Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “So they’re having a war. We’ve been through that kind of situation before. We don’t have to take sides. We land on the planet best suited—”

  “If it were an ordinary interplanetary squabble, okay. But as it happens, one of those worlds—the third from the sun—is a sort of free-living polyp of the old Hruntan Empire, and the inner one is a survivor of the Hamiltonians. They’ve been fighting for a century, on and off, without any contact with Earth. Now—the Earth’s found them.”

  “And?” Amalfi said.

  “And it’s cleaning them both out,” Hazleton said grimly. “We’ve just received an official police warning to get the hell out of here.”

  Above the city the yellow sun was now very much smaller. The Okie metropolis, skulking out from the two warm warring worlds under one-quarter drive, crept steadily into hiding within the freezing blue-green shadow of one of the ruined giant planets of the system. Tiny moons, a quartet of them, circled in a gelid minuet against the chevrons of ammonia-storms that banded the gas giant.

  Amalfi watched the vision screens tensely. This kind of close maneuvering, involving the balancing of the city against a whole series of conflicting gravitational fields, was very delicate, and not the kind of thing to which he was accustomed; the city generally gave gas giants a wide berth. His own preternatural “feel” for the spatial conditions in which he spent his life must here be abetted by every electronic resource at its command.

  “Too heavy, Twenty-third Street,” he said into the mike. “You’ve got close to a two-degree bulge on your arc of the screen. Trim it.”

  “Trim, boss.”

  Amalfi watched the image of the giant planet and its chill handmaidens. A needle tipped gently.

  “Cut!”

  The whole city throbbed once and went silent. The silence was a little frightening: the distant hum of the spindizzies was a part of the expected environment, and when it was damped, one felt a strange shortness of breath, as if the air had gone bad. Amalfi yawned involuntarily, his diaphragm sucking against an illusory shortage of oxygen.

  Hazleton yawned, too, but his eyes were glittering. Amalfi knew that the city manager was enjoying himself now; the plan had been his, and so he no longer cared that the city might be in serious danger from here on out. He was taking lazy folks’ pains.

  Amalfi only hoped that Hazleton was not outsmarting himself and the city at the same time. They had had some narrow squeaks with Hazleton’s plans before. There had been, for instance, that episode on Thor V. Of all the planets in the inhabited galaxy on which an Okie might choose to throw his weight around, Thor V was easily the worst. The first Okie city Thor V ever saw had been an outfit which had dropped its city name and taken to calling itself the Interstellar Master Traders. By the time it had left Thor V again, it had earned itself still another appellation: the Mad Dogs. On Thor V, hatred of Okies was downright hereditary, and for good reason …

  “Now we’ll sit tight for a week,” Hazleton said, his spatulate fingers shooting the courser of his slide rule back and forth. “Our food will hold out that long. And that was a very convincing orbit Jake gave us. The cops will be sure we’re well on our way out of this system by now—and there aren’t enough of them to take care of the two warring planets and to comb space for us at the same time, anyhow.”

  “You hope.”

  “It stands to reason, doesn’t it?” Hazleton said, his eyes gleaming. “Sooner or later, within a matter of weeks, they’ll find out that one of those two planets is stronger than the other, and concentrate their forces on that one. When that happens, we’ll hightail for the planet with the weaker police investiture. The cops’ll be too busy to prevent our landing there, or to block our laying on supplies once we’re grounded.”

  “That’s fine as far as it goes. But it also involves us directly with the weaker planet. The cops won’t need any better excuse for dispersing the city.”

  “Not necessarily,” Hazleton insisted. “They can’t break us up just for violating a Vacate order. They know that as well as we do. If necessary, we can call for a court ruling and show that the Vacate order was inhumane—and in the meantime, they can’t enforce the order while we’re under the aegis of an enemy of theirs. Which reminds me—we’ve got an ‘I want off from a man named Webster, a pile engineer. He’s one of the city’s original complement, and as good as they come; I hate to see him leave.”

  “If he wants off, he gets it,” Amalfi said. “What does he opt?”

  “Next port of call.”

  “Well, this looks like it. Well—”

  The intercom on the flight board emitted a self-deprecatory burp. Amalfi pressed the stud.

  “Mr. Mayor?”

  “Yep.”

  “This is Sergeant Anderson at the Cathedral Parkway lookout. There’s a whopping big ship just come into view around the bulge of the gas giant. We’re trying to contact her now. A warship.”

  “Thanks,” Amalfi said, shooting a glance at Hazleton. “Put her through to here when you do make contact.” He dialed the ’visor until he could see the limb of the giant planet opposite the one into which the city was swinging. Sure enough, there was a tiny sliver of light there. The strange ship was still in direct sunlight, but even so, she must have been a whopper to be visible at all so far away. The mayor stepped up the magnification, and was rewarded with a look at a tube about the size of his thumb.

  “Not making any attempt to hide,” he murmured, “but then you couldn’t very well hide a thing that size. She must be all of a thousand feet long. Looks like we didn’t fool ’em.”

  Hazleton leaned forward and studied the innocuous-looking cylinder intently. “I don’t think that’s a police craft,” he said. “The police battleships on the clean-up squad are more or less pear-shaped, and have plenty of bumps. This boat only has four turrets, and they’re faired into the hull—what the ancients used to call ‘streamlining.’ See?”

  Amalfi nodded, thrusting out his lower lip speculatively. “Local stuff, then. Designed for fast atmosphere transit. Archaic equipment—Muir engines, maybe.”

  The intercom burped again. “Ready with the visiting craft, sir,” Sergeant Anderson said.

  The view of the ship and the blue-green planet was wiped away, and a pleasant-faced young man looked out at them from the screen. “How do you do?” he said formally. The question didn’t seem to mean anything, but his tone indicated that he didn’t expect an answer to it anyhow. “I am speaking to the commanding officer of the … the flying fortress?”

  “In effect,” Amalfi said. “I’m the mayor here, and this gentleman is the city manager; we’re responsible for different aspects of command. Who are you?”

  “Captain Savage of the Federal Navy of Utopia,” the young man said. He did not smile. “May we have permission to approach your fort or city or whatever it is? We’d like to land a representative.”

  Amalfi snapped the audio switch and looked at Hazleton. “What do you think?” he said. The Utopian officer politely and pointedly did not watch the movements of his lips.

  “It should be safe enough. Still, that’s a big ship, even if it is a museum piece. They could as easily send their man in a life craft.”

  Amalfi opened the circuit again. “Under the circumstances, we’d just as soon you stayed where you are,” he said. “You’ll understand, I’m sure, Captain. However, you may send a gig if you like; your representative is welcome here. Or we will exchange hostages—”

  Savage’s hand moved across the screen as if brushing the suggestion away. “Quite unnecessary, sir. We heard the interstellar craft warn you away. Any enemy of theirs must be a friend of ours. We are hoping that you can shed some light on what is at best a confused situation.”

  “That’s possible,” Amalfi said. “If that is all for now—”

  “Yes sir. End of transmission.”

  “Out.”

  Hazleton arose. “Suppose I meet this emissary. Your office?”

  “Okay.”r />
  The city manager went out, and Amalfi, after a few moments, followed him, locking up the control tower. The city was in an orbit and would be stable until the time came to put it in flight again. On the street, Amalfi flagged a cab.

  It was a fairly long haul from the control tower, which was on Thirty-fourth Street and The Avenue, down to Bowling Green, where City Hall was; and Amalfi lengthened it a bit more by giving the Tin Cabby a route that would have put folding money into the pocket of a live one of another, forgotten age. He settled back, bit the end off a hydroponic cigar, and tried to remember what he had heard about the Hamiltonians. Some sort of a republican sect, they’d been, back in the very earliest days of space travel. There’d been a public furor … recruiting … government disapproval and then suppression … hm-m-m. It was all very dim, and Amalfi was not at all sure that he hadn’t mixed it up with some other event in Terrestrial history.

  But there had been an exodus of some sort. Shiploads of Hamiltonians going out to colonize, to set up model planets. Come to think of it, one of the nations then current in the West on Earth had had a sort of Hamiltonianism of its own, something called a timocracy. It had all died down after a while, but it had left traces. Nearly every major political wave after space flight had its vestige somewhere in the inhabited part of the galaxy.

  Utopia must have been colonized very early. The Hruntan Imperials, had they arrived first, would have garrisoned both habitable planets as a matter of course.

  It was a little easier to remember the Hruntan Empire, since it was of much more recent vintage than the Hamiltonians; but there was less to remember. The outer margins of exploration had spawned gimcrack empires by the dozen in the days when Earth seemed to be losing her grip. Alois Hrunta had merely been the most successful of the would-be emperors of space. His territory had expanded as far as the limits of communication would allow an absolute autocracy to spread, and then had been destroyed almost before he was assassinated, broken into duchies by his squabbling sons. Eventually the duchies fell in their turn to the nominal but irresistible authority of Earth, leaving, as the Hamiltonians had left, a legacy of a few remote colonies—worlds where a dead dream was served with meaningless pomp.

  The cab began to settle, and the façade of City Hall drifted past Amalfi’s cab window. The once-golden motto— MOW YOUR LAWN, LADY?— looked greener than ever in the light of the giant planet. Amalfi sighed. These political squabbles were dull, and they were guaranteed to make a major project out of the simple matter of earning a square meal.

  The first thing that Amalfi noticed upon entering his office was that Hazleton looked uncomfortable. This was practically a millennial event. Nothing had ever disturbed Hazleton before; he was very nearly the perfect citizen of space: resilient, resourceful, and almost impossible to surprise—or bluff. There was nobody else in the office but a girl whom Amalfi did not recognize; probably one of the parliamentary secretaries who handled many of the intramural affairs of the city.

  “What’s the matter, Mark? Where’s the Utopian contact man?”

  “There,” Hazleton said. He didn’t exactly point, but there was no doubt about his meaning. Amalfi felt his eyebrows tobogganing over his broad skull. He turned and studied the girl.

  She was quite pretty: black hair, with blue lights in it; gray eyes, very frank, and a little amused; a small body, well made, somewhat on the sturdy side. She was dressed in the most curious garment Amalfi had ever seen—she had a sort of sack over her head, with holes for her arms and neck, and the cloth was pulled in tightly above her waist. Her hips and her legs down to just below her knees were covered by a big tube of black fabric, belted at the top. Her legs were sheathed into token stockings of some sleazily woven, quite transparent stuff. Little flecks of color spotted the sack, and around her neck she had a sort of scarf—no, it wasn’t a scarf, it was a ribbon—what was it, anyhow? Amalfi wondered if even deFord could have named it.

  After a moment the girl began to seem impatient of his inspection, and he turned his head away and continued walking toward his desk. Behind him, her voice said gently, “I didn’t mean to cause a sensation, sir. Evidently you didn’t expect a woman …?”

  Her accent was as archaic as her clothes; it was almost Eliotian. Amalfi sat down and collected his scattered impressions.

  “No, we didn’t,” he said. “However, we have women in positions of authority here. I suppose we were misled by Earth custom, which doesn’t allow women much hand in the affairs of the military. You’re welcome, anyhow. What can we do for you?”

  “May I sit down? Thank you. First of all, you can tell us where all these vicious fighting ships come from. Evidently they know you.”

  “Not personally,” Amalfi said. “They know the Okie cities as a class, that’s all. They’re the Earth police.”

  The Utopian girl’s piquant face dimmed subtly, as though she had expected the answer and had been fighting to believe it would not be given.

  “That’s what they told us,” she said. “We … we couldn’t accept it. Why are they attacking us then?”

  “It was bound to happen sooner or later,” Amalfi said as gently as possible. “Earth is incorporating the independent planets as a matter of policy. Your enemies the Hruntans will be taken in, too. I don’t suppose we can explain why very convincingly. We aren’t exactly in the confidence of Earth’s government.”

  “Oh,” the girl said. “Then perhaps you will help us? This immense fortress of yours——”

  “I beg your pardon,” Hazleton said, smiling ruefully. “The city is no fortress, I assure you. We are only lightly armed. However, we may be able to help you in other ways—frankly, we’re anxious to make a deal.”

  Amalfi looked at him under his eyelids. It was incautious, and unlike Hazleton, to discuss the city’s armament or lack of it with an officer who had just come on board from a strange battleship.

  The girl said, “What do you want? If you can teach us how those—those police ships fly, and how you keep your city aloft—”

  “You don’t have the spindizzy?” Amalfi said. “But you must have had it once, otherwise you’d never have got way out here from Earth.”

  “The secret of interstellar flight has been lost for nearly a century. We still have the first ship our ancestors flew in our museum; but the motor is a mystery. It doesn’t seem to do anything.”

  Amalfi found himself thinking: Nearly a century? Is that supposed to be a long time? Or do the Utopians lack the anti-agathic drugs, too? But ascomycin was supposed to have been discovered more than half a century before the Hamiltonian Exodus. Curiouser and curiouser.

  Hazleton was smiling again. “We can show you what the spindizzy does,” he said. “It is too simple to yield its secret lightly. As for us—we need supplies, raw materials. Oil, most of all. Have you that?”

  The girl nodded. “Utopia is very rich in oil, and we haven’t needed it in quantity for nearly twenty-five years—ever since we rediscovered molar valence.” Amalfi pricked up his ears again. The Utopians lacked the spindizzy and the anti-agathics—but they had something called molar valence. The term told its own story: anyone who could modify molecular bonding beyond the usual adhesion effects would have no need for mechanical lubricants like oil. And if the Utopians thought they had only rediscovered such a technique, so much the better.

  “As for us, we can use anything you can give us,” the girl went on. Abruptly she looked very weary in spite of her healthy youth. “All our lives we have been fighting these Hruntan barbarians and waiting for the day when help would arrive from Earth. Now Earth has come—and its hand is against both worlds! Things must have changed a great deal.”

  “The fault doesn’t lie in change,” Hazleton said quietly, “but in that you people have failed to change. Traveling away from Earth for us is very like traveling in time: different distances from the home planet have different year-dates. Stars remote from Earth, like yours, are historical backwaters. And the situation becomes comp
licated when the historical periods interpenetrate, as your Hamiltonian era and the Hruntan Empire have interpenetrated. The two cultures freeze each other the moment they come in conflict, and when history catches up with them—well, naturally it’s a shock.”

  “On a more practical subject,” Amalfi said, “we’d prefer to pick our own landing area. If we can send technicians to your planet in advance, they’ll find a lie for us.”

  “A lie?”

  “A mining site. That’s to be permitted, I presume?”

  “I don’t know,” the girl said uncertainly. “We’re very short on metals, steel especially. We have to salvage all our scrap—”

  “We use almost no iron or steel,” Amalfi assured her. “We reclaim what we need, as you do—steel’s nearly indestructible, after all. What we’re after is germanium and some other rare-earth metals for instruments. You ought to have plenty of those to spare.” Amalfi saw no point in adding that germanium was the base of the present universal coinage. What he had said was true as far as it went, and in dealing with these backward planets, there were always five or six facts best suppressed until after the city had left.

  “May I use your phone?”

  Amalfi moved away from the desk, then had to come back again as the girl dabbed helplessly at the ’visor controls. In a moment she was outlining the conversation to the Utopian captain. Amalfi wondered if the Hruntans understood English; not that he was worried about the present interchange being overheard—the giant planet would block that most effectively, since the Utopians used ordinary radio rather than ultraphones or Dirac communicators—but it was of the utmost importance, if Hazleton’s scheme was to be made workable, that the Hruntans should have heard and understood the warning the Earth police had issued to the city. It was a point that would have to be checked as unobtrusively as possible.

  It might also be just as well to restrict sharply the technical information the city passed out in this star system. If the Hamiltonians—or the Hruntans—suddenly blossomed out with Bethé blasters, field bombs, and the rest of the modern arsenal (or what had been modern the last time the city had been able to update its files, not quite a century ago), the police would be unhappy. They would also know whom to blame. It was comforting to know that nobody in the city knew how to build a Canceller, at least. Amalfi had a sudden disquieting mental picture of a mob of Hruntan barbarians swarming out of this system in spindizzy-powered ships, hijacking their way back to an anachronistic triumph, snuffing out stars like candle flames as they went.