Cities in Flight (48 page)

"But we don't have to take it. We can go to Earth and demand our rights. We're citizens, every one of us-unless there are any Vegans here. You a Vegan, buddy?"

The scarred face stared down at Amalfi, smiling gruesomely. A nervous titter went through the hall.

"The rest of us can go to Earth and demand that the government bail us out. What else is government for, anyhow? Who produces the money that kept the politicians fat all through the good centuries? What would the government have to govern and tax and penalize if it weren't for the Okies? Answer me that, you with the orbital fort under your belt!"

The laughter was louder and sounded more assured now. Amalfi, however, was quite used to gibes at his pod; such thrusts were for him a sure sign that his current opponent had run out of pertinent things to say. He returned coldly: "More than half of us had charges against us when we came here-not local charges, but violations of Earth orders of one kind or another. Some of us have been dodging being brought back on our Violations dockets for decades. Are you going to offer yourselves to the Earth cops on a platter?"

The King did not appear to be listening with more than half an ear. He had Brought up a broad grin at the second wave of laughter, and had been looking back down at Dee for admiration.

"We'll send out signal on the Dirac," he said. "To all Okies, everywhere. 'We're all going back to Earth,' we'll say. 'We're going home to get an accounting. We've done Earth's heavy labor all over the galaxy, and Earth's paid us by turning our money into waste paper. We're going home to see that Earth does something about it'-we'll set a date-'and any Okie with starman's guts will follow us.' How does that sound, eh?"

Dee's grip on Amalfi's hand was now tighter than any pressure he would have believed she could exert. Amalfi did not speak to the King; he simply looked back at him, his eyes metallic.

From somewhere fairly far back in the throne room, a newly familiar voice called, "The mayor of the nameless city has asked a pertinent question. From the point of view of Earth, we're a dangerous collection of potential criminals at worst. At best we're discontented jobless people, and "undesirable in large numbers anywhere near the home planet."

Hazleton pushed up to the front row, on the other side of Dee, and glared belligerently up at the King. The King, however, had looked away again, over Hazleton's head.

"Anybody got a better idea?" the immense black man said dryly. "Here's good old Vega down here; he's full of ideas. Let's hear his idea. I'll bet it's colossal. I'll just bet he's a genius, this Vegan."

"Get up there, boss," Hazleton hissed. "You've got "em!"

Amalfi released Dee's hand-he had some difficulty in being gentle about it-bounded clumsily but without real effort onto the dais, and turned to face the crowd.

"Hey there, mister," someone shouted. "You're no Vegan!"

The crowd laughed uneasily.

"Never said I was," Amalfi retorted. Hazleton's face promptly fell. "Are you all a pack of children? No mythical fort is going to bail you out of this. Neither is any fool mass flight on Earth. There isn't any easy way out. There is one tough way out, if you've got the guts for it."

"Let's hear it."

"Speak up!"

"Let's get it over with."

"All right," Amalfi said. He walked back to the immense throne of the Hapsburgs and sat down in it, catching the King flatfooted. Standing, Amalfi, despite his bulk, was a smaller man than the King, but on the throne he made the King look not only smaller but also quite irrelevant. From the back of the dais, his voice boomed out as powerfully as before.

"Gentlemen," he said, "our germanium is worthless now. So is our paper money. Even the work we do doesn't seem to be worth while now, on any standard. That's our trouble, and there isn't much that Earth can do about it-they're caught in the collapse, too."

"A professor," the King said, his seamed lips twisting.

"Shaddap. You asked me up here. I'm staying up here until I've had my say. The commodity we all have to sell is labor. Hand labor, heavy work, isn't worth anything. Machines can do that. But brainwork can't be done with anything but brains; art and pure science are beyond the compass of any machine.

"Now, we can't sell art. We can't produce it; we aren't artists and aren't set up as such; there's an entirely different segment of galactic society that supplies that need. But brainwork in pure science is something we can sell, just as we've always sold brainwork in applied sciences. If we play our cards right, we can sell it anywhere, for any price we ask, regardless of the money system involved. It's the ultimate commodity, and in the long run it's a commodity which no one but the Okies could merchandise successfully.

"Selling that commodity, we could take over the Acolytes or any other star system. We could do it better in a general depression than we could ever have done it before, because we can now set any price on it that we choose."

"Prove it," somebody called.

"That's easy. We have here around three hundred cities. Let's integrate and use their accumulated knowledge. This is the first time in history that so many City Fathers have been gathered together in one place, just as it's the first time that so many big organizations specializing in different sciences have ever been gathered together. If we were to consult with each other, pool our intellectual resources, we'd come out technologically at least a thousand years ahead of the rest of the galaxy. Individual experts can be bought for next to nothing now, but no individual expert-nor any individual city or planet- could match what we'd have.

"That's the priceless coin, gentlemen, the universal coin: human knowledge. Look now: there are eighty-five million undeveloped worlds in this galaxy ready to pay for knowledge of the current vintage, the kind we all share right now, the kind that runs about a century behind Earth on the average. But if we were to pool our knowledge, then even the most advanced planets, even Earth itself, would see their coinages crumble in the face of their eagerness to buy what we would have to offer."

"Question!"

"You're Dresden-Saxony back there, right?" Amalfi said. "Go ahead, Mayor Specht."

"Are you sure accumulated technology is the answer? You yourself said that straight techniques are the province of machines. The ancient Godel-Church theorems show that no machine or set of machines can score significant advances on human thought. The designer has to precede the machine, and has to have achieved the desired function before the machine can even be built."

"What is this, a seminar?" the King demanded. "Let's—"

"Let's hear it," someone called.

"After that mess today—"

"Let 'em talk-they make sense!"

Amalfi waited a moment and then said, "Yes, Mayor Specht. Go ahead."

"I had about made my point. The machines can't do the job you offer as the solution to our troubles. This is why mayors have authority over City Fathers, rather than the other way around."

"That's quite true," Amalfi said. "And I don't pretend that a completely cross-connective hookup among all our City Fathers would automatically bail us out. For one thing we'd have to set the hookup pattern very carefully as a topological problem, to be sure we didn't get a degree of connectivity which would result in the disappearance of knowledge instead of its accumulation. There's an example of just the kind of thing you were talking about: machines can't handle topology because it isn't quantitative.

"I said that this was the hard way of solving the problem, and I meant just that. After we'd pooled our machine-accumulated knowledge, furthermore, we'd have to interpret it before we could put it to some use.

"That would take time. Lots of time. Technicians will have to check the knowledge-pooling at every stage; they'll have to check the City Fathers to be sure they can take in what's being delivered to them-as far as we know, they have no storage limits, but that assumption hasn't ever been tested before on the practical level. They'll have to assess what it all adds up to in the end, run the assessments through the City Fathers for logical errors, assess the logic for supralogical bugs beyond the logics that the City Fathers use, check all the assessments for new implications needing complete rechecks-of which there will be thousands....

"It'll take more than two years, and probably closer to five years, to do even a scratch job. The City Fathers will do their part of it in a few hours, and the rest of the time will be consumed by human brainwork. While that part of it's going on, we'll have it thin. But we've got it damn thin already, and when it's all over, we'll be able to write our own tickets, anywhere in the galaxy."

"A very good answer," Specht said. He spoke quietly, but each word whistled through the still, sweat-humid air like a thin missile. "Gentlemen, I believe the mayor of the nameless city is right."

"The hell he is!" the King howled, striding to the front of the dais and trying to wipe the air out of his way as he walked. "Who wants to sit for five years making like a pack of scientists while the Acolytes have us all digging ditches?"

"Who wants to be dispersed?" someone countered shrilly. "Who wants to pick a fight with Earth? Not me. I'll stay as far away from the Earth cops as I can. That's common sense for Okies."

"Cops!" the King shouted. "Cops look for single cities. What if a thousand cities marched on Earth? What cop would bother with one city on one disorderly conduct charge? If you were a cop and you saw a mob coming down at you, would you try to bust it up by pinching one man in it who'd run out on a Vacate order, or shaded a three per cent fruit-freezing contract? If that's common sense for Okies, I'll eat it.

"You guys are chicken, that's your trouble. You got knocked around today and you hurt. You're tender. But you know damn weft that the law exists to protect you, not scum like the Acolytes. It's a cinch we can't call the Earth cops here to project us-the cops are too few for that, we're too few, and besides, we would get nabbed individually for whatever we've got written against us. But in a march of thousands of Okies-a peaceful march, to ask Earth to give you what belongs to you-you couldn't be touched individually. But you're scared! You'd rather squat in a jungle and die by pieces!"

"Not us!"

"Us neither!"

"When do we start?"

"That's more like it," the King said.

Specht's voice said, "Buda-Pesht, you're trying to drum up a stampede. The question isn't closed yet."

"All right," the King agreed. "I'm willing to be reasonable. Let's take a vote."

"We aren't ready for a vote yet. The question is still open."

"Well?" said the King. "You there on the overstaffed potty-you got anything more to say? Are you as afraid of a vote as Specht is?"

Amalfi got up with deliberate slowness.

"I've made my points, and I'll abide by the voting," he said, "if it's physically possible for us to do so-our spindizzy equipment wouldn't tolerate an immediate flight to Earth if the voting goes that way. I've made my point. A mass flight to Earth would be suicide."

"One moment," Specht's voice cut in again. "Before we vote, I for one want to know who it is that has been advising us. Buda-Pesht we know. But-who are you?"

There was instant dead silence in the throne room.

The question was loaded, as everyone in the hall knew. Prestige among Okies depended, in the long run, upon only two things: time aloft and coups recorded by the interstellar grapevine." Amalfi's city stood high on both tallies; he had only to identify his city, and he would stand at least an even chance of carrying the voting. Even while nameless, for that matter, the city had earned considerable kudos in the jungle.

Evidently Hazleton thought so, too, for Amalfi could see the frantic covert hand signals he was making. Tell 'em, boss. It can't miss. Tell 'em!

After a long, suspended heartbeat, the mayor said, "My name is John Amalfi, Mayor Specht."

A single broad comber of contempt rolled through the hall.

"Asked and answered," the King said, showing his ragged teeth. "Glad to have you aboard, Mister Amalfi. Now if you'll get the hell off the platform, we'll get on with the voting. But don't be in any hurry to leave town, Mister Amalfi. I want to talk to you, man to man. Understand?"

"Yeah," Amalfi said. He swung his huge bulk lightly to the floor of the hall, and walked back to where Dee and Hazleton were standing, band in hand.

"Boss, why didn't you tell 'em?" Hazleton whispered, his face hard. "Or did you want to throw the whole show away? You had two beautiful chances, and you muffed 'em both!"

"Of course I muffed them. I came here to muff them. I came here to dynamite them, as a matter of fact. Now you and Dee had better get out of here before I have to give Dee to the King in order to get back to our city at all."

"You staged that, too, John," Dee said. It was not an accusation; it was simply a statement of fact.

"I'm afraid I did," Amalfi said. "I'm sorry, Dee; it had to be done, or I wouldn't have done it. I was also sure that I could fox the King on that point, if that's any consolation to you. Now move, or you will be sunk. Mark, make plenty of noise about getting away."

"What about you?" Dee said. "I'll be along later. Git!"