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such as mobile processing plants which still needed to be powered by
gravitron-polarityv generators or "spindizzies"; but for the most part the
trend was toward the development of local, self-sufficient industries.
It was while he was setting up the City Fathers for the problem in analysis of
the million-fold transmission from the home lens, alone in what had once been
his Mayor's Office, that Amalfi had suddenly had thrown at him the fragment
from the writings of a man dead eleven centuries
before Amalfi had been born. Possibly the uttering of the unexpected fragment
had been simply an artifact of the warming-up process-like most computers of
their age and degree of complexity, it took the City Fathers two to three
hours to be$otne completely sane after they had been out of service for a
while-or perhaps Amalfi's fingers, working with sure automatism even after all
these years, had been wiser than his head, and without the collusion of
Amalfi's consciousness had built into the problem elements of what was really
troubling him: the New Earthmen. In either event, the quotation was certainly
apposite:
"If this be the whole fruit of victory, we say: if the generations of mankind
suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets and martyrs sang in the fire,
and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end than that a race of
creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, to protract in saecula
saeculorum their contented and inoffensive lives-why, at such a rate, better
lose than win the battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before
the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be
saved from so singularly flat a winding-up."
"What was that?" Amalfi barked into the microphone.
"AN EXTRACT FROM 'THE WILL TO BELIEVE,' BY WILLIAM JAMES, MR. MAYOR."
"Well, it's irrelevant; get ydur bottles and firecrackers back on the main
problem. Wait a minute-is this the Librarian?"
"YES, MR. MAYOR."
"What's the date of the work you quoted?"
"1897, MR, MAYOR."
"All right. Switch out and hook into the analytical side of the loop; you've
no business at the output end for this problem."
A flowmeter needle bobbed upward as the drain of the library machine on the
circuit was discontinued for a moment, then dipped again. He did not proceed
with the project for a while, however, but instead simply sat and thought
about the fragment that the machines had offered him. There were, he supposed,
a few unreconstructed Okies still alive on New Earth, though the only one that
he knew personally was John Amalfi. He himself had no special nostalgia qua
nostalgia for all the history he had outlived, for he could hardly forget that
it had been by his
foreplanning that New Earth had been founded. And for a period of perhaps four
years there had been plenty to occupy his mind: the discovery that the planet,
then unnamed, was at. once the refuge and the feudal fief of a notorious pack
of bindlestiffs calling itself Interstellar Master Traders-better known in the
home lens simply as "the Mad Dogs"-had raised a considerable obstacle to
colonization, the solution of which obviously needed to be drastic, and was.
But the destruction of IMT in 3948 in the Battle of the Blasted Heath had left
Amalfi at long last without problems and without function, and he had
subsequently found himself utterly unable to become used to living in a stable
and ordered society. The James quotation almost perfectly summarized his
feelings about the Okie citizens who had once been his charges, and their
descendants; he had of course to excuse the natives, who knew no better and
were finding the problems of self-government an unprecedented challenge after
their serfdom under "the Mad Dogs."
Local space travel, he knew very well, was no solution for him; one planet in
the Cloud was very like another, and the Cloud itself was only 20,000 light
years in diameter-a fact which made the Cloud extremely convenient to organize
from one administrative center, but a fact of no significance whatsoever to a
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