

"I am Jorn the Apostle," the ancient face said. "What do you want of me?"

"I think you should pull off of New Earth," Amalfi said. It was not at all what he had intended to say; it was in fact wholly contrary to the entire chain of reasoning he had just worked through. But there was something about the face that compelled him to say what was on his mind.

"I am not on New Earth," Jorn said. "But I take your meaning. And I take it there are many people on New Earth who share your opinion, Mr. Amalfi, as is only natural. This does not affect me."

"I didn't expect it to, just as a simple statement of opinion," Amalfi said. "But I can offer you good reasons."

"I will listen. But do not expect me to be reasonable."

"Why not?" Amalfi said, genuinely surprised.

"Because I am not a reasonable man," Jorn said patiently. "The uprising of my followers on New Earth took place without orders from me; it is a gift which God himself has placed in my "hand. That being the case, reason does not apply."

"I see," Amalfi said. He paused. This was going to be tougher to bring off than he had dreamed; in fact, he had his first doubt as to whether it could be brought off at all. "Are you aware, sir, that this planet is a hotbed of Stochasticism?"

Jorn's bushy eyebrows lifted slightly. "I know that the Stochastics are strongest and most numerous on New Earth," he said. "I have no way of knowing how deeply the philosophy has penetrated the populace of New Earth as a whole. It is one of the things I mean to see stamped out."

"You'll find that impossible. A mob of farm boys can't eradicate a major philosophical system."

"But how major is it?" Jorn said. "In terms of influence? I admit I have the impression that much of New Earth may be corrupted by it, but I have no certain knowledge that this is so. At the distance from New Earth that I am forced to operate, I may well be magnifying it in my mind, especially since it is so completely antithetical to the Word of God; it would be natural for me to assume that the homeland of Stochasticism is also a 'hotbed' of it. But I do not know this to be true."

"So you will risk the souls of the Warriors of God on the assumption that it is not true."

"Not necessarily," Jorn said. "Considering the forces for which you speak, Mr. Amalfi, it is so plainly to your advantage to exaggerate the influence of Stochasticism; your very use of the tool suggests that, since I cannot think you mean me any advantage. I suspect that in actuality the Stochastics, like intellectuals at all times and in all places, are largely out of touch with the general assumptions of the culture in which they are operating; and that the people of New Earth are no more Stochastics than they are Warriors of God or anything else describable as a school of thought. If any label applies, they are simply a people who are no longer describable as Okies." Amalfi sat there and sweated. He had met his match and he knew it.

"And if you are wrong?" he said at last. "If Stochasticism is as ingrained on this planet as I've tried to warn you it is?"

"Then," Jorn the Apostle said, "I must take the risk. My Warriors on New Earth are farm boys, as you have pointed out. I doubt that Stochasticism will make much headway with them; they will shrug it off, as contrary to common sense. They will be mistaken in that estimate, but how could they know that? Ignorance is the defense God the Father has given them, and I think it will be sufficient" There was the cue. Amalfi could only hope that it had not come too late.

"Very well," he said, rather more grimly than he had intended. "Events will put us both to the proof; there is no more to be said."

"No," Jorn said, "there is this much more: you may actually have meant to do me a service, Mr. Amalfi. If it so proves out, then I will give the devil his due-one must be honest even with evil, there is no other good course. What do you want of me?"

And thus the verbal sparring-match had come so quickly to full circle; and this time there was no way to remain ignorant of, let alone to evade, the purport of the question. It was not political; it was personal; and it had been intended that way from the beginning.

"You could return me three hostages which your blockading fleet is holding," Amalfi said. His mouth tasted of aloes. "A woman and two children."

"Had you asked for that in the beginning," Jorn the Apostle said, "I would have given it to you." Was it actually pity in his voice? "But you have placed their lives upon the block of your own integrity, Mr. Amalfi. So be it; if I become convinced that I must lose New Earth because of Stochasticism, I will return the three before I withdraw my blockading squadron; otherwise, not. And, Mr. Amalfi—"

"Yes?" Amalfi whispered.

"Bear in mind what "is at stake, and do not let your ingenuity overwhelm you. I know well that you are fabulously inventive; but human lives should not hang upon the success of a work of art. Go with God." The screen was dark.

Amalfi mopped his forehead with a trembling hand. With his last words, Jorn the Apostle had succeeded in telling the whole story of Amalfi's life, and it had not made comfortable listening.

Nevertheless, he hesitated only a moment longer. Though Jorn had probably already seen through the improvision which had occurred to Amalfi-late enough so that he had been unable to betray that, too, to Jorn over the Dirac for the universe to hear-there was no other course open but to try to carry it through. The alternative which Jorn had proposed actually came out to the same thing in the end: that of transforming a lie into the truth. If this was an art, as Amalfi had good reason to know it was, it was at the same time not a "work of art," but only a craft; it was Jorn himself now who was committing human lives to the dictates of a work of art, that elaborate fiction which was his religion.

Being careful, this time, to cut the screen out of the circuit in advance, Amalfi called the Mayor's office.

"This is the Commissioner of Public Safety," he told the robot secretary. In ordinary times the machine would know well enough that there was no such office, but the confusion over there now must be such that the pertinent memory banks must by now have been by-passed; he felt reasonably confident that the phrase, a code alarm of long standing in the Okie days would get through to Hazleton; as in fact it did in short order.

"You are late calling in," Mark's voice said guardedly. "Your report is overdue. Can't you report your findings hi person?"

"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.

"Yes, I know what he means, Estelle. But I hope you never do."