Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  He awoke at dusk, refilled his canteen from the stream, and began the long scramble down the other side of the range. The route he took was necessarily more than a little devious, but thanks to the two compasses he was never in any doubt about his bearings, for more than a few minutes at a time. Long before midnight, he caught his first glimpse of Scranton, glowing dully in the valley like a scatter of dewdrops in a spider’s web. By dawn, he had buried his pack along with the New York clothes—by now more than a little dirty and torn—and was shambling cheerfully across the cleared perimeter of Scranton, toward the same street by which he had boarded the town willy-nilly so long ago. There were many differences this time, not the least of which was his possession of the necessary device for getting through the edge of the spindizzy field.

  He was spotted at once, of course, and two guards came trotting out to meet him, red-eyed and yawning; obviously, it was near the end of their trick.

  “Whatcha doin’ out here?”

  “Went to pick mushrooms,” Chris said, with what he hoped was an idiotic grin. “Didn’t find any. Funny kind of woods they got here.”

  One of the sleepy guards looked him over, but apparently saw nothing but the issue clothing and Chris’s obvious youth. He cussed Chris out more or less routinely and said:

  “Where ya work?”

  “Soaking pits.”

  The two guards exchanged glances. The soaking pits were deep, electrically heated holes in which steel ingots were cooled, gently and slowly. Occasionally they had to be cleaned, but it wasn’t economical to turn the heat off. The men who did the job were lowered into the pits in asbestos suits for four minutes at a time, which was the period it took for their insulating wooden shoes to burst into flame; then they were hauled out, given new shoes, and lowered into the pit again—and this went on for a full working day. Nobody but the mentally deficient could safely be assigned to such an inferno.

  “Awright, feeb, get back on the job. And don’t come out here no more, get me? You’re lucky we didn’t shoot you.”

  Chris ducked his head, grinned, and ran. A minute later, he was twisting and dodging through the shabby streets. Despite his confidence, he was a little surprised at how well he remembered them.

  The hidey hole among the crates was still there, too, exactly as he and Frad had last left it, even to the stub of candle. Chris ate his other tin of field rations, and sat down in the darkness to wait.

  He did not have to wait long, though the time seemed endless. About an hour after the end of the work day, he heard the sounds of someone threading the labyrinth with sure steps; and then the light of the flash came darting in upon him.

  “Hi, Frad,” he said. “I’m glad to see you. Or I will be, once you get that light out of my eyes.”

  The spoor of the flashlight beam swung toward the ceiling. “Is that you, Chris?” Frad’s voice said. “Yep, I see it is. But you must have grown a foot.”

  “I guess I have. I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner.”

  The big man sat down with a grunt. “Never thought you’d make it at all—it was just a hunch, once I heard who it was we were up against. I hope you’re not trying to switch sides, like those other three idiots.”

  “Are they still alive?” Chris said with sudden fear.

  “Yep. As of an hour ago. But I wouldn’t put any money on them lasting. Frank is getting wilder by the day—I used to think I understood him, but not any more. Is that what you’re here for—to try and sneak those kids out? You can’t do it.”

  “No,” Chris said. “Or anyhow, not exactly. And I’m not trying to switch sides, either. But we were wondering why you let your city manager get you into this mess. Our City Fathers say he’s gone off his rocker, and if the machines can see it, you ought to be able to. In fact, you just said you did.”

  “I’ve heard about those machines of yours,” Frad said slowly. “Do they really run the city, the way the stories say?”

  “They run most of it. They don’t boss it, though; the Mayor does that.”

  “Amalfi. Hmm. To tell you the truth, Chris, everybody knows that Frank’s lost control. But there’s nothing we can do about it. Suppose we threw him out—not that it’d be easy—where’d we go from there? We’d still be in the same mess.”

  “You wouldn’t be at war with my town any more,” Chris suggested.

  “No, and that’d be a gain, as far as it went. But we’d still be in the rest of the hole. Just changing a set of names won’t put any money in the till, or any bread in our mouths.” He paused for a moment and then added bitterly, “I suppose you know we’re starving. Not me, personally—Frank feeds his own—but I don’t eat very well either when I have to look at the faces I meet on the streets. Frank’s big play against Amalfi is crazy, sure—but except for that we’ve got no hope.”

  Chris was silent. It was what he had expected to find, but that made the problem no easier.

  “But you haven’t answered my question,” Frad said. “What are you up to? Just collecting information? Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  “I’m trying to promote a revolution,” Chris said. It sounded embarrassingly pompous, but he couldn’t think of any other way to put it. He was also trying to avoid saying anything which would be an outright lie, but from this point onward that was going to be increasingly difficult. “The Mayor says you must have flunked your contracts because you don’t have any machines to judge them. Evidently that happens a lot of times to small cities that don’t have computer control. And the City Fathers say you could have done this job.”

  “Now wait a minute. Let’s take this one step at a time. Suppose we got rid of Frank and patched things up with Amalfi. Could we get some help from your City Fathers on reorganizing the job?”

  Now the guesswork had to begin, to be followed rapidly by the outright lying. “Sure you could. But we’d have to have our people back first—Piggy Kingston-Throop and the two women.”

  Frad made a quick gesture of dismissal in the dim light. “I’d do that for a starter, not as part of a deal. But look, Chris, this is a complicated business. Your city landed here to do the job we defaulted on. If we do it after all, then somebody doesn’t get paid. Not a likely deal for Amalfi to make.”

  “Mayor Amalfi isn’t offering any deal yet. But Frad, you know what our contract with Argus is like. Half of it is to do the job you didn’t do, sure. But the other half of it is to get rid of Scranton. If you turn into a decent town instead of a bindlestiff, we’ll get that part of the money—and it’s the bigger part, now. Naturally the Mayor’d rather do it by finagling than by fighting—if we fight, we’ll need all the money and more just to pay for the damages, both of us. Isn’t that logical?”

  “Hmm. I guess it is. But if you want to keep me reasonable, you’d better lay off that word ‘bindlestiff.’ It’s true enough, but it makes me mad all the same. Either we treat as equals, or we don’t treat.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chris said. “I don’t know a lot about this kind of thing. The Mayor would have sent somebody else if he’d had anybody who could have gotten in. But there wasn’t anyone but me.”

  “Okay. I’m edgy, that’s all. But there’s one thing more, and that’s the colonists. They’re not going to trust us just because we’ve gotten rid of Frank. They don’t know that he’s the problem, and they’ll have no better reason to trust the next city manager. If we’re going to get back the mining part of the contract, Amalfi will have to guarantee it. Would he do that?”

  Chris was already in far deeper waters than his conscience could possibly justify. He knew abruptly that he could push no farther into the untrue and the unknown.

  “I don’t know, Frad. I never asked, and he didn’t say. I suppose he’d have to ask the City Fathers for an opinion first—and nobody knows what they might say.”

  Frad squatted and thought about it, smacking one fist repeatedly into the other palm. After a moment, he seemed about to ask another question, but it never got out.
>
  “Well,” he muttered finally, “every deal has one carrot in it. I guess we take the chance. You’ll have to stay here, Chris. I can knock Barney’s and Huggins’ heads together easy enough, but Frank’s something else again. When the shooting really starts, he might turn out to be a lot faster than I am—and besides, he won’t care what else he hits. If I manage to dump him I’ll come back for you soon enough—but you’d better stay out of sight until it’s over.”

  Chris had expected nothing else, but the prospect of again missing all the excitement, while he simply sat and waited, disappointed him all the same. However, it also reminded him of something.

  “I’ll stay here. But, Frad, if it doesn’t look as if it’s working, don’t wait till it’s hopeless. Let me know and I’ll try to get help.”

  “Well … all right. But better not to have any outsiders visible if it’s going to stick. If anybody in this town sees New York’s finger in this even people who hate Frank’ll be on his side again. We’re all a little crazy around here lately.”

  He stood up, his face somber, and picked up the flashlight.

  “I hope you’ve got the straight goods,” he said. “I don’t like to do this. Frank trusts me—I guess I’m the last man he does trust. And for some reason I always liked him, even though I knew he was a louse from the very beginning. Some guys hit you that way. It’s not going to be fun, stabbing him in the back. He’s got it coming, sure—but all the same I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t trust you more.”

  He swung to the exit into the labyrinth. Chris swallowed and said: “Thanks, Frad. Good luck.”

  “Sit tight. I’ll see you.”

  Of necessity, Chris did not stay in the hole every minute of the day, but even so he found that he quickly lost track of the passage of time. He ate when he seemed to need to—though most of the food had been removed from the hide-out, Frad had missed one compact cache—and slept as much as possible. That was not very much, however, for now that he was inactive he found himself a prey to more and more anxiety and tension, made worse by his total ignorance of what was going on outside.

  Finally he was convinced that the deadline had passed. After this, all possibility of sleep vanished; from minute to minute he awaited the noises of battle joined, or the deepening drone which would mean that Scranton was carrying him off again. The close confines of the hole made the tension even more nightmarish. At the first faint sound in the labyrinth, he jumped convulsively, and would have started like a hare had there been any place to run to.

  In the uncertain light of the flash, Frad looked ghastly: he had several days’ growth of beard and was haggard with sleeplessness. In addition, he had a beautiful black eye.

  “Come on out,” he said tersely. “The job’s mostly done.”

  Chris followed Frad out into the half-light of the warehouse, which seemed brilliant after the stuffy inkiness of the hole, and thence into the intolerable brilliance of late-afternoon sunlight.

  “What happened to Frank Lutz?” he said breathlessly.

  Frad stared straight ahead, and when he replied, his voice was totally devoid of expression.

  “We got rid of him. The subject is closed.”

  Chris shied off from it hastily. “What happens now?”

  “There’s still a little mopping up to do, and we could use some help. If you called your friends now, we could let them in—as long as Amalfi doesn’t send a whole boarding squad.”

  “No, just two men.”

  Frad nodded. “Two good men in full armor should flatten things out in a day or so at the most.” He hailed a passing Tin Cab. As it settled obediently beside them, Chris saw that there were several inarguable bullet holes in it. How old they were was of course impossible to know, but it was Chris’s guess that they hadn’t been there for as much as a week. “I’ll get you to the radio and you can take it from there. Then it’ll be time to get the deal drawn up.”

  And that would be the moment that Chris had been dreading above all others—the moment when he would have to talk to Anderson and Amalfi, and tell them what he had done, what he had started, what he had committed them to.

  There was no doubt in his mind as to how he felt about it. He was scared.

  “Come on, hop in,” Frad said. “What are you waiting for?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE: An Interview With Amalfi

  THE CITY was still administered, with due regard for tradition, from City Hall, but its control room was in the mast of the Empire State Building. It was here that Amalfi received them all—Chris, Frad, and Sgts. Anderson and Dulany—for he had been occupying it around the clock while the alert had been on, as officially it still was. It was a marvelous place, jammed to the ceilings with screens, lights, meters, automatic charts, and scores of devices Chris could not even put a name to; but Chris was more interested in the Mayor.

  Since he was at the moment talking to Frad, Chris had plenty of opportunity to study him.

  The fabulous Amalfi had turned out to be a complete surprise. Chris could not say any more just what kind of man he had pictured in his mind. Something more stalwart, lean and conventionally heroic, perhaps—but certainly not a short barrel-shaped man with a bull neck, a totally bald head and hands so huge that they looked as though they could crush rocks. The oddest touch of all was the cigar, held in the powerful fingers with almost feminine delicacy, and drawn on with invariable relish. Nobody else in the city smoked— nobody else—because there was no place in it to grow tobacco. The cigar, then, was more than a badge of office; it was a symbol of the wealth of the city, like the snow imported from the mountains by the Roman emperors, and Amalfi treated it like a treasure, not a habit. When he was thinking, he had an odd way of holding it up and looking at it, as though everything that was going on in his head was concentrated in its glowing coal.

  He was saying to Frad: “The arrangements with the machinery are cumbersome, but not difficult in principle. We can lend you our Brood assembly until she replicates herself; then you reset the daughter machine, feed her scrap, and out come City Fathers to the number that you’ll need—probably about a third as many as we carry, and it’ll take maybe ten years. You can use the time feeding them data, because in the beginning they’ll be idiots except for the computation function.

  “In the meantime we’ll refigure your job problem on our own machines. Since we’ll trust the answer, and since Chris says you’re a man of your word, that means that of course we’ll underwrite your contract with the Argidae.”

  “Many thanks,” Frad said.

  “Not necessary,” Amalfi rumbled. “For value received. In fact we got more than we’re paying for—we learned something from you. Which brings us to our drastic friend Mr. deFord.” He swung on Chris, who tried unsuccessfully to swallow his heart. “I suppose you’re aware, Chris, that this is D-day for you: your eighteenth birthday.”

  “Yes, sir. I sure am.”

  “Well, I’ve got a job for you if you want it. I’ve been studying it ever since it was first mentioned to me, and all I can say is, it serves you right.”

  Chris swallowed again. The Mayor studied the cigar judiciously.

  “It calls for a very odd combination of skills and character traits. Taking the latter first, it needs initiative, boldness, imagination, a willingness to improvise and take short-cuts, and an ability to see the whole of a complex situation at a glance. But at the same time, it needs conservative instincts, so that even the boldest ideas and acts tend to be those that save men, materials, time, money. What class of jobs does that make you think of so far?”

  “M ILITARY GENERAL OFFICERS,” the City Fathers promptly announced.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Amalfi growled. He was plainly irritated, but it seemed to Chris an old irritation, almost a routine one. “Chris?”

  “Well, sir, they’re right, of course. I might even have thought of it myself, though I can’t swear to it. At least all the great generals follow that pattern.”

  “Okay. As for t
he skills, a lot of them are required, but only one is cardinal. The man has got to be a first-class cultural morphologist.”

  Chris recognized the term, from his force-feeding in Spengler. It denoted a scholar who could look at any culture at any stage in its development, relate it to all other cultures at similar stages, and come up with specific predictions of how these people would react to a given proposal or event. It surely wouldn’t be a skill a general would ever be likely to have a use for, even if he had the time to develop it.

  “You’ve got the character traits, that’s plain to see—including the predisposition toward the skill. Most Okies have that, but in nowhere near the degree you seem to. The skill itself, of course, can only emerge with time and practice … but you’ll have lots of time. The City Fathers say five years’ probation.

  “As for the city, we never had such a job on the roster before, but a study of Scranton and some more successful towns convinces us that we need it. Will you take it?”

  Chris’s head was whirling with a wild, humming mixture of pride and bafflement. “Excuse me, Mr. Mayor—but just what is it?”

  “City manager.”

  Chris stared at Sgt. Anderson, but his guardian looked as stunned as Chris felt. After a moment, however, he winked solemnly. Chris could not speak; but at last he managed to nod his head. It was all the management he was capable of, right now.

  “Good. The City Fathers predicted you would, so you were started on the drugs in your first meal of today. Welcome to citizenship, Mr. deFord.”

  Even at this moment, however, a part of Chris’s mind seemed curiously detached. He was thinking of the original reason he had wanted long life: in the hope that some day, somehow, he might yet get back home. It had never occurred to him that by the time that happened, there would be nothing left back there that he could call his own. Even now, Earth was unthinkably remote, not only in space, but in his heart.