“Check. Our course as before, then.”
“Necessarily.”
Still the city manager did not go. “Boss,” he said at last, “that outfit is heavily armed. They could muscle in on us with no trouble.”
“Mark, I’d call you yellow if I didn’t know you were just lazy,” Amalfi growled. He stopped suddenly and peered up the length of Hazleton’s figure to his long, horselike face. “Or are you leading up to something?”
Hazleton grinned like a small boy caught stealing jam.
“Well, I did have something in mind. I don’t like ‘stiffs, especially killers. Are you willing to entertain a small scheme?”
“Ah,” Amalfi said, relaxing. “That’s better. Let’s hear it.”
II.
THE wild star, hurling itself through the Rift on a course that would not bring it to the far wall for another ten thousand Earth years, carried with it six planets, of which only one was even remotely Earthlike. That planet shone deep, chlorophyll green on the screens long before it had grown enough to assume a recognizable disk shape. The proxies called in now, arrived one by one, circling the new world like a swarm of ten-meter footballs, eying it avidly.
It was everywhere the same: savagely tropical, in the throes of a geological period roughly comparable to Earth’s Carboniferous era. Plainly, the only planet would be nothing but a way station; there would be no work for pay there.
Then the proxies began to pick up weak radio signals.
Nothing, of course, could be made of the language; Amalfi turned that problem over to the City Fathers at once. Nevertheless, he continued to listen to the strange gabble while he warped the city into an orbit. The voices sounded ritualistic, somehow.