Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  Chris was beginning to practice thinking like Amalfi—not very confidently to be sure, since he had never seen the man, but at least it made a good game. The landing, Chris concluded tentatively, had been chosen mostly to prevent Scranton from seeing what the city was doing without sending over planes; and secondly to prevent foot traffic between the two cities. Probably it would never come to warfare between the two cities, anyhow, for nothing would be more likely to bring the cops to the scene in a hurry; and besides, it was already quite clear from New York’s history that Amalfi actively hated anything that did the city damage, whether it was bombs or only rust.

  In the past, his most usual strategy had been to outsit the enemy. If that failed, he tried to outperform them. As a last resort, he tried to bring them into conflict with themselves. There were no pure cases of any of these policies on record—every example was a mixture, and a complicated one—but these three flavorings were the strongest, and usually one was far more powerful than the other two. When Amalfi salted his dish, you could hardly taste the pepper or the mustard.

  Not everyone could eat it thereafter, either; there were, Chris suspected, more subtle schools of Okie cookery. But that was how Almalfi did it, and he was the only chef the city had. Thus far, the city had survived him, which was the only test that counted with the citizens and the City Fathers.

  On Argus III, it seemed, Amalfi’s hope was to starve Scranton out by outperforming it. The city had the contract; Scranton had lost it. The city could do the job; Scranton had made a mess of it, and left behind a huge yellow scar around its planetfall which might not heal for a century. And while New York worked and Scranton starved—here was where a faint pinch of outsittery was added to the broth—Scranton couldn’t carry through on its desperate hope of seizing Argus III as a new home planet; though the Argidae could not yell for the cops at the first sign—or the last—of such a piracy, New York could and would. Okie solidarity was strong, and included a firm hatred of the cops … but it did not extend to encouraging another incident like Thor V, or bucking the cops against another city like IMT. Even the outlaw must protect himself against the criminally insane, especially if they seem to be on his side.

  Okay; if that was what Amalfi planned, so be it. There was nothing that Chris could say about it, anyhow. Amalfi was the mayor, and he had the citizens and the City Fathers behind him. Chris was only a youngster and a passenger.

  But he knew one thing about the plan that neither Amalfi nor any other New Yorker could know, except himself:

  It was not going to work.

  He knew Scranton; the city didn’t. If this was how Amalfi planned to proceed against Frank Lutz, it would fail.

  But was he reading Amalfi’s mind aright? That was probably the first question. After several days of worrying—which worsened his school record drastically—he took the question to the only person he knew who had ever seen Amalfi: his guardian.

  “I can’t tell you what Amalfi’s set us up to do, you aren’t authorized to know,” the perimeter sergeant said gently. “But you’ve done a lot of good guessing. As far as you’ve guessed, Chris, you’re pretty close.”

  Carla banged a coffee cup angrily into a saucer. “Pretty close? Joel, all this male expertise is a pain in the neck. Chris is right and you know it. Give him a break and tell him so.”

  “I’m not authorized,” Anderson said doggedly, but from him that was tantamount to an admission. “Besides, Chris is wrong on one point. We can’t sit there forever, just to prevent this tramp from taking over Argus Three. Sooner or later we’ll have to be on our own way, and we can’t overstay our contract, either—we’ve got Violations of our own on our docket that we care about, whether Scranton cares about Violations or not. We have a closing date that we mean to observe—and that makes the problem much stiffer.”

  “I see it does,” Chris said diffidently. “But at least I understood part of it. And it seems to me that there are two big holes in it—and I just hope I’m wrong about those.”

  “Holes?” the perimeter sergeant said. “Where? What are they?”

  “Well, first of all, they’re probably pretty desperate over there, or if they aren’t now, they soon will be. The fact that they’re in this part of space at all, instead of wherever it was the Mayor directed them, back when I came on board here, shows that something went wrong with their first job, too.”

  Anderson snapped a switch on his chair. “Probability?” he said to the surrounding air.

  “S EVENTY-TWO PER CENT,” the air said back, making Chris start. He still had not gotten used to the idea that the City Fathers overheard everything one said, everywhere and all the time; among many other things, the city was their laboratory in human psychology, which in turn enabled them to answer such questions as Anderson had just asked.

  “Well, score another for you,” the sergeant said in a troubled voice.

  “But I hadn’t quite gotten to my point yet, sir. The thing is, now this job has gone sour on them too, so they must be awfully low on supplies. No matter how good our strategy is, it has to assume that the other side is going to react logically. But desperate men almost never behave logically; look at German strategy in the last year of World War Two, for instance.”

  “Never heard of it,” Anderson admitted. “But it seems to make sense. What’s the other hole?”

  “The other one is really only a guess,” Chris said. “It’s based on what I know about Frank Lutz, and I only saw him twice, and heard one of his aides talk about him. But I don’t think he’d ever allow anybody to outbluff him; he’d always fight first. He has to prove he’s the toughest guy in any situation, or his goose is cooked—somebody else’ll take over. It’s always like that in a thug society—look at the history of the Kingdom of Naples, or Machiavelli’s Florence.”

  “I’m beginning to suspect you’re just inventing these examples,” Anderson said, frowning blackly. “But again, it does make a certain amount of sense—and nobody but you knows even a little about this man Lutz. Supposing you’re right; what could we do about it that we’re not doing now?”

  “You could use the desperation,” Chris said eagerly. “If Lutz and his gang are desperate, then the ordinary citizen must be on the edge of smashing things up. And I’m sure they don’t have any ‘citizens’ in our sense of the word, because the aide I mentioned before let slip that they were short on the drugs. I think he meant me to overhear him, but it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. The man on the street must hate the gang even in good times. We could use them to turn Lutz out.”

  “How?” Anderson said, with the air of a man posing a question he knows to be unanswerable.

  “I don’t know exactly. It’d have to be done more or less by feel. But I used to have at least two friends over there, one of them with constant access to Lutz. If he’s still around and I could sneak over there and get in touch with him—”

  Anderson held up a hand and sighed. “I was kind of afraid you were going to trot out something like that. Chris, when are we going to cure you of this urge to go junketing? You know what Amalfi said about that.”

  “Circumstances alter cases,” Carla put in.

  “Yes, but-oh, all right, all right, I’ll go one step farther, at least.” Once more he snapped the switch, and said to the air: “Comments?”

  “W E ADVISE AGAINST SUCH A VENTURE, SERGEANT A NDERSON. THE CHANCE THAT MISTER DE F ORD WOULD BE RECOGNIZED IS PROHIBITIVELY HIGH. ”

  “There, you see?” Anderson said. “Amalfi would ask them the same question. He ignores their advice more often than not, but in this case what they say is just what he’s already decided himself.”

  “Okay,” Chris said, not very much surprised. “It’s a pretty fuzzy sort of idea, I’ll admit. But it was the only one I had.”

  “There’s a lot to it. I’ll tell the Mayor your two points, and suggest that we try to do something to stir up the animals over there. Maybe hell think of another way of tackling that. Cheer up, Chris; i
t’s a darned good thing you told me all this, so you shouldn’t feel bad if a small part of what you said gets rejected. You can’t win them all, you know.”

  “I know,” Chris said. “But you can try.”

  If Amalfi thought of any better idea for “stirring up the animals” in Scranton, Chris did not hear of it; and if he tried it, obviously it had no significant effect. While the city worked, Scranton sat sullenly where it was, ominously silent, while New York’s contract termination date drew closer and closer. Poor and starving though it must have been, Scranton had no intention of being outsat at the game of playing for so rich a planet as Argus III; if Amalfi wanted Scranton off the planet, he was going to have to throw it off—or call for the cops. Frank Lutz was behaving pretty much as Chris had predicted, at least so far.

  Then, in the last week of the contract, the roof fell in.

  Chris got the news, as usual, from his guardian. “It’s your friend Piggy,” he said wrathfully. “He had the notion that he could pretend to turn his coat, worm his way into Scranton’s government, and then pull off some sort of coup. Of course Lutz didn’t believe him, and now we’re all in the soup.”

  Chris was torn between shock and laughter. “But how’d he get there?”

  “That’s one of the worst parts of it. Somehow he sold two women on the idea of being deadly female spies, concubine type, as if a thug government ever had any shortage of women, especially in a famine! One of them is a sixteen-year-old girl whose family is spitting flames, for every good reason. The other is a thirty-year-old passenger who’s the sister of a citizen, and he’s one of Irish Dulany’s fighter pilots. The sister, the City Fathers tell us now, is a borderline psychotic, which is why she never made citizenship herself; but they authorized the brother to teach her to fly because it seemed to help her clinically. She stole the boarding-squad plane for the purpose, and by the time we got the whole story from the machines, it was all over.”

  “You mean that the City Fathers heard Piggy and the others planning all this?”

  “Sure they did. They hear everything—you know that.”

  “But why didn’t they tell somebody?” Chris demanded.

  “They’re under orders never to volunteer information. And a good thing too, almost all the time; without such an order they’d be jabbering away on all channels every minute of the day—they have no judgment. Now Lutz is demanding ransom. We’d pay any reasonable sum, but what he wants is the planet—you were right again, Chris, logic has gone out the window over there—and we can’t give him what we don’t own, and we wouldn’t if we could. Piggy has gotten us into a war, and not even the machines can see what the consequences will be.”

  Chris blew out his breath in a long gust. “What are we going to do?”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  “No, I don’t want to know about tactics or anything like that. Just a general idea. Piggy is a friend of mine—it sounds silly right now, but I really like him.”

  “If you don’t like a man when he’s in trouble, you probably never liked him at all,” the perimeter sergeant agreed reflectively. “Well, I can’t tell you very much more, all the same. In general terms, Amalfi is stalling in a way he hopes will give Lutz the idea that he’s going to give in, but won’t give the Argidae the same impression; the machines have run him up a set of key words that should convey the one thing to the colonists and the other to Scranton. Contract termination is only a week away, and if we can stall Lutz until the day before that—well, I can’t say what we’ll do. But generally, again, we’ll move in there and deprive him of his marbles. That’ll give us a day to get out of this system before the cops come running, and when they do catch us, at least they’ll find that we have a fulfilled contract. Incidentally, it also gives us a day to collect our pay—”

  “OVERRIDE,” the City Fathers said suddenly, without being asked anything at all.

  “Woof! Sorry. Either I’ve already said one word too many, or I was going to. Can’t say anything else, Chris.”

  “But I thought they never volunteered information!”

  “They don’t,” Anderson said. “That wasn’t volunteered. They are under orders from Amalfi to monitor talk about this situation and shut it up when it begins to get too loose. That’s all I can say—and it’s none of it the best news I ever spread.”

  Only a week to go—and the contract date, Chris realized for the first time, was exactly one day before his birthday. Everything was going to be gained or lost within the same three days: for himself, for Piggy and his two victims, for Scranton, for Argus III, for the city.

  And again he knew, as surely as he knew his left hand from his right, that Amalfi’s present plan was not going to work.

  And again the rock upon which it was sure to founder was Frank Lutz.

  Chris did not doubt that Amalfi could outsmart Lutz hands down in any face-to-face situation, but that was not what this was. He did doubt, and doubted most thoroughly, that any list of trigger words the City Fathers could prepare could fool Lutz for long, no matter how well they lulled the hundred eyes of Argus to sleep; the city manager of Scranton was educated, shrewd, experienced in the ways of politics and power—and by now, on top of all that, he would be almost insanely suspicious. Suspicion of everyone had been normal for him even in good times; if he suspected his friends when things were going right, he would hardly be more trustful of his enemies in the very last days of a disaster.

  Chris knew very little yet about the politics of Okie cities, but he knew his history. Also, he knew skunks; he had often marveled at the obduracy with which poor Kelly had failed to profit by his tangles with them. Maybe the dog had liked them; they are affectionate pets for a cautious master. But the human variety was not worth the risk. One look at Frank Lutz had taught Chris that.

  And even supposing that Lutz did not shoot from the hip while New York was still trying to stall, bringing down upon the city a rain of missiles or whatever other bombardment Scranton was able to mount; even supposing that Lutz was totally taken in by Amalfi’s strategy, so that New York took his city away from him at the very last minute, without firing a shot or losing a man; even supposing all this—and it was an impossible budget of suppositions—Piggy and the two women prisoners would not survive it. In New York only Chris could know with what contempt Lutz treated the useless people aboard his own town; and only Chris could guess what short shrift he would give three putative refugees from a great city that did tolerate passengers.

  Piggy’s pitiful expedition was probably heaving slag right now. If Lutz allowed them to live, more or less, through the next week, he would certainly have them executed the instant he saw his realm toppling, no matter how fast Amalfi moved upon Scranton when the H-hour arrived—it takes no more than five seconds to order that hostages be sacrificed. That was the whole and only reason why the many wars of medieval Earth had gone on so many years after all the participants had forgotten why they had been started or, if they remembered, no longer cared: there was still ransom money to be made.

  His guardian was already impatient of that kind of example, however. As for Amalfi and the City Fathers, they had made their position too clear to be worth appealing to now. Were Chris to go back to them, they would give him more than another No; such an approach would give them all the reasons they could possibly need to put Chris under a 24-hour watch.

  Yet this time he knew they were wrong; and this time he planned very carefully, fighting off the constant conviction that these ancient men and machines could not possibly have made a mistake … and would snap the switch on him at any moment.

  If they knew what he was up to, they remained inactive, and kept their own counsel. He trudged out of the city the next night. Nobody tried to stop him. Nobody even seemed to see him go.

  That was exactly what he had hoped for; but it made him feel miserably in the wrong, and on his own.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Hidey Hole

  ORDINARILY CHRIS would not have ventured into a st
range wilderness at night; even under present circumstances, he would have left perhaps an hour before sunrise, leaving himself only enough darkness to put distance between himself and any possible pursuit. But on Argus III, he had several advantages going for him.

  One of these was a homing compass, a commonplace Okie object the needle of which always pointed toward the strongest nearby spindizzy field. On most planets, cities tended to keep a fractional field going to prevent the local air from mixing with that of the city itself—and when the city was on a war footing, the generators would be kept running as a matter of course in case a quick getaway should be needed. The gadget would point him away from New York for half his trip, and an ordinary magnetic compass would serve to show which way; thereafter, the homing compass would be pointing steadily toward Scranton.

  The second advantage was light. Argus had no moon—but it had the hundred eyes of the nearby blue-white giant suns of the cluster, and beyond them the diffuse light of the rest of the cluster, throughout this half of the year. The aggregate sky glow was almost twice as bright as Earthly moonlight—more than good enough to read by, and to cast sharp shadows, though not quite enough to trigger the color sensitivity of the human eye.

  Most important of all, Chris knew pine woods and mountains. He had grown up among them.

  He traveled light, carrying with him only a small pack containing two tins of field rations, a canteen and a change of clothing. The “fresh” clothes were those he had been wearing when he had first been transferred to New York; it had taken considerable courage to ask the City Fathers if they were still in storage, despite his knowledge that the machines never told what they knew unless asked. The request left behind a clue, but that really didn’t matter; once Sgt. Anderson realized Chris was missing, he could be in little doubt about where he had gone.

  By dawn he was almost over the crest of the range. By noon he had found himself a cave on the other side from which a small, ice-cold stream issued. He went very cautiously into this, as deep as he could go on his hands and knees, looking for old bones, droppings, bedding or any other sign that some local animal lived there. He found none, as he had expected; few animals care to make a home directly beside running water—it is too damp at night, and it attracts too many potential enemies. Then he ate for the first time and went to sleep.