Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 87: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

EARTHMAN, COME HOME 85 ““‘What’s the main strategy from here on out, boss? I gather that you’ve got it set up. Are you ready to give it a name yet?” “Not quite,” the mayor said. ‘““Un- less you like long titles. It’s still just another problem in political pseudo- morphism.” Amalfi caught sight of Karst’s deliberately incurious face and his own grin broadened. “‘Or,”’ he said, “the fine art of tricking your opponent into throwing his head at you.” , II. IMT was a squat city, long rooted in the stony soil, and as changeless as a forest of cenotaphs. Its quietness, too, was like the quietness of a cemetery, and the Proctors carrying the fanlike wands of their office, the pierced fans with the jagged tops and the little jingling tags, were much like friars moving among the dead. The quiet, of course, could be accounted for very simply. The serfs were not allowed to speak within the walls of IMT unless spoken to, and there were comparatively few Proctors in the city to speak to them. For Amalfi there was also the imposed silence of the slaughtered millions of Thor V blanketing the air. He won- dered if the Proctors could still hear that raw silence. The naked brown figure of a passing serf glanced furtively at the party, saw Heldon, and raised a finger to its lips in the established gesture of respect. Heldon barely nodded. Amalfi, necessarily, took no overt notice at all, but he thought: Shh, is it? I don’t wonder, But it’s too late, Heldon. The secret is out. . Karst trudged behind them, shoot- ing an occasional wary glance at Heldon from under his tangled eye- brows. His caution was wasted on the Proctor. They passed through a decay- ing public square, in the center of which was an almost obliterated stat- uary group, so weather-worn as to have lost any integrity it might ever have had; integrity, Amalfi mused, is not a characteristic of monuments. Except to a sharp eye, the mass of stone on the old pedestal might have been nothing but a moderately large meteorite, riddled with the twisting pits characteristic of siderites. Amalfi could see, however, that the spaces sculped out of the interior of that block of stone, after the fashion of an ancient sculptor named Moore, had once had meaning. Inside that stone there had once stood a powerful human figure, with its foot resting upon the neck of a slighter. Once, evi- dently, IMT had actually been proud of the memory of Thor V— ‘Ahead is the temple,” Heldon said suddenly. “The machinery is beneath it. There should be no one of interest in it at this hour, but I had best make sure. Wait here.” “Suppose somebody notices us?” Amalfi said. “This square is usually avoided. Also, I have men posted around it to divert any chance traffic. If you don’t wander away, you'll be safe.” The Proctor strode away toward the big domed building and disappeared abruptly down an alleyway. Behind Amalfi, Karst began to sing, in an ex- ceedingly scratchy voice, but very softly: a folk-tune of some kind, obvi- ously. The melody, which once had had to do with a town named Kazan, was too many thousands of years old for Amalfi to recognize it, even had he not been tune-deaf. Nevertheless, the mayor abruptly found himself listen- ing to Karst, with the intensity of a comicbooks.co im