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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, hiriiself 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 discombohulafte, 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 degrav-itate 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 fof, 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]