Cities in Flight (46 page)

"All right. Give it a point thirty-four per cent screen to clinch its present orbit, and come on back. Make sure you don't give it more than that, or those overtimed spindizzies will advertise its position to anyone coming within two parsecs of it, and interfere with our own operation to boot."

"Right."

And now there were the local cops to be considered. They had chalked up against Amalfi's city, not only the issuing of a bad check, but the theft of state property, and the deaths of Acolyte technicians on board the other city.

Only the jungle was safe, and even the jungle was safe only temporarily. In the jungle, at least for the time being, one city could lose itself among three hundred others- many of which would be better armed than Amalfi's city had ever been.

There might even be a chance, in such a salmon-pack of cities, that Amalfi would see at last with his own eyes the mythical Vegan orbital fort-the sole non-human construction ever to go Okie, and now the center of an enormous saga of exploits woven about it by the starmen. Amalfi was as fascinated by the legend as any other Okie, though he knew the meager facts well: the fort had circled Vega until the smashing of the Confederacy's home planet, and then-unexpectedly, since the Vegans had never been given to flying anything bigger than a battleship-had taken off for parts unknown, smashing its way through the englobement of police cruisers almost instantly. Nothing had ever been heard of it since, although the legend grew and grew.

The Vegans themselves had been anything but an attractive people, and it was difficult to say why the story of the orbital fort was so beloved with the Okies. Of course, Okies generally disliked the cops and said that they had no love for Earth, but this hardly explained why the legend of the fort was so popular among them. The fort was now said to be invulnerable and unlimited; it had done miracles in every limb of the galaxy; it was everywhere and nowhere; it was the Okies' Beowulf, their Cid, their Sigurd, Gawaine, Roland, Cuchulainn, Prometheus... Lemminkainen ...

Amalfi felt a sudden chill. The thought that had just come to him was so outrageous that he had almost stopped thinking it in the middle, out of sheer instinct. The fort-probably it had been destroyed centuries ago. But if it did still exist, certain conclusions emerged implacably, and certain actions could be taken on them. . . .

Yes, it was possible. It was possible. And definitely worth trying....

But if it actually worked ...

Having made the decision, Amalfi put the idea resolutely aside. In the meantime, one thing was sure: as long as the Acolytes continued to use the jungle as a labor pool, their cops would not risk smashing things up indiscriminately only in order to search out one single "criminal" city. To the Acolyte's way of thinking, all Okies were lawbreakers, by definition.

Which, Amalfi thought, was quite correct as far as his own city was concerned. The city was not only a bum now, but a bindlestiff to boot-by definition.

The end of the line.

"Boss? I'm coming in. What's the dodge? We'll need to pull it soon, or—"

Amalfi looked up steadily at the red dwarf star above the balcony.

"There is no dodge," he said. "We're licked, Mark. We're going to the jungle."

THE cities drifted along their sterile orbits around the little red sun. Here and there, a few showed up on the screen by their riding lights, but most of them could not spare even enough power to keep riding lights going. The lights were vital in such close-packed quarters, but power to maintain spindizzy screens was more important still.

Only one city glowed-not with its riding lights, which were all out, but by street lighting. That city had power to waste, and it wanted the fact known. And it wanted it known, too, that it preferred to waste the power in sheer bragging to the maintenance of such elementary legalities as riding lights.

Amalfi looked soberly at the image of the bright city. It was not a very clear image, since the bright city was in a preferred position close to the red dwarf, where that sun's natural and unboundable gravitational field strained the structure of space markedly. The saturation of the intervening area with the smaller screens of the other Okies made the seeing still worse, since Amalfi's own city had been unable to press through the pack beyond eighteen AU's from the sun, a distance about equivalent to that from Sol to Uranus. For Amalfi, consequently, the red dwarf was visually only a star of the tenth magnitude- the G0 star four light years away seemed much closer.

But obviously, three hundred-odd Okie cities could not all huddle close enough to a red dwarf to derive any warmth from it. Somebody had to be on the outside. It was equally obvious, and expectable, that the city with the most power available to it should be the one drawn up the most cosily to the dull stellar fire, while those who most needed to conserve every erg shivered in the outer blackness.

What was surprising was that the bright city should be advertising its defiance of local law and common sense alike-while police-escorted Acolyte ships were shoving their way into the heart of the jungle.

Amalfi looked up at the screen banks. For the second time within the year, he was in a chamber of City Hall which was almost never used. This one was the ancient reception hall, which had been fitted with a screen system of considerable complexity about five hundred and eighty years ago, just after the city had first taken to space. It was called into service only when the city was approaching a heavily developed, highly civilized star system, in order to carry on the multiple negotiations with various diplomatic, legal, and economic officials which had to be gone through before an Okie could hope to deal with such a system. Certainly Amalfi had never expected to have any use for the reception hall in a jungle.

There was a lot, he thought grimly, that he didn't know about living in an Okie jungle.

One of the screens came alight. It showed the full-length figure of a woman in sober clothing of an old style, utilitarian in cut, but obviously made of perishable materials. The woman inside the clothes was hard-eyed, but not hard of muscle; an Acolyte trader, evidently.

"The assignment," the trader said in a cold voice, "is a temporary development project on Hern Six, as announced previously. We can take six cities there, to be paid upon a per-job basis."

"Attention, Okies."

A third screen faded in. Even before the image had stabilized in the locally distorted space-lattice, Amalfi recognized its outlines. The general topology of a cop can seldom be blurred by distortion of any kind. He was only mildly surprised to find, when the face came through, that the police spokesman was Lieutenant Lerner, the man whose bribe had turned to worthless germanium in his hands.

"If there's any disorder, nobody gets hired," Lerner said. "Nobody. Understand? You'll present your offers to the lady in proper fashion, and she'll take or leave your bids as she sees fit. Those of you who are wanted outside the jungle will be held accountable if you leave the jungle- we're offering no immunities this trip. And if there's any damn insolence-—"

Lieutenant Lerner's image drew its forefinger across its throat in a gesture that somehow had never lost its specificity. Amalfi growled and switched off the audio; Lerner was still talking, as was the trader, but now another screen was coming on, and Amalfi had to know what words were to come from it. The speeches of the trader and the cop could be predicted almost positively in advance-as a matter of fact, the City Fathers had already handed Amalfi the predictions, and he had listened to the actual speeches only long enough to check them for barely possible unknowns.

But what the bright city near the red dwarf-the jungle's boss, the king of the hobos-would say ...

Not even Amalfi, let alone the City Fathers, could know that in advance. Lieutenant Lerner and the trader worked their mouths soundlessly while the wavering shadow on the fourth screen jelled. A slow, heavy, brutally confident voice was already in complete possession of the reception hall.

"Nobody takes any offer less than sixty," it said. "The class A cities will ask one hundred and twenty-four for the Hern Six job, and grade B cities don't get to underbid them until the goddam trader has all the A's she'll take. If she picks all six from the A’s that's tough. No C's are to bid at all on the Hern Six deal. We'll take care of anybody that breaks ranks, either right away . .."

The image came through. Amalfi goggled at it.

". . . or after the cops leave. That's all for now."

The image faded. The twisted, hairless man in the ancient metal-mesh cape stood in Amalfi's memory for quite a while afterwards.

The Okie King was a man made of lava. Perhaps he had been born at one time, but now he looked like a geological accident, a column of black stone sprung from a fissure and contorted roughly into the shape of a man.

And his face was shockingly disfigured and scarred by the one disease that still remained unconquered, unsolved, though it no longer killed.

Cancer.

A voice murmured inside Amalfi's head, coming from the tiny vibrator imbedded in the mastoid bone behind the mayor's right ear. "That's just what the City Fathers said he would say," Hazleton commented softly from his post uptown in the control tower. "But he can't be as naive as all that. He's an old-timer; been aloft since back before they knew how to polarize spindizzy screens against cosmic radiation. Must be eight hundred years old at a minimum."

"You can lay up a lot of cunning in that length of time," Amalfi agreed in a similarly low voice. He was wearing throat mikes under a high military collar. As far as the screens were concerned, he was standing motionless, silent, and alone; though he was an expert at talking without moving his lips, he did not try to do so now, for the fuzziness of local transmission conditions made it unlikely that his murmuring would be detected. "It doesn't seem likely that he means what he says. But we'd best sit tight for the moment."

He glanced into the auxiliary battle tank, a three-dimensional chart in which color-coded points of lights moved, showing each city, the nearby sun, and the Acolyte vessels, not to scale, but in their relative positions. The tank was camouflaged as a desk and could be seen into only from behind;" hence it was out of sight of any eye but Amalfi's. In it the Acolyte force showed itself to consist of one trader's ship and four police craft; one of the latter was a command cruiser, very probably Lerner's, and the others were light cruisers.

It was not much of a force, but then, there was no real need for a full squadron here. With a minimum of organization, the Okies could run Lerner and his ward out of the jungle, even at some cost to their own numbers-but where would the Okies run to after Lerner had yelled for navy support? The question answered itself.

A string of twenty-three small "personal" screens came on now, high up along the curve of the far wall. Twenty-three faces looked down at Amalfi-the mayors of all but one of the class A cities in the jungle; Amalfi's own city was the twenty-fourth. Amalfi valved the main audio gain back up again.

"Are we ready to begin?" the Acolyte woman said. "I've got codes here for twenty-four cities, and I see you're all here. Small courage among Okies these days- twenty-four out of three hundred of you for a simple job like this! That's the attitude that made Okies of you in the first place. You're afraid of honest work."

"We'll work," the King's voice said. His screen, however, remained gray-green. "Look over the codes and take your pick."

The trader looked for the voice. "No insolence," she said sharply. "Or I'll ask for volunteers from the grade B's. It would save me money, anyhow."

There was no reply. The trader frowned and looked at the code list in her hand. After a moment, she called off three numbers, and then, with greater hesitation, a fourth. Four of the screens above Amalfi went blank, and in the tank, four green flecks began to move outward from the red dwarf star.

"That's all we need for Hern Six except for a pressure job," the woman said slowly. "There are eight cities listed here as pressure specialists. You there-who are you, anyhow?"

"Bradley-Vermont," one of the faces above Amalfi said.

"What would you 'ask for a pressure job?"

"One hundred and twenty-four," Bradley-Vermont's mayor said sullenly.

"O-ho! You've a high opinion of yourself, haven't you? You may as well float here and rot for a while longer, until you learn something more about the law of supply and demand. You-you're Dresden-Saxony, it says here. What's your price? Remember, I only need one."

Dresden-Saxony's mayor was a slight man with high cheekbones and glittering black eyes. He seemed to be enjoying himself, despite his obvious state of malnutrition; at least, he was smiling a little, and his eyes glittered over the dark shadows which made them look large.

"We ask one hundred 'and twenty-four," he said with malicious indifference.

The woman's lids slitted. "You do, eh? That's a coincidence, isn't it? And you?"

"The same," the third mayor said, though with obvious reluctance.

The trader swung around and pointed directly at Amalfi. In the very old cities, such as the one the King operated, it would be impossible to tell who she was pointing at, but probably most of the cities in the jungle had compensating tri-di. "What's your town?"

"We're not answering that question," Amalfi said. "And we're not pressure specialists anyhow."

"I know that, I can read a code. But you're the biggest Okie I've ever seen, and I'm not talking about your belly either; and you're modern enough for the purpose. The job is yours for one hundred-no more."

"Not interested."

"You're a fool as well as a fat man. You just came into this hell-hole and there are charges against-—"

"Ah, you know who we are. Why did you ask?"

"Never mind that. You don't know what a jungle is like until you've lived in it. You'd be smart to take the job and get out now while you can. You'd be worth one hundred and twelve to me if you could finish the job under the estimated time."

"You've denied us immunity," Amalfi said, "and you needn't bother offering it, either. We're not interested in pressure work for any price."

The woman laughed. "You're a liar, too. You know as well as I do that nobody arrests Okies on jobs. And you take on the volunteer before interviewing the others might be-resented.

"Keep out of this," the voice of the King said, so much more slowly and heavily than before that its weight was almost tangible upon the air. "Let the lady do her own picking. She's got no use for a class C outfit."

“We'll take the job. We're a mining town from way back, and we can refine the stuff, too, by gaseous diffusion, mass spectrography, mass chromatography, whatever's asked. We can handle it. And we've got to have it."

"So do the rest," the King said, coldly unimpressed. 'Take your turn."

"We're dying out here! Hunger, cold, thirst, disease!"

"Others are in the same state. Do you think any of us like it here? Wait your turn!"

"All right," the woman said suddenly. "I'm sick of being told who I do and who I don't want. Anything to get this over with. File your coordinates, whoever that is out there, and—"

"File your coordinates and we'll have a Dirac torpedo there before you've stopped talking!" the King roared. "Acolyte, what are you paying for this rock-heaving? Nobody here works for less than sixty-that's flat."

"We'll go for fifty-five."

The woman smiled an unpleasant smile. "Apparently somebody in this pest area is glad of a chance to do some honest work for a change. Who's next?"

"Hell, you don't need to take a class C city," one of the rejected class A's blurted. "We'll go for fifty-five. What can we lose?"

"Then we'll take fifty," the outsider whispered immediately.

"You'll take a bolt in the teeth! As for you-you're Coquilhatville-Congo, eh?-you're going to be sorry you ever had a tongue to flap."

There was already a stir among the green dots in the tank. Some of the larger cities were leaving their orbits. The woman began to look vaguely alarmed.

"Hazleton!" Amalfi murmured quickly. "This is going to get worse before it gets better. Set us up, as fast as you can to move into one of the vacated orbits close to the red star the moment I give the word."

"We won't be able to put on any speed—"

"I wouldn't want us to if we could. It'll have to be done wouldn't find it difficult to leave the job once it's finished. Here now-I'll give you one hundred and twenty. That's my top offer, and it's only four less than the pressure experts are asking. Fair enough?"

"It may be fair enough," Amalfi said. "But we don't do pressure work; and we've already gotten in reports from the proxies we sent to Hern Six as soon as Lieutenant Lerner said that was where the job was. We don't like the look of it. We don't want it. We won't take it at one hundred and twenty, we won't take it at one hundred and twenty-four-and we won't take it at all. Understand?"