Cities in Flight (31 page)

The view of the ship and the blue-green planet was wiped away, and a pleasant-faced young man looked out at them from the screen. "How do you do?" he said formally. The question didn't seem to mean anything, but his tone indicated that he didn't expect an answer to it anyhow. "I am speaking to the commanding officer of the . .. the flying fortress?"

"In effect" Amalfi said. "I'm the mayor here, and this gentleman is the city manager; we're responsible for different aspects of command. Who are you?"

"Captain Savage of the Federal Navy of Utopia," the young man said. He did not smile. "May we have permission to approach your fort or city or whatever it is? We'd like to land a representative.”

Amalfi snapped the audio switch and looked at Hazleton. "What do you think?" he said. The Utopian officer politely and pointedly did not watch the movements of his lips.

"It should be safe enough. Still, that's a big ship, even if it is a museum piece. They could as easily send their man in a life craft."

Amalfi opened the circuit again. "Under the circumstances, we'd just as soon you stayed where you are," he said. "You'll understand, I'm sure, Captain. However, you may send a gig if you like: your representative is welcome here. Or we will exchange hostages—"

Savage's hand moved across the screen as if brushing the suggestion away. "Quite unnecessary, sir. We heard the interstellar craft warn you away. Any enemy of theirs must be a friend of ours. We are hoping that you can shed some light on what is at best a confused situation."

"That's possible," Amalfi said. "If that is all for now

"Yes sir. End of transmission."

"Out."

Hazleton arose. "Suppose I meet this emissary. Your office?"

"Okay."

The city manager went out, and Amalfi, after a few moments, followed him, locking up the control tower. The city was in an orbit and would be stable until the time came to put it in flight again. On the street, Amalfi flagged a cab.

It was a fairly long haul from the control tower, which was on Thirty-fourth Street and The Avenue, down to Bowling Green, where City Hall was; and Amalfi lengthened it a bit more by giving the Tin Cabby a route that would have put folding money into the pocket of a live one of another, forgotten age. He settled back, bit the end off a hydroponic cigar, and tried to remember what he had heard about the Hamiltonians. Some sort of a republican sect, they'd been, back in the very earliest days of space travel. There'd been a public furor . . . recruiting . . . government disapproval and then suppression . . . hm-m-m. It was all very dim, and Amalfi was not at all sure that he hadn't mixed it up with some other event in Terrestrial history.

But there had been an exodus of some sort. Shiploads of Hamiltonians going out to colonize, to set up model planets. Come to think of it, one of the nations then current in the West on Earth had had a sort of Hamiltonianism of its own, something called a democracy. It had all died down after a while, but it had left traces. Nearly every major political wave after space flight had its vestige somewhere in the inhabited part of the galaxy.

Utopia must have been colonized very early. The Hruntan Imperials, had they arrived first, would have garrisoned both habitable planets as a matter of course.

It was a little easier to remember the Hruntan Empire, since it was of much more recent vintage than the Hamiltonians; but there was less to remember. The outer margins of exploration had spawned gimcrack empires by the dozen in the days when Earth seemed to be losing her grip. Alois Hrunta had merely been the most successful of the would-be emperors of space. His territory had expanded as far as the limits of communication would allow an absolute autocracy to spread, and then had been destroyed almost before he was assassinated, broken into duchies by his squabbling sons. Eventually the duchies fell in

The cab began to settle, and the facade of City Hall drifted past Amalfi's cab window. The once-golden motto-MOW YOUR LAWN, LADY?-looked greener than ever in the light of the giant planet. Amalfi sighed. These political squabbles were dull, and they were guaranteed to make a major project out of the simple matter of earning a square meal.

The first thing that Amalfi noticed upon entering his office Was that Hazleton looked uncomfortable. This was practically a millennial event. Nothing had ever disturbed Hazleton before; he was very nearly the perfect citizen of space: resilient, resourceful, and almost impossible to surprise-or bluff. There was nobody else in the office but a girl whom Amalfi did not recognize; probably one of the parliamentary secretaries who handled many of the intramural affairs of the city.

"What's the matter, Mark? Where's the Utopian contact man?"

"There," Hazleton said. He didn't exactly point, but there was no doubt about his meaning. Amalfi felt his eyebrows tobogganing over his broad skull. He turned and studied the girl.

She was quite pretty: black hair, with blue lights in it; gray eyes, very frank, and a little amused; a small body, well made, somewhat on the sturdy side. She was dressed in the most curious garment Amalfi had ever seen-she had a sort of sack over her head, with holes for her arms and neck, and the cloth was pulled in tightly above her waist. Her hips and her legs down to just below her knees were covered by a big tube of black fabric, belted at the top. Her legs were sheathed into token stockings of some sleazily woven, quite transparent stuff. Little flecks of color spotted the sack, and around her neck she had a sort of scarf-no, it wasn't a scarf, it was a ribbon-what was it, anyhow? Amalfi wondered if even deFord could have named it.

After a moment the girl began to seem impatient of his inspection, and he turned his head away and continued walking toward his desk. Behind him, her voice said gently, "I didn't mean to cause a sensation, sir. Evidently you didn't expect a woman . .. ?"

Her accent was as archaic as her clothes; it was almost Eliotian. Amalfi sat down and collected his scattered impressions. ,

"No, we didn't," he said. "However, we have women in positions of authority here. I suppose we were misled by

Earth custom, which doesn't allow women much hand in the affairs of the military. You're welcome, anyhow. What can we do for you?"

"May I sit down? Thank you. First of all, you can tell us where all these vicious fighting ships come from. Evidently they know you."

"Not personally," Amalfi said. "They know the Okie cities as a class, that's all. They're the Earth police."

The Utopian girl's piquant face dimmed subtly, as though she had expected the answer and had been fighting to believe it would not be given.

"That's what they told us," she said. "We . . . we couldn't accept it. Why are they attacking us then?"

"It was bound to happen sooner or later," Amalfi said as gently as possible. "Earth is incorporating the independent planets as a matter of policy. Your enemies the Hruntans will be taken in, too. I don't suppose we can explain why very convincingly. We aren't exactly in the confidence of Earth's government."

"Oh," the girl said. "Then perhaps you will help us? This immense fortress of yours-“

"I beg your pardon." Hazleton said, smiling ruefully. "The city is no fortress, I assure you. We are only lightly armed. However, we may be able to help you in other ways-frankly, we're anxious to make a deal."

Amalfi looked at him under his eyelids. It was incautious, and unlike Hazleton, to discuss the city's armament or lack of it with an officer who had just come on board from a strange battleship.

The girl said, "What do you want? If you can teach us how those-those police ships fly, and how you keep your city aloft—"

"You don't have the spindizzy?" Amalfi said. "But you must have had it once, otherwise you'd never have got way out here from Earth."

"The secret of interstellar flight has been lost for nearly a century. We still have the first ship our ancestors flew in our museum; but the motor is a mystery. It doesn't seem to do anything."

Amalfi found himself thinking: Nearly a century? Is that supposed to be a long time? Or do the Utopians lack the anti-agathic drugs, too? But ascomycin was supposed to have been discovered more than half a century before the Hamiltonian Exodus. Curiouser and curiouser.

Hazleton was smiling again. "We can show you What the spindizzy does," he said. "It is too simple to yield its secret lightly. As for us-we need supplies, raw materials. Oil, most of all. Have you that?"

The girl nodded. "Utopia is very, rich in oil, and we haven't needed it in quantity for nearly twenty-five years- ever since we rediscovered molar valence." Amalfi pricked up his ears again. The Utopians lacked the spindizzy and the anti-agathics-but they had something called molar valence. The term told its own story: anyone who could modify molecular bonding beyond the usual adhesion effects would have no need for mechanical lubricants like oil. And if the Utopians thought they had only rediscovered such a technique, so much the better.

"As for us, we can use anything you can give us," the girl went on. Abruptly she looked very weary in spite of her healthy youth. "All our lives we have been fighting these Hruntan barbarians and waiting for the day when help would arrive from Earth. Now Earth has come-and its hand is against both worlds! Things must have changed a great deal."

"The fault doesn't lie in change," Hazleton said quietly, "but in that you people have failed to change. Traveling away from Earth for us is very like traveling in time: different distances from the home planet have different year-dates. Stars remote from Earth, like yours, are historical backwaters. And the situation becomes complicated when the historical periods interpenetrate, as your Hamiltonian era and the Hruntan Empire have interpenetrated. The two cultures freeze each other the moment they come in conflict, and when history catches up with them-well, naturally it's a shock."

"On a more practical subject," Amalfi said, "we'd prefer to pick our own landing area. If we can send technicians to your planet in advance, they'll find a lie for us."

"A lie?"

"A mining site. That's to be permitted, I presume?"

"I don't know," the girl said uncertainly. "We're very short on metals, steel especially. We have to salvage all our scrap—"

"We use almost no iron or steel," Amalfi assured her. "We reclaim what we need, as you do-steel's nearly indestructible, after all. What we're after is germanium and some other rare-earth metals for instruments. You ought to have plenty of those to spare." Amalfi saw no point in adding that germanium was the base of the present universal coinage. What he had said was true as far as it went, and in dealing with these backward planets, there were always five or six facts best suppressed until after the city had left.

"May I use your phone?"

Amalfi moved away from the desk, then had to come back again as the girl dabbed helplessly at the 'visor controls. In a moment she was outlining the conversation to the Utopian captain. Amalfi wondered if the Hruntans understood English; not that he was worried about the present interchange being overheard-the giant planet would block that most effectively, since the Utopians used ordinary radio rather than ultraphones or Dirac communicators-but it was of the utmost importance, if Hazleton's scheme was to be made workable, that the Hruntans should have heard and understood the warning the Earth police had issued to the city. It was a point that would have to be checked as unobtrusively as possible.

It might also be just as well to restrict sharply the technical information the city passed out in this star system. If the Hamiltonians-or the Hruntans-suddenly blossomed out with Bethe blasters, field bombs, and the rest of the modern arsenal (or what had been modern the last time the city had been able to update its files, not quite a century ago), the police would be unhappy. They would also know whom to blame. It was comforting to know that nobody in the city knew how to build a Canceller, at least. Amalfi had a sudden disquieting mental picture of a mob of Hruntan barbarians swarming out of this system in spindizzy-powered ships, hijacking their way back to an anachronistic triumph, snuffing out stars like candle flames as they went.

"It is agreed," the girl said. "Captain Savage suggests that I take your technicians back with me in the gig to save time. And is there also someone who understands the interstellar drive—"

"I'll go along," Hazleton said. "I know spindizzies as well as the next man."

"Nothing doing, Mark. I need you here. We've plenty of grease monkeys for that purpose. We can send them your man Webster; here's his chance to get off the city before we even touch ground." Amalfi spoke rapidly into the vacated 'visor. "There. You'll find the proper people waiting at your gig, young lady. If Captain Savage will phone us exactly one week from today and tell us where on Utopia we're to land, we'll be out of occultation with this gas planet, and will get the message."

There was a long silence after the Utopian girl had left. At last Amalfi said slowly, "Mark, there is no shortage of women in the city."

Hazleton flushed. "I'm sorry, boss. I knew it was impossible directly the words were out of my mouth. Still, I think we may be able to do something- for them; the Hruntan Empire was a pretty nauseating sort of state, if I remember correctly."