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had ever been involved in anything more dangerous than a pushover. The
Hruntans, vastly inferior in equipment, were rich in experience, and their
tactics were masterly. They had forced the engagement in a heavily mined area,
which was equivalent to picking a fight in the heart of a furnace-except that
the Hruntans, having sown the mines, knew where the fire
was hottest. Their losses, of course, were terrific-nearly five to one. But
they had the numbers to waste, and it was obvious that officers whp did not
value their own lives would be unlikely to value those of their crews.
After a while, even Hazleton had to turn the screen off and order O'Brien to
recall the proxies. The carnage was frightening, not just per se, but in the
mental attitude behind it. Even a hardened killer, after a certain amount of
watching men trying to snuff out a fire by leaping into it, might have felt
his brains cracking.
The city settled toward Utopia. Outlying police scouts reported the fact-the
reports were plainly audible in the city's Communications Room-and those
reports would be exhumed later and acted upon. But now, in the midst of the
battle, the cops had no time to care about what the city did. When they began
to care again, the city hoped to be gone-or invulnerable.
The question of how Utopia had resisted the Hruntan onslaught for nearly a
century remained a riddle. It became more of a riddle after the city landed on
Utopia. The planet was a death trap of radioactivity. There were no cities;
there were seething white-hot pools that would never cool within the lifetime
of humanity to show where cities once had stood. One of the continental land
masses was not habitable at all. The very air disturbed counters slightly. In
the daytime, the radioactivity was just below the dangerous limit; at night,
when the drop in temperature released the normal microscopic increase in the
radon content-a phenomenon common to the atmospheres of all Earthlike
planets-the air was unbreathable.
Utopia had been bombarded with fission bombs and dust canisters at every
opposition with the Hruntan planet for the past seventy\Utopian years. The
favorable oppositions occurred only once every twelve years-otherwise even the
underground liffr of Utopia would have been impossible.
"How have you kept them off?" Amalfi asked. "Those boys are soldiers. If they
can put up this much of a battle against the police, they should be able to
wipe up the floor with you folks."
Captain Savage, perched uncomfortably in the belfry, blinking at the sun,
managed a thin smile. "We know all their tricks. They are very fine
strategists-I will grant you that. But in some respects they are
unimaginative.
Necessarily, I suppose; initiative is not encouraged among them." He stirred
uneasily. "Are you going to leave your city out here in plain sight? And at
night, too?"
"Yes. I doubt that the Hruntans will attack us; they're busy, and besides,
they probably know that the police don't love us, and will be too puzzled to
call us an enemy of theirs right off the bat. As for the air-we're maintaining
a point naught two per cent spindizzy field. Not enough to be noticeable, but
it changes the moment of inertia of our own atmosphere enough to prevent much
of your air from getting in."
"I don't think I understand that," Savage said. "But doubtless you know your
own resources. I confess, Mayor Amalfi, that your city is a complete mystery
to us. What does it do? Why are the police against you? Are you exiled?"
"No," Amalfi said. "And the police aren't against us exactly. We're just
rather low in the social scale; we're migratory workers, interstellar hobos,
Okies. The police are as obligated to protect us as they are to protect any
other citizen-but our mobility makes us possible criminals by their figuring,
so we have to be watched."
Savage's summary of his reaction to this was the woeful sentence Amalfi had
come to think of as the motto of Utopia. "Things have changed so much," the
officer said.
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