Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “You don’t risk a thing. Either I deliver the planet to you, or I don’t. All I want is for you to rescind the fine against the city, wipe the tape of the earlier Vacate order, and give us a safe-conduct out of this system. If we don’t deliver, you don’t pay.”

  “Hm-mm.” There was a muttering in the background, as though somebody were talking softly over the cop’s shoulder. “How’d you pull it off?”

  “That,” Amalfi said dryly, “would be telling. If you want to play, proof over the agreement.”

  “No soap. You violated the Vacate order and you’ll have to pay the fine-that’s flat.”

  That was good enough for Amalfi. The cop certainly was not going to promise to wipe his tape of evidence of a tort while he was talking on the Dirac; that he had picked this particular point to stick on indicated general agreement, however.

  “Just send me a safe-conduct under seal, then. I’ll put the whole thing in the Margraf Hazca’s strong room; you get it back when you get the planet.”

  After a short silence, the cop said, “Well … all right.” The tape began to whir at Amalfi’s elbow. Satisfied, he broke the contact.

  If this coup came off on schedule, it would become legendary—the police would be mighty tight-lipped about it, but the Okie cities would spread the tale all over the galaxy.

  Somehow, the desertion of Hazleton made the prospect savorless.

  Someone was shaking him. He wanted very badly to awaken, but his sleep was as deep as death, and it seemed that no possible struggle could bring him up to the rim of the pit. Shapes and faces whirled about him, and in the blackness he felt the approach of great steel teeth.

  “Amalfi! Wake up, man! Amalfi, it’s Mark—wake up—”

  The steel jaws came together with a terrible snapping report, and the wheeling faces vanished. Bluish light spilled into his eyes.

  “Who? What is it?”

  “It’s me,” Hazleton said. Amalfi blinked up at him uncomprehendingly. “Quick, quick. There’s only a little time.”

  Amalfi sat up slowly and looked at the city manager. He was too stunned to know whether he was pleased or not, and the oppression of his nightmare was still with him, a persistent emotion lingering after dreamed events he could no longer remember.

  “I’m glad to see you,” he said. Oddly, the statement seemed untrue; he could only hope it would become true later. “How’d you get through the police cordon? I’d have said it couldn’t be done.”

  “By force, and fraud, the old combination. I’ll explain later.”

  “You nearly didn’t make it,” Amalfi said, feeling a sudden influx of energy. “Is it still night here? Yes. The big blowup isn’t due much before noon, otherwise I wouldn’t have been asleep. After that, you’d have found no city here.”

  “Before noon? That isn’t according to the timetable. But that can wait. Get up, boss, there’s work waiting.”

  The door to Amalfi’s room slid aside suddenly, and the Utopian girl stood at the sill, her face pinched with anxiety. Amalfi reached hastily for his jacket.

  “Mark, we must hurry. Captain Savage says he won’t wait but fifteen minutes more. And he won’t—he hates you underneath, I can tell, and he’d love to leave us here with the barbarians!”

  “Right away, Dee,” Hazleton said, without turning.

  The girl disappeared. Amalfi stared at the prodigal city manager. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What is all this, anyhow? Mark, you haven’t sold yourself on some idiotic personal rescue mission?”

  “Personal? No.” Hazleton grinned. “We’re getting the whole city out of here, right on the timetable. I wanted to get word to you that we were following through as planned, but the Utopians have no Diracs, and I didn’t want to tip off the cops. Get dressed, that’s a good fellow, and I’ll explain as we go. These Hamiltonians have been working like demons, installing spindizzies in every available ship. They’d about decided to surrender to the cops—after all, they’ve more in common with Earth than with the Hruntans—but when I told them what we planned, and showed them how the spindizzy works, it was like giving them all new hearts.”

  “They believed you as quickly as that?”

  Hazleton shrugged. “No, of course not. To be on the safe side, they made up an escape fleet of twenty-five ships—reconverted light cruisers—and sent them out on this mission. They’re upstairs now.”

  “Over the city?”

  “Yes. I heard the hijacking of the city—I gather you had the radio on for the benefit of the cops, but it came through pretty clearly on Utopia, too. So I sold them on combining their escape project with a sneak raid to escort the city out. It took some selling, but I convinced them that they’d get out of this system easier if the cops had two things to think about at once. And so here we are, right on the timetable.” Hazleton grinned again. “The cops had no notion that there were any Utopian ships anywhere near this planet, and they keep a sloppy watch. They know now, of course, but it’ll take them a little while to mass here—and by that time, well be gone.”

  “Mark, you’re a romantic ass,” Amalfi said. “Twenty-five light cruisers—archaic ones at that, spindizzies or not!”

  “There’s nothing archaic about Savage’s plans,” Hazleton said. “He hates my guts for swiping Dee from him, but he knows space combat. This is a survival fleet, for Hamiltonianism, not just people. As soon as we’re attacked, all twenty-five of them are going to take off in different directions, putting up a stiff battle and doing their best to turn the affair into a series of individual dogfights. That insures the survival of some of them, of their ideology—and of the city.”

  “I expected something more from you than a gesture out of a bad stereo,” Amalfi said. “Napoleonism! Heedless of danger, young hero leads devoted band into enemy stronghold, snatching beloved sovereign from enraged infidel! Pah! The city’s staying where it is. If you want to go off with this suicide squadron, go ahead.”

  “Amalfi, you don’t understand—”

  “You underestimate me,” Amalfi said harshly. He strode across the room to the balcony, Hazleton at his heels. “Sensible Hamiltonians stayed home, that’s a cinch. Giving them the spindizzy was a smart idea—it made them fight longer and kept the cops busy when we needed the time. But these people who are trying to escape toward the edge of the galaxy—they’re the incurables, the fanatics. Do you know how they’ll wind up? You should, and you would if there wasn’t a woman in your head addling your brains with a long-handled spoon. After a few generations on the rim, none of ’em will remember Hamiltonianism. Making a new planet livable is a job for a carefully prepared, fully manned expedition. These people are the tatters of a military debacle—and you want us to help set up the debacle! No thanks.”

  He threw the door to the balcony open so hard that Hazleton had to jump to avoid being hit, and went out. It was a clear night, bitterly cold as always on Gort, and hundreds of stars glared through the glow the city cast upon the sky. The Utopian ships, of course, could not be seen: they were too high, and probably were as well near to invisible and undetectable, even close up, as Utopian science could make them.

  “I’ll have a job explaining this to the Hruntans,” he said, his voice charged with suppressed rage. “The best I’ll be able to do is to claim the Hamiltonians were trying to destroy us before we could finish giving away the friction-field plans. And to do that, I’ll have to yell to the Hruntans for help right away.”

  “You gave the Hruntans—”

  “Certainly!” Amalfi said. “It was the only weapon we had left after we had to sign a contract with them. The possibility of a Utopian landing in force here vanished the moment the police beat us to the punch. And here you are still trying to use the blunted tool!”

  “Mark!” the girl’s voice drifted out from the room, frantic with anxiety. “Mark! Where are you?”

  “Go along,” Amalfi said, without turning his head. “After a while they’ll have no time to cherish their ritual beliefs, and you c
an have a nice frontier home, on the ox-bone plow level. The city is staying here. By noon tomorrow, the Utopians who stayed will be put in an excellent position to bargain with Earth for rights, the Hruntans will be horn-swoggled, and we’ll be on our way.”

  The girl, evidently having noticed the open door, came through it in time to hear the last two sentences. “Mark!” she cried. “What does he mean? Savage says—”

  Hazleton sighed. “Savage is an idiot and so am I. Amalfi’s right; I’ve been acting like a child. You’d better get aloft while you have the chance, Dee.”

  She came forward to the railing and took his arm, looking up at him. Her face was so full of puzzlement and hurt that Amalfi had to look away; that look reminded him of too many things best forgotten—some of them not exactly remote. He heard her say, “Do you—do you want me to go, Mark? You’re staying with the city?”

  “Yes,” Hazleton muttered. “I mean, no. I’ve made a terrific mess of things, it appears. Maybe I can help now—maybe not. But I’ve got to stay. You’d be better off with your own people—”

  “Mayor Amalfi,” the girl said. Amalfi turned unwillingly. “You said when I first met you that there was a place for women in this city. Do you remember?”

  “I remember,” Amalfi said. “But you wouldn’t like our politics, I’m sure. This is not a Hamiltonian state. It’s stable, self-sufficient, static—a beachcomber by the seas of history. We’re Okies. Not a nice name.”

  The girl said, “It may not always be so.”

  “I’m afraid it will. Even the people don’t change much, Dee. I suspect that you haven’t been told this before, but the great majority of them are well over a century old. I myself am nearly seven hundred. And you would live as long if you joined us.”

  Dee’s face was a study in mixed shock and incredulity, but she said doggedly, “I’ll stay.”

  The sky began to pale slightly. No one spoke. Aloft, the stars were dimming, and there was no sign to show that a tiny fleet of ships was dwindling away into the boundless universe.

  Hazleton cleared his throat. “What’s for me to do, boss?” he said hoarsely.

  “Plenty. I’ve been making do with Carrel, but though he’s willing, he lacks experience. First of all, make us ready to take off at the very first notice. Then cudgel your brains to think up something to tell the Hruntans about this Utopian fleet. You can fancy up my excuse, or think up one of your own—I don’t care which. You’re better at that kind of thing than I ever was.”

  “So what’s supposed to happen at noon?”

  Amalfi grinned. He realized with a subdued shock that he felt good. Getting Hazleton back was like finding a flawed diamond that you’d thought you’d lost—the flaw was still there and would never go away, but still the diamond had been the cleanest-cutting tool in the house, and had had a certain sentimental value.

  “It goes like this. Carrel sold the Hruntans on building a master friction-field generator for the whole planet—said it would make their machines consume less power, or some such nonsense. The plans he gave them call for a generator at least twice as powerful as the Hruntans think it is, and with nearly all the controls left off. It will run only one way: full positive. Tomorrow at noon they’re scheduled to give it a trial run.

  “In the meantime, there’s a Hruntan named Schloss who probably has the machine tabbed for what it actually is, and we’ve set up the old double-knife trick to get him out of the picture. It’s my guess that this should start a big enough rhubarb among the scientists to keep them from prying until it’s too late. Since this whole deal looked as though it would work out the same way that the Utopian landing would have, I also called the cops according to your timetable and got a safe-conduct. Simple?”

  Halfway through the explanation, Hazleton was far enough back to normal to begin looking amused. When it was over, he was chuckling.

  “That’s a honey,” he said. “Still, I can see why you weren’t too satisfied with Carrel. Amalfi, you’re a prime bluffer. Telling me to go off with Savage in that dramatic fashion! Do you know that your fancy plot isn’t going to come off?”

  “Why, Mark?” Dee said. “It sounds perfect to me.”

  “It’s clever, but it’s full of loose ends. You have to look at these things like a dramatist; a climax that almost comes off is no climax. We’d better—”

  In the bedroom, Amalfi’s private phone chimed melodiously, and a neon bulb went on over the balcony doorway. Amalfi frowned and flicked a switch on the railing.

  “Mr. Mayor?” a concealed speaker said nervously. “Sorry to wake you up, but there’s trouble. First of all, at least twenty ships were over here a while back; we were going to call you for that, but they went away on their own. But now we’ve got a sort of a refugee, a Hruntan who calls himself Doctor Schloss. He claims the other Hruntans are all out to get him and he wants to work for us. Shall I send him to Psych or what? It might just be true.”

  “Of course it’s true,” Hazleton said. “There’s your first loose end, Amalfi.”

  The affair of Dr. Schloss proved difficult to untangle; Amalfi had not studied his man closely enough. Carrel’s agent had done a thorough job of counterfeiting local politics. It was always preferable, when the city needed a man’s death, to so arrange matters that the actual killing was done by an outsider, and in this case that had proven absurdly easy to arrange. There were four separate cliques within the scientific hierarchy of Gort, all of them undercutting each other with fanatical perseverance, like shipmates trying to do for each other by boring holes in the hull. In addition, the court itself did not trust Dr. Schloss, and took sides sporadically when the throat-cutting became overt.

  It had been simple enough to set currents in motion which would sweep Dr. Schloss away, but Schloss had declined to be swept. The moment he became aware of any threat, he had come with disconcerting directness to the city.

  “The trouble is,” Carrel reported, “that he didn’t realize what was flying until it was almost too late. He’s a peculiarly sane character and would never dream that anybody was ‘out to get him’ until the knife actually pricked him.”

  Hazleton nodded. “It’s my bet that it was the court itself that finally alarmed him—they wouldn’t bother trying to sneak up on him.”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  “Which means that we’ll have Bathless Hazca and his dandies here looking for him,” Amalfi growled. “I don’t suppose he bothered to cover his tracks. What are you going to do, Mark? We can’t count on their starting the anti-friction fields early enough to get us out of this.”

  “No,” Hazleton agreed. “Carrel, does your man still have contact with the group that was going to punch Schloss’s ticket?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have him rub out the top man in that group, then. The time is past for delicate measures.”

  “What do you propose to gain by that?” Amalfi asked.

  “Time. Schloss has disappeared. Hazca may guess that he’s come here, but most of the cliques will think he’s been killed. This will look like a vengeance killing by some member of Schloss’s group— he has no real clique of his own, of course, but there must be several men who thought they stood to gain by keeping him alive. We’ll start a vendetta. Confusion is what counts in a fight like this.”

  “Perhaps so,” Amalfi said. “In that case, I’d better tackle Graf Nandór right away with a fistful of accusations and complaints. The more confusion, the more delay—and it’s less than four hours to noon now. In the meantime, we’ll have to hide Schloss as best we can, before he’s spotted by one of Hazca’s guards here. That invisibility machine in the old West Side subway tunnel seems like the best place … do you remember the one? The Lyrans sold it to us, and it just whirled and blinked and buzzed and didn’t do a thing.”

  “That was what my predecessor got shot for,” Hazleton said. “Or was it for that fiasco on Epoch? But I know where the machine is, yes. I’ll arrange to have the gadget do a little whirli
ng and blinking—Hazca’s soldiery is afraid of machinery and would never think of looking inside one that’s working, even if they did suspect a fugitive inside it. Which they won’t, I’m sure. And … gods of all stars, what was that?”

  The long, terrifying metallic roar died away into a mutter. Amalfi was grinning.

  “Thunder,” he said. “Planets have a phenomenon called weather, Mark; a nasty habit of theirs. I think we’re due for a storm.”

  Hazleton shuddered. “It makes me want to hide under the bed. Well, let’s get to work.”

  He went out, with Dee trailing. Amalfi, reflecting on the merits of attack as a defensive measure, waved a cab up to the balcony and had himself ferried to the first setback of the mid-town RCA building. He would have liked to have landed at the top, where the penthouse was, but the cornices of the building now bristled with pompoms and mesotron rifles; Graf Nandór was taking no chances.

  The elevator operator was not allowed to take Amalfi beyond the seventieth floor. Swearing, he climbed the last five flights of steps; the blue rage he was working up was not going to be counterfeit by the time he reached the penthouse. At every landing he was inspected with insolent suspicion by lounging groups of soldiers.

  There was music in the penthouse, and it reelsed of the combination of perfume and unwashed bodies which was the personal trademark of Hruntan nobility. Nandór was sprawled in a chair, surrounded by women, listening to a harpist sing a ballad of unspeakable obscenity in a quavering, emotionless voice. In one jeweled hand he held a heavy goblet half full of fuming Rigellian wine—it must have come from the city’s stores, for the Hruntans had had no contact with Rigel for centuries—which he passed back and forth underneath his substantial nose, inhaling the vapors delicately.

  He lifted his eyes over the rim of the goblet as Amalfi came in, but did not otherwise bother to acknowledge him. Amalfi felt his blood pressure mounting and his wrists growing cold and numb, and tried to control himself. It was all very well to be properly angry, but he needed some mastery over what he said and did.