Cities in Flight (44 page)

"That's bad," he heard Hazleton murmur. It was certainly unpromising. The planet turned slowly under his eyes.

Then a city slid up over the horizon. Hazleton's breath sucked sharply through his teeth. Amalfi could also hear a soft stirring sound, and then footsteps-several of the technicians had come up behind him to peer over his shoulder.

"Posts!" he growled. The technicians scattered like leaves.

On the idle service world, the grounded city was startlingly huge. It thrust up from the ground like an invader- but a naked giant, fallen and defenseless, without its spindizzy screens. There was, of course, every good reason why the screens should not be up, but still, a city without them was a rare and disconcerting sight, like a flayed corpse in a tank. There seemed to be some activity at its perimeter. Amalfi could not resist thinking of that activity as bacterial.

"Doesn't that answer the question Dee's way?" Hazleton suggested at last. "There's an outfit that has dough for repairs, so money from outside the Acolyte area must still be good. It's having the repairs made, so it can't be quite hopeless-it thinks it has someplace to go from here. And it's a cinch to be a smart outfit, well worth consulting. It's prevented the Acolytes from fleecing it-and some form of Acolyte swindle is the only remaining explanation for the existence of the jungle. We'd best get in touch with it before we land, boss, and find out what to expect."

"No," Amalfi said. "Stick to your post, Mark."

"Why? Surely it can't do any harm."

Amalfi didn't answer", His own psi sense had already told him something that knocked Hazleton's argument into a cocked helmet, but that something showed on Hazleton's own instruments, if Hazleton cared to look. The city manager had allowed an extrapolation to carry him off. into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.

Abruptly the board began to wink with directional signals. Automatic guides from the control tower on Murphy were waving the city to a readied dock. Amalfi shifted the space stick obediently, awaiting the orange blinker that would announce some living intelligence ready with an opinion as to the desirability of Okies on Murphy.

But neither opinion nor blinker had yet asked for his attention even when Amalfi had begun to float the city for its planting in the unpromising soil below. Evidently business was so poor on Murphy that the garage had lost most of its staff to more "going" projects. In that case, no entities but the automatics in the tower would be on hand to supervise an unexpected landing.

With a shrug, Amalfi cut the City Fathers back in. There was no need for a human being to land a city as long as the landing presented no problem in policy. There were more than enough human uses for human beings; routine operations were the proper province of the City Fathers.

"First planetfall since He," Hazleton said. He seemed to be brightening a little. "It'll feel good to stretch our legs."

"No leg-stretching or any other kind of calisthenics," Amalfi said. "Not until we get more information. I haven't gotten a yeep out of this planet yet. For all we know, we may be restricted to our own premises by the local customs." .

"Wouldn't the tower have said so?"

"No tower would be empowered to deliver a message like that to all comers. It might scare off an occasional legitimate customer. But' it could still be so, Mark; you should know that. Let's do some snooping first."

Amalfi picked up his mike. "Get me the perimeter sergeant ... Anderson? This is the mayor. Arm ten good men from the boarding squad, and meet the city manager and me at the Cathedral Parkway lookout. Station your men at the adjacent sally ports, well out of sight of the localities, if there are any such around. ... Yes, that'd be just as well, too. ... Right."

Hazleton said, "We're going out."

"Yes. And, Mark-this star cluster may well be the last stop that we'll ever make. Will you remember that?"

"I'll have no difficulty remembering it," Hazleton said, looking directly at Amalfi with eyes as gray as ice, "seeing that it's exactly what I told you four days ago. I have my own notions of the proper way to cope with the possibility, and they probably won't jibe with yours. Four days ago you were explaining to me that I was being excessively defeatist. Now you've expropriated my conclusion because something has forced it on you-and I know you better than to expect you to tell me what that something is-and so now you're telling me to 'Remember Thor Five' again. You can't have it both ways, Amalfi."

For a second, the two men's glances remained locked, pupil with pupil.

"You two," Dee's voice said, "might just as well be married."

From the skywalk of the graving dock in which the city rested at last, a walk level with the main deck of the city, the world of Murphy presented to Amalfi the face of a desolate mechanical wilderness.

It was an elephant's graveyard of cranes, hoists, dollies, spur lines, donkey engines, cables, scaffolding, pallets, halftracks, camel-backs, chutes, conveyors, bins, tanks, hoppers, pipelines, waldoes, spindizzies, trompers, breeders, proxies, ehrenhafts, and half a hundred other devices of as many ages which might at some time be needed in servicing some city.

Much of the machinery was rusty, or fallen in upon itself, or whole on the surface but forever dead inside, with a spurious wholeness that so simple an instrument as the dosimeter every man wore on his left wrist could reveal as submicroscopic scandal. Much of it, too, was still quite usable. But all of it had the look of machinery which no one really expected to use.

On the near horizon, the other city, the one Amalfi had seen from aloft, stood tall and straight. Tiny mechanisms puttered about it.

And far below the skywalk, on the cluttered surface of Murphy, in the shadow of the bulge of Amalfi's city, a tiny and merely human figure danced and gesticulated.

Amalfi led the way down the tight spiral of the metal staircase, Hazleton and Sergeant Anderson behind him. Their steps were muffled-in the thin air. He watched his own carefully; on a low-gravity world it was just as well to temper the use of one's muscles. The fact that one fell slower on such worlds did not much lessen the thump at the end of the fall, and Amalfi had found long ago that, away from the unvarying one-G field of the city, his bull strength often betrayed him even when he was being normally careful.

The dancing doll proved to be a short, curly-haired techie in a clean but mussed uniform. Possibly he had slept in it; at least it seemed clear that he had never done any work in it. He had a smooth, chubby face, dark of complexion, greasy and stippled with clogged pores. He glared at Amalfi truculently with eyes like beer-bottle ends.

"What the hell?" he said. "How'd you get here?"

"We swam, how else? When do we get some service?"

"I'll ask the questions, bum. And tell your sergeant to keep his hand off his gun. He makes me nervous, and when I'm nervous, there's no telling what I'll do. You're after repairs?"

"What else?"

"We're busy," the garageman said. "No charity here. Go back to your jungle."

"You're about as busy as a molecule at zero," Amalfi roared, thrusting his head forward. The garageman's shiny, bulbous nose retreated, but not by much. "We need repairs, and we mean to have 'em. We've got money to pay, and Lieutenant Lerner of your own local cops sent us here to get 'em. If those two reasons won't suit you, I'll have my sergeant put his gun hand to some use-he could probably draw and fire before you tripped over something in this junk yard."

"Who the hell are you threatening? Don't you know you're in the Acolyte stars now? We've broken up better- no, now wait a minute, sergeant, let's not be hasty. I've been dealing with bums until they're coming out of my ears. Maybe you're all right after all. You did say something about money-I heard you distinctly."

"You did," Amalfi said, remaining impassive with difficulty.

"Your City Fathers will vouch for it?"

"Sure. Hazleton-oh, hell, Anderson, what happened to the city manager?"

"He took a branching catwalk farther up," the perimeter sergeant said. "Didn't say where he was going."

It didn't, after all, pay to be too cautious, Amalfi thought wryly. If his brains hadn't been concentrating so exclusively on his feet, he would have detected the fact that only one other pair of feet was with him as soon as Hazleton had begun to catfoot it away.

"He'll be back-I hope," Amalfi said. "Look, friend, what we need is repair work. We've got a bad spindizzy in a hot hold. Can you haul it out and give us a replacement, preferably the newest model you've got?"

The garageman considered it. The problem seemed to appeal to him; his whole expression changed, so thoroughly that he looked almost friendly in his intimate ugliness.

"I've got a Six-R-Six in storage that might do, if you've got the refluxlaminated pediments to mount it on," he said slowly. "If you haven't, I've also a reconditioned B-C-Seven-Seven-Y that hums as sweetly as new. But I've never done any hot hauling before-didn't know spindizzies ever hotted up enough to notice. Anybody on board your burg that can give me a hand on decontamination?"

"Yes, it's all set up and ready to ride. Check the color of our money, and let's get on it."

"It'll take a little time to get a crew together," the garageman said. "By the way, don't let your men wander around. The cops don't like it.",

"I'll do my best."

The garageman scampered away, dodging in and out among the idle, rust-tinted machines. Amalfi watched him go, marveling anew at how quickly the born technician can be gulled into forgetting who he's working for, let alone how his work is going to be used. First you mention money-since techies are usually underpaid; you then cap that with a tough and inherently interesting problem- and you have your man. Amalfi was always happy when he met a pragmatist in the enemy's camp.

"Boss—"

Amalfi spun. "Where the hell have you been? Didn't you hear me say that this planet is probably taboo to tourists? If you'd been on hand when you were needed, you'd have heard the 'probably' knocked out of that statement-to say nothing of speeding matters considerably!"

"I'm aware of that," Hazleton said evenly. "I took a calculated risk-something you seem to have forgotten how to do, Amalfi. And it paid off. I've been over to that other city, and found out something that we needed to know. Incidentally, the graving docks around here are a mess. This one, and the one the other city is in, must be the only ones in operation for hundreds of miles. All the rest are nearly full or sand and rust and flaked concrete."

"And the other city?" Amalfi said very quietly.

"It's been garnisheed; there's no doubt about it. It's shabby and deserted. Half of it is being held up by buttressing, and it's got huts pitched in the streets. It's nearly a hulk. There's a crew over there putting it in some sort of operating order, but they're in no hurry, and they aren't doing a damn thing to make the city habitable-all they want it to do is run. It's not the city's own complement, obviously. Where they are, I'm afraid to think."

"There's considerable thinking you haven't done," Amalfi said. "The original crew is obviously in debtor's prison. The garage is putting the city in order for some kind of dirty job that they don't expect it to outlast-and that no city still free could be hired to do at any price."

"And what would that be?"

"Setting up a planethead on a gas giant," said Amalfi. "They want to work some low-density, ammonia-methane world with an ice core, a Jupiter-type planet, that they can't conquer any other way. It's my guess that they hope to use such a planethead as an inexhaustible source of poison gas."

"That's not your only guess," Hazleton said, his lips thinned. "I expect to be disciplined for wandering off, Amalfi, but I'm a big boy, and won't have rationalizations palmed off on me just to keep the myth of your omniscience going."

"I'm not omniscient," Amalfi said mildly. "I looked at the other city on the screen. And I looked at the instruments. You didn't. The instruments alone told me that almost nothing was going on in that city that was normal to Okie operation. They also told me that its spindizzies were being turned to produce a field which would burn them-out within a year, and they told me what that field was supposed to do-what kind of conditions it was supposed to resist.

"Spindizzy fields will bounce any fast-moving large aggregate of molecules. They won't much impede the passage of gases by osmosis. If you so drive a field as to exclude the smallest possible molecular exchange, even under a pressure of more than a million atmospheres, you destroy the machine. That set of conditions occurs only in one kind of situation, a situation no Okie would ever commit himself to for an instant: setting down on a gas giant. Obviously then, since the city was being readied for that kind of job, it had been garnisheed-it was now state property, and nobody cares about wasting state property."

"Once again," Hazleton said, "you might have told me that in time to prevent my taking my side jaunt. However, this time it's just as well you didn't, because I still haven't come to the main thing I discovered. Do you know the identity of that city?"

"No."

"Good for you for admitting it. I do. It's the city we heard about when it was in the building three centuries ago; the so-called all-purpose city. Even under all the junk and decay, the lines are there. These Acolytes are letting it rot where it makes a real difference, just to hot-rod it for one job only. We could take it away from them if we tried. I studied the plans when they were first published, and—"