Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “Well?” Nandór said at last.

  “Are you aware of the fact that you’ve just escaped being blown into a rarefied gas?” Amalfi demanded.

  “Oh, my dear fellow, don’t tell me you’ve just circumvented an assassination attempt on my behalf,” Nandór said. His English seemed to have been picked up from a Liverpudlian—only the men of that Okie city spoke through their adenoids in that strange fashion. “Really, that’s a bit thick.”

  “There were twenty-five Hamiltonian ships over the city,” Amalfi said grimly. “We beat ’em off, but it was a close shave. Evidently the whole business didn’t even wake you or your bosses up. What good are we going to be to you if you can’t even protect us?”

  Nandór looked alarmed. He pulled a mike from among the pillows and spoke into it for a moment in his own tongue. The answer was inaudible to Amalfi, but after it came, the Hruntan looked less anxious, though his face was still clouded.

  “What are you selling me, my man?” he said querulously. “There was no battle. The ships dropped no bombs, did no damage; they have been pursued out as far as the police englobement.”

  “Does a deaf man recognize an argument?” Amalfi said. “And how do you dazzle a blind man? You people think that all weapons have to go ‘bang!’ to be deadly. If you’ll look at our power boards, you’ll see records of a million megawatt drain over one half hour at dawn—and we don’t chew up energy at that rate making soup!”

  “That’s of no moment,” the Graf murmured. “Such records can be faked, and there are a good many ways of consuming energy anyhow—or wasting it. Let us suppose instead that these ships who ‘attacked’ you landed a spy—eh? And that subsequently a Hruntan scientist, a traitor to his emperor, was taken from your city, perhaps in the hope of carrying him back to Utopia?”

  His face darkened suddenly. “You interstellar tramps are childishly stupid. Obviously the Hamiltonian rabble hoped to rescue your city, and were frightened off by our warriors. Schloss may have gone with them—or he may be hiding in the city somewhere. We will have our answer directly.”

  He waved at the silent women, who crowded hastily out through the curtained doorway. “Do you care to tell me now where he is?”

  “I keep no tabs on Hruntans,” Amalfi said evenly. “Sorting garbage is no part of my duties.”

  Coolly Nandór threw the remainder of his wine in Amalfi’s face. The fuming stuff turned his eye sockets into fire. With a roar he stumbled forward, groping for the Hruntan’s throat. The man’s laughter retreated from him mockingly; then he felt heavy hands dragging his arms behind his back.

  “Enough,” the Graf said. “Hazca’s chief questioner will make some underling babble, if we have to hang them all up by their noses.” A blast of thunder interrupted him; outside the penthouse, rain roared along the walls like surf, the first such shower the city had experienced in more than thirty years. Through a haze of pain, Amalfi found that he could see the lights again, although the rest of the world was a red blur. “But I think we’d best shoot this one at once—he talks rather more freely than pleases me. Give me your pistol, you there with the lance-corporal’s collar.”

  Something moved across Amalfi’s clearing vision, a long shadow with a knot at the end of it—an arm with a pistol. “Any last words?” Nandór said pleasantly. “No? Tsk. Well, then—”

  A thousand bumblebees took flight in the room. Amalfi felt his whole body jerk upward. Oddly, there was no pain, and he could still see—things continued to take on definition all around him. The clear sight of the dying? …

  “Proszáchá!” Nandór roared. “Egz prá strasticzek Maria, d ó—”

  The thunder cut him off again. Somewhere in the room one of the soldiers was whimpering with fright. To Amalfi’s fire-racked sight, everyone and everything seemed to be floating in mid-air. Nandór sprawled rigidly, half-erect, his body an inch or so off the cushions, his clothing standing away from him. The pistol was still pointed at Amalfi, but Nandór was not holding it; it hung immobile above the carpet, an inch away from his frozen fingers. The carpet itself was not on the floor but above it, a sea of fur, every filament of which bristled straight up. Pictures had sprung away from the walls and were suspended. The cushions had risen from the chair and moved away from each other a little, then stopped, as if caught by a stroboscopic camera in the first stages of an explosion; the chair itself was an inch above the rug. At the far side of the room, a bookshelf had burst, and the cans of microfilm were ranked neatly in front of the case, evenly spaced, supported by nothing but the empty air.

  Amalfi took a cautious breath. His jacket, which, like Nandór’s, had ballooned away from his chest, creaked a little, but the fabric was elastic enough to stretch. Nandór saw the movement and made a frantic snatch for the pistol. His left forearm was glued to its position above the chair and could not be moved at all. The gun retreated from his free hand, then followed it back obediently as Nandór pulled back for another try.

  The second try was an even greater fiasco. Nandór’s arm brushed one of the arms of the chair, and then it, too, was held firmly, an inch away from the wood. Amalfi chuckled.

  “I would advise you not to move any more than you can help,” he said. “If you should bring your head too close to some other object, for instance, you would have to spend the rest of your time looking at the ceiling.”

  “What … have you done?” Nandór said, choking. “When I get free—”

  “You can’t, not as long as your friends have their friction-field in operation,” Amalfi said. “The plans we gave you were accurate enough, except in one respect: your generator can be operated only in reverse. Instead of allowing molecular valence full play, it freezes molecular relationships as they stand, and creates adherence between all surfaces. If you had been able to put full power into that generator, you would have stopped molecular movement in place, and frozen all of us to death in a split second—but your power sources are rather puny.”

  He realized suddenly that his feet were aching violently; the plastic membranes of his shoes were trying to stand away from his flesh, and pressing heavily against his skin. His jaw muscles were aching, too; only the fact that the field traveled over surfaces had protected him from having his teeth jammed away from each other, and even at that it was an effort to part his lips to talk against the pressure.

  He inhaled slowly. The jacket creaked again. His ribs ground against his sternum. Then, suddenly, the fabric gave way, and the silver belt which had been stitched into it snapped into a tense hoop around his body. His soles hit the straining carpet heavily, and the air puffed out of his shoes.

  He swung his arms experimentally, brushing his hands past his thighs. They moved freely. Only the silver belt maintained its implausible position, girdling the keg of his chest like a stave, soaking up the field.

  “Good-by,” he said. “Remember not to move. The cops will let you go in a little while.”

  Nandór was not listening. He was watching with bulging eyes the slow amputation of six of his fingers by the rings he was wearing.

  There was now, Amalfi knew, no longer than fifteen minutes before the overdriven friction-field would begin to have more serious effects. Normal molecular cohesion could not be disturbed; homogeneous objects—stones, girders, planks—would remain as they were, but things which were made up of fitted parts would soon begin to yield to the pressure driving them away from each other. After that, structures joined by binders of smaller coherence than the coherence of their parts would begin to give way; older buildings, such as City Hall, would become taller and of greater volume as the ancient bricks pulled away from each other—and would collapse the moment the influence of the friction-field was removed. More modern constructions and machines would last only a little longer. By the time the cops inherited Gort, the planet would be a mass of rubble.

  And eventually the human body, assembled of a thousand tubes, tunnels, caverns, and pockets, would strain, and swell, and burst—and only a few c
ity men had the silver belt; there had not been time.

  Puffing, Amalfi threw himself down the stairs, dodging among the paralyzed, floating guards. The bumblebee sound was very hard on the nerves. At the seventieth floor he found an unexpected problem; the lights on the elevator board told him that the car had been sealed in the shaft, probably by the action of the safety mechanisms when it had been derailed by the friction-field.

  Going down by the stairs was out of the question. Even under normal conditions he could never have traveled seventy flights of stairs, and in the influence of the field, his feet moved as if in thick mud, for the belt could not entirely protect his extremities. Tentatively he touched the wall. The same nauseous sucking sensation enfolded his hand, and he pulled it away.

  Gravity … the quickest way down …

  He entered the nearest office, threading his way among the four suspended, moaning figures who belonged there, and kicked the window out. It was impossible to open it against the field, which had sprung it an inch from its lands; only the amazing lateral strength of glass had preserved the pane, but against a cross-sectional blow, it shattered at once. He climbed out.

  It was twenty stories down to the next setback. He planted his feet against the metal, and then his hands. As an afterthought, he also laid his forehead against the wall. He began to slide.

  The air whispered in his ears, and windows blinked past him. His palms were beginning to feel warm; they were not actually touching the metal, but the reluctant binding energies were exacting a toll. It was the penalty he had to pay for the heightened pull of friction.

  As the setback rushed up to him, he flattened his whole body against the side of the building. The impact of the deck was heavy, but it did not seem to break any bones. He staggered to the parapet and climbed over, without allowing a split second for second thoughts. The long, whistling slide began again.

  For a moment after he fell against the concrete of the sidewalk, he was ready to get up and throw himself over still another cliff. His hands and his forehead were as seared as if they had been dipped in boiling oil, and inside his telfon shoes his feet seemed to be bubbling like lumps of fat in a rendering vat. On the solid ground, a belated vertigo knotted him helplessly for long, valuable minutes.

  The building whose flank he had traversed began to groan.

  All along the street, men stood in contorted attitudes. It was like the lowest circle of hell. Amalfi got up, retching, and lurched toward the control tower. The bumblebee sound filled the universe.

  “Amalfi! Gods of all stars, what happened to you—”

  Someone took Amalfi’s arm. Serum from the enormous blister which was his forehead flooded his eyes.

  “Mark—”

  “Yes, yes. What’s the matter—how did you—”

  “Get aloft. Get—”

  Pain wrenched him into a ringing darkness.

  After a while he felt his head and hands being laved with something cool. The touch was very delicate and soothing. He swallowed and tried to breathe.

  “Easy, John. Easy.”

  John. No one called him that. A woman’s voice. A woman’s hands.

  “Easy.”

  He managed a croaking sound, and then a word or two. The hands stroked the coolness across his forehead, gently, monotonously. “Easy, John. It’s all right.”

  “Aloft?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s … that? Mark—”

  “No,” said the voice. It laughed, surprisingly, a musical sound. “This is Dee, John. Hazleton’s girl.”

  “The Hamiltonian girl.” He allowed himself to be silent for a while, savoring the coolness. But there were too many things that needed to be done. “The cops. They should have the planet.”

  “They have it. They almost had us. They don’t keep their bargains very well. They charged us with aiding Utopia; that was treason, they said.”

  “What happened?”

  “Doctor Schloss made the invisibility machine work. Mark says the machine must have been damaged in transit, so the Lyrans didn’t cheat you after all. He hid Doctor Schloss in it—that was your idea, wasn’t it?—and Schloss got bored and amused himself trying to figure out what the machine was for; nobody had told him. He found out. He made the whole city invisible for nearly half an hour before his patchwork connections burned out.”

  “Invisible? Not just opaque?” Amalfi tried to think about it. And he had nearly had Schloss killed! “If we can use that—”

  “We did. We sailed right through the police ring, and they looked right through us. We’re on our way to the next star system.”

  “Not far enough,” Amalfi said, stirring uneasily. “Not if we’re charged with technical treason. Cops will detect us, follow us. Tell Mark to head for the Rift.”

  “What is the Rift, John?”

  At the word, the bottom seemed to fall out of things, and Amalfi was again sinking into that same pit in which he had been floundering in dream the night that Hazleton had come back to the city. How do you tell a planetbound colonial girl what the Rift is? How do you teach her, in just a few words, that there is a place in the universe so empty and lightless that even an Okie dreams about it? Let it go.

  “The Rift is a hole. It’s a place where there aren’t any stars. I can’t explain it any better. Tell Mark we have to go there, Dee.”

  There was a long silence. She was frightened, that much was plain. But at last she said, “The Rift. I’ll tell him.”

  “He’ll argue. Say it’s an order.”

  “Yes, John. The Rift; it’s an order.”

  And then she was silent. Somehow she had accepted it. Amalfi was surprised; but the steady, uneventful passage of the cool hands was putting him to sleep. Yet there was still something more …

  “Dee?”

  “Yes, John.”

  “You said— we’re on our way.”

  “Yes, John.”

  “You, too? Even to the Rift?”

  The girl made her fingertips trace a smile upon his forehead. “Me, too,” she said. “Even to the Rift. The Hamiltonian girl.”

  “No,” Amalfi said. He sighed. “Not any more, Dee. Now you’re an Okie.”

  There was no answer, but the movement of the cool fingers did not hesitate. Under Amalfi the city soared outward, humming like a bee, into the raw night.

  CHAPTER THREE: The Rift

  EVEN to the men of the flying city, the Rift was awesome beyond all human experience. Loneliness was natural between the stars, and starmen of all kinds were used to it—the star-density of the average cluster was more than enough to give a veteran Okie claustrophobia. But the enormous empty loneliness of the Rift was unique.

  To the best of Amalfi’s knowledge, no human being, let alone a city, had ever crossed the Rift before. The City Fathers, who knew everything, agreed. Amalfi was none too sure that it was wise, for once, to be a pioneer.

  Ahead and behind, the walls of the Rift shimmered, a haze of stars too far away to resolve into individual points of light. The walls curved gently toward a starry floor, so many parsecs “beneath” the granite keel of the city that it seemed to be hidden in a rising haze of star dust.

  “Above” there was nothing; a nothing as final as the slamming of a door. It was the empty ocean of space that washes between galaxies.

  The Rift was, in effect, a valley cut in the face of the galaxy. A few stars swam in it, light millennia apart—stars which the tide of human colonization could never have reached. Only on the far side was there likely to be any inhabited planet, and, consequently, work for the city.

  On the near side there was still the police. It was not, of course, the same contingent which had consolidated Utopia and the Duchy of Gort; such persistence by a single squadron of cops, over a trail which had spanned nearly three centuries, would have been incredible for so small a series of offenses on the city’s part. Nevertheless, there was a violation of a Vacate order still on the books, and a little matter of a trick … and the wo
rd had been passed. To turn back was out of the question for the city.

  Whether or not the police would follow the city even as far as the Rift, Amalfi did not know. It was, however, a good gamble. Crossing a desert of this size would probably be impossible for so small an object as a ship, out of a sheer inability to carry enough supplies; only a city which could grow its own had much chance of surviving such a crossing.

  Soberly Amalfi contemplated the oppressive chasm which the screens showed him. The picture came in from a string of proxies, the leader of which was already parsecs out across the gap. And still the far wall was featureless, just beginning to show a faintly granular texture which gave promise of resolution into individual stars at top magnification.

  “I hope the food holds out,” he muttered. “If we make this one, it’ll make the most colossal story any Okie ever had to tell. They’ll be calling us the Rifters from one end of the galaxy to the other.”

  Beside him, Hazleton drummed delicately upon the arm of his chair. “And if we don’t,” he said, “they’ll be calling us the biggest damned fools that ever got off the ground—but we won’t be in a position to care. Still, we do seem to be in good shape for it, boss. The oil tanks are almost full, and the Chlorella crops are flourishing. Both breeders are running, so there’ll be no fuel problem. And I doubt that we’ll have any mutation trouble in the crops out here—isn’t free-field incidence supposed to vary directly with star-density?”

  “Sure,” Amalfi said, irritated. “We won’t starve if everything goes right.” He paused; there had been a stir behind him, and he turned around. Then he smiled.

  There was something about Dee Hazleton that relaxed him. She had not yet seen enough actual space cruising to acquire the characteristic deep Okie star-burn, nor yet to lose the wonder of being now, by Utopian standards, virtually immortal, and so she seemed still very pink and young and unharried.