Cities in Flight (42 page)

Barium paste. Evidently Hazleton had known that Amalfi could not leave the platform, and instead had plastered him with the paste in default of trying to get a suit on him. Even his eyes were covered with a transparent visor, and a feeling of distension in his nostrils bespoke a Kolman barium filter.

So much for the gas. The heavy tensions in and around the bindlestiff city continued to gather; they would soon be unbearable. Above, just outside the shell of circling mines, the first few police cruisers were sidling down with great caution. The war in the jungle had already fallen apart into meaninglessness. The abduction of the women by the tramps had collapsed all Hevian rivalries. Bandits and civilized towns alike were bent now upon nothing but the destruction of Fabr-Suithe and its allies. Fabr-Suithe could hold them off for a long time, but it was clearly time for the bindlestiff to leave-time for it to make off with its pleased and wondering Hevian women, its anti-agathics, its germanium, and whatever else it had managed to garner-tune for it to lose itself again hi the Rift before the Earth police could invest the planet of He.

The gravitic field "around the bindlestiff city knotted suddenly, painfully, in Amalfi's brain, and began to rise away from the lake of boiling mud. The 'stiff was taking off. In a moment it would be gone through the rent in the mine umbrella which only the tramps could see.

Amalfi pressed the button-the only one, this time, that had been connected to anything.

Moving Day began.

Moving Day began with six pillars of glaring white, forty miles in diameter, which burst through the soft soil at each compass point of He. Fabr-Suithe had sat directly over the site of one of them. The bandit town was nothing but a flake of ash in a split second, a curled black flake borne aloft on the top of a white-hot piston.

The pillars lunged, roaring, into the heavens, fifty, a hundred, two hundred miles, and burst at their tops like popcorn. The Hevian sky burned thermite-blue with steel meteors. Outside, the space mines, cut off from the world of which they had been satellites by the greatest spindizzy field in history, fled away into the Rift.

And when the meteors had burned away, the sun was growing.

The world of He was on spindizzy drive, its magnetic moment transformed into momentum. It was the biggest Okie "city" that had ever flown. There was no time to feel alarm. The sun flashed by and was dwindling to a point before the fact could be grasped. Then it was gone. The far wall of the Rift began to swell and separate into individual points of light.

The planet of He was crossing the Rift.

Appalled, Amalfi fought to understand the scale of speed. He failed. The planet of He was moving, that was all he could comprehend. It was moving at a proper cruising speed for a City of its size-a speed that gulped down light years as if they were gnats. Even to think of controlling such a flight was ridiculous.

Stars began to wink past He like fireflies. They had reached the other side of the Rift. The planet began to curve gradually away from the main cloud. Then the stars were all behind.

The surface of the saucer that was the galaxy began to come into view.

"Boss! We're going out of the galaxy! Look—"

"I know it. Get me a fix on He's old sun as soon as we're high enough above the Rift to see it again. After that it'll be too late."

Hazleton worked feverishly. It took him only half an hour, but during that time, the massed stars receded far enough to make plain the gray scar of the Rift as a long shadow on a spangled ground. At the end the Hevian sun was only a tenth-magnitude point in it.

"Got it, I think. But we can't swing the planet back. It'll take us thousands of years to cross to the next galaxy. We'll have to abandon He, boss, or we're sunk."

"All right. Get us aloft. Full drive."

"Our contract-—"

"Fulfilled-take my word for it now. Spin!"

The city sprang aloft. The planet of He did not dwindle in the city's sky. It simply vanished, snuffed out in the intergalactic gap. Miramon, if he lived, would be the first of a totally new race of pioneers.

Amalfi moved then, back towards the controls, the barium casing cracking and falling off him as he came back to life. The air of the city still stank of Hawkesite, but the concentration of the gas already had been taken down below the harmful level by the city's purifiers. The mayor began to edge the city away from the vector of He's flight and the city's own, back toward the home lens.

Hazleton stirred restlessly.

"Your conscience bothering you, Mark?"

"Maybe," Hazleton said. "Is there some escape clause in our contract with Miramon that lets us desert him like this? If there is, I missed it, and I read the fine print pretty closely."

"No, there's no escape clause," Amalfi said abstractedly, shifting the space stick by a millimeter or two. "The Hevians won't be hurt. The spindizzy screen will protect them from loss of heat and atmosphere-their volcanoes will keep them warmer than they'll probably like, and their technology is up to producing all the light they'll need. But they won't be able to keep the planet well enough lit to satisfy the jungle. That will die. By the time Miramon and his friends reach the star that suits them in the Andromedan galaxy, they'll understand the spindizzy well enough to put their planet back into, the proper orbit. Or maybe they'll like roaming better by that time, and will decide to be an Okie planet. Either way, we licked the jungle for them, just as we promised to do, fair and square."

"We didn't get paid," the city manager pointed out. "And it'll take a lot of fuel to get back to any part of our own galaxy. The bindlestiff got off ahead of us, and got carried way out of range of the cops in the process, right on our backs-with plenty of germanium, drugs, women, the no-fuel drive, everything."

"No, they didn't," Amalfi said. "They blew up the moment we moved He."

"All right," Hazleton said resignedly. "You could detect that where I couldn't, so I'll take your word for it. But you'd better be able to explain it!"

"It's not hard to explain. The 'stiffs had captured Doctor Beetle. I was pretty sure they had; after all, they came to He for no other reason. They needed the no-fuel drive, and they knew Doctor Beetle had it because they heard the agronomists' SOS, just as we did. So they snatched Doctor Beetle when he was landed-do you remember what a big fuss their bandit-city allies made about the other agronomist lifeship, to divert us? It worked, too-and in the meantime they cooked the secret out of him. Probably in his own tank."

"So?"

"So," Amalfi said, "the tramps forgot that any Okie city always has passengers like Doctor Beetle-people with big ideas only partially worked out, ideas that need the finishing touches that can only be provided by some other culture. After all, a man doesn't take passage on an Okie city unless he's a third-rater, hoping to make his everlasting fortune on some planet where the inhabitants know much less than he dribs."

Hazleton scratched his head ruefully. "That's right. We had the same experience with the Lyran invisibility machine. It never worked until we took Doc Schloss on board."

"Exactly. The 'stiffs were in too much of a hurry. They didn't carry their stolen no-fuel drive with them until they found some culture which could perfect it. They tried to use it right away. They were lazy. And they tried to use it inside the biggest spindizzy field ever generated. What happened? It blew up. I felt it happen-and the top of my head nearly came off then and there. If we hadn't left the 'stiffs parsecs behind in the first split second. Doctor Beetle's drive would have blown up He at the same time. It doesn't pay to be lazy, Mark."

"Who ever said it did?" Hazleton said. After a moment's more thought, he began to plot the point at which the city would probably re-enter its own galaxy. That point turned out to be a long way away from the Rift, in an area that, after a mental wrench to visualize it backwards from the usual orientation, promised a fair population.

"Look," he said, "we'll hit about where the last few waves of the Acolytes settled-remember the Night of Hadjji?"

Amalfi didn't, since he hadn't been born then, but he remembered the history, which was what the city manager had meant. He said, "Good. I want to take us to garage and get that Twenty-third Street machine settled for good and all. I'm tired of its blowing out in the pinches, and it's going sour for fair now. Hear it?"

Hazleton, cocked his head intently. In the lull, Amalfi saw suddenly that Dee was standing in the doorway, still completely enswathed in her anti-gas suit except for the faceplate.

"Is it over?" she said.

"Well, our stay on He is over. We're still on the run, if that's what you mean. The cops never give up, Dee; you'll learn that sooner or later."

"Where are we going?"

She asked the question in the same tone in which she had once said, "What is a volt, John?" For an astonishing moment Amalfi was almost overwhelmed with an urge to send Hazleton from the room on some excuse, to return almost bodily to those days of her innocence, to relive all the previous questions that she had asked-the moments when he had known the answers better.

There was, of course, no real answer to this one. Where would an Okie go? They were going, that was all. If there was a destination, no one could know what it was.

He endured the surge of emotion stoically. In the end, he only shrugged.

"By the way," he said, "what's the operational day?" Hazleton looked at the clock. "M plus eleven twenty-five."

With a sidelong glance, Amalfi leaned forward, resumed the helmet he had cast aside on He, and turned on the City Fathers.

The helmet phones shrilled with alarm. "All right, all right," he growled. "What is it?"

"MAYOR AMALFI, HAVE YOU TIPPED THIS PLANET?"

"No," Amalfi said. "We sent it on its way as it was." There was a short silence, humming with computation. It was probably just as well, Amalfi thought, that the machines had been turned off for a while; they had not had a rest in many centuries. They would probably emerge into consciousness a little saner for it.

"VERY WELL. WE MUST NOW SELECT THE POINT AT WHICH WE LEAVE THE RIFT. STAND BY FOR DETERMINATION."

Hazleton and Amalfi grinned at each other. Amalfi said, "We're coming in on the last Acolyte stars, and we'll need to decelerate far beyond spindizzy safety limits. We urgently need an overhaul on the Twenty-third Street driver. Give us a determination for the present social setup there, please—"

"YOU ARE MISTAKEN. THAT CLUSTER IS NOWHERE NEAR THE RIFT. FURTHERMORE, THE POPULACE THERE HAS A LONG RECORD OF MASS XENOPHOBIA AND HAD BEST BE AVOIDED. WE WILL GIVE YOU A DETERMINATION FOR THE FAR RIFT WALL. STAND BY."

Amalfi removed the headset gently. "The Rift wall," he said, moving the microphone away from his mouth. "That was long ago-and far away."

A SPINDIZZY going sour makes the galaxy's most unnerving noise. The top range of the sound is inaudible, but it feels like a multiple toothache. Just below that, there is a screech like metal tearing, which blends smoothly into a composite cataract of plate glass, slate, and boulders; this is the middle register. After that, there is a painful gap in the sound's spectrum, and the rest of the noise comes into one's ears again with a hollow round dinosaurian sob and plummets on down into the subsonics, ending in frequencies which induce diarrhea and an almost unconquerable urge to bite one's thumbs.

The noise was coming, of course, from the Twenty-third Street spindizzy, but it permeated the whole city. It was tolerable only so long as the hold which contained the moribund driver was kept sealed. Amalfi knew better than to open that hold. He surveyed the souring machine via instruments, and kept the audio tap prudently closed. The sound fraction which was thrumming through the city's walls was bad enough, even as far up as the control chamber.

Hazleton's hand came over his left shoulder, stabbing a long finger at the recording thermocouple.

"She's beginning to smoke now. Damned if I know how she's lasted this long. The model was two hundred years old when we took it aboard-and the repair job I did on He was only an emergency rig."

"What can we do?" Amalfi said. He did not bother to look around; the city manager's moods were his own second nature. They had lived together a long time-long enough to learn what learning is, long enough to know that, just as habit is second nature, so nature-the seven steps from chance to meaning-is first habit. The hand which rested upon Amalfi's right shoulder told him all he needed to know about Hazleton at this moment. "We can't shut her down."

"If we don't, she'll blow for good and all. That hold's hot already."

"Hot and howling. .. . Let me think a minute."

Hazleton waited. After another moment, Amalfi said, "We'll keep her shoving. If the City Fathers can push this much juice through her, maybe they can push just a little more. Maybe enough to get us down to a reasonable cruising speed. Besides-we couldn't jury-rig that spindizzy again. It's radiating all up and down the line. The City Fathers could shut her down if we ordered it, but it'd take human beings to repair her and re-tune the setup stages. And it's too late for that."

"It'll be a year before anything alive can go into that hold," Hazleton agreed gloomily. "All right. How's our velocity now?"

"Negligible, with reference to the galaxy as a whole. But as far as the Acolyte stars proper are concerned- we'd shoot through the whole cluster at about eight times the city's top speed if we stopped decelerating now. It's going to be damned tight, that's for sure, Mark."

"Excuse me," Dee's voice said behind them. She was hesitating just beyond the threshold of the lift shaft. "Is there something wrong? If you're busy—"

"No busier than usual," Hazleton said. "Just wondering about our usual baby."

"The Twenty-third Street machine. I could tell by the curvature of your spines. Why don't you have it replaced and get it over with?"

Amalfi and the city manager grinned at each other, but the mayor's grin was short-lived.

"Well, why not?" he said suddenly.

"My gods, boss, the cost," Hazleton said with incredulity. "The City Fathers would impeach you for suggesting it." He donned the helmet. "Treasury check," he told the microphone.

"They've never had to run her all by themselves under max overdrive before now. I predict that they'll emerge from the experience clamoring to have her replaced, even if we don't eat for a year to pay for it. Besides, we should have the money, for once. We dug a lot of germanium while we were setting up He to be de-wobbled. Maybe the time really has come when we can afford a replacement."

Dee came forward swiftly, motes of light on the move in her eyes. "John, can that be true?" she said. "I thought we'd lost a lot on the Hevian contract."

"Well, we're not rich. We would have been, I'm still convinced, if we'd been able to harvest the anti-agathics on a decent scale."

"But we didn't," Dee said. "We had to run away."

"We ran away. But in terms of germanium alone, we can call ourselves well off. Well enough off to buy a new spindizzy. Right, Mark?"

Hazleton listened to the City Fathers a moment more, and then took off the bone-mikes. "It looks that way," he said. "Anyhow, we can easily cover the price of an overhaul, or maybe even of a reconditioned second-hand machine of a later model. Depends on whether or not the Acolyte stars have a service planet, and what the garage fees are there."

"The fees should be low enough to keep us solvent," Amalfi said, thrusting his lower lip out thoughtfully. "The Acolyte area is a backwater, but it was settled originally by refugees from an anti-Earth pogrom in the Malar system-an aftermath of the collapse of Vega, as I recall. There's a record of the pogrom in the libraries of most planets-you reminded me of it, Mark: the Night of Hadjji-which means that the Acolytes aren't far enough away from normal trading areas to be proper frontier stars."

He paused, and his frown deepened. "Now that I come to think of it, the Acolytes were an important minor source of power metals for part of this limb of the galaxy at one time. They'll have at least one garage planet, Mark, depend on it. They may even have work for the city to do."

"Sounds good," Hazleton said. "Too good, maybe. Actually, we've got to sit down in the Acolytes, boss, because that Twenty-third Street machine won't carry us beyond them at anything above a snail's pace. I asked the City Fathers that while I was checking the treasury. This is the end of the line for that gadget."

He sounded tired. Amalfi looked at him.

"That's not what's worrying you, Mark," he said. "We've always had that problem waiting for us somewhere in the future, and it isn't one that's difficult of solution. What's the real trouble? Cops, maybe?"

"All right, it's cops," Hazleton said, a little sullenly. "I know we're a long way away from any cops that know us by name. But have you any idea of the total amount of unpaid fines we're carrying? And I don't see how we can assume that any amount of distance is 'too great' for the cops to follow us if they really want us-and it seems that they do."

"Why, Mark?" Dee said. "After all, we've done nothing serious."

"It piles up," Hazleton said. "We haven't been called on our Violations docket in a long time. When we're finally caught, we'll have to pay in full, and if that were to happen now, we'd be bankrupt."

"Pooh," Dee said. Like anyone more or less recently naturalized, her belief in the capacities of her adopted city-state was as finite as it was unbounded. "We could find work and build up a new treasury. It might be hard going for a while, but we'd survive it. People have been broke before, and come through it whole."

"People, yes; cities, no," Amalfi said. "Mark is right on that point, Dee. According to the law, a bankrupt city must be dispersed. It's essentially a humane law, in that it prevents desperate mayors and city managers from taking bankrupt cities out again on long job-hunting trips, during which half of the Okies on board will die just because of the stubbornness of the people in charge."

"Exactly," Hazleton said.

"Even so, I think it's a bogey," Amalfi said gently. "I'll grant you your facts, Mark, but not your extrapolation. The cops can't possibly follow us from He's old star to here. We didn't know ourselves that we'd wind up among the Acolytes. I doubt that the cops were even able to plot He's course, let alone our subsequent one. Isn't that so?"

"Of course. But—"

"And if the Earth cops alerted every local police force in the galaxy to every petty offender," Amalfi continued with quiet implacability, "no local police force would ever be able to do any policing. They'd be too busy, recording and filing and checking new alerts coming in constantly from a million inhabited planets. Their own local criminals would mostly go free, to become a burden upon the filing systems of every other inhabited area.

"So, believe me, Mark, the cops around here have never even heard of us. We're approaching a normal situation, that's all. The Acolyte cops haven't the slightest reason to treat us as anything, but just another wandering, law abiding Okie city-and after all, that's really all we are."

"Good," Hazleton said, his chest collapsing to expel a heavy sigh

Amalfi heard neither the word nor the sigh.

At the same instant, the big master screen, which had been showing the swelling, granulating mass of the Acolyte star cluster, flashed blinding scarlet over its whole surface, and the scrannel shriek of a police whistle made the air in the control room seethe.

The cops swaggered and stomped on board the Okie city, and into Amalfi's main office in City Hall, as if the nothingness of the marches of the galaxy were their personal property. Their uniforms were not the customary dress coveralls-actually, space-suit liners-of the Earth police, however. Instead, they were flashy black affairs, trimmed with silver braid, Sam Browne belt, and shiny boots. The blue-jowled thugs who had been jammed into these tight-fitting creations reminded Amalfi of a period which considerably antedated the Night of Hadjji-or any other event in the history of space flight.

And the thugs carried meson pistols. These heavy, cumbersome weapons could be held in one hand, but two hands were needed to fire them. They were very modern side arms to find in a border star cluster. They were only about a century out of date. This made them thoroughly up-to-date as far as the city's own armament was concerned.

The pistols told Amalfi several other things that he needed to know. Their existence here could mean only one thing: that the Acolytes had had a recent contact with one of those pollinating bees of the galaxy, an Okie city. Furthermore, the probability was not high that it had been the sole Okie contact the Acolytes had had for a long time, as Amalfi might otherwise have assumed.

It took years to build up the technology to mass produce meson pistols so that ordinary cops could pack them. It took more years still, years spent in fairly frequent contact with other technologies, to make adoption of the pistol possible at all. The pistol, then, confirmed unusually frequent contact with other Okies, which, in turn, meant that there was a garage planet here, as Amalfi had hoped.

The pistol also told Amalfi something else, which he did not much like. The meson pistol was not a good antipersonnel weapon.

It was much more suitable for demolition work.

The cops could still swagger in Amalfi's office, but they could not stomp effectively. The floor was too thickly carpeted. Amalfi never used the ancient, plushy office, with its big black mahogany desk and other antiques, except for official occasions. The control tower was his normal on-duty habitat, but that was closed to non-citizens.

"What's your business?" the police lieutenant barked at Hazleton. Hazleton, standing beside the desk, said nothing, but merely jerked his head toward where Amalfi was seated, and resumed looking at the big screen back of the desk.

"Are you the mayor of this burg?" the lieutenant demanded.

"I am," Amalfi said, removing a cigar from his mouth and looking the lieutenant over with lidless eyes. He decided that he did not like the lieutenant. His rump was too big. If a man is going to be barrel-shaped, he ought to do a good job of it, as Amalfi had. Amalfi had no use for top-shaped men.

"All right, answer the question, Fatty. What's your business?"

"Petroleum geology."

"You're lying. You're not dealing with some isolated, type Four-Q podunk now, Okie. These are the Acolyte stars."

Hazleton looked with pointedly vague puzzlement at the lieutenant, and then back to the screen, which showed no stars at all within any reasonable distance.

The by-play was lost on the cop. "Petroleum geology isn't a business with Okies," he said. "You'd all starve if you didn't know how to mine and crack oil for food. Now give me a straight answer before I decide you're a vagrant and get tough."

Amalfi said evenly, "Our business is petroleum geology. Naturally we've developed some side lines since we've been aloft, but they're mostly natural outgrowths of petroleum geology-on which subject we happen to be experts. We trace and develop petroleum sources for planets which need the material." He eyed the cigar judiciously and thrust it back between his teeth. "Incidentally, Lieutenant, you're wasting your breath threatening us with a vagrancy charge. You know as well as we do that vagrancy laws are specifically forbidden by article one of the Constitution."

"Constitution?" the cop laughed. "If you mean the Earth Constitution, we don't have much contact with Earth out here. These are the Acolyte stars, see? Next question: have you any money?"

"Enough."

"How much is enough?"

"If you want to know whether or not we have operating capital, our City Fathers will give you the statutory yes or no answer if you can give them the data on your system that they'll need to make the calculation. The answer will almost assuredly be yes. We're not required to report our profit pool to you, of course."

"Now look," the lieutenant said. "You don't need to play the space lawyer with me. All I want to do is get off this town. If you've got dough, I can clear you-that is, if you got it through legal channels."