Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 96: what you’re looking at

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

94 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 over- head. 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 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 tem- ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION porarily by nothing more complicated than a kick in the teeth. : Nevertheless, Amalfi had no inten- tion 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 ap- proximately 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 un- recognizable 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 renudiating it, I still have the same weapon I had before. Cast off, or—’”’ Heldon’s guards released him be- fore 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 least, 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. GComichookssco m