Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “You mean they’re rewarding me?” Chris squeaked indignantly.

  “Certainly.”

  “But how?”

  “By letting you go on studying even when they’re not satisfied with your progress. That’s quite a concession, Chris.”

  “Maybe so,” Chris said glumly. “But I’d get the point faster if they handed out lollipops instead.”

  Dr. Braziller had never heard of lollipops; she was an Okie. She only responded, a little primly: “You’d get it fast enough if they decided on a punishment system for you instead. They’re rigidly just, but know nothing about mercy; and leniency with children is utterly foreign to them—which is one reason why I’m here.”

  The city hummed onward, and so did the days—and the months. Only Chris seemed to be making no progress in any visible direction.

  No, that wasn’t quite true. Piggy was going nowhere, either, as far as Chris could see. But there the situation was even more puzzling and full of complications. To begin with, ever since Chris had first met him, Piggy had been denying that he cared about what happened to him when he turned eighteen; so it was odd—though not entirely surprising—to discover that he did care, after all. In fact, though his situation appeared to be now quite hopeless, Piggy was full of loud self-confidence, belied in the next breath by dark hints of mysterious plans to cinch what was supposed to be cinched already, and even darker hints of awful things to come if it didn’t turn out to be cinched. It was all more than Chris could manage to sort out, especially considering his inability to see more than half a minute into his own future. Some days he felt as though Piggy’s old accusation—“Boy, you are dumb!”—were written on his forehead in letters of fire.

  Although Piggy said almost nothing about it, Chris gathered that he had already approached his father on the subject of biasing the City Fathers in his favor on the Citizenship Tests, and had been rebuffed with a loud roar, only slightly tempered by the intervention of his mother. There was of course no way to study for the Tests, since they measured nothing but potentials, not achievements; which meant, in turn, that there was no such thing as a pony or a crib for them.

  Now, it was obvious, Piggy was thinking back to Chris’s adventure on Heaven. Judging by the questions he asked about it, Chris deduced that Piggy was searching for something heroic to do, in order to do it much better than Chris had. Chris was human enough to doubt that Piggy could make a much better showing, but in any event the city was still in space, so no opportunity offered itself.

  Occasionally, too, he would disappear after class for several days running. On his return, his story was that he had been prowling around the city eavesdropping on the adult passengers. They were, Piggy said, up to something—just possibly, the building of a secret Dirac transmitter with which to call the Lost City. Chris did not believe a word of this, nor did he think Piggy did either.

  The simple, granite-keel facts were that time was running out for both of them, and that desperation was setting in: for Piggy because he had never tried, and for Chris because nothing he tried seemed to get him anywhere. All around them their younger schoolmates seemed to be opening into talents with the violence and unpredictability of popcorn, turning everything the memory cells fed them into salt and savor no matter how high the heat was turned up. In comparison, Chris felt as retarded as a dinosaur, and just as clumsy and gigantic.

  It was in this atmosphere of pervasive, incipient failure that Sgt. Anderson one evening said calmly:

  “Chris, the Mayor wants to talk to you.”

  From anyone else, Chris would have taken such an announcement as a practical joke, too absurd to be even upsetting. From Sgt. Anderson he did not know how to take it; he simply stared.

  “Relax—it isn’t going to be an ordeal, and besides I didn’t say he wanted to see you. Sit back down and I’ll explain.”

  Numbly, Chris did so.

  “What’s happened is this: We’re approaching another job of work. From the first contacts we had with these people, it sounded simple and straightforward, but of course nothing ever is. (Amalfi says the biggest lie it’s possible to tell in the English language is, ‘It was as simple as that.’) Supposedly we were going to be hired on to do a straightforward piece of local geology and mining—nothing so tricky as changing the whole setup of a planet; just a standard piece of work. You’ve seen the motto on City Hall?”

  Chris had. It read: Mow YOUR LAWN, LADY? It had never seemed very dignified to him, but he was beginning to understand what it implied. He nodded.

  “Well, that’s the way it’s always supposed to be: We come in, we do a job, we go out again. Local feuds don’t count; we take no part in them.

  “But as we got closer to signing a contract with this place—it’s called Argus Three—we began to get hints that we were second comers. Apparently there’d already been one city on Argus, hired to do the job, but hadn’t done it well.

  “We tried to find out more about this, naturally, to be sure the Argidae were telling a straight story; we didn’t want to be poaching on any other city’s contract. But the colonists were very vague about the whole thing. Finally, though, they let it slip that the other city was still sitting on their planet, and still claimed to be working on the job, even though the contract deadline had passed. Tell me—what would you do in a case like that, if you were Amalfi?”

  Chris frowned. “I don’t know any other answer but the one in the books. If the planet has an overstayed city, it’s supposed to call the cops. All other cities should stay clear, otherwise they might get involved in the shooting, if there is any.”

  “Right; and this appears to be a classic case. The colonists can’t be too explicit because they know that every word they broadcast to us is going to be overheard; but the City Fathers have analyzed what Argus Three has sent us, and the chances are a hundred to one that that other city has settled on Argus Three for good … in short, that it means to take over the planet. The Argidae don’t want to call the cops, for reasons we don’t know. Instead, they seem to be trying to hire us to take on this tramp city and clear him out. If we tackle that, there will be shooting, that’s for sure—and the cops will probably show up anyhow before it’s over.

  “Obviously, as you say, the thing to do is get out of the vicinity, fast. Cities ought not to fight with each other, let alone get involved in anything like a Violation. But Argus Three’s offering us sixty-three million dollars in metal to slough them of the tramp before the cops arrive, and the Mayor thinks we can do it. Also, he hates tramps—I think he might even have taken on the job for nothing. The fact, anyhow, is that he has taken it.”

  The perimeter sergeant paused and eyed Chris, seemingly waiting for comments. At last Chris said: “What did the City Fathers say?”

  “They said NO in a loud voice until the money was mentioned. After that they ran an accounting of the treasury, and gave Amalfi his head. They had a few additional facts to work from that I haven’t told you yet, most of which seem to indicate that we can dispossess this tramp without too much damage to our own city, and very possibly before the cops even hear that anything’s happening. All the same, bear in mind that they think of nothing but the city as a whole. If some of us get killed in the process they won’t care, as long as the city itself gets off cleanly. They’re not sentimental.”

  “I already know that,” Chris said, with feeling. “But—how do I come into all this? Why does the Mayor want to talk to me? I don’t know anything but what you’ve told me—and besides, he’s already made up his mind.”

  “He’s made up his mind,” Anderson agreed, “but you know a lot that he doesn’t know. As we get closer to Argus Three, he wants you to listen to the broadcasts from the Argidae, and anything we may pick up from the tramp, and fill him in on any clues you hear.”

  “But why?”

  “Because you’re the only person on board who knows the tramp at first hand,” the perimeter sergeant said, with slow, deliberate emphasis. “It’s your old f
riend Scranton.”

  “But—that can’t be so! There were hundreds of us put on board from Scranton—all adults but me—”

  “Press-gang sweepings,” Anderson said with cold disgust. “Oh, there were one or two specialists we found a use for, but none of them ever paid any attention to city politics. The rest were bulgy-muscled misfits, a large proportion of them psychotics. We cured them, but we couldn’t raise their IQ’s; without something to sell, or the Interplanetary Grand Prix, or heavy labor to keep their minds off their minds, they’re just so many vegetables. We—Irish and I—couldn’t find even one worth taking into our squads. We’ve made citizens of the three good specialists, but the rest will be passengers till they die.

  “But you’re the happy accident of that crew right now, Chris. The City Fathers say that your history aboard Scranton shows that you know something about the town. Amalfi wants to mine that knowledge. Want to tackle it?”

  “I—I’ll try.”

  “Good.” The perimeter sergeant turned to the miniature tape recorder at his elbow. “Here’s a complete transcript of everything we’ve heard from Argus Three so far. After you’ve heard it and made any comments that occur to you, Amalfi will begin to feed us the live messages, from the bridge. Ready?”

  “No,” Chris said, more desperately than he could ever have imagined possible for him. “Not yet. My head is about to bust already. Do I get off from school while this is going on? I couldn’t take it, otherwise.”

  “No,” Anderson said, “you don’t. If a live message comes through while you’re in class, we’ll pull you out. But you’ll go right back in again. Otherwise your schooling will go right on just as before, and if you can’t take the new burden, well, that’ll be too bad. You’d better get that straight right away, Chris. This isn’t a vacation, and it isn’t a prize. It’s a job, for the survival of the city. Either you take it or you don’t; either way, you get no special treatment. Well?”

  For what seemed to him to be a long time, Chris sat and listened to his echoing Okie headache. At last, however, he said resignedly:

  “I’ll take it.”

  Anderson snapped the switch, and the tape began to run on the spools.

  The earliest messages, as Anderson had noted, were vague and brief. The later ones were longer, but even more cryptic. Chris was able to worry very little more information out of them than Amalfi and the City Fathers already had. As promised, he spoke to Amalfi—but from the Andersons’ apartment, through a hookup which fed what he had to say to the mayor and to the machines simultaneously.

  The machines asked questions about population, energy resources, degree of automation and other vital matters, not a one of which Chris could answer. The Mayor mostly just listened; on the few occasions when his heavy voice cut in, Chris was unable to figure out what he was getting at.

  “Chris, this railroad you mentioned; how long before you were born had it been pulled up?”

  “About a century, sir, I think. You know Earth went back to the railroads in the middle two thousands, when all the fossil fuels ran out and they had to give up the highways to farmland.”

  “No, I didn’t know that. All right, go ahead.”

  Now the City Fathers were asking him about armament. He had no answer for that one, either.

  There came a day, however, when this pattern changed suddenly and completely. He was, indeed, pulled out of class for the purpose, and hurried into a small anteroom containing little but a chair and two television screens. One of the screens showed Sgt. Anderson; the other, nothing but a testing pattern.

  “Hello, Chris. Sit down and pay attention; this is important. We’re getting a transmission from the tramp city. We don’t know whether it’s just a beacon or whether they want to talk to us. Amalfi thinks it’s unlikely that they’d be putting out a beacon in their situation, regardless of the law—they’ve broken too many others already. He’s going to try to raise them, now that you’re here; he wants you to listen.”

  “Right, sir.”

  Chris could not hear his own city calling, but after only a few minutes—for they were quite close to Argus Three now—the test pattern on the other screen vanished, and Chris saw an odiously familiar face.

  “Hullo. This here’s Argus Three.”

  “ ‘This here’ is not Argus Three,” Amalfi’s deep voice said promptly. “ ‘This here’ is the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and there’s no point in your hiding it. Get me your boss.”

  “Now wait a minute. Just who do you think—”

  “This here is New York, New York, calling, and I said, ‘Get me your boss.’ Go do it.”

  The face by now was both sullen and confused. After a moment’s hesitation, it vanished. The screen flickered, the test pattern came back briefly, and then a second familiar face was looking directly at Chris. It was impossible to believe that the man couldn’t see him, and the idea was outright frightening.

  “Hello, New York,” he said, affably enough. “So you’ve got us figured out. Well, we’ve got you figured out, too. This planet is under contract to us; be notified.”

  “Recorded,” Amalfi said. “We also have it a matter of record that you are in Violation. Argus Three has made a new contract with us. It’d be the wisest course to clear ground and spin.”

  The man’s eyes did not waver. Chris realized suddenly that it was an image of Amalfi he was staring at, not at Chris himself. “Spin yourself,” he said evenly. “Our argument is with the colonists, not with you. We don’t spin without a Vacate order from the cops. Once you mix into this, you may find it hard to mix out again. Be notified.”

  “Your self-confidence,” Amalfi said, “is misplaced. Recorded.”

  The image from Scranton contracted to a bright point and vanished. The Mayor said at once:

  “Chris, do you know either of those guys?”

  “Both of them, sir. The first one’s a small-time thug named Barney. I think he was the one who killed my brother’s dog when I was impressed, but I didn’t see who did it.”

  “I know the type. Go ahead.”

  “The other one is Frank Lutz. He was the city manager when I was aboard. It looks as if he still is.”

  “What’s a city manager? Never mind, I’ll ask the machines. All right. He looks dangerous; is he?”

  “Yes, sir, he is. He’s smart and he’s tricky—and he has no more feeling than a snake.”

  “Sociopath,” Amalfi said. “Thought so. One more question: Does he know you?”

  Chris thought hard before answering. Lutz had seen him only once, and had never had to think about him as an individual again—thanks to the lifesaving intervention of Frad Haskins. “Sir, he just might, but I’d say not.”

  “Okay. Give the details to the City Fathers and let them calculate the probabilities. Meanwhile we’ll take no chances. Thanks, Chris. Joel, come topside, will you?”

  “Yes, sir.” Anderson waited until he heard the Mayor’s circuit cut out. Then his image, too, seemed to be staring directly at Chris. In fact, it was.

  “Chris, did you understand what Amalfi meant about taking no chances?”

  “Uh—no, not exactly.”

  “He meant that we’re to keep you out of this Lutz’s sight. In other words, no deFord expeditions on this job. Is that clear?”

  It was all too clear.

  CHAPTER TEN: Argus Asleep

  THE ARGUS system was well named: It was not far inside a crowded and beautiful cluster of relatively young stars, so that the nights on its planet had indeed a hundred eyes, like the Argus of the myth. The youth of the cluster went far toward explaining the presence of Scranton, for like all third-generation stars, the sun of Argus was very rich in metals, and so were its planets.

  Of these there were only a few—just seven, to be exact, of which only the three habitable ones had been given numbers, and only Argus III actually colonized; II was suitable only for Arabs, and IV for Eskimos. The other four planets were technically of the gas giant class, but
they were rather undernourished giants; the largest of them was about the size of Sol’s Neptune. The closeness of the stars in the cluster to each other had swept up much of the primordial gas before planet formation had gotten a good start; the Argus system was in fact the largest yet to be encountered in the cluster.

  Argus III, as the city droned down over it, looked heart-stoppingly like Pennsylvania; Chris began to feel a little sorry for the coming dispossession of Scranton—of which he had no doubts whatsoever—for surely the planet must have provided an intolerable temptation. It was mountainous over most of its land area, which was considerable; water was confined to many thousands of lakes, and a few small and intensely salty seas. It was also heavily wooded—almost entirely with conifers, or plants much like them, for evolution here had not yet gotten as far as a flowering plant. The firlike trees had thick boles and reared up hundreds of feet, noble monsters with their many shoulders hunched, as they had to be to bear their own weight in the two-G gravitation of this metal-heavy planet. The first sound Chris heard on Argus III after the city grounded was the explosion of a nearby seed cone, as loud as a crack of thunder. One of the seeds broke a window on the thirtieth floor of the McGraw-Hill Greenhouse, and the startled staff there had had to hack it to bits with fire axes to stop its germinating on the rug.

  Under these circumstances it hardly mattered where the city settled; there was iron everywhere; and conversely there was no place on the planet which would be out of eavesdropping or of missile range of Scranton, to the mutual inconvenience of both parties. Nevertheless, Amalfi chose a site with great care, one just over the horizon from the great scar in the ground Scranton had made during its fumbled mining attempt, and with the highest points of an Allegheny-like range reared up between the two Okies. Only then did the machinery begin to rumble out into the forests.