Cities in Flight (49 page)

Hazleton stared at Amalfi a moment longer. Then he turned and pushed back through the crowd, the frightened, reluctant girl at his heels. His method of being very noisy was characteristic of him: he was so completely silent that everyone within sight of him knew that he was making a getaway; even his footsteps made no sound at all. In the surging hall his noiselessness was as conspicuous as a siren in church.

Amalfi stood his ground long enough to let the King see that the principal hostage was still on hand, still obeying the letter of the King's order. Then, the moment the King's attention was distracted, he faded, moving with the local current in the crowd, bending his knees slightly to reduce his height, tipping his head back to point his conspicuous baldness away from the dias, and making only the normal amount of sound as he moved-becoming, in short, effectively invisible,

By this time the voting was in full course, and it would be five minutes at the least before the King could afford to interrupt it long enough to order the doors closed against Amalfi. After Hazleton's and Dee's ostentatiously alarmed exists, an emergency order in the middle of the voting would have made it painfully obvious what the King was after.

Of course, had the King had the foresight to equip himself with a personal transmitter before mounting the dais, the outcome might have been different. The King's failure to do so strengthened Amalfi's conviction that the King had not been mayor of Buda-Pesht long, and that he had not won the post by the usual processes.

But Dee and Hazleton would get out all right. So would Amalfi. On this limited subject, Amalfi had been six jumps ahead of the King all the way.

Amalfi drifted toward the part of the crowd from where, roughly, he estimated that the voice of the mayor of Dresden-Saxony had been coming. He found the worn, birdlike Slav without difficulty.

"You keep a tight holster-flap on your weapons," Specht said in a low voice.

"Sorry to disappoint you, Mayor Specht. You set it up beautifully. It might cheer you up a bit to know that the question was just the right one, all the same, and many thanks for it. In return I owe you the answer; are you good at riddles?"

"Riddles?"

"Raetseln," Amalfi translated.

"Oh-conundrums. No, but I can try."

"What city has two names twice?"

Evidently Specht did not need to be good at riddles to come up with the answer to that one. His jaw dropped. "You're N—" he began.

Amalfi held up his hand in the conventional Okie FYI sign: "For your information only." Specht gulped and nodded. With a grin, Amalfi drifted on out of the palace.

There was a lot of hard work still ahead, but from now on it should be all downhill. The "march" on Earth would be carried in the voting.

Nothing essential remained to be done now in the jungle but to turn the march into a stampede.

By the time he reached his own city, Amalfi found he was suddenly intensely tired. He berthed the second gig Hazleton had had the perimeter sergeant send for him and went directly to his room, where he ordered his supper sent up.

This last move, he was forced to conclude, had been a mistake. The city's stores were heavily diminished, and the table that was set for him-set, as it would have been for anyone else in the city, by the City Fathers with complete knowledge of his preferences-was meager and uninteresting. It included fuming Rigellian wine, which he despised as a drink for Barbarians; such a choice could only mean that there was nothing else to drink in the city but water.

His weariness, the solitude, the direct transition from the audience hall of the Hapsburgs to his bare new room under the mast in the Empire State Building-it had been an elevator-winch hocusing until the city had converted to friction-fields-and the dullness of the meal combined to throw him into a rare and deep state of depression. What he thought he could see of the future of Okie cities did not exactly cheer him, either.

It was at this point that the door to his room irised open, and Hazleton stalked silently through it, hooking his chromoclav back into his belt.

They looked at each other stonily for a moment. Amalfi pointed to a chair.

"Sorry, boss," Hazleton said, without moving. "I've never used my key before except in an emergency, you know that. But I think maybe this is an emergency. We're in a bad way-and the way you're dealing with the problem strikes me as crazy. For the survival of the city, I want to be taken into your confidence."

"Sit down," Amalfi said. "Have some Rigel wine."

Hazleton made a wry face and sat down.

"You're in my confidence, as always, Mark. I don't leave you out of my plans except where I think you might shoot from the hip if I didn't. You'll agree that you've done that occasionally-and don't throw up the Thor Five situation again, because there I was on your side; it was the City Fathers that objected to that particular Hazleton gimmick."

"Granted."

"Good," Amalfi said. "Tell me what you want to know, then."

"Up to a point I understand what you're out to do," Hazleton said without preamble. "Your use of Dee as a safe-conduct in and out of the meeting was a shrewd trick. Considering the political threat we represented to the King, it was probably the only thing you could have done. Understand, I resent it personally and I may yet pay you off for it. But it was necessary, I agree."

"Good," the mayor said wearily. "But that's a minor point, Mark."

"Granted, except on the personal level. The main thing is that you threw away the whole chance you schemed so hard to get. The knowledge-pooling plan was a good one, and you had two major chances to put it across. First of all, the King set you up to claim we were Vegan-nobody has ever actually seen that fort, and physically you're enough unlike the normal run of humanity to pass for a Vegan without much trouble. Dee and I don't look Vegan, but we might be atypical, or maybe renegades.

"But you threw that one away. Then the mayor from Dresden-Saxony set you up to swing almost everybody our way by letting them know our name. If you'd followed through, you would have carried the voting. Hell, you'd probably have wound up king of the jungle to boot.

"And you threw that one away, too."

Hazleton took his slide rule out of his pocket and moodily pushed the slide back and forth in it. It was a gesture frequent enough with him, but ordinarily it preceded or followed some use of the rule. Tonight it was obviously just nervous play.

"But Mark, I didn't want to be king of the jungle," Amalfi said slowly. "I'd much rather let the present incumbent hold that responsibility. Every crime that's ever been committed, or will be committed in the near future, in this jungle, will be laid at his door eventually by the Earth cops. On top of that, the Okies here will hold him personally responsible for every misfortune that comes their way while they're in the jungle. I never did want that job; I only wanted the King to think that I wanted it.... Incidentally, did you try to raise that city out on the perimeter, the one that said it had mass chromatography?"

"Sure," Hazleton said. "They don't answer."

"Okay. Now, about this knowledge-pooling plan: it wouldn't work, Mark. First of all, you couldn't keep a pack of Okies working at it long enough to get any good out of it. Okies aren't philosophers, and they aren't scientists except in a limited way. They're engineers and merchants; in some respects they're adventurers, too, but they don't think of themselves as adventurers. They're practical-that's the word they use. You've heard it."

"I've used it," Hazleton said edgily.

"So have I. There's a great deal of meaning packed into it. It means, among other things, that if you get Okies involved in a major analytical project, they'll get restive. They want sets of, applications of principles, not principles pure and useless; And it isn't in their natures to sit still in one place for long. If you convince them that they should, they'll try, and the whole thing will wind up in a terrific explosion.

"But that's only point one. Mark, have you any idea of the real scope of the knowledge-pooling project? I'm not trying to put you oil the spot, believe me. I don't think anybody in that hall realized it. If they had, they'd have laughed me off the platform. There again, Okies aren't scientists, and their outlook is too impatient to let them carry a really long chain of reasoning to a conclusion."

"You're an Okie," Hazleton pointed out. "You carried it to a conclusion. You told them how long it would take."

"I'm an Okie. I told them it would take from two to five years to do even a scratch job. As an Okie, I'm an expert at half-truths. It would take from two to five years even to get the project set up! And the rest of the job, Mark, would take centuries."

"For a scratch job?"

"No such thing as a scratch job in this universe of discourse," Amalfi said, reaching for the fuming wine and reconsidering at the last minute. "Those cities out there represent the accumulated scientific knowledge of all the high-technical-level cultures they've ever encountered. Even allowing for the usual information gaps, that's about five thousand planets-full of data, at a minimum estimate. Sure, we could pool all that knowledge-just as I said at the meeting, the City Fathers could take it all in, and classify it, in only a little over an hour-after we'd spent two to five years setting them up to do it. And then we'd have to integrate it. And you've got to integrate it, Mark; you've got to know it thoroughly enough to be able to make it do something. You couldn't offer it for sale unless you-did that. Would you like the job?"

"No," Hazleton said slowly, but at once. "But Amalfi, am I ever going to know what you're doing if you persist in proceeding like this? You didn't go to that meeting just to waste time; I can trust you that far. So I have to assume that the whole maneuver was a trick, designed to force the March on Earth, rather than to defeat it. You gave the cities a clearly defined, superficially sound, and less-attractive alternative. Once they had rejected the alternative, they had committed themselves to the King's tactics, without knowing it."

"That's quite right."

"If that's right," Hazleton said, looking up suddenly with a flat flash of almost-violet eyes, "I think it's stupid. I think it's stupid even though it was marvelously devious. There's such a thing as outsmarting yourself."

Amalfi said, "That could be. In any event, if the choice had been limited to marching on Earth versus staying in the jungle, the cities would have stayed hi the jungle. Would it have been sensible to allow that?"

"We can't afford to stay in the jungle, anyhow."

"Of course we can't. And by the same token, we couldn't leave it by ourselves. The only way we could get free of this star cluster is in the middle of a mass movement. What else could I have been shooting for?"

"I don't know," Hazleton said. "But there's something else besides that in the back of your head."

"And your complaint is that you don't know about it in advance. I know why you don't know. You know, too."

"Dee?"

"Certainly," Amalfi said. "You weren't asking yourself the right question. You were emotionally driven to ask why I wanted Dee along. The question was pertinent enough, but it wasn't exactly central. If you had stood back a little further from the whole problem, you'd have seen why I wanted the March on Earth to go through, too."

"I’ll keep trying," Hazleton said grimly. "Though I'd have preferred to be told. You and I are getting further apart every year, boss. It used to be that we thought very much alike; and it was then that you developed your habit of not telling me the whole story. It was a training device, I think now. The more I was made to worry about the total plan, the more I was required to think the thing out for myself-which meant trying to figure you out-the more training I got in thinking like you. And of course, to be a proper city manager, I had to think like you. You had to be sure that any decisions I made in your absence would be the decisions you would have made had you been around.

"All this hit me after our tangle with the Duchy of Gort. That incident was the first time that you and I had been out of touch with each other long enough for a situation of really major proportions to develop-a situation about which I knew Very little until I could get back to the city from Utopia and get briefed.

"When I got back, I found that I was damn lucky not to have thought like you. My first failure to comprehend your whole plan-and your training method of leaving me to puzzle things out alone-apparently had doomed me in your mind. You had* written me off, and you were training Carrel as my successor."

"All this is accurate reportage," Amalfi said. "If you mean to accuse me of keeping a bard school—"

"—"a fool will learn in no other?"

"No. A fool won't learn at all. But I don't deny keeping a hard school. Go on."

"I haven't far to go, now. I learned in the Gort-Utopia system that thinking the way you think can sometimes be deadly for me. I got off Utopia by thinking my way, not yours. The confirmation came when we hit He; had I been thinking entirely like you in that situation, we'd still be on the planet."

"Mark, you still haven't made your point. I can tell. It's perfectly true that we often relied on your plans, and precisely because they come from a mind most unlike my own. What of it?"

"This of it. You're now out to rub out whatever trace of originality I have. You used to value it, as you say. You used to use it for the city, and defend it against the City Fathers when they had an attack of conservatism. But now you've changed, and so have I.