Cities in Flight

by James Blish

“Yes, it’s part of the feudal mores. Chris, those men in the boat are going to take a lot of ribbing from their peers, regardless of the fact that they were never in any danger and they had sense enough to let you spin your own noose. They’ll be likely to take it out on you when you’re taken out for questioning.”

  “I’ve already been interviewed,” Chris said grimly. “And they did.”

  “You have? Murder! There goes that one up the flue, Irish.”

  “Complication,” Dulany agreed.

  Anderson fell silent, leaving Chris to wonder what they had been talking about. Evidently they had been planning something which his news had torpedoed—though it was hard to imagine even the beginnings of such a plan, for their captors, out of a respect for the two Okies which Chris knew to be more than justified, had left them nothing but their underwear. At last the boy said hesitantly:

  “What could I have done if my interview were still coming up?”

  “Located our space suits,” Anderson said gloomily. “Not that they’d have let you search the place, that’s for sure, but you might have gotten a hint, or tricked them into dropping one. Even wary men sometimes underestimate youngsters. Now we’ll just have to think of something else.”

  “There are dozens of space suits standing around the wall of that big audience chamber,” Chris said. “If you could only get there, maybe one of them would fit one of you.”

  Dulany only smiled slightly. Anderson said: “Those aren’t suits, Chris; they’re armor—plate armor. Useless here, but they have some kind of heraldic significance; I think the Barons used to collect them from each other, like scalps.”

  “That may be,” Chris said stubbornly, “but there were at least two real suits there. I’m sure of that.”

  The two sergeants looked at each other. “Is it possible—?” Anderson said. “They’ve got the bravado for it, all right.”

  “Could be.”

  “By Sirius, there’s a bluff we’ve got to call! Get busy on that lock, Irish!”

  “In my underwear? Nix.”

  “What difference does that—oh, I see.” Anderson grimaced impatiently. “We’ll have to wait for lights out. Happily it won’t be long.”

  “How are you going to bust the lock, Sergeant Dulany?” Chris asked. “It’s almost as big as my head!”

  “Those are the easy kinds,” Dulany said loquaciously.

  Chris in fact never did find out what Dulany did with the lock, for the operation was performed in the dark. Standing as instructed all the way to the back of the cell, he did not even hear anything until the huge, heavy door was thrown back with a thunderous crash.

  The crash neatly drowned out the only yell the guard outside managed to get off. In this thunder-ridden fortress, nobody would think anything of such a noise. Then there was a jangle of keys, and two loud clicks as the unfortunate man was manacled with his own handcuffs. The Okies rolled him into the cell.

  “What’ll I do if he comes to?” Chris whispered hoarsely.

  “Won’t for hours,” Dulany’s voice said. “Shut the door. We’ll be back.”

  From the boarding-squad sergeant, nine words all in one speech had the reassuring force of an oration. Chris grinned and shut the door.

  Nothing seemed to happen thereafter for hours, except that the thunder got louder. That was certainly no novelty on Heaven. But was it possible for even the heaviest thunderclap to shake a pile of stone as squat and massive as Castle Wolfwhip? Surely it couldn’t last long if that were the case—and yet it was obviously at least a century old, probably more.

  The fourth such blast answered his question. It was an explosion, and it was inside the building. In response, all the lights came on; and Chris saw that the door had been jarred open.

  When he went over to close it again, he found himself looking down a small precipice. The corridor floor had collapsed. Several stunned figures were sitting amid the rubble it had made on the story below it. Considering the size of the blocks of which it had been made, they were lucky that it hadn’t killed them.

  Still another explosion, and this time the lights went back out. Quite evidently, the suits Chris had seen in the audience hall had indeed been Anderson’s and Dulany’s battle dress. Well, this ought to cure the baron of Castle Wolfwhip of the habit of exhibiting his scalps. It ought to cure him of the habit of kidnapping Okies, too. It occurred to Chris that the whole plan of using Anderson and Dulany as hostages, even in their underwear, was about as safe an operation as trying to imprison two demons in a corncrib.

  Then they were back. Seeing them hovering in the collapsed corridor, their helmet lamps making a shifting, confusing pattern of shadows, Chris realized, too, what kind of vehicle the city would have sent out after him if he had managed to get word back.

  “You all right?” Anderson’s PA speaker demanded. “Good. Didn’t occur to me that the floor might go.”

  They came into the cell. The guard, who had just recovered his senses, took one look and crawled into the corner farthest from the two steel figures.

  “Now we’ve got a problem. We’ve got a safe-conduct out of the castle, but we can’t carry you through that storm, and we don’t dare risk putting you in one of their suits.”

  “Boat,” Dulany said, pointing at Chris.

  That’s right, I forgot, he knows how to drive one. Okay, boy, stick your elbows out and well fly you out to where there’s a floor you can walk on. Irish, let’s go.”

  “One minute.” Dulany unhooked a bunch of keys from his waist and tossed them into the corner where the guard was cowering. “Right.”

  Only Anderson joined him in the swan boat, still in his armor; Dulany stayed airborne, in radio communication with Anderson, in case the colonials should have the notion of making the boat turn around and return home on autopilot. After he saw the holes the two cops had torn through the great walls of Castle Wolfwhip, Chris doubted that they’d even entertain such a notion, but obviously it was sensible not to take chances where it wasn’t necessary.

  The moment the boat was crawling across the bottom of the lake, Anderson took his helmet off and turned promptly to studying the control board. Finally he nodded and snapped three switches.

  “That should do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Prevent them from putting this tub under remote control. In fact from this point on they won’t even be able to locate her. Now Irish can shoot on ahead of us and get the word to the Mayor.” He put the helmet back on and spoke briefly, then doffed it.

  “Now, Chris,” he said grimly, “comes the riot act.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT: The Ghosts of Space

  THE “riot act” was every bit as unpleasant as he had foreseen it would be, but somehow he managed to live through it—mostly by bearing in mind as firmly as possible that he had it coming. He was never likely to become a real Okie by stealing the property of people who had hired the city on to do a job, no matter how good he thought his reasons were.

  And in this first disastrous instance he had simply been in the way. The city would have known soon enough in any event of the fact that Anderson and Dulany were being held prisoner, since the colonists of Heaven could not have used them effectively as hostages without notifying Amalfi of the fact; and there was no doubt in Chris’s mind that the two cops could have gotten out of Castle Wolf-whip without his intervention, and perhaps a good deal faster, too. Above all, they might have been gotten out by Amalfi without violence, and thus saved the contract intact. The appearance of Chris as a third prisoner had been totally unwelcomed to both sides, and had turned what had been merely a tense situation into an explosion.

  In the end, they gave him full marks for imagination and boldness, as well as for coolness under fire, but by that time Chris had learned enough about the situation to feel that his chances of ever becoming a citizen were not worth an Oc dollar. The new contract was considerably more limited than the old, and called for reparations for the damage the two sergeants had done to Castle Wol
f-whip; under it, the city stood to gain considerably less than before.

  Chris was astonished that there was any new contract at all, and said so, rather hesitantly. Anderson explained:

  “Violence between employer and employee is as old as man, Chris, but the work has to be done all the same. The colonists as a corporate entity disown the kidnapper and claim the right to deal with him according to their own system of justice, which we’re bound to respect. Damage to real property, on the other hand, has to be paid for—and the city can’t disown Irish and me because we’re officers and agents of the city.”

  “But what about the scheme to ground the city and take it over?”

  “We know nothing about that except what you overheard. That would have no status in a colonial court, and probably wouldn’t even if you were a citizen—in this case, if you were of legal age.”

  And there it was again. “Well, there’s something else I’ve been wondering about,” Chris said. “Why is the age to start the drugs fixed at eighteen? Wouldn’t they work at any age? Suppose we took aboard a man forty years old who also happened to be a red-hot expert at something we needed. Couldn’t you start him on the drugs anyhow?”

  “We could and we would,” Anderson assured him. “Eighteen is only the optimum age, the earliest age at which we can be sure the specimen is physically mature. You see the drugs can’t set the clock back. They just arrest aging from the moment when they’re first given. Tell me, have you ever heard of the legend of Tithonus?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “I don’t know it very well myself; ask the City Fathers. But briefly, he got himself in the good books of the goddess of dawn, Eos, and asked for the gift of immortality. She gave it to him, but he was pretty old at the time. When he realized that he was just going to stay that way forever, he asked Eos to take the gift back. So she changed him into a grasshopper, and you know how long they live.”

  “Hmm. A man who was going to be a permanent seventy-five wouldn’t be much good to himself, I guess. Or to the city either.”

  “That’s the theory,” the perimeter sergeant agreed. “But of course we have to take ’em as we find ’em. Amalfi went on the drugs at fifty—which, for him, happened to be his prime.”

  Thus his education went on, much as before, except that he stayed scrupulously away from the docks. Since the new contract was limited to three months, there probably wouldn’t have been much to see down there anyhow—or so he told himself, not without a suspicion that there were a few holes in his logic. In addition, he got some sympathy and support from a wholly unexpected source: Piggy Kingston-Throop.

  “It just goes to show you how much truth there is in all this jabber about citizenship,” he said fiercely, at their usual after-class meeting. “Here you go and do them a big fat favor, and all they can think of to do is lecture you for getting in their way. They even go right on doing business with these guys who were going to grab the city if they could.”

  “Well, we do have to eat.”

  “Yeah, but it’s dirty money all the same. Come to think of it, though, if I’d have been in your shoes I’d have handled it differently.”

  “I know,” Chris said, “that’s what they all keep telling me. I should never have gotten into the boat in the first place.”

  “Pooh, that part’s all right,” Piggy said scornfully. “If you hadn’t gotten into the boat they’d never have known about the plot to take the city—that’s the favor you did them, and don’t you forget it. They’re on their guard now. No, I mean what happened after you locked the guys up in the back cabin. You said that the boat had bumped into the dock and was trying to climb it, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And a lot of cops came running?”

  “I don’t know about a lot,” Chris said cautiously. “There were three or four, I think.”

  “Okay. Now if it had been me, I would have just stopped the boat right there, and gotten out, and told the cops what I’d heard. Let them drag it out of the guys you’d locked up. You know how the City Fathers cram all that junk into our heads in class—well, they can take stuff out the same way. Dad says it’s darned unpleasant for the victim, but they get it.”

  Chris could only shrug helplessly. “You’re right. That would have been the sensible thing to do. And it seems obvious the way you tell it. But all I can say is, it didn’t occur to me.” He thought a moment, and then added: “But in a way I’m not too sorry, Piggy. That way, I never would have gotten to Castle Wolfwhip at all—sure, it would have been better if I hadn’t—but it sure was exciting while I was there.”

  “Boy, I’ll bet it was! I wish I’d been there!” Piggy began to shadowbox awkwardly. “I wouldn’t have hidden in any cell, believe you me. I’d have showed ’em!”

  Chris did his best not to laugh. “Going by what I heard, if you’d gone along with the sergeants—if they’d let you—you’d have been killed by your own friends. Those weren’t just rotten eggs they were throwing around.”

  “All the same, I’ll bet-Hullo, we’re lifting.”

  The city had not lifted yet, but Chris knew what Piggy meant; he too could hear the deepening hum of the spindizzies. “So we are. That three months sure went by in a hurry.”

  “Three months isn’t much in space. We’ll be eighteen before we know it.”

  “That,” Chris said gloomily, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  “Well, I don’t give a darn. This whole deal about your running off with the boat proves that they don’t mean what they say about earning citizenship. Like I say, the whole thing’s just a scheme to keep kids in line, so they won’t have to be watched so much. The minute you actually do something for the survival of the city, bingo! the roof falls on you. Never mind that, it was a good thing to do and shows you’ve got guts—you’ve caused them trouble, and that’s what the system’s supposed to prevent.”

  There was, Chris saw, something to be said for the theory, no matter how exaggerated Piggy’s way of putting it was. In Chris’s present state of discouragement, it would be a dangerously easy point of view to adopt.

  “Well, Piggy, what I want to know is, what are you going to do if you’re wrong? I mean, supposing the City Fathers decide not to make you a citizen, and it turns out that they can’t be fixed? Then you’ll be stuck with being a passenger for the rest of your life—and it’d only be a normal lifetime, too.”

  “Passengers aren’t as helpless as they think,” Piggy said darkly. “Some one of these days the Lost City is going to come back, and when that happens, all of a sudden the passengers are going to be top dog.”

  “The Lost City? I never heard of it.”

  “Of course you haven’t. And the City Fathers won’t ever tell you about it, either. But word gets around.”

  “Okay, don’t be mysterious,” Chris said. “What’s it all about?”

  Piggy’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “Do you swear not to tell anybody else, except another passenger?”

  “Sure.”

  Piggy looked elaborately over both shoulders before going on. As usual, they were the only youngsters on the street, and none of the adults were paying the slightest attention to them.

  “Well,” he said in the same tone of voice, “it’s like this. One of the first cities ever to take off was a big one. Nobody knows its name, but I think it was Los Angeles. Anyhow, it got lost, and ran out of drugs, and then out of food, way off in some part of space that was never colonized, so it couldn’t find any work either. But then they made a planetfall on a new world, something nobody had ever seen before. It was like Earth—bigger, but the same gravity, and a little more oxygen in the air, and a perfect climate—like spring all year round, even at the poles. If you planted seeds there, you had to jump back in a hurry or the plant would hit you under the chin, they grew so fast.

  “But that wasn’t the half of it.”

  “It sounds like plenty,” Chris said.

  “That was all good, but the
y found something else even better. There was a kind of grain growing wild there, and when they analyzed it to see whether or not it was good to eat, they found it contained an antideath drug—not any of ours, but better than all of ours rolled into one. They didn’t even have to extract it—all they had to do was make bread out of the plant.”

  “Wow. Piggy, is this just a story?”

  “Well, I can’t give you an affidavit,” Piggy said, offended. “Do you want to hear the rest or don’t you?”

  “Go ahead,” Chris said hastily.

  “So then the question was, what were they going to do with their city? They didn’t need it. Everything they needed came right up out of the ground while their backs were turned. So they decided to stock it up and send it out into space again, to look for other cities. Whenever they make contact with a new Okie town, they take all the passengers off—nobody else—and take them back to this planet where everybody can have the drugs, because there’s never any shortage.”

  “Suppose the other city doesn’t want to give up its passengers?”

  “Why wouldn’t it want to? If it had any use for them, they’d be citizens, wouldn’t they?”

  “Yes, but just suppose.”

  “They’d give them up anyhow. Like I said, the Lost City is big.”

  Unfortunately for the half-million other questions Chris wanted to ask, at that point the city moaned softly to the sound of the take-cover siren. The boys parted hurriedly; but Chris, after a moment’s thought, did not go home. Instead, he holed up in a public information booth, where he fed his card into the slot and asked for the Librarian.

  He had promised not to mention the Lost City to anyone but another passenger, which ruled out questioning his guardian, or the City Fathers directly; but he had thought of a way to ask an indirect question. The Librarian was that one of the 134 machines comprising the City Fathers which had prime charge of the memory banks, and was additionally charged with teaching; it did not collect information, but only catalogued and dispensed it. Interpretation was not one of its functions.