Cities in Flight (35 page)

She came forward to the railing and took his arm, looking up at him. Her face was so full of puzzlement and hurt that Amalfi had to look away; that look reminded him of too many things best forgotten-some of them not exactly remote. He heard her say, "Do you-do you want me to go, Mark? You're staying with the city?"

"Yes," Hazleton muttered. "I mean, no. I've made a terrific mess of things, it appears. Maybe I can help now-maybe not. But I've got to stay. You'd be better off with your own people—"

"Mayor Amalfi," the girl said. Amalfi turned unwillingly. "You said when I first met you that there was a place for women in this city. Do you remember?"

"I remember," Amalfi said. "But you wouldn't like our politics, I'm sure. This is not a Hamiltonian state. It's stable, self-sufficient, static-a beachcomber by the seas of history. We're Okies. Not a nice name."

The girl said, "It may not always be so."

"I'm afraid it will. Even the people don't change much, Dee. I suspect that you haven't been told this before, but the great majority of them are well over a century old. I myself am nearly seven hundred. And you would live as long if you joined us."

Dee's face was a study in mixed shock and incredulity, but she said doggedly, "I'll stay."

The sky began to pale slightly. No one spoke. Aloft, the stars were dimming, and there was no sign to show that a tiny fleet of ships was dwindling away into the boundless universe.

Hazleton cleared his throat. "What's for me to do, boss?" he said hoarsely.

"Plenty. I've been making do with Carrel, but though he's willing, he lacks experience. First of all, make us ready to take off at the very first notice. Then cudgel your brains to think up something to tell the Hruntans about this Utopian fleet. You can fancy up my excuse, or think up one of your own-I don't care which. You're better at that kind of thing than I ever was."

"So what's supposed to happen at noon?"

Amalfi grinned. He realized with a subdued shock that he felt good. Getting Hazleton back was like finding a flawed diamond that you'd thought you'd lost-the flaw was still there and would never go away, but still the diamond had been the cleanest-cutting tool in the house, and had had a certain sentimental value.

"It goes like this. Carrel sold the Hruntans on building a master friction-field generator for the whole planet-said it would make their machines consume less power, or some such nonsense. The plans he gave them call for a generator at least twice as powerful as the Hruntans think it is, and with nearly all the controls left off. It will run only one way: full positive. Tomorrow at noon they're scheduled to give it a trial run.

"In the meantime, there's a Hruntan named Schloss who probably has the machine tabbed for what it actually is, and we've set up the old double-knife trick to get him out of the picture. It's my guess that this should start a big enough rhubarb among the scientists to keep them from prying until it's too late. Since this whole deal looked as though it would work out the same way that the Utopian landing would have, I also called the cops according to your timetable and got a safe-conduct. Simple?"

Halfway through the explanation, Hazleton was far enough back to normal to begin looking amused. When it was over, he was chuckling.

"That's a honey," he said. "Still, I can see why you weren't too satisfied with Carrel. Amalfi, you're a prime bluffer. Telling me to go off with Savage in that dramatic fashion! Do you know that your fancy plot isn't going to come off?"

"Why, Mark?" Dee said. "It sounds perfect to me."

"It's clever, but it's full of loose ends. You have to look at these things like a dramatist; a climax that almost comes off is no climax. We'd better—"

In the bedroom, Amalfi's private phone chimed melodiously, and a neon bulb went on over the balcony doorway. Amalfi frowned and flicked a switch on the railing.

"Mr.- Mayor?" a concealed speaker said nervously. "Sorry to wake you up, but there's trouble. First of all, at least twenty ships were over here a while back; we were going to call you for that, but they went away on their own. But now we've got a sort of a refugee, a Hruntan who calls himself Doctor Schloss. He claims the other Hruntans are all out to get him and he wants to work for us. Shall I send him to Psych or what? It might just be true."

"Of course it's true," Hazleton said. "There's your first loose end, Amalfi."

The affair of Dr. Schloss proved difficult to untangle; Amalfi had not studied his man closely enough. Carrel's agent had done a thorough job of counterfeiting local politics. It was always preferable, when the city needed a man's death, to so arrange matters that the actual killing was done by an outsider, and in this case that had proven absurdly easy to arrange. There were four separate cliques within the scientific hierarchy of Gort, all of them undercutting each other with fanatical perseverance, like shipmates trying to do for each other by boring holes in the hull. In addition, the court itself did not trust Dr. Schloss, and took sides sporadically when the throat-cutting became overt.

It had been simple enough to set currents in motion which would sweep Dr. Schloss away, but Schloss had declined to be swept. The moment he became aware of any threat, he had come with disconcerting directness to the city.

"The trouble is," Carrel reported, "that he didn't realize what was flying until it was almost too late. He's a peculiarly sane character and would never dream that anybody was 'out to get him' until the knife actually pricked him."

Hazelton nodded. "It's my bet that it was the court itself that finally alarmed him-they wouldn't bother trying to sneak up on him."

"That's correct, sir."

"Which means that we'll have Bathless Hazca and his dandies here looking for him," Amalfi growled. "I don't suppose he bothered to cover his tracks. What are you going to do, Mark? We can't count on their starting the anti-friction fields early enough to get us out of this."

"No," Hazleton agreed. "Carrel, does your man still have contact with the group that was going to punch Schloss's ticket?"

"Sure."

"Have him rub out the top man in that group, then. The time is past for delicate measures."

"What do you propose to gain by that?" Amalfi asked.

"Time. Schloss has disappeared. Hazca may guess that he's come here, but most of the cliques will think he's been killed. This will look like a vengeance killing by some member of Schloss's group-he has no real clique of his own, of course, but there must be several men who thought they stood to gain by keeping him alive. We'll start a vendetta. Confusion is what counts in a fight like this."

"Perhaps so," Amalfi said. "In that case I'd better tackle Graf Nandor right away with a fistful of accusations and complaints. The more confusion, the more delay-and it's less than four hours to noon now. In the meantime, we'll have to hide Schloss as best we can, before he's spotted by one of Hazca's guards here. That invisibility machine in the old West Side subway tunnel seems like the best place ... do you remember the one? The Lyrans sold it to us, and it just whirled and blinked and buzzed and didn't do a thing."

"That was what my predecessor got shot for," Hazleton said. "Or was it for that fiasco on Epoch? But I know where the machine is, yes. I'll arrange to have the gadget do a little whirling and blinking-Hazca's soldiery is afraid of machinery and would never think of looking inside one that's working, even if they did suspect a fugitive inside it. Which they won't, I'm sure. And . . . gods of all stars, what was that?"

The long, terrifying metallic roar died away into a mutter. Amalfi was grinning.

"Thunder," he said. "Planets have a phenomenon called weather, Mark; a nasty habit of theirs. I think we're due for a storm."

Hazleton shuddered. "It makes me want to hide under the bed. Well, let's get to work."

He went out, with Dee trailing. Amalfi, reflecting on the merits of attack as a defensive measure, waved a cab up to the balcony and had himself ferried to the first setback of the. mid-town RCA building. He would have liked to have landed at the top, where the penthouse was, but the cornices of the building now bristled with pompoms and mesotron rifles; Graf Nandor was taking no chances.

The elevator operator was not allowed to take Amalfi beyond the seventieth floor. Swearing, he climbed the last five flights of steps; the blue rage he was working up was not going to be counterfeit by the time he reached the penthouse. At every landing he was inspected with insolent suspicion by lounging groups of soldiers.

There was music in the penthouse, and it reeked of the combination of perfume and unwashed bodies which was the personal trademark of Hruntan nobility. Nand6r was sprawled in a chair, surrounded by women, listening to a harpist sing a ballad of unspeakable obscenity in a quavering, emotionless voice. In one jeweled hand he held a heavy goblet half full of fuming Rigellian wine-it must have come from the city's stores, for the Hruntans had had no contact with Rigel for centuries-which he passed back and forth underneath his substantial nose, inhaling the vapors delicately.

He lifted his eyes over the rim of the goblet as Amalfi came in, but did not otherwise bother to acknowledge him. Amalfi felt his blood pressure mounting and his wrists growing cold and numb, and tried to control himself. It was all very well to be properly angry, but he needed some mastery over what he said and did.

"Well?" Nandor said at last.

"Are you aware of the fact that you've just escaped being blown into a rarified gas?" Amalfi demanded.

"Oh, my dear fellow, don't tell me you've just circumvented an assassination attempt on my behalf," Nandor said. His English seemed to have been picked up from a Liverpudlian-only the men of that Okie city spoke through their adenoids in that strange fashion. "Really, that's a bit thick."

"There were twenty-five Hamiltonian ships over the city," Amalfi said grimly. "We beat 'em off, but it was a close shave. Evidently the whole business didn't even wake you or your bosses up. What good are we going to be to you if you can't even protect us?"

Nandor looked alarmed. He pulled a mike from among the pillows and spoke into it for a moment in his own tongue. The answer was inaudible to Amalfi, but after it came, the Hruntan looked less anxious, though his face was still clouded.

"What are you selling me, my man?" he said querulously. "There was no battle. The ships dropped no bombs, did no damage; they have been pursued out as far as the police englobement."

"Does a deaf man recognize an argument?" Amalfi said. "And how do you dazzle a blind man? You people think that all weapons have to go 'bang!' to be deadly. If you'll look at our power boards, you'll see records of a million megawatt drain over one half hour at dawn-and we don't chew up energy at that rate making soup!"

"That's of no moment," the Graf murmured. "Such records can be faked, and there are a good many ways of consuming energy anyhow-or wasting it. Let us suppose instead that these ships who 'attacked' you landed a spy- eh? And that subsequently a Hruntan scientist, a traitor to his emperor, was taken from your city, perhaps in the hope of carrying him back to Utopia?"

His face darkened suddenly. "You interstellar tramps are childishly stupid. Obviously the Hamiltonian rabble hoped to rescue your city, and were frightened off by our warriors. Schloss may have gone with them-or he may be hiding in the city somewhere. We will have our answer directly."

He waved at the silent women, who crowded hastily out through the curtained doorway. "Do you care to tell me now where he is?"

"I keep no tabs on Hruntans," Amalfi said evenly. "Sorting garbage is no part of my duties."

Coolly Nandor threw the remainder of his wine in Amalfi's face. The fuming stuff turned his eye sockets into fire. With a roar he stumbled forward, groping for the Hruntan's throat. The man's laughter retreated from him mockingly; then he felt heavy hands dragging his arms behind his back.

"Enough," the Graf said. "Hazca's chief questioner will make some underling babble, if we have to hang them all up by their noses." A blast of thunder interrupted him; outside the penthouse, rain roared along the walls like surf, the first such shower the city had experienced in more than thirty years. Through a haze of pain, Amalfi found that he could see the lights again, although the rest of the world was a red blur. "But I think we'd best shoot this one at once-he talks rather more freely than pleases me. Give me your pistol, you there with the lance-corporal's collar."

Something moved across Amalfi's clearing vision, a long shadow with a knot at the end of it-an arm with a pistol. "Any last words?" Nandor said pleasantly, "No? Tsk. Well, then—"

A thousand bumblebees took flight in the room. Amalfi felt his whole body jerk upward. Oddly, there was no pain, and he could still see-things continued to take on definition all around him. The clear sight of the dying?...

"Proszdchd!" Nandor roared. "Egz prd strasticzek Maria, do—"

The thunder cut him off again. Somewhere in the room one of the soldiers was whimpering with fright. To Amalfi's fire-racked sight, everyone and everything seemed to be floating in mid-air. Nandor sprawled rigidly, half-erect, his body an inch or so off the cushions, his clothing standing away from him. The pistol was still pointed at Amalfi, but Nand6r was not holding it; it hung immobile above the carpet, an inch away from his frozen fingers. The carpet itself was not on the floor but above it, a sea of fur, every filament of which bristled straight up. Pictures had sprung away from the walls and were suspended. The cushions had risen from the chair and moved away from each other a little, then stopped, as if caught by a stroboscopic camera in the first stages of an explosion; the chair itself was an inch above the rug. At the far side of the room, a bookshelf had burst, and the cans of microfilm were ranked neatly in front of the case, evenly spaced, supported by nothing but the empty air.