Cities in Flight (29 page)
"We got rid of him. The subject is closed."
Chris shied off from it hastily. "What happens now?"
"There's still a little mopping up to do, and we could use some help. If you called your friends now, we could let them in-as long as Amalfi doesn't send a whole boarding squad."
"No, just two men."
Frad nodded. "Two good men in full armor should flatten things out in a day or so at the most." He hailed a passing Tin Cab. As it settled obediently beside them, Chris saw that there were several inarguable bullet holes in it. How old they were was of course impossible to know, but it was Chris's guess that they hadn't been there for as much as a week. "I'll get you to the radio and you can take it from there. Then it'll be time to get the deal drawn up."
And that would be the moment that Chris had been dreading above all others-the moment when he would have to talk to Anderson and Amalfi, and tell them what he had done, what he had started, what he had committed them to.
There was no doubt in his mind as to 'how he felt about it. He was scared.
"Come on, hop in," Frad said. "What are you waiting for?"
The city was still administered, with due regard for tradition, from City Hall, but its control room was in the mast of the Empire State Building. It was here that Amalfi received them all-Chris, Frad, and Sgts. Anderson and Dulany-for he had been occupying it around the clock while the alert had been on, as officially it still was.
It was a marvelous place, jammed to the ceilings with screens, lights, meters, automatic charts, and scores of devices Chris could not even put a name to; but Chris was more interested in the Mayor. Since he was at the moment' talking to Frad, Chris had plenty of opportunity to study him.
The fabulous Amalfi had turned out to be a complete surprise. Chris could not say any more just what kind of man he had pictured in his mind. Something more stalwart, lean and conventionally heroic, perhaps-but certainly not a short barrel-shaped man with a bull neck, a totally bald head and hands so huge that they looked as though they could crush rocks. The oddest touch of all was the cigar, held in the powerful fingers with almost feminine delicacy, and drawn on with invariable relish. Nobody else in the city smoked-nobody else-because there was no place in it to grow tobacco. The cigar, then, was more than a badge of office; it was a symbol of the wealth of the city, like the snow imported from the mountains by the Roman emperors, and Amalfi treated it like a treasure, not a habit. When he was thinking, he had an odd way of holding it up and looking at it, as though everything that was going on in his head was concentrated in its glowing coal.
He was saying to Frad: "The arrangements with the machinery are cumbersome, but not difficult in principle. We can lend you our Brood assembly until she replicates herself; then you reset the daughter machine, feed her scrap, and out come City Fathers to the number that you'll need-probably about a third as many as we carry, and it'll take maybe ten years. You can use the time feeding them data, because in the beginning they'll be idiots except for the computation function.
"In the meantime we'll refigure your job problem on our own machines. Since we'll trust the answer, and since Chris says you're a man of your word, that means that of course we'll underwrite your contract with Argidae."
"Many thanks," Frad said.
"Not necessary," Amalfi rumbled. "For value received. In fact we got more than we're paying for-we learned something from you. Which brings us to our drastic friend Mr. deFord." He swung on Chris, who tried unsuccessfully to swallow his heart. "I suppose you're aware, Chris, that this is D-day for you: your eighteenth birthday."
"Yes, sir. I sure am."
"Well. I've got a job for you if you want it. I've been studying it ever since it was first mentioned to me, and all I can say is, it serves you right."
Chris swallowed again. The Mayor studied the cigar judiciously.
"It calls for a very odd combination of skills and character traits. Taking the latter first, it needs initiative, boldness, imagination, a willingness to improvise and take short-cuts, and an ability to see the whole of a complex situation at a glance. But at the same time, it needs conservative instincts, so that even the boldest ideas and acts tend to be those that save men, materials, time, money. What class of jobs does that make you think of so far?"
"MILITARY GENERAL OFFICERS," the City Fathers promptly announced.
"I wasn't talking to you," Amalfi growled. He was plainly irritated, but it seemed to Chris an old irritation, almost a routine one. "Chris?'
"Well, sir, they're right, of course. I might even have thought of it myself, though I can't swear to it. At least all the great generals follow that pattern."
"Okay. As for the skills, a lot of them are required, but only one is cardinal. The man has got to be a first-class cultural morphologist."
Chris recognized the term, from his force feeding in Spengler. It denoted a scholar who could look at any culture at any stage in its development, relate to it all other cultures at similar stages, and come up with specific predictions of how these people would react to a given proposal or event. It surely wouldn't be a skill a general would ever be likely to have a use for, even if he had the time to develop it.
"You've got the character traits, that's plain to see-including the predisposition toward the skill. Most Okies have that, but in nowhere near the degree you seem to. The skill itself, of course, can only emerge with time and practice ... but you'll have lots of time. The City Fathers say five years' probation.
"As for the city, we never had such a job on the roster before, but a study of Scranton and some more successful towns convinces us that we need it. Will you take it?"
Chris's head was whirling with a wild, humming mixture of pride and bafflement. "Excuse me, Mr. Mayor-but just what is it?"
"City manager."
Chris stared at Sgt. Anderson, but his guardian looked as stunned as Chris felt. Alter a moment, however, he winked solemnly. Chris could not speak; but at last he managed to nod his head. It was all the management he was capable of, right now.
"Good. The City Fathers predicted you would, so you were started on the drugs in your first meal of today. Welcome to citizenship, Mr. deFord."
Even at this moment, however, a part of Chris's mind seemed curiously detached. He was thinking of the original reason he had wanted long life: in the hope that some day, somehow, he might yet get back home. It had never occurred to him that by the time that happened, there would be nothing left back there that he could call his own. Even now, Earth was unthinkably remote, not only in space, but in his heart.
His definition of "home" had changed. He had won long life; but with it, new ties and new obligations; not an eternal childhood on Earth, but a life for-the stars.
He wrenched his attention back to the control room. "What about Piggy?" he said curiously. "I talked to him on the way back. He seems to have learned a lot."
"Too late," Amalfi said, his voice inflexibly stern. "He wrote his own ticket. It's a passenger ticket. He's got boldness and initiative, all right-all of it of the wrong kind, totally untempered by judgment or imagination. The same kind of pitfall will always lie ahead of you, Chris; that, too, is an aspect of the job. It'd be wise not to forget it."
Chris nodded again, but the warning could not dampen his spirits now; for this was for some reason the highest moment of them all—"the moment when Frad Haskins, the new city manager of Scranton, shook his hand and said huskily:
"Colleague, let's talk business."
To John W. Campbell, Jr.
SPACE flight got its start as a war weapon amid the collapse of the great Western culture of Earth. The invention of Muir's tape-mass engine carried early explorers out as far as Jupiter; and gravity was discovered-though it had been postulated centuries before-by the 2018 Jovian expedition, the last space flight with Muir engines which was completed on behalf of the West before that culture's final extinction. The building, by remote control, of the Bridge on the face of Jupiter itself, easily the most enormous (and in most other respects the most useless) engineering project ever undertaken by man, had made possible direct, close measurements of Jupiter's magnetic field. The measurements provided final confirmation of the Blackett-Dirac equations. which as early as 1948 had proposed a direct relationship between magnetism, gravitation, and the rate of spin of any mass.
Up to that time, nothing had been done with the Blackett-Dirac hypothesis, which remained a toy of pure mathematicians. Then, abruptly, the hypothesis and the mathematicians had their first innings; From the many pages of symbols and the mumbled discussions of the possible field-strength of a single electronic pole in rotation, the Dillon Wagonner gravitron polarity generator-almost immediately dubbed the "spindizzy" in honor of what it did to electron rotation-sprang as if full-born. The overdrive, the meteor screen, and antigravity had all arrived in one compact package labeled "G 2(PC/BU)2."
Every culture has its characteristic mathematic, in which its topographers can see its inevitable social form. This expression, couched in the algebra of the Magian culture, pointing toward the matrix mechanics of the new Nomad Era, remained essentially a Western discovery. At first its major significance seemed to lie in the fact that it was rooted in a variation of the value of C, the velocity of light, as a limit. The West used the spindizzy to scatter the nearby stars with colonists during the last fifty years of its existence; but even then, it did not realize the power of the weapon that it held in its faltering hands. Essentially, the West never found out that the spindizzy could lift anything, as well as protect it and drive it faster than light.
In the succeeding centuries, the whole concept of space flight was almost forgotten. The new culture on Earth, that narrow planar despotism called by historiographers the Bureaucratic State, did not think that way. Space flight had been a natural, if late, outcome of Western thought patterns, which had always been ambitious for the infinite. The Soviets, however, were opposed so bitterly to the very idea that they would not even allow their fiction writers to mention it. Where the West had soared from the rock of Earth like a sequoia, the Soviets spread like lichens over the planet, tightening their grip, satisfied to be at the bases of the pillars of sunlight the West had sought to ascend.
This was the way the Bureaucratic State had been born and had triumphed, and it was the way it. meant to maintain its holdings. There had never been any direct military conquest of the West by the Soviets. Indeed, by 2105, the date usually assigned to the fall of the West, any such battle would have depopulated the Earth almost overnight. Instead, the West helped conquer itself, a long and painful process which many people foresaw but no one was able to halt. In its anxiety to prevent infiltration by the, enemy, the West developed thought controls of its own, which grew ever tighter. In the end, the two opposing cultures could no longer be told apart-and since the Soviets had had far more practice at running this kind of monolithic government than had the West, Soviet leadership became a bloodless fact.
The ban on thinking about space flight extended even to the speculations of physicists. The omnipresent thought police were instructed in the formulae of ballistics and other disciplines of astronautics, and could detect such work-Unearthly Activities, it was called-long before it might have reached the proving-stand stage.
The thought police, however, could not ban atomic research because the new state's power rested upon it. It had been from study of the magnetic moment of the electron that the Blackett equation had emerged. The new state had suppressed the spindizzy-it was too good an escape route-and the thought police had never been told that the optimal equation was one of those in the "sensitive area." The Soviets did not dare let even that much be known about it.
Thus, despite all of the minority groups purged or "reeducated" by the Bureaucratic State, the pure mathematicians went unsuspected about the destruction of that state, innocent even in their own minds of revolutionary motives. The spindizzy was rediscovered, quite inadvertently, in the nuclear physics laboratories of the Thorium Trust.
The discovery spelled the doom of the flat culture, as the leveling menace of the nuclear reactor and the Solar Phoenix had cut down the soaring West. Space flight returned. For a while, cautiously, the spindizzy was installed only in new spaceships, and there was another period-comically brief-of interplanetary exploration. The tottering edifice fought to retain its traditional balance. But the center of gravity had shifted. The waste inherent in using the spindizzy only in a ship could not be disguised: There was no longer any reason why a man-carrying vehicle to cross space needed to be small, cramped, organized fore-and-aft, penurious of weight. Once antigravity was an engineering reality, it was no longer . necessary to design ships specially for space travel, for neither mass nor aerodynamic lines meant anything any more. The most massive and awkward object could be lifted and hurled off the Earth, and carried almost any distance. Whole cities, if necessary, could be moved. Many were. The factories went first; they toured Earth, from one valuable mineral lie to another, and then went farther aloft. The exodus began. Nothing could be done to prevent it, for by that time the whole trend was obviously in the best interests of the State. The mobile factories changed Mars into the Pittsburgh of the solar system; the spindizzy had lifted the mining equipment and the refining plants bodily to bring life back to that lichen-scabbed ball of rust. The blank where Pittsburgh itself had been was a valley of slag and ashes. The great plants of the Steel Trust gulped meteors and chewed into the vitals of satellites. The Aluminum Trust, the Germanium Trust, and the Thorium Trust put their plants aloft to mine the planets.
But the Thorium Trust's Plant No. 8 never came back. The revolution against the planar culture began with that simple fact. The first of the Okie cities soared away from the solar system, looking for work among the colonists left stranded by the ebb tide of Western civilization. The new culture began- among these nomad cities; and when it was all over, the Bureaucratic State, against its own will, had done what it had long promised to do "when the people were ready"-it had withered away. The Earth that it once bad owned, right down to the last grain of sand, was almost deserted. Earth's nomad cities-migratory workers, hobos, Okies-had become her inheritors.
Primarily the spindizzy had made this possible; but it could not have maintained it- without heavy contributions from two other social factors. One of these was longevity. The conquest of so-called "natural" death had been virtually complete by the time the technicians on the Jovian Bridge had confirmed the spindizzy principle, and the two went together like hand in spacemitt. Despite the fact that the spindizzy would drive a ship-or a city-at speeds enormously faster than that of light, interstellar flight still consumed finite time. The vastness of the galaxy was sufficient to make long flights consume lifetimes, even at top spindizzy speed.
But when death yielded to the anti-agathic drugs, there was no longer any such thing as a "lifetime" in the old sense.
The other factor was economic: The rise of the metal germanium as the jinn of solid-state physics. Long before flight into deep space became a fact, the metal had assumed a fantastic value on Earth,, The opening of the interstellar frontier drove its price down to a manageable level, and gradually it emerged as the basic, stable monetary standard of space trade. Nothing else could have kept the nomads in business.
And so the Bureaucratic State had fallen; but the social structure did not collapse entirely. Earth laws, though much changed, survived, and not entirely to the disadvantage of the Okies. The migrant cities found worlds that refused them landing permits. Others allowed them to land, but exploited them mercilessly. The cities fought back, but they were not efficient fighting machines. Steam shovels, by and large, had been more characteristic of the West than tanks, but in a fight between the two, the outcome was predictable; that situation never changed. It was, of course, a waste to bottle a spindizzy in so small an object as a spaceship, but a war vessel is meant to waste power-the more, the more deadly. The Earth police put the rebel cities down; and then, in self-protection, because the cities were needed, Earth passed laws protecting the cities.
Thus the Earth police held their jurisdiction, but the hegemony of Earth was weak, for the most part. There were many corners of the galaxy which knew Earth only as a legend, a green myth floating unknown thousands of parsecs away in space, known and ineluctable thousands of years away iii history. Some of them remembered much more vividly the now-broken tyranny of Vega, and did not know-some of them never had known-even the name of the little planet that had broken that tyranny.
Earth itself became a garden planet, bearing only one city worth noticing, the sleepy capitol of a galaxy. Pittsburgh valley bloomed, and rich honeymooners went there to frolic. Old bureaucrats went to Earth to die.
Nobody else went there at all.