Cities in Flight (40 page)

Miramon goggled. "Impossible. An explosion had to expand evenly in all directions that are open to it."

"Not if the explosive is a piperazohexynitrate built from polarized carbon atoms. Such atoms can't move in any direction but at right angles to the gravity radius. That's what I mean. You people are up to dynamite, but not to TDX."

He paused, frowning. "Of course some of our losses have just been to bandit raids, with missile weapons and ordinary bombs-your friends from Fabr-Suithe and their allies. But these camps where there was an explosion and no crater to show for it-—"

He fell silent. There was no point in mentioning the gassed corpses. It was hard even to think about them. Somebody on this planet had a gas which was a regurgitant, a sternutatory, and a vesicant all in one. The men had been forced out of their masks-which had been designed solely to protect them from volcanic gases-to vomit, had taken the stuff into their lungs by convulsive sneezing, and had blistered into great sacs of serum inside and out. That, obviously, had been the multiple-benzene-ring gas Hawkesite; it had been very popular during the days of the warring stellar "empires," when it had been called "polybathroomfloorine" for no discoverable reason. But what was it doing on He?

There was only one possible answer, and for a reason which he did not try to understand, it made Amalfi breathe a little easier. All around him the jungle sighed and swayed, and humming clouds of gnats made rainbows over the dew-laden pinnae of the ferns. The jungle, almost always murmurously quiet, had never seemed like the real enemy-and now Amalfi knew that his intuition had been right. The real enemy had at last declared itself, stealthily, but with a stealth which was naivete itself in comparison with the ancient guile of the jungle.

"Miramon," Amalfi said" tranquilly, "we're in a spot. That criminal city I told you about-the bindlestiff-is already here. It must have landed even before my city arrived, long enough ago to hide itself very thoroughly. Probably it came down at night in some taboo area. The tramps in it have leagued themselves with Fabr-Suithe anyhow, that much is obvious."

A moth with a two-meter wingspread blundered across the clearing, piloted by a gray-brown nematode which had sunk its sucker above the ganglion between the glittering creature's pinions. Amalfi was in a mood to read parables into things, and the parasitism reminded him of how greatly he had underestimated the enemy. The bindlestiff evidently knew, and was skillful with, the secret of manipulating a new culture. A-shrewd Okie never attempts to overwhelm a civilization by direct assault, but instead pilots it, as indetectably as possible, doing no apparent harm, adding no apparent burden, but turning history deftly and tyrannically aside at the crucial instant...

Amalfi snapped the belt switch of his ultraphone. "Hazleton?"

"Here, boss." Behind the city manager's voice was the indistinct rumble of heavy mining. "What's up?"

"Nothing yet. Are you having any bandit trouble out there?"

"No. We're not expecting any, either, with all this artillery."

"Famous last words," Amalfi said. "The 'stiffs here, Mark-and it's no stranger, either."

There was a short silence. In the background, Amalfi could hear the shouts of Hazleton's crew. When the city manager's voice came in again, it was moving from word to word very carefully, as if it expected each one to break under its weight. "You imply that the 'stiff was already on He when our Dirac broadcast went out. Right? I'm not sure these losses of ours can't be explained some simpler way, boss; the theory ... uh ... lacks elegance."

Amalfi grinned tightly. "A heuristic criticism," he said. "Go to the foot of the class, Mark, and think it over. Thus far they've out-thought us six ways for Sunday. We may be able to put your old scheme about the women into effect still, but if it's to work, we'll have to smoke the 'stiff out into the open."

"How?"

"Everybody here knows that there's going to be a drastic change in the planet when we finish what we're doing, but we're the only ones who know exactly what we're going to do. The 'stiffs will have to stop us, whether they've got Doctor Beetle or not. So I'm forcing their hand. Moving Day is hereby advanced by one thousand hours."

"What! I'm sorry, boss, but that's flatly impossible."

Amalfi felt a rare spasm of anger. "That's as may be," he growled. "Nevertheless, spread it around; let the Hevians hear it. And just to prove that I'm not kidding, Mark, I'm turning the City Fathers back on at M plus 1100. If you're not ready to spin before then, you may well swing instead."

The click of the belt switch to the off position was unsatisfying. Amalfi would much have preferred to have concluded the interview with something really final-a clash of cymbals, for instance. He swung suddenly on Miramon.

"What are you goggling at?"

The Hevian shut his mouth, flushing. "Your pardon," he said. "I was hoping to understand your instructions to your assistant, in the hope of being of some use. But you spoke in such incomprehensible terms that it sounded like a theological dispute. As for me, I never argue about politics or religion." He turned on his heel and stamped off through the trees.

Amalfi watched him go, cooling off gradually. This would never do. He must be getting to be an old man. All during the conversation with Hazleton he had felt his temper getting the better of his judgment, yet he had felt sudden and inert, unwilling to make the effort of opposing the momentum of his anger. At this rate, the City Fathers would soon depose him and appoint some stable character to the mayoralty-not Hazleton, certainly, but some un-poetic youngster who would play everything by empirics. Amalfi was in no position to be threatening anyone else with liquidation, even as a joke.

He walked toward the grounded city, heavy with sunlight, sunk in reflection. He was now about nine hundred years old, give or take fifty; strong as an ox, mentally alert and active, in good hormone balance, all twenty-eight . senses sharp, his own special psi faculty- orientation-still as infallible as ever, and all in all as sane as a compulsively peripatetic starman could be. The anti-agathics would keep him in this shape indefinitely, as far as anyone knew-but the problem of patience had never been solved.

The older a man became, the more quickly he saw answers to tough questions because the more experience he had to bring to bear on them; and the less likely he was to tolerate slow thinking among his associates. If he were sane, his answers were generally right answers-if he were unsane, they were not; but what mattered was the speed of the thinking itself. In the end, both the sane and the unsane became equally dictatorial, less and less ready to explain why they picked one answer over another.

It was funny: before death had been indefinitely postponed, it had been thought that memory would turn longevity into a Greek gift, because not even the human brain could remember a practical infinity of accumulated facts. Nowadays, however, nobody bothered to remember many facts. That was what the City Fathers and like machines were for: they stored data. Living men memorized nothing but processes, throwing out obsolete ones for new ones as invention made it necessary. When they needed facts, they asked the machines.

In some cases, even processes were wiped from human memory to make more room if there were simple, indestructible machines to replace them-the slide rule, for instance. Amalfi wondered suddenly if there was a single man in the city who could multiply, divide, take square root, or figure pH in his head or on paper. The thought was so novel as to be alarming-as novel as if an ancient astrophysicist had seriously wondered how many of his colleagues could run an abacus.

No, memory was no problem. But it was hard to be patient after a thousand years.

The bottom of an airlock drifted into his field of view, plastered with brown tendrils of mud. He looked up. The lock, drilled directly into the great granite disc which was the foundation of the city, was a severed end of what had been a subway line running out of Manhattan centuries ago; this one evidently had been the Astoria line of the BMT, a lock seldom used, since it was too far from both the Empire State and City Hall, the city's two present centers of control. It was certainly a long way around the perimeter from where Amalfi had expected to go back on board. Feeling like a stranger, he went in.

Inside, the corridor rang with bloodcurdling shrieks which echoed endlessly. It was as if somebody were flaying a live dinosaur, or, better, a pack of them. Underneath the noise there was a sound like water being expelled under high pressure, arid someone was laughing hysterically. Alarmed, Amalfi ran up the nearest steps; the noise got louder. He hunched his bull shoulders and burst through the door behind which the butchery seemed to be going on.

Surely there had never been such a place in the city. It was a huge, steamy chamber, walled with some ceramic substance placed in regular tiles. The tiles were slimy and stained, hence, old-very old. On the floor, smaller hexagonal white tiles made an endlessly repeating mosaic, reminding Amalfi at once of the structural formula of Hawkesite.

Hordes of nude women ran aimlessly back and forth in the chamber, screaming, battering at the wall, dodging wildly, or rolling on the mosaic floor. Every so often a thick stream of water caught one of them, bowling her howling away. Overhead, long banks of nozzles sprayed needles of mist into the air; Amalfi was soaking wet almost at once. The laughter got louder. ;

The mayor bent quickly, threw off his muddy shoes, and stalked the laughter, his toes gripping the slippery tiles. The heavy column of water swerved toward him, then was warped away again.

"John! Do you need a bath so badly? Come join the party!"

It was Dee Hazleton. She was as nude as any of her victims, and was gleefully plying an enormous hose. She looked lovely; Amalfi turned his mind determinedly away from that thought.

"Isn't this fun? We just got a new batch of these creatures. I got Mark to have the old fire hose connected, and I've been giving them their first wash."

It did not sound much like the old Dee. Amalfi expressed his opinion of women who lost their inhibitions with such drastic thoroughness. He went on at some length, and Dee made as if to turn the hose on him again.

"No, you don't," he growled, wresting it from her. It proved extremely hard to manage. "What is this place, anyhow? I don't recall any such torture chamber in the plans."

"It was a public bath, Mark says. There's another one downtown, in the Baruch Houses district, and another one on Forty-first Street beside the Port Authority Terminal, and quite a few others. Mark says they must have been closed up when the city first went aloft. I've been using this one to sluice off these women before they're sent to Medical."

"With city water?" Even the thought of such waste made his hackles rise.

"Oh no, John, I know better than that. The water's pumped in from the river to the west."

"Water for bathing!" Amalfi said. "No wonder the ancients sometimes didn't have enough to drink. Still, I'd thought the static jet was older than that."

He surveyed the Hevian women, who, now that the water was turned off, were huddled in the warmest part of the echoing chambers. None of them shared Dee's gently curved ripeness, but, as usual, some of them showed promise. Hazelton was prescient, it had to be granted. Of course it had been expectable that the Hevians would turn out to be human. Only eleven non-human civilizations had ever been discovered, and of these, only the Lyrans and the Myrdians had any brains to speak of (unless one counted the Vegans; Earthmen did not think of them as human, but all the non-human cultures did; anyhow, they were extinct as a civilization).

But to have the Hevians turn over complete custody of their women to the Okies, without so much as a preliminary conference, at the first contact, had been a colossal break. Hazleton had advanced his proposal to use any possible women as bindlestiff-bait years before any Okie could have known that there were people on He at all.

Well, that was Hazleton's own psi gift: not true clairvoyance, but an ability to pluck workable plans out of logically insufficient data. Time after time only the seemingly miraculous working-out of some obvious flight of fancy had prevented Hazleton's being jettisoned by the blindly logical City Fathers.

"Dee, come to Astronomy with me," Amalfi said. "I've got something to show you. And for my sake, put on something, or the men will think I'm out to found a dynasty."

"All right," Dee said reluctantly. She was not yet used to the odd Okie standards of exposure, and sometimes appeared nude when it wasn't customary-a compensation, Amalfi supposed for her Utopian upbringing, which had taught her that nudity had a deleterious effect upon the purity of one's politics. The Hevian women moaned and hid their heads while she put on her shorts. Most of them had been stoned for inadvertently covering themselves at one time or another, for in Hevian society women were not people but reminders of damnation, doubly evil for the slightest taint of secretiveness.

History, Amalfi thought, would be more instructive a teacher if it were not so stupefyingly repetitious. He led the way up the corridor, searching for a lift shaft, disturbingly conscious of Dee's wet soles padding cheerfully behind him.

In Astronomy, Jake was, as usual, peering wistfully at a galaxy somewhere out on the marches of nowhen, trying to turn spiral arms into elliptical orbits without recourse to the calculations section. He looked up as Amalfi and the girl entered.