Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “It is agreed,” the girl said. “Captain Savage suggests that I take your technicians back with me in the gig to save time. And is there also someone who understands the interstellar drive—”

  “I’ll go along,” Hazleton said. “I know spindizzies as well as the next man.”

  “Nothing doing, Mark. I need you here. We’ve plenty of grease monkeys for that purpose. We can send them your man Webster; here’s his chance to get off the city before we even touch ground.” Amalfi spoke rapidly into the vacated ’visor. “There. You’ll find the proper people waiting at your gig, young lady. If Captain Savage will phone us exactly one week from today and tell us where on Utopia we’re to land, we’ll be out of occultation with this gas planet, and will get the message.”

  There was a long silence after the Utopian girl had left. At last Amalfi said slowly, “Mark, there is no shortage of women in the city.”

  Hazleton flushed. “I’m sorry, boss. I knew it was impossible directly the words were out of my mouth. Still, I think we may be able to do something for them; the Hruntan Empire was a pretty nauseating sort of state, if I remember correctly.”

  “That’s none of our business,” Amalfi said sharply. He disliked having to turn the full force of his authority upon Hazleton; the city manager was for Amalfi the next best thing to that son his position had never permitted him to father—for the laws of all Okie cities include elaborate safeguards against the founding of any possible dynasty. Only Amalfi knew how many times this youngster’s elusive, amoral intelligence had brought him close to being deposed and shot by the City Fathers; and a situation like this one was crucial to the survival of the city.

  “Look, Mark. We can’t afford to have sympathies. We’re Okies. What are the Hamiltonians to us? What are they to themselves, for that matter? I was thinking a minute ago of what a disaster it’d be if the Hruntans got a Canceller or some such weapon and blackmailed their way back to a real empire again. But can you see a rebirth of Hamiltonianism any better—in this age? Superficially it would be easier to take, I’ll admit, than another Hruntan tyranny—but historically, it’d be just as disastrous. These two planets have been fighting each other over two causes that played themselves out half a millennium ago. They aren’t either of them relevant any more.”

  Amalfi stopped for a breath, taking the mangled cigar out of his mouth and eyeing it with mild surprise. “I knew that the girl was disturbing your judgment the moment I realized that I’d have to read you the riot act like this. Ordinarily you’re the best cultural morphologist I’ve ever had, and every city manager has to be a good one. If you weren’t in a sexual uproar, you’d see that these people are the victims of a pseudomorphosis—dead cultures both of ’em, going through the pangs of decay, even though they both do think it’s rebirth.”

  “The cops don’t see it that way,” Hazleton said abstractedly.

  “How could they? They haven’t our point of view. I’m not talking to you as a cop. I’m trying to talk like an Okie. What good does it do you to be an Okie if you’re going to mix in on some petty border feud? Mark, you might as well be dead—or back on Earth, it’s the same thing in the end.”

  He stopped again. Eloquence was unnatural to him; it embarrassed him a little. He looked sharply at the city manager, and what he saw choked off the springs of his rare volubility. He felt, not for the first time, the essential loneliness that went with perspective.

  Hazleton wasn’t listening any more.

  There was a battle in progress when the city made its run to Utopia. It was rather spectacular. The Hruntan planet, military in organization and spirit down to the smallest detail of daily living, had not waited for the Earth police to englobe it. The Hruntan ships, though they were nearly of the same vintage as those flown by the Utopians, were being fought to the limit, fought by experienced officers who were unencumbered by any sniveling notions about the intrinsic value of human life. There was not much doubt as to the outcome, but for the time being, the police were unhappy.

  The battle was not directly visible from the city; the Hruntan planet was nearly forty degrees away from Utopia now. It was the steady widening of the distance between the two planets that had first given Hazleton his idea for a sneak landing. It had also been Hazleton who had dispatched the proxies—guided missiles less than five meters long—which hung invisibly upon the outskirts of the conflict and watched it with avid television eyes.

  It was an instructive dogfight. The police craft, collectively, had not engaged in a major battle for decades; and individually, few of the Earthmen had ever been involved in anything more dangerous than a pushover. The Hruntans, vastly inferior in equipment, were rich in experience, and their tactics were masterly. They had forced the engagement in a heavily mined area, which was equivalent to picking a fight in the heart of a furnace—except that the Hruntans, having sown the mines, knew where the fire was hottest. Their losses, of course, were terrific—nearly five to one. But they had the numbers to waste, and it was obvious that officers who did not value their own lives would be unlikely to value those of their crews.

  After a while, even Hazleton had to turn the screen off and order O’Brien to recall the proxies. The carnage was frightening, not just per se, but in the mental attitude behind it. Even a hardened killer, after a certain amount of watching men trying to snuff out a fire by leaping into it, might have felt his brains cracking.

  The city settled toward Utopia. Outlying police scouts reported the fact—the reports were plainly audible in the city’s Communications Room—and those reports would be exhumed later and acted upon. But now, in the midst of the battle, the cops had no time to care about what the city did. When they began to care again, the city hoped to be gone—or invulnerable.

  The question of how Utopia had resisted the Hruntan onslaught for nearly a century remained a riddle. It became more of a riddle after the city landed on Utopia. The planet was a death trap of radioactivity. There were no cities; there were seething white-hot pools that would never cool within the lifetime of humanity to show where cities once had stood. One of the continental land masses was not habitable at all. The very air disturbed counters slightly. In the daytime, the radioactivity was just below the dangerous limit; at night, when the drop in temperature released the normal microscopic increase in the radon content—a phenomenon common to the atmospheres of all Earthlike planets—the air was unbreathable.

  Utopia had been bombarded with fission bombs and dust canisters at every opposition with the Hruntan planet for the past seventy Utopian years. The favorable oppositions occurred only once every twelve years—otherwise even the underground life of Utopia would have been impossible.

  “How have you kept them off?” Amalfi asked. “Those boys are soldiers. If they can put up this much of a battle against the police, they should be able to wipe up the floor with you folks.”

  Captain Savage, perched uncomfortably in the belfry, blinking at the sun, managed a thin smile. “We know all their tricks. They are very fine strategists—I will grant you that. But in some respects they are unimaginative. Necessarily, I suppose; initiative is not encouraged among them.” He stirred uneasily. “Are you going to leave your city out here in plain sight? And at night, too?”

  “Yes. I doubt that the Hruntans will attack us; they’re busy, and besides, they probably know that the police don’t love us, and will be too puzzled to call us an enemy of theirs right off the bat. As for the air—we’re maintaining a point naught two per cent spindizzy field. Not enough to be noticeable, but it changes the moment of inertia of our own atmosphere enough to prevent much of your air from getting in.”

  “I don’t think I understand that,” Savage said. “But doubtless you know your own resources. I confess, Mayor Amalfi, that your city is a complete mystery to us. What does it do? Why are the police against you? Are you exiled?”

  “No,” Amalfi said. “And the police aren’t against us exactly. We’re just rather low in the social scale; we’re
migratory workers, interstellar hobos, Okies. The police are as obligated to protect us as they are to protect any other citizen—but our mobility makes us possible criminals by their figuring, so we have to be watched.”

  Savage’s summary of his reaction to this was the woeful sentence Amalfi had come to think of as the motto of Utopia. “Things have changed so much,” the officer said.

  “You should set that to music. I can’t say that I understand yet how you’ve held out so long, either. Haven’t you ever been invaded?”

  “Frequently,” Savage said. His voice was half gloomy and half charged with pride. “But you have seen how we live. At best, we have beaten them off; at worst, we cannot be found. And the Hruntans themselves have made this planet a difficult place to live. Many of their landing parties succumbed to the results of their own bombing.”

  “Still—”

  “Mob psychology,” Savage said, “is something of a science with us—as it is with them, but we have developed it in a different direction. Combined with the subsidiary art of camouflage, it is a powerful weapon. By dummy installations, faked weather conditions, false high-radioactivity areas, we have thus far been able to make the Hruntans erect their invasion camps exactly on the spots we have previously chosen for them. It is a form of chess: one persuades, or lures, the enemy into entering an area where one can dispose of him in perfect safety and with a minimum of effort.”

  He blinked up at the sun, nibbling at his lower lip. After a while he added, “There is another important factor. It is freedom. We have it. The Hruntans do not. They are defending a system which is ascetic in character—that is, it offers few rewards to the individual, even once it has triumphed. We on Utopia are fighting for a system which has personal rewards for us—the rewards of freedom. It makes a difference. The incentive is greater.”

  “Oh, freedom,” Amalfi said. “Yes, that’s a great thing, I suppose. Still, it’s the old problem. Nobody is ever free. Our city is vaguely republican, it might even be Hamiltonian in one sense. But we aren’t free of the requirements of our situation, and never can be. As for efficiency in warfare being increased by freedom—I question that. Your people are not free now. A wartime political economy has to tend toward dictatorship; that’s what killed off the West back on Earth. Your people are fighting for steak tomorrow, not steak today. Well—so are the Hruntans. The difference between you exists as a potential, but—a difference which makes no difference is no difference.”

  “You are subtle,” Savage said, standing up. “I think I can see why you would not understand that part of our history. You have no ties, no faith. You will have to excuse us ours. We cannot afford to be logic-choppers.”

  He went down the stairs, his shoulders thrown back unnaturally. Amalfi watched him go with a rueful grin. The young man was a character; talking with him was like being brought face to face with a person from a historical play. Except, of course, that a character in a play is ordinarily understandable even at his queerest; Savage had the misfortune to be real, not the product of an artificer with an ax to grind.

  Amalfi was reminded abruptly of Hazleton. Where was Hazleton, anyhow? He had gone off hours ago with that girl upon some patently trumped-up errand. If he didn’t hurry, he’d be trapped underground overnight. Amalfi did not mind working alone, but there were managerial jobs in the city which the mayor simply could not handle efficiently—and besides, Hazleton might be committing the city to something inconvenient. Amalfi went down to his office and called the Communications Room.

  Hazleton had not reported in. Grumbling, Amalfi went about the business of organizing the work of the city—the work for which it had gone aloft, but which it found so seldom. It disturbed him that there was no official work contract between the city and Utopia; it was not customary, and if Utopia should turn out, as so many ideals-ridden planets had turned out, to be willing to cheat on an astronomical scale for the sake of its obsession, there would be no recourse under the Earth laws. People with Ends in view were quick to justify all kinds of Means, and the city, which was nothing but Means made concrete and visible, had learned to beware of short cuts.

  Hazleton, it appeared, was off somewhere on a short cut. Amalfi could only hope that he—and the city—would survive it.

  The Earth police did not wait for Hazleton, either. Amalfi was mildly appalled to see how rapidly the Earth forces reformed and were reinforced. Their logistics had been much improved since the city had last seen them in action. The sky sparkled with ships driving in on the Hruntan planet.

  That was bad. Amalfi had expected to have several months at least to build up a food reserve on Utopia before making the run to the Hruntan planet that Hazleton’s strategy called for. Evidently, however, the Hruntan world would be completely blockaded by that time.

  The mayor sent out an emergency warning at once. The thin resistance which the spindizzy field had offered to Utopia’s atmosphere became a solid, hard-driven wall. The spindizzies screamed into the highest level of activity they could maintain without snapping the gravitational thread between the city and Utopia. Around the perimeter of that once-invisible field, a flicker of polarization thickened to translucence. Drive-fields were building, and only a few light rays, most of them those to which the human eye was least sensitive, got through the fields and out again. To Utopian onlookers the city went dark blood-color and became frighteningly indistinct.

  Calls began to come in at once. Amalfi ignored them; his flight board, a compressed analog of the banks in the control tower, was alive with alarm signals, and all the speakers were chattering at once.

  “Mr. Mayor, we’ve just made a strike in that old till; it’s lousy with oil-bearing shale—”

  “Stow what you have and make it tight.”

  “Amalfi! how can we get any thorium out of—”

  “More where we’re going. Damp your stock on the double.”

  “Com Room. Still no word from Mr. Hazleton—”

  “Keep trying.”

  “Calling the flying city! Is there something wrong? Calling the flying—”

  Amalfi cut them all off with a brutal swipe at the toggles. “Did you think we’d stay here forever? Stand by!”

  The spindizzies screamed. The sparkling of the ships coming to invest the Hruntan planet became brighter by the minute. It would be a near thing.

  “Whoop it up there on Forty-second Street! What d’you think you’re doing, warming up tea? You’ve got ninety seconds to get that machine to take-off pitch!”

  “Take-off? Mr. Mayor, it’ll take at least four minutes—”

  “You’re kidding me. I can tell. Dead men don’t kid. Move!”

  “Calling the flying city —”

  The sparks spread over the sky like a Catherine wheel whirling into life. The watery quivering of the single point of light that was the Hruntan planet dimmed among them, shivered, blended into the general glitter. From Astronomy, Jake added his voice to the general complaint.

  “Thirty seconds,” Amalfi said.

  From the speaker which had been broadcasting the puzzled, fearful inquiries of the Utopians, Hazleton’s voice said calmly, “Amalfi, are you out of your mind?”

  “No,” Amalfi said. “It’s your plan, Mark. I’m just following through. Twenty-five seconds.”

  “I’m not pleading for myself. I like it here, I think. I’ve found something here that the city doesn’t have. The city needs it—”

  “Do you want off, too?”

  “No, hell no,” Hazleton said. “I’m not asking for it. But if I had to take it anyhow, I’d take it here—”

  A brief constriction made Amalfi’s big frame knot up tightly. Nothing emotional—no, nothing to do with Hazleton; probably some spindizzy operator was hurrying things. He staggered to his feet and threw up in the little washstand. Hazleton went on talking, but Amalfi could hardly hear him. The clock grinned and rushed on.

  “Ten seconds,” Amalfi gasped, a little late.

  “Amalfi, listen to m
e!”

  “Mark,” Amalfi said, choking, “Mark, I haven’t time. You made your choice. I … five seconds … I can’t do anything about that. If you like it there, go ahead and stay. I wish you, I wish you everything, Mark, believe me. But I have to think of—”

  The clock brought its thin palms together piously.

  “… the city—”

  “Amalfi—”

  “Spin!”

  The city vaulted skyward. The sparks whirled in around it.

  CHAPTER TWO: Gort

  THE flying of the city normally was in Hazleton’s hands. In his absence—though it had never happened before—a youngster named Carrel took charge. Amalfi’s own hand rarely touched the stick except in spots where even the instruments could not be trusted.

  Running the Earth blockade to the Hruntan planet was no easy job, especially for a green pilot like Carrel, but Amalfi did not greatly care. He huddled in his office and watched the screens through a gray mist, wondering if he would ever be warm again. The baseboards of the room were pouring out radiant heat, but it didn’t seem to do any good. He felt cold and empty.

  “Ahoy the Okie city,” the ultraphone barked savagely. “You’ve had one warning. Pay up and clear out of here, or we’ll break you up.”

  Reluctantly Amalfi tripped the toggle. “We can’t,” he said uninterestedly.

  “What?” the cop said. “Don’t give me that. You’re in a combat area, and you’ve already landed on Utopia in defiance of a Vacate order. Pay your fine and beat it, or you’ll get hurt.”