Cities in Flight (27 page)

"I already know that," Chris said, with feeling. "But how do I come into all this? Why does the Mayor want to talk to me? I don't know anything but what you've told me-and besides, he's already made up his mind."

"He's made up his mind," Anderson agreed, "but you know a lot that he doesn't know. As we get closer to Argus Three, he wants you to listen to the broadcasts from the Argidae, and anything we may pick up from the tramp, and fill him in on any clues you hear."

"But why?"

"Because you're the only person on board who knows the tramp at first hand," the perimeter sergeant said, with slow, deliberate emphasis. "It's your old friend Scranton."

"But-that can't be so! There were hundreds of us put on board from Scranton-all adults but me—"

"Press-gang sweepings," Anderson said with cold disgust. "Oh, there were one or two specialists we found a use for, but none of them ever paid any attention to city politics. The rest were bulgy-muscled misfits, a large pro. portion of them psychotics. We cured them, but we couldn't raise their IQ's; without something to sell, or the Interplanetary Grand Prix, or heavy labor to keep their minds off their minds, they're just so many vegetables, We-Irish and I-couldn't find even one worth taking into our squads. We've made citizens of the three good specialists, but the rest will be passengers till they die.

"But you're the happy accident of that crew right now, Chris. The City Fathers say that your history aboard Scranton shows that you know something about the town, Amalfi wants to mine that knowledge. Want to tackle it?"

"I-I'll try."

"Good." The perimeter sergeant turned to the miniature tape recorder at his elbow. "Here's a complete transcript of everything we've heard from Argus Three so far. After you've heard it and made any comments that occur to you, Amalfi will begin to feed us the live messages, from the bridge. Ready?"

"No," Chris said, more desperately than he could eves have imagined possible for him. "Not yet. My head is about to bust already. Do I get off from school while this is going on? I couldn't take it, otherwise."

"No," Anderson said, "you don't. If a live message comes through while you're in class, we'll pull you out. But you'll go right back in again. Otherwise your schooling will go right on just as before, and if you can't take the new burden, well, that'll be too bad. You'd better get that straight right away, Chris. This isn't a vacation, and it isn't a prize. It's a job, for the survival of the city. Either you take it or you don't; either way, you get no special treatment. Well?"

For what seemed to him to be a long time, Chris sat and listened to his echoing Okie headache. At last, however, he said resignedly:

"I'll take it."

Anderson snapped the switch, and the tape began to run on the spools.

The earliest messages, as Anderson had noted, were vague and brief. The later ones were longer, but ever more cryptic. Chris was able to worry very little more information out of them than Amalfi and the City Fathers already had. As promised, he spoke to Amalfi-but from the Anderson's apartment, through a hookup which fed what he had to say to the mayor and to the machines simultaneously.

The machines asked questions about population, energy resources, degree of automation and other vital matters, not a one of which Chris could answer. The Mayor mostly just listened; on the few occasions when his heavy voice cut in, Chris was unable to figure out what he was getting at.

"Chris, this railroad you mentioned; how long before you were born had it been pulled up?"

"About a century, sir, I think. You know Earth went back to the railroads in the middle two thousands, when all the fossil fuels ran out and they had to give up the highways to, farmland."

"No, I didn't know that. All right, go ahead."

Now the City Fathers were asking him about armament. He had no answer for that one, either.

There came a day, however, when this pattern changed suddenly and completely. He was, indeed, pulled out of class for the purpose, and hurried into a small anteroom containing little but a chair and two television screens. One of the screens showed Sgt. Anderson; the other, nothing but 'a testing pattern.

"Hello, Chris. Sit down and pay attention: this is important. We're getting a transmission from the tramp city. We don't know whether it's just a beacon or whether they want to talk to us. Amalfi thinks it's unlikely that they'd be putting out a beacon in their situation, regardless of the law-they've broken too many others already. He's going to try to raise them, now that you're here; he wants you to listen."

"Right, sir."

Chris could not hear his own city calling, but after only a few minutes-for they were quite close to Argus Three now-the test pattern on the other screen vanished, and Chris saw an odiously familiar face.

"Hullo. This here's Argus Three."

"'This here' is not Argus Three," Amalfi's deep voice said promptly. "'This here' is the city of Scranton. Pennsylvania, and there's no point in your hiding it. Get me your boss."

"Now wait a minute. Just who do you think—"

"This here is New York, New York, calling, and I said, 'Get me your boss.' Go do it."

The face by now was both sullen and confused. After a moment's hesitation, it vanished. The screen flickered, the test pattern came back briefly, and then a second familiar face was looking directly at Chris. It was impossible to believe that the man couldn't see him, and the idea was outright frightening.

"Hello, New York," he said, affably enough. "So you've got us figured out. Well, we've got you figured out, too. This planet is under contract to us; be notified."

"Recorded," Amalfi said. "We also have it a matter of record that you are in Violation. Argus Three has made a new contract with us. It'd be the wisest course to clear ground and spin."

The man's eyes did not waver. Chris realized suddenly that it was an image of Amalfi he was staring at, not at Chris himself. "Spin yourself," he said evenly. "Our argument is with the colonists, not with you. We don't spin without a Vacate order from the cops. Once you mix into this, you may find it hard to mix out again. Be notified."

"Your self-confidence," Amalfi said, "is misplaced. Recorded."

The image from Scranton contracted to a bright point and vanished. The Mayor said once:

"Chris, do you know either of those guys?"

"Both of them, sir. The first one's a small-time thug named Barney. I think he was the one who killed my brother's dog when I was impressed, but I didn't see who did it."

"I know the type. Go ahead."

"The other one is Frank Lutz. He was the city manager when I was aboard. It looks as if he still is."

"What's a city manager? Never mind, I'll ask the machines. All right. He looks dangerous; is he?"

"Yes, sir, he is. He's smart and he's tricky-and he has no more feeling than a snake."

"Sociopath," Amalfi said. "Thought so. One more question: Does he know you?"

Chris thought hard before answering. Lutz had seen him only once, and had never had to think about him as an individual again-thanks to the lifesaving intervention of Frad Haskins. "Sir, he just might, but I'd say not."

"Okay. Give the details to the City Fathers and let them calculate the probabilities. Meanwhile we'll take no chances. Thanks, Chris. Joel, come topside, will you?"

"Yes, sir." Anderson waited until he heard the Mayor's circuit cut out. Then his image, too, seemed to be staring directly at Chris. In fact, it was.

"Chris, did you understand what Amalfi meant about taking no chances?"

"Uh-no, not exactly."

"He meant that we're to keep you out of this Lutz's sight. In other words, no deFord expeditions on this job. Is that clear?"

It was all too clear.

The Argus system was well named: It was not far inside a crowded and beautiful cluster of relatively young stars, so that the nights on its planet had indeed a hundred eyes, like the Argus of the myth. The youth of the cluster went far toward explaining the presence of Scranton, for like all third-generation stars, the sun of Argus was very rich in metals, and so were its planets.

Of these there were only a few-just seven, to be exact, of which only the three habitable ones had been given numbers, and only Argus III actually colonized; II was suitable only for Arabs, and IV for Eskimos. The other four planets were technically of the gas giant class, but they were rather ,undernourished giants: the largest of them was about the size of Sol's Neptune. The closeness of the stars in the cluster to each other had swept up much of the primordial gas before planet formation had gotten a good start; the Argus system was in fact the largest yet to be encountered in the cluster.

Argus III, as the city droned down over it, looked heart-stoppingly like Pennsylvania. Chris began to feel a little sorry for the coming dispossession of Scranton-of which he had no doubts whatsoever-for surely the planet must have provided an intolerable temptation. It was mountainous over most of its land area, which was considerable; water was confined to many thousands of lakes, and a few small and intensely salty seas It was also heavily wooded-almost entirely with conifers, or plants much like them, for evolution here had not yet gotten as far as a flowering plant. The firlike trees had thick boles and reared up hundreds of feet. noble monsters with their many shoulders hunched, as they had to be to bear their own weight in the two-G gravitation of this metal-heavy planet. The first sound Chris heard on Argus III after the city grounded was the explosion of a nearby seed cone, as loud as a crack of thunder. One of the seeds broke a window on the thirtieth floor of the McGraw-Hill Greenhouse, and the startled staff there had had to hack it to bits with fire axes to stop its germinating on the rug.

Under these circumstances it hardly mattered where the city settled; there was iron everywhere' and conversely there was no place on the planet which would be out of eavesdropping or of missile range of Scranton, to 'the mutual inconvenience of both parties. Neverthe1ess, Amalfi chose a site with great care, one just over the horizon from the great scar in the ground Scranton had made during its fumbled mining attempt and with the highest points of an Allegheny-like range reared up between the two Okies. Only then did the machinery begin to rumble out into the forests.

Chris was beginning to practice thinking like Amalfi-not very confidently to be sure, since he had never seen the man, but at least it made a good game. The landing, Chris concluded tentatively, had been chosen mostly to prevent Scranton from seeing what the city was doing without sending over planes: and secondly to prevent foot traffic between the two cities. Probably it would never come to warfare between the two cities, anyhow, for nothing would be more likely to bring the cops to the scene in a hurry: and besides, it was already quite clear from New York's history that Amalfi actively hated anything that did the city damage, whether it was bombs or only rust.

In the past, his most usual strategy had been to outsit the enemy. If that failed, he tried to outperform them. As a last resort, he tried to bring them into conflict with themselves. There were no pure cases of any of these policies on record.'-every example was a mixture, and a complicated one-but these three flavorings were the strongest, and usually one was far more powerful than the other two. When Amalfi salted his dish, you could hardly taste the pepper or the mustard.

Not everyone could eat it thereafter, either: there were, Chris suspected, more subtle schools of Okie cookery. But that was how Amalfi 'did it, and he was the only chef the city had. Thus far, the city had survived him, which was the only test that counted with the citizens and the City Fathers.

On Argus III, it seemed, Amalfi's hope was to starve Scranton out by outperforming it. The city had the contract; Scranton had lost it. The city could do the job; Scranton had made a mess of it, and left behind a huge yellow scar around its planetfall which might not heal for a century. And while New York worked and Scranton starved-here was where a faint pinch of outsittery was added to the broth-Scranton couldn't carry through on its desperate hope of seizing Argus III as a new home planet; though the Argidae could not yell for the cops at the first sign-or the last-of such a piracy, New York could and would. Okie solidarity was strong, and included a firm hatred of the cops . .. but it did not extend to encouraging another incident like Thor V, or bucking the cops against another city like IMT. Even the outlaw must protect himself against the criminally insane, especially if they seem to be on his side.

Okay; if that was what Amalfi planned, so be it. There was nothing that Chris could say about it, anyhow. Amalfi was the mayor, and he had the citizens and the City Fathers behind him. Chris was only a youngster and a passenger.

But he knew one1 thing about the plan that neither Amalfi nor any other New Yorker could know, except himself:

It was not going to work.

He knew Scranton; the city didn't. If this was how Amalfi planned to proceed against Frank Lutz, it would fail.

But was he reading Amalfi's mind aright? That was probably the first question. After several days of worrying-which worsened his school record drastically-he took the question to the only person he knew who had ever seen Amalfi: his guardian.

"I can't tell you what Amalfi's set us up to do, you aren't authorized to know," the perimeter sergeant said gently. "But you've done a lot of good guessing. As far as you've guessed, Chris, you're pretty close."

Carla banged a coffee cup angrily into a saucer. "Pretty close? Joel, all this male expertise is a pain in the neck.

Chris is right and-you know it. Give him a break and tell him so."

"I'm not authorized," Anderson said doggedly, but from him that was tantamount to an admission. "Besides, Chris is wrong on one point. We can't sit there forever, just to prevent this tramp from taking over Argus Three. Sooner' or later we'll have to be on our own way, and we can't overstay our contract, either-we've got Violations of our own on our docket that we care about, whether Scranton cares about Violations or not. We have a closing date that we mean to observe-and that makes the problem much stiffer."

"I see it does," Chris said diffidently. "But at least I understood part of it. And it seems to me that there are two big holes in it-and I just hope I'm wrong about those."

"Holes?" the perimeter sergeant said. "Where? What are they?"

"Well, first of all, they're probably pretty desperate over there, or if they aren't now, they soon will be. The fact that they're in this part of space at all, instead of wherever it was the Mayor directed them, back when I came on board here, shows that something went wrong with their first job, too."

Anderson snapped a switch on his chair. "Probability?" he said to the surrounding air.

"SEVENTY-TWO PER CENT." the air said back, making Chris start. He still had not gotten used to the idea that the City Fathers' overheard everything one said, everywhere and all the time; among many other things, the city was their laboratory in human psychology, which in turn enabled them to answer such questions as Anderson had just asked.

"Well, score another for you," the sergeant said in a troubled voice.

"But I hadn't quite gotten to my point yet, sir. The thing is, now this job has gone sour on them too, so they must be awfully low on supplies. No matter how good our strategy is, it has to 'assume that the other side is going to react logically. But desperate men almost never behave logically: look at German strategy in the last year of World War Two, for instance."

"Never heard of it," Anderson admitted. "But it seems to make sense. What's the other hole?"

"The other one is really only a guess," Chris said. "It's based on what I know about Frank Lutz, and I only saw him twice, and heard one of his aides talk about him. But I don't think he'd ever allow anybody to outbluff him; he'd always fight first. He has to prove he's the toughest guy in any situation, or his goose is cooked-somebody else'll take over. It's always like that in a thug society-look at the history of the Kingdom of Naples, or Machiavelli's Florence."

"I'm beginning to suspect you're just inventing these examples," Anderson said, frowning blackly. "But again, it does make a certain amount of sense-and nobody but you knows even a little about this man Lutz. Supposing you're right; what could we do about it that we're not doing now?"

"You could use the desperation," Chris said eagerly. "If Lutz and his gang are desperate, then the ordinary citizen must be on the edge of smashing things up. And I'm sure they don't have any 'citizens' in our sense of the word, because the aide I mentioned before let slip that they were short on the drugs. I think he meant me to overhear him, but it didn't mean anything to me at the time. The man on-the street must hate the gang even in good times. We could use them to turn Lutz out."

"How?" Anderson said, with the air of a man posing a question he knows to be unanswerable.

"I don't know exactly. It'd have to be done more or less by feel. But I used to have at least two friends over there, one of them with constant access to Lutz. If he's still around and I could sneak over there and' get in touch with him—"

Anderson held up a hand and sighed. "I was kind of afraid you were going to trot out something like that. Chris, when are we going to cure you of this urge to go junketing? You know what Amalfi said about that"

"Circumstances alter cases," Carla put in.

"Yes, but-oh, all right, all right, I'll go one step farther, at least." Once more he snapped the switch, and said to the air: "Comments?"

"WE ADVISE AGAINST SUCH A VENTURE, SERGEANT ANDERSON. THE CHANCE THAT MISTER DEFORD WOULD BE RECOGNIZED IS PROHIBITIVELY HIGH."

"There, you see?" Anderson said. "Amalfi would ask them the same question. He ignores their advice more often than not, but in this case what they say is just what he's already decided himself."

"Okay," Chris said, not very much surprised, "It's a pretty fuzzy sort of idea, I'll admit. But it was the only one I had."

"There's a lot to it. I'll tell the Mayor your two points, and suggest that we try to do something to stir up the animals over there. Maybe he'll think of another way of tackling that. Cheer up, Chris; it's a darned good thing you told me all this, so you shouldn't feel bad if a small part of what you said gets rejected. You can't win them all, you know."

"I know," Chris said. "But you can try."

If Amalfi thought of any better idea for "stirring up the animals" in Scranton, Chris did not hear of it; and if he tried it, obviously it had no significant effect. While the city worked, Scranton sat sullenly where it was, ominously silent, while New York's contract termination date drew closer and closer. Poor and starving though it must have been, Scranton had no intention of being outsat at the game of playing for so rich a planet' as Argus III; if Amalfi wanted Scranton off the planet, he was going to have to throw it off-or call for the cops. Frank Lutz was behaving pretty much as Chris had predicted, at least so far.

Then, in the last week of the contract, the roof fell in.

Chris got the news, as usual, from his guardian. "It's your friend Piggy," he said wrathfully. "He had the notion that he could pretend to turn his coat, worm his way into Scranton's government, and then pull off some sort of coup. Of course Lutz didn't believe him, and now we're all in the soup."

Chris was torn between shock and laughter. "But how'd he get there?"

"That's one of the worst parts of it. Somehow he sold two women on the idea of being deadly female spies, concubine type, as if a thug government ever had any shortage of women, especially in a famine! One of them is a sixteen-year-old girl whose family is spitting flames, for every good reason. The other is a thirty-year-old passenger who's the sister of a citizen, and he's one of Irish Dulany's fighter pilots. The sister, the City Fathers tell us now, is a borderline psychotic, which is why she never made citizenship herself; but they authorized the brother to teach her to fly because it seemed to help her clinically. She stole the boarding-squad plane for the purpose, and by the time we got the whole story from the machines, it was all over."

"You mean that the City Fathers heard Piggy and the others planning all this?"

"Sure they did. They hear everything-you know that."

"But why didn't they tell somebody?" Chris demanded.

"They're under orders never to volunteer information. And a good thing too, almost all the time; without such an order they'd be jabbering away on all channels every minute of the day-they have no judgment. Now Lutz is demanding ransom. We'd pay any reasonable sum, but what he wants is the planet-you were right again, Chris, logic has gone out the window over there-and we can't give him what we don't own, and we wouldn't if we could. Piggy has gotten us into a war, and not even the machines can see what the consequences will be."

Chris blew' out his breath in a long gust. "What are we going to do?"

"Can't tell you."

"No, I don't want to know about tactics or anything like that. Just a general idea. Piggy is a friend of mine-it sounds silly right now, but I really like him."