Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 95: what you’re looking at

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

EARTHMAN, the forearms of serfs. Such pussy-ant steps made for sure footing, but not for fast transit. weAs far as Amalfi was able to com- pute, the steps rose gently along the outside curvature of the Temple’s dome, following a one-and-half helix to the summit. Why? Presumably, the Proctors didn’t require themselves to climb long flights of stairs for noth- ing, even with serfs to carry them. Why couldn’t Star Chamber be under the dome with the spindizzies, for in- stance, instead of atop it? Amalfi was not far past the first half-turn before one good reason be- came evident. There was a rustle of voices jostling its way through the chinks in the dome from below; a con- gregation, 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 mathe- matically would be the bottom of the bowl, where the floor of Star Chamber was, the architect of the Temple evi- dently had contrived a whispering- gallery—a vault to which a Proctor might put his ear, and hear the thin- nest syllable of conspiracy in the crowd of suppliants below. It was ingenious, Amalfi had to ad- mit. Conspirators on church-bearing planets generally tend to think of churches as safe places for quiet plot- ting. 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 scram- bled 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 COME HOME 93 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 pilots cabin of IMT. And that, in as old a city as IMT, meant that visibil- ity would be all-important—requiring a situation atop the tallest structure in the city, and as close to 360° visibil- ity 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 semi- circular 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, straight- ened, 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 engi- neering principles. The free end of the slab almost touched the table top. Amalfi sprang onto the table and scrambled up the tilted face of he stone; as he neared the top, the trans- lating center of gravity which he repre- sented actuated a counterweighing mechanism somewhere, and the slab closed, bearing him the rest of the way. This was the control cabin, all right. Comichooksnco im