Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  The man in the kitchen garden straightened, leaned his hoe against the back of his shack, and went inside. Now the valley outside the raw-earth circle looked deserted indeed, and it suddenly occurred to Chris that this might be more than an appearance. Was there something dangerous about being too close to a city under a spindizzy field? Were he and the lone gardener being foolhardy?

  At the moment, the whole world was silent except for the distant grumbling of Scranton itself. He knew he had nothing to fear from the rail bed behind him, for the tracks had been torn up long ago to feed the furnaces. There was a legend in the valley that on quiet nights one could still hear the Phoebe Snow going by, but Chris scoffed at such fairy tales. (Besides, his father had told him, that had been a daytime train. ) Even the ties were gone, burned as firewood by the shack dwellers through generations of harsh Pennsylvania winters.

  He racked his memory for what little he knew about the behavior of spindizzies, but could come up with nothing but that they were machines and that they lifted things. Though his schooling had been poor and spasmodic, he was a compulsive reader, devouring even the labels on cans if there was nothing else available; but the physics of interstellar flight is an impossible discipline to grasp even for an advanced student without a first-rate teacher to help, and the closest Chris had even come to a good teacher was Scranton’s public librarian. She had tried hard; but she did not know the subject.

  As a result, Chris stayed where he was. He would probably have done so even had he known positively that there was some danger; for in the valley, anything new was a change—even the fact, disastrous though it was, that Scranton was about to go as permanently out of his life and world as Betelgeuse. His own life thus far had held little but squirrel trapping; stealing eggs from neighbors as badly off as his own family; hunting scrap to sell to the mills; helping Bob nurse their father through repeated bouts of an illness which, but for the fact that there was no one in thirty-second-century America to diagnose it, would have been recognized as the ancient African scourge of kwashiorkor or malignant malnutrition; keeping the little girls out of the berry patch; fishing for fingerlings; and watching the rockets of the rich howl remotely through the highest reaches of the indifferent sky.

  He had often thought of leaving, though he had no trade to practice and knew of no place in the world where his considerable but utterly untrained brute strength could be sold at any price. But there was loyalty and love in the motherless family, and it had often before sustained them when there had been nothing to eat but fried dough and green tomatoes, and no warmth against the Christmas snows but huddling with the little kids under a heap of the old rags that were their clothes; and in the end, Chris stuck by it as stubbornly and devotedly as Bob always had. In all the depopulated Earth there was no place to which he owed more loyalty, and no place which could offer him more in return—the worse possible substratum for dreams of escape, even for a temperament as naturally sunny and sanguine as Chris’s. In a world where a Ph.D. in economics could find no one to teach, nor use his knowledge of how the economy wagged to find any other niche in it—a world in which a thousand penny-ante jobs left him no time even to tend his wife’s grave, yet all the same paid him less and less every year—what hope could his boys reasonably cherish for any better future? The answer, alas, was all too obvious; and for the little girls, the foreseeable future was even more grim.

  The nomad cities offered no better way of escape. More often than not, Chris had read, star roving was simply another form of starvation, without even the company of a blue sky, a scrub forest or a patch of ground to grow turnips in. Otherwise, why did almost every city which had ever left the Earth fail to come back home? Pittsburgh had made its fortune on Mars, to be sure—but it was a poor sort of fortune that kept you sitting in a city all your life, with nothing to see beyond the city limits but an ochre desert, a desert with no air you could breathe, a desert that would freeze you solid only a few minutes after the tiny sun went down. Sooner or later, too, his father said, Pittsburgh would have to leave the solar system as all the other cities had—not, this time, because it had exhausted the iron and the oxygen, but because there would be too few people left on the Earth to buy steel. There were already too few to justify Pittsburgh’s coming back to the once-golden triangle of rivers it had abandoned thirty years ago; Pittsburgh had wealth, but was finding it increasingly hard to spend on the Earth, even for necessities. The nomad cities seemed, like everything else, to be a dead end.

  Nevertheless Chris sat on the embankment and watched, for only a single, simple reason: Something was going on. If he envied the city its decision to leave the valley, he was unaware of it. He was there simply to see something happen, for a change.

  A brief rustle of shrubbery behind him made him turn. A dog’s head peered across the roadbed at him from the foot of the mountainside, surrounded incongruously by the trumpets of tiger lilies; it looked a little as if it were being served up on a platter. Chris grinned.

  “Hello, Kelly. Look out for bees.”

  The dog whuffed and came trotting to him, looking foolishly proud of itself—as it probably was, for Kelly was usually not very good at finding anything, even his own way home. Bob, whose dog Kelly officially was, said that Kelly was a combination of Kerry blue and collie—hence the name—but Chris had never seen a pure sample of either breed, and Kelly did not look anything like the pictures of either. He looked, in point of fact, like a shaggy mutt, which was fortunate for him, since that was what he was.

  “What do you make of it, handsome? Think they’ll ever get that thing off the ground?”

  Kelly gave an imitation of a dog trying to think, registered pain, wagged his tail twice, woofed at a butterfly and sat down, panting. It had obviously always been his impression that he belonged to Chris, an impression Bob had wisely never tried to discourage. Explaining something that abstract to Kelly was (a) a long and complicated task, and (b) utterly hopeless anyhow. Kelly earned his own keep—he caught rabbits—which made up for the nuisance he was when he caught a porcupine; so nobody in the family but Chris much cared whom he thought he belonged to.

  There was at last some activity around the parching city. Small groups of men, made so tiny by distance that they were almost invisible except for their bright yellow steelworkers’ helmets, were patrolling the bare perimeter. There was probably a law about that, Chris reflected. Equally probably it would be the last Earth law Scranton would ever be obliged to observe—no matter how many of them the city fathers took into space of their own free will. No doubt the patrol was looking for rubbernecks who might be standing too close for safety.

  He imagined it so vividly that for a moment he had the illusion of hearing their voices. Then he realized with a start that it was not an illusion. A flash of yellow hard hats revealed another group of patrollers working their way through the shacks at the foot of the embankment and coming in his direction.

  With the ingrained prudence of the lifelong poacher, he took at once to the bushes on the other side of the roadbed. Not only would he be invisible from there, but, of course, he could no longer see the patrol; however, he could still hear it.

  “… anybody in these shacks. Ask me, it’s a waste of time.”

  “The boss says look, so we look, that’s all. Myself, I think we’d make out better in Nixonville.”

  “Them tramps? They can smell work ten miles away. People on this side of town, they used to look for work. Not that there ever was any.”

  Chris cautiously parted the shrubbery and peered out. The gang was still out of sight, but there was another group coming toward him from the other direction, walking along the old roadbed. He let the bushes swing closed hastily, wishing that he had retreated farther up the mountainside. It was too late for that now, though. The new patrol was close enough to hear the brush rustle, and would probably see him too if he was in motion.

  Down in the valley there was a sudden, slight hum, like bee-buzz, but infinitely gentler, an
d deeper in tone. Chris had never heard anything exactly like it before, but there could be no doubt in his mind about what it was: Scranton’s spindizzies were being tuned. Was he going to have to hide right through the take-off, and miss seeing it? But surely the city wouldn’t leave until its patrols were back on board!

  The voices came closer, and beside him Kelly growled softly. The boy grasped the dog firmly by the scruff and shook him gently, not daring to speak. Kelly shut up but all his muscles were tensed.

  “Hey! Look what we got here!”

  Chris froze as completely as a rabbit smelling fox; but another voice struck in at once.

  “You guys get outa here. This here’s my place. You got no business with me.”

  “Yeah? You didn’t hear anything about getting out of the valley by noon today? There’s a poster on your own front door that says so. Can’t read, huh, Jack?”

  “I don’t do everything any piece of paper says. I live here, see? It’s a lousy dump, but it’s mine, and I’m staying, that’s all. Now blow, will you?”

  “Well, now, I don’t know if that’s all, Jack. It’s the law that you’re supposed to be vacated. We don’t want your shack, but it’s the law, see?”

  “It’s the law that I got a right to my own property, too.”

  A new voice chimed in from the embankment, not fifteen feet from where Chris and Kelly crouched. “Trouble down there, Barney?”

  “Squatter. Won’t move. Says he owns the place.”

  “That’s a laugh. Get him to show you his deed.”

  “Ah, why bother with that? We ain’t got the time. Let’s impress him and get moving.”

  “No you don’t—”

  There was the meaty sound of a blow landing, and a grunt of surprise. “Hey, he wants to play rough! All right, mister—”

  More impacts, and then the sound of something smashing—glass or crockery, Chris guessed, but it might have been furniture. Before Chris could do more than grab at him convulsively, Kelly burst into a volley of high, howling yelps, broke free, crashed out of the bushes and went charging across the embankment toward the fracas.

  “Look out! Hey—Where’d that mutt come from?”

  “Out of the bushes there. Somebody’s in there still. Red hair, I can see it. All right, Red, out in the open—on the double!”

  Chris rose slowly, ready to run or fight at the drop of a hard hat. Kelly, on the far side of the embankment, gave up his idiot barking for a moment, his attention divided between the struggle in the shack and the group now surrounding Chris.

  “Well, Red, you’re a husky customer. I suppose you didn’t hear about any vacate order, either.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Chris said defiantly. “I live in Lakebranch. I only came over to watch.”

  “Lakebranch?” the leader said, looking at another of his leathery-faced patrolmates.

  “Hick town, way out back some place. Used to be a resort. Nothing out there now but poachers and scratchers.”

  “That’s nice,” the other man said, tipping back his yellow helmet and grinning. “Nobody’ll miss you, I guess, Red. Come along.”

  “What do you mean, come along?” Chris said, his fists clenching. “I have to be home by five.”

  “Watch it—the kid’s got some beef on him.”

  The other man, now clearly in charge, laughed scornfully. “You scared? He’s a kid, isn’t he? Come on, Red, I got no time to argue. You’re here past noon, we got a legal right to impress you.”

  “I told you, I’m due home.”

  “You should have thought of that before you came here. Move along. You give us a hard time, we give you one, get it?”

  Below, three men came out of the shack, holding hard to the gardener Chris had seen earlier. All looked considerably battered, but the sullen red-neck was secured all the same.

  “We got this one—no thanks to you guys. Thought you was going to be right down. Big help you was!”

  “Got another one, Barney. Let’s go, Red.”

  The press-gang leader took Chris by the elbow. He was not unnecessarily violent about it, but the movement was sudden enough to settle matters in Kelly’s slow brain. Kelly was unusually stupid, even for a dog, but he now knew which fight interested him most. With a snarl which made even Chris’s hackles rise—he had never in his life before heard a dog make such a noise, let alone Kelly—the animal streaked back across the embankment and leaped for the big man’s legs.

  In the next thirty seconds of confusion Chris might easily have gotten away—there were a hundred paths through the undergrowth that he might have taken that these steel puddlers would have found it impossible to follow—but he couldn’t abandon Kelly. And with an instinct a hundred thousand years old, the patrol fell on the animal enemy first, turning their backs on the boy without even stopping to think.

  Chris was anything but a trained in-fighter, but he had instincts of his own. The man with Kelly’s teeth in him was obviously busy enough. Chris lobbed a knob-kerrie fist at the man next to him. When the target looked stunned but failed to fall, Chris threw the other fist. It didn’t land where Chris had meant it to land, exactly, but the man staggered away anyhow, which was good enough. Then Chris was in the middle of the melee and no longer had any chance even to try to call his shots.

  After a while, he was on the broken granite of the old roadbed, and no longer cared about Scranton, Kelly or even himself. His head was ringing. Over him, considerable swearing was going on.

  “—more trouble than he’s worth. Give him a shoe in the head and let’s get back!”

  “No. No killing. We can impress ’em, but we can’t bump ’em off. One of you guys see if you can slap Huggins awake.”

  “What are you—chicken all of a sudden?”

  The press-gang leader was breathing hard, and as Chris’s sight cleared, he saw that the big man was sitting on the ground wrapping a bloody leg in a length of torn shirt. Nevertheless he said evenly: “You want to kill a kid because he gave you a fight? That’s the lousiest excuse for killing a man I ever heard, let alone a kid. You give me any more of that, I’ll take a poke at you myself.”

  “Ah, shaddup, will you?” the other voice said surlily. “Anyhow we got the dog—”

  “You loud-mouthed— look out!”

  Two men grabbed Chris, one from each side, as he surged to his feet. He struggled fiercely, but all the fight left in him was in his soul, not any in his muscles.

  “What a bunch of flap-jaws. No wonder you can’t hold your own with a kid. Huggins, put your hat on. Red, don’t you listen to that slob, he’s been all mouth all his life. Your dog ran away, that’s all.”

  The lie was kindly meant, no matter how clumsy it was, but it was useless. Chris could see Kelly, not far away. Kelly had done the best he could; he would never have another chance.

  The youngster the press-gang dragged stumbling toward Scranton had a heart made of stone.

  CHAPTER TWO: A Line of Boiling Dust

  THE CITY inside the perimeter of raw earth was wavery and unreal. It did not hum any more, but it gave a puzzling impression of being slightly in shadow, though the July sun was still blazing over it. Even in his grief and anger, Chris was curious enough to wonder at the effect, and finally he thought he saw what caused it: The heat waves climbing the air around the town seemed to be detouring it, as though the city itself were inside a dome. No, not a dome, but a bubble, only a part of which was underground; it met the earth precisely at the cleared perimeter.

  The spindizzy field was up. It was invisible in itself, but it was no longer admitting the air of the Earth.

  Scranton was ready.

  Thanks to the scrapping, the patrol was far behind schedule; the leader drove them all through the scabrous, deserted suburbs without any mercy for his own torn leg. Chris grimly enjoyed watching him wince at every other step, but the man did not allow the wound to hold him up, nor did he let any of the lesser bruises and black eyes in the party serve as excuses for foot dragging.


  There was no way to tell, by the normal human senses, when the party passed through the spindizzy screen. Midway across the perimeter, which was a good five hundred feet wide, the leader unshipped from his belt a device about as big as an avocado, turned it in his hands until it whined urgently, and then directed the group on ahead of him in single file, along a line which he traced in the dry red ground with the toe of his boot.

  As his two guards left his side, Chris crouched instinctively. He was not afraid of them, and the leader apparently was going to stay behind. But the big man saw the slight motion.

  “Red, I wouldn’t if I were you,” he said quietly. “If you try to run back this way after I turn off this gadget—or if you try to go around me—you’ll go straight up in the air. Look back and see the dust rising. You’re a lot heavier than a dust speck, and you’ll go up a lot farther. Better relax. Take it from me.”

  Chris looked again at the dubious boundary line he had just crossed. Sure enough, there was a hair-thin ruling there, curving away to both sides as far as he could see, where the inert friable earth seemed to be turning over restlessly. It was as though he were standing inside a huge circle of boiling dust.

  “That’s right, that’s what I meant. Now look here.” The press-gang leader bent and picked up a stone just about as big as his fist—which was extraordinarily big—and shied it back the way they had come. As the rock started to cross the line above the seething dust, it leaped skyward with an audible screech, like a bullet ricocheting. In less than a second, Chris had lost sight of it.

  “Fast, huh? And it’d throw you much farther, Red. In a few minutes, it’ll be lifting a whole city. So don’t go by how things look. Right where you stand, you’re not even on the Earth any more.”

  Chris looked at the mountains for a moment, and then back at the line of boiling dust. Then he turned away and resumed marching toward Scranton.