Cities in Flight (61 page)
The slab came down easily, hinged at one end as the block down below over the generator room had been. The ancestors of the Proctors had not been much given to varying their engineering principles. The free end of the slab almost touched the table top. Amalfi sprang onto the table and scrambled up the tilted face of the stone; as he neared the top, the translating center of gravity which he represented actuated a counterweighting mechanism somewhere, and the slab closed, bearing him the rest of the way.
This was the control cabin, all right. It was tiny and packed with panels, all of which were thick in dust. Bull's-eyes of thick glass looked out over the city at the four compass points, and there was one set overhead, A single green light was glowing on one of the panels. While he walked toward it, it went out.
That had been Karst, cutting the power. Amalfi hoped that the peasant would get out again. He had grown to like him. There was something in his weathered, immovable, shockproof courage, and in the voracity of his starved intelligence, that reminded the mayor of someone he had once known. That that someone was Amalfi as he had been at the age of twenty-five, Amalfi did not know, and there was no one else alive who would be able to tell him.
Spindizzies in essence are simple; Amalfi had no difficulty in setting and locking the controls the way he wanted them, or in performing sundry small tasks of highly selective sabotage. How he was to conceal what he had done, when every move left huge smears in the heavy dust, was a tougher problem. He solved it at length in the only possible way: he took off his shirt and flailed it at all of the boards. The result made him sneeze until his eyes watered, but it worked.
Now all he had to do was get out.
There were already sounds below in Star Chamber, but he was not yet worried about a direct attack. He still had a black egg, and the Proctors knew it. Furthermore, he also had the pole with the hooked bill, so that in order to open up the control room at all, the Proctors would have to climb on each other's shoulders. They weren't in good physical shape for gymnastics, and besides, they would know that men indulging in such stunts could be defeated temporarily by nothing more complicated than a kick in the teeth.
Nevertheless, Amalfi had no intention of spending the rest of his life in the control room of IMT. He had only about six minutes to get out of the city altogether.
After thinking very rapidly for approximately four seconds, Amalfi stood on the stone slab, overbalanced it, and slid solemnly down onto the top of the table in Star Chamber.
After a stunned instant, half a dozen pairs of hands grabbed him at once. Heldon's face, completely unrecognizable with fury and fear, was thrust into his.
"What have you done? Answer, or I'll order you torn to pieces."
"Don't be a lunkhead. Tell your men to let go of me. I still have your safe-conduct-and in case you're thinking of repudiating it, I still have the same weapon I had before. Cast off, by God, or-—"
Heldon's guards released him before he had finished speaking. Heldon lurched heavily up onto the table top and began to claw his way up the slab. Several other robed, bald-headed men jostled after him-evidently Heldon had been driven by a greater fear to tell some of the Great Nine what he had done. Amalfi walked backwards out of Star Chamber and down two steps. Then he bent, desposited his remaining black egg carefully on the threshold, thumbed his nose at the furious soldiery, and took off down the spiral stairs at a dead run.
It would take Heldon a while, perhaps as much as a minute after he switched on the controls, to discover that the generators had been cut out while he was chasing Amalfi; and another minute, at best, to get a flunky down into the basement to turn them on again. Then there would be a warm-up time of four minutes. After that- IMT would go aloft.
Amalfi shot out into the alleyway and thence into the street, caroming off an astounded Proctor. A shout rose behind him. He doubled over and kept running.
The street was nearly dark in the twilight of the twin suns. He kept in the shadows and made for the nearest corner. The cornice of the building ahead of him abruptly turned lava-white, then began to dim through the red. He never did hear the accompanying scream of the mesotron rifle. He was concentrating on something else.
Then he was around the corner. The quickest route to the edge of the city, as well as he could recall, was down the street he had just quitted, but that was now out of the question; he had no desire to be burned down. Whether or not he could get out of IMT in time by any alternate route remained to be seen.
Doggedly, he kept running. He was fired on once more, by a man who did not really know on whom he was firing. Here, Amalfi was just a running man who failed to fit the categories; any first shot at him would be a reflex of disorientation, and aimed accordingly badly....
The ground shuddered, ever so delicately, like the hide of a monster twitching at flies in its sleep. Somehow Amalfi managed to run still faster.
The shudder came again, stronger this time. A long, protracted groan followed it, traveling in a heavy wave through the bedrock of the city. The sound brought Proctors and serfs alike boiling out of the buildings.
At the third shock, something toward the center of the city collapsed with a sullen roar. Amalfi was caught up in the aimless, terrified eddying of the crowd, and fought with hands, teeth, and bullet head....
The groaning grew louder. Abruptly, the ground bucked. Amalfi pitched forward. With him went the whole milling mob, falling in wind-rows like stacked grain. There was frantic screaming everywhere, but it was worst inside the buildings. Over Amalfi's head a window shattered explosively, and a woman's body came twisting and tumbling through the shuddering air.
Amalfi heaved himself up, spitting blood, and ran again. The pavement ahead was cracked in great, irregular shards, like a madman's mosaic. Just beyond, the blocks were tilted all awry, reminding Amalfi irrelevantly of a breakwater he had seen on some other planet, in some other century....
He was clambering over them before he realized that these could only mark the rim of the original city of IMT. There were still more buildings on the other side of the huge, rock-filled trench, but the trench itself showed where the perimeter of the ancient Okie city had been sunk into the soil of the planet. Fighting for air with saw-edged rales, he threw himself from stone to stone toward the far edge of the trench. This was the most dangerous ground of all; if IMT were to lift now, he would be ground as fine as mincemeat in the tumbling rocks. If he could just reach the marches of the Barrens....
Behind him, the groaning rose steadily in pitch, until it sounded like the tearing of an endless sheet of metal. Ahead, across the Barrens, his own city gleamed in the last rays of the twin suns. There was fighting around it; little bright flashes were sputtering at its edge. The rockets Amalfi had heard, four of them, were arrowing across the sky, and black things dropped from them. The Okie city responded with spouts of smoke.
Then there was an unbearably bright burst. After Amalfi could see again, there were only three rockets. In another few seconds there wouldn't be any: the City Fathers never missed.
Amalfi's lungs burned. He felt sod under his sandals. A twisted runner of furze lashed across his ankle, and he fell again.
He tried to get up and could not. The seared turf, on which an ancient rebel city once had stood, rumbled threateningly. He rolled over. The squat towers of IMT were swaying, and all around the edge of the city, huge Mocks and clods heaved and turned over, like surf. Impossibly, a thin line of light, intense and ruddy, appeared above the moiling rocks. The suns were shining under the city...
The line of light widened. The old city took the air with an immense bound, and the rending of the long-rooted foundations was ear-splitting. From the sides of the huge mass, human beings threw themselves desperately toward the Barrens; most of them, Amalfi saw, were serfs. The Proctors, of course, were still trying to control the flight of IMT....
The city rose majestically. It was gaining speed. Amalfi's heart hammered. If Heldon and his crew could figure out in time what Amalfi had done to the controls, Karst's old ballad would be re-enacted; and the crushing rule of the Proctors made safe forever.
But Amalfi had done his work well. The city of IMT did not stop rising. With a profound, visceral shock, Amalfi realized that it was already nearly a mile up, and still accelerating. The air would be thinning up there, and the Proctors had forgotten too much to know what to do. ...
A mile and a half.
Two miles.
It grew smaller, At five miles it was just a wavery ink blot, lit on one side. At seven miles it was a point of dim light.
A bristle-topped head and a pair of enormous shoulders lifted cautiously from a nearby gully. It was Karst. He continued to look aloft for a moment, but IMT at ten miles was invisible. He looked down to Amalfi.
"Can-can it come back?" he said huskily.
"No," Amalfi said, his breathing gradually coming under control. "Keep watching, Karst. It isn't over yet. Remember that the Proctors had called the Earth cops."
At that same moment, the city of IMT reappeared-in a way. A third sun flowered in the sky. It lasted for three or four seconds. Then it dimmed and died.
"The cops were warned," Amalfi said softly, "to watch for an Okie city trying to make a getaway. They found it, and they dealt with it. Of course they got the wrong city, but they don't know that. They'll go home now-and now we're home, and so are you and your fellow men. Home on Earth, for good."
Around them there was a murmuring of voices, hushed with disaster, and with something else, too-something so old, and so new, that it hardly had a name on the planet that IMT had ruled. It was called freedom.
"On Earth?" Karst repeated. He and the mayor climbed painfully to their feet. "What do you mean? This is not Earth-—"
Across the Barrens, the Okie city glittered-the city that had pitched camp to mow some lawns. A cloud of stars was rising behind it.
"It is now," Amalfi said. "We're all Earthmen, Karst. Earth is more than just one little planet, buried in another galaxy than this. Earth is much more important than that.
"Earth isn't a place. It's an idea."
To Lester and Evelyn del Rey
Bismillahi 'rrahmani 'rrahim
When the day that must come shall have come suddenly,
None shall treat that sudden coming as a lie:
Day that shall abase! Day that shall exalt!
When the earth shall be shaken with a shock,
And the mountains shall be crumbled with a crumbling,
And shall become scattered dust,
And into three bands shall ye be divided: ...
Before thee have we granted to a man a life that shall last forever:
If thou then die, shall they live forever?
Every soul shall taste of death: ...
But it shall come on them suddenly and shall confound them; and they shall not be able to put it back, neither shall they be respited.
-The Koran; Sura LVI, Sura XXI
... Thus we have seen that Earth, a planet like other civilized worlds, having a score of myriads of years of atmosphere-bound history behind her, and having begun manned local space-flight in approximately her own year 1960, did not achieve importance on a galactic scale until her independent discovery of the gravitron polarity generator in her year 2019. Her colonials made first contact with the Vegan Tyranny in 2289, and the antagonism between the two great cultures, one on its way down, the other rapidly developing, culminated in the Battle of Altair in 2310, the first engagement of what has come to be known as the Vegan War. Some 65 years later, Earth launched the first of the fleet of space-cruising cities, the "Okies," by which it was eventually to dominate the galaxy for a long period, and in 2413 the long struggle with the Vegans came to an end with the investment of Vega itself, and the Battle of the Forts. The subsequent scorching of the Vegan system by the Third Colonial Navy, under Admiral Alois Hrunta, prompted Earth proper to indict its admiral in absentia for atrocities and attempted genocide. The case was tried, also in absentia, by the Colonial Court; Hrunta was found guilty, but refused to submit to judgment. An attempt to bring him in by force brought home for the first tune the fact that the Third Colonial Navy had defected to him almost en masse and resulted in 2464 in the Battle of BD 40°4048'. Both sides suffered heavy losses, but there was no other outcome, and Hrunta subsequently declared himself Emperor of Space-the first of many such gimcrack "empires" which were to spawn on the fringes of Earth's jurisdiction during the so-called Empty Years. This period officially began in 2522 with the collapse of local government on Earth-the Bureaucratic State, dating from 2105-which after a brief police interregnum allowed the now large numbers of Okie cities to develop in effectual anarchy, a condition very well suited to their proliferation of trade routes throughout the known and unknown galaxy.
We have already discussed the collapse under its own weight of the Hruntan Empire and the final reduction of the fragments by the recrudescent Earth police during the period 3545-3602. We have stressed this relatively minor aspect of Earth history not because it was at all unusual, but because it was typical of the balkanization of Earth's official power during the very period when its actual power was greatly on the rise. Our discussion of the history of one of the Okie cities, New York, N. Y., which began its space-flying career in 3111 and thus overlapped much of the history of the Hruntan Empire, may be compared to illustrate the difference in the treatment accorded by Earth to her two very different children, empires and Okies, and history shows the wisdom of the choice; for it was the wide-ranging Okies who were to make the galaxy an orchard for Earth for a relatively long period, as such periods go in galactic history.
Customs and cultures pronounced officially dead have, however, a way of stirring again long after their supposed interment. In some instances, of course, this is simply a reflex twitch; for example, though the grandiose collapse of the Earth culture certainly can be said to have begun during the Battle of the Jungle in the Acolyte cluster in 3905, we find only five years later the Acolyte-Regent, a Lt. Lerner, proclaiming himself Emperor of Space; but the Acolyte fleet, already considerably cut up by its encounter with the Okies in the jungle, was annihilated by the Earth police on their arrival a year later, and Emperor Lerner died that same year in a slum on a tenthrate Acolyte planet named Murphy from an overdose of wisdomweed. On a larger scale, the Battle of Earth in 3975, in which Earth found herself pitted against her own Okie cities, was marked also by an unexpected resurrection of the Vegan Tyranny, whose secretly constructed and long-wandering orbital fort chose this moment to make its last bid for galactic power. Its failure was a repetition in miniature of the failure of the entire Vegan Tyranny, despite superior force of arms, in any conflict with the Earthmen, who were far better chessmasters; the Vegans characteristically left prediction to computers, which lack the ability to make long intuitive leaps, as well as the decisiveness to act upon them.
The Okie city which had outplayed the Vegan orbital fort in the game of thinking ahead, our type-city New York, was far enough ahead of its own culture to have left the galaxy by 3978 for the Greater Magellanic Cloud. It left behind an Earth which in 3976 cut its own throat as a galactic power with the passage of the so-called anti-Okie Bill. Though the Magellanic planet which New York colonized in 3998 was in 3999 christened New Earth, the earlier date of 3976 marks the passing of Earth from the stellar stage. Already there were reaching out from one of the galaxy's largest and most beautiful star-clusters the first tentative strands of that strange culture called the Web of Hercules, which was destined to become the Milky Way's IVth great civilization. And yet once more a civilization which from every historical point of view had to be pronounced dead refused to stay entirely buried. The creeping, inexorable growth of the Web of Hercules through the heart of the galaxy was destined to be interrupted by that totally revolutionary, totally universal physical cataclysm now known as the Ginnangu-Gap; and though it is due entirely to the Web of Hercules that we still have records of galactic history before that cataclysm, and thus a continuity with the universe's past surely unprecedented in all the previous cycles, we must note, with more than a little awe, the sudden and critical reappearance of Earthmen in this tuneless moment of chaos and creation, and the drastic and fruitful exeunt which they wrote for themselves into the universal drama.