Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  Someday, perhaps, the constant strain of wandering from star to star, from crisis to crisis, would tell on her, as it did upon all Okies. She would not lose the wanderlust, but the wanderlust would take its toll.

  Or perhaps her resiliency was too great even for that. Amalfi hoped so.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I’m only kibitzing.”

  The word, like a great part of Dee’s vocabulary, was a mystery to Amalfi. He grinned and turned back to Hazleton. “If we hadn’t been sound enough to risk crossing,” he went on, “I’d have let us be captured; we could have paid the fine on the Vacate violation, just barely, and with luck we could have gotten a show-cause injunction against breaking us up slapped on the cops for that ‘treason’ charge. But just look at that damned canyon, Mark. We’ve never been as long as fifty years without a planetfall before, and this crossing is going to take all of the hundred and four the Fathers predicted. The slightest accident, and we’ll be beyond help—we’ll be out where no ship could reach us.”

  “There’ll be no accident,” Hazleton said confidently.

  “There’s fuel decomposition—we’ve never had a flash fire before, but there’s always a first time. And if that Twenty-third Street spin-dizzy conks out again, it’ll damn near double the time of the crossing—”

  He stopped abruptly. Through the corner of his eye, a minute pinprick of brightness poked insistently into his brain. When he looked directly at the screen, it was still there, though somewhat dimmed as its image moved off the fovea centralis of his Retma. He pointed.

  “Look—is that a cluster? No, it’s too small and sharp. If that’s a single free-floating star, it’s close.”

  He snatched up a phone. “Give me Astronomy. Hello, Jake. Can you figure me the distance of a star from the source of an ultraphone videocast?”

  “Why, yes,” the voice on the phone said. “Wait, and I’ll pick up your image. Ah—I see what you’re after: something at ten o’clock, can’t tell what yet. Dinwiddie pickups on your proxies? Intensity will tell the tale.” The astronomer chuckled like a parrot on the rim of a cracker barrel. “Now if you’ll just tell me how many proxies you have ahead, and how far they—”

  “Five. Full interval.”

  “Hm-m. A big correction, then.” There was a long, itching silence. Amalfi knew that there would be no hurrying Jake. He was not the city’s original astronomer; that man had fallen victim to a native of a planet called St. Rita’s after he had insisted once too often to said native that St. Rita’s was not the center of the universe. Jake had been swapped from another city for an atomic-pile engineer and two minor photosynthetics technicians under the traditional “rule of discretion,” and he had turned out to be interested only in the behavior of the more remote galaxies. Persuading him to think about the immediate astronomical situation of the city was usually a hopeless struggle; he seemed to feel that problems of so local a nature were nearly beneath notice.

  The “rule of discretion” was an Okie tradition which Amalfi had never before invoked, and never since, for it seemed to him to smell suspiciously of peonage. It had evolved, the City Fathers said, from the trading of baseball players, a term which meant nothing to Amalfi. The results of his one violation of his own attitude toward the rule sometimes seemed to him to smack of divine retribution.

  “Amalfi?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About ten parsecs, give or take four-tenths. That’s from the proxies, not from us. I’d say you’ve found a floater, my boy.”

  “Thanks.” Amalfi put the phone back and drew a deep breath. “Just a few years’ travel. What a relief.”

  “You won’t find any colonists on a star that isolated,” Hazleton reminded him.

  “I don’t care. It’s a landing point, possibly a fuel or even a food source. Most stars have planets; a freak like this might not, or it might have dozens. Just cross your fingers.”

  He stared at the tiny sun, his eyes aching from sympathetic strain. A star in the middle of the Rift—almost certainly a wild star, moving at four hundred or five hundred kilometers per second, but not, as such stars usually were, a white dwarf; by eye alone, Amalfi estimated it to be an F star like Canopus. It occurred to him that a people living on a planet of that star might remember the moment when it burst through the near wall of the Rift and embarked upon its journey into the emptiness.

  “There might be people there,” he said. “The Rift was swept clean of stars once, somehow. Jake claims that this is an overdramatic way of putting it, that the mean motions of the stars probably opened the gap naturally. But either way, that sun must be a recent arrival, going at quite a clip, since it’s moving counter to the general tendency. It could have been colonized while it was still passing through a populated area. Runaway stars tend to collect hunted criminals as they go by, Mark.”

  “Possibly,” Hazleton admitted. “Though I’ll bet that if that star ever was among the others, it was way back before space flight. By the way, that image is coming in from your lead proxy, out across the valley. Don’t you have any outriggers? I ordered them sent.”

  “Sure. But I don’t use them except for routine. Cruising the Rift lengthwise would really be suicide.”

  “I know. But where there’s one isolated star, there may be another. Maybe a nearer one.”

  Amalfi shrugged. “We’ll take a look if you like.”

  He touched the board. On the screen, the far wall of the Rift was wiped away. Nothing was left but what looked like a thin haze; down at that end, the Rift turned and eventually faded out into a rill of emptiness, soaking into the sands of the stars.

  “Nothing on that side. Lots of nothing.”

  Amalfi moved the switch again.

  On the screen, apparently almost within hallooing distance, a city was burning.

  It was all over in a few minutes. The city bucked and toppled in a maelstrom of lightning. Feeble flickers of resistance spat around its edges—and then it no longer had any edges. Sections of it broke off and melted like wraiths. From its ardent center, a few hopeless life craft shot out into the gap; whatever was causing the destruction let them go. No conceivable life ship could live long enough to get out of the Rift.

  Dee cried out. Amalfi cut in the audio circuit, filling the control room with a howl of static. Far behind the wild blasts of sound, a tiny voice was shouting desperately, “Rebroadcast if anyone hears us. Repeat: We have the fuelless drive. We’re destroying our model and evacuating our passenger. Pick him up if you can. We’re being blown up by a bindlestiff. Rebroadcast if—”

  Then there was nothing left but the skeleton of the city, glowing whitely, evaporating in the blackness. The pale, innocent light of the guide beam for a Bethé blaster played over it, but it was still impossible to see who was wielding the weapon. The Dinwiddie circuits in the proxies were compensating for the glare, so that nothing was coming through to the screen that did not shine with its own light.

  The terrible fire died slowly, and the stars brightened. As the last spark flared and went out, a shadow loomed against the distant star-wall. Hazleton drew his breath in sharply.

  “Another city! So some outfits really do go bindlestiff! And we thought we were the first ones out here!”

  “Mark,” Dee said in a small voice. “Mark, what is a bindlestiff?”

  “A tramp,” Hazleton said, his eyes still on the screen. “The kind of outfit that gives all Okies a bad name. Most Okies are true hobos, Dee; they work for their living wherever they can find work. The bindlestiff lives by robbery—and murder.”

  His voice was bitter. Amalfi himself felt a little sick. That one city should destroy another was bad enough; but it was even more of a wrench to realize that the whole scene was virtually ancient history. Ultrawave transmission was somewhat faster than light, but only by about 25 per cent; unlike the Dirac transmitter, the ultraphone was by no means an instantaneous communicator. The dark city had destroyed its counterpart years ago, and must now be beyond pursuit. It wa
s even beyond identification, for no orders could be sent now to the lead proxy which would result in any action until still more years had passed.

  “Some outfits go bindlestiff, all right,” he said. “And I think the number must have been increasing lately. Why that should be, I don’t know, but evidently it’s happening. We’ve been losing a lot of legitimate, honest cities lately—getting no answer to Dirac casts, missing them at rendezvous, and so on. Maybe now we know why.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Hazleton said. “But I don’t see how there could be enough piracy to account for all the losses. For all we know, the Vegan orbital fort may be out here, picking off anybody who’s venturesome enough to leave the usual commerce lanes.”

  “I didn’t know the Vegans flew cities,” Dee said.

  “They don’t,” Amalfi said abstractedly. He considered describing the legendary fort, then rejected the idea. “But they dominated the galaxy once, before Earth took to space flight. At their peak they owned more planets than Earth does right now, but they were knocked out a hell of a long time ago …. I’m still worried about that bindlestiff, Mark. You’d think that some heavy thinker on Earth would have figured out a way to make Diracs compact enough to be mounted in a proxy. They haven’t got anything better to do back there.”

  Hazleton had no difficulty in penetrating to the real core of Amalfi’s grumbling. He said, “Maybe we can still smoke ’em out, boss.”

  “Not a chance. We can’t afford a side jaunt.”

  “Well, I’ll send out a general warning on the Dirac,” Hazleton said. “It’s barely possible that the cops will be able to invest this part of the Rift before the ’stiff gets out of it.”

  “That’ll trap us neatly, won’t it? Besides, that bindlestiff isn’t going to leave the Rift, at least not until it’s picked up those life craft.”

  “Eh? How do you know?”

  “Did you hear what the SOS said about a fuelless drive?”

  “Sure,” Hazleton said uneasily, “but the man who knows how to build it must be dead by now, even if he escaped when his city was blasted.”

  “We can’t be sure of that—and that’s the one thing that the ’stiff has to make sure of. If the ’stiffs get ahold of that drive, there’ll be all hell to pay. After that, ’stiffs won’t be a rarity any more. If there isn’t widespread piracy in the galaxy now, there will be—if we let the ’stiffs get that no-fuel drive.”

  “Why?” Dee said.

  “ I wish you knew more history, Dee. I don’t suppose there were ever any pirates on Utopia, but Earth once had plenty of them. They eventually died out, thousands of years ago, when sailing ships were replaced by fueled ships. The fueled ships were faster than sailing vessels—but they couldn’t themselves become pirates because they had to touch civilized ports regularly to coal up. They could always get food off some uninhabited island, but for coal they had to visit a real port. The Okie cities are in the same position now; they’re fueled ships. But if that bindlestiff can actually get its hands on a no-fuel drive—so he can sail space without having to touch civilized planets for power metals—well, we just can’t allow it to happen, that’s all. We’ve got to get that drive away from them.”

  Hazleton stood up, kneading his hands nervously. “That’s perfectly true—and that’s why the ’stiff will knock itself out to recapture those life ships. You’re right, Amalfi. Well, there’s only one place in the Rift where a life ship could go, and that’s to the wild star. So the ’stiff is probably there, too, by now—or on the way there.” He looked thoughtfully at the screen, once more glittering only with anonymous stars. “That changes things. Shall I send out the Dirac warning, or not?”

  “Yes, send it out. It’s the law. But I think it’s up to us to deal with the ’stiff; we’re familiar with ways of manipulating strange cultures, and we know how Okies think—even ’stiffs. Whereas the cops would just smash things up if they did manage to get here in time.”

  “Check. Our course as before, then.”

  “Necessarily.”

  Still the city manager did not go. “Boss,” he said at last, “the outfit is heavily armed. They could muscle in on us with no trouble.”

  “Mark, I’d call you yellow if I didn’t know you were just lazy,” Amalfi growled. He stopped suddenly and peered up the length of Hazleton’s figure to his sardonic, horselike face. “Or are you leading up to something?”

  Hazleton grinned like a small boy caught stealing jam. “Well, I did have something in mind. I don’t like ’stiffs, especially killers. Are you willing to entertain a small scheme?”

  “Ah,” Amalfi said, relaxing. “That’s better. Let’s hear it.”

  “It centers on women. Women are the best possible bindlestiff bait.”

  “I grant you that,” Amalfi said. “But what women would you use? Ours? Nix.”

  “No, no,” Hazleton said. “This is predicated on there being an inhabited planet going around that star. Are you still with me?”

  “I think,” Amalfi said slowly, “that I may even be a meter or so ahead of you.”

  The wild star, hurling itself through the Rift on a course that would not bring it to the far wall for another ten thousand Earth years, carried with it six planets, of which only one was even remotely Earthlike. That planet shone deep chlorophyll green on the screens long before it had grown enough to assume a recognizable disc shape. The proxies, called in now, arrived one by one, circling the new world like a swarm of five-meter footballs, eyeing it avidly.

  It was everywhere the same: savagely tropical, in the throes of a geological period roughly comparable to Earth’s Carboniferous Era. Plainly, the only habitable planet would be nothing but a way station; there would be no work for pay there.

  Then the proxies began to pick up weak radio signals.

  Nothing, of course, could be made of the language; Amalfi turned that problem over to the City Fathers at once. Nevertheless, he continued to listen to the strange gabble while he warped the city into an orbit. The voices sounded ritualistic, somehow.

  The City Fathers said:

  “THIS LANGUAGE IS A VARIANT OF HUMANOID PATTERN G, BUT THE SITUATION IS AMBIGUOUS. GENERALLY WE WOULD SAY THAT THE RACE WHICH SPEAKS IT IS INDIGENOUS TO THE PLANET, A RARE OCCURRENCE, BUT BY NO MEANS UNHEARD OF. THERE ARE TRACES OF FORMS WHICH MIGHT BE DEGENERATES OF ENGLISH, HOWEVER, AS WELL AS STRONG EVIDENCES OF DIALECT MIXTURES SUGGESTING A TRIBAL SOCIETY. THIS LATTER FACT IS NOT CONSONANT WITH THE POSSESSION OF RADIO NOR WITH THE UNDERLYING SAMENESS OF THE PATTERN. UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, WE MUST POSITIVELY FORBID ANY MACHINATION BY MR. HAZLETON ON THIS VENTURE.”

  “I didn’t ask them for advice,” Amalfi said. “And what good is a lesson in etymology at this point? Still, Mark, watch your step—”

  “‘Remember Thor Five,’” Hazleton said, mimicking the mayor’s father-bear voice to perfection. “All right. Do we land?”

  For answer, Amalfi grasped the space stick, and the city began to settle. Nothing that appeared to answer as a ready-made landing area offered itself, and the mayor had already decided that nothing would. He sidled the city downward gently, guiding himself mainly by the increasingly loud chanting in his earphones.

  At four thousand meters there was a brief glitter from amid the dark green waves of the treetops. The proxies converged on it slowly, cautious of their prim electronic lives, and on the screens a turreted roof showed—then two, four, a dozen. There was a city there—not an Okie, but a homebody, grown from the earth. Closer views showed it to be walled, the wall standing just inside a clear ring where nothing grew; the greenery between the towers was camouflage.

  At three thousand, a flight of small ships burst from the native city like frightened birds, molting feathers of flame. “Gunners!” Hazleton snapped into his mike. “Posts!”

  Amalfi shook his head, and continued to bring his city closer to the ground. The fire-tailed birds wheeled around them, weaving a pattern in smoky plumes; yet an Earthman would have thought, not of birds, b
ut of the nuptial flight of drone bees.

  Amalfi, who had not seen an Earthly bird or bee for nearly a millennium now, nevertheless sensed the ceremony in the darting cortege. With fitting solemnity, he brought the city to a stop not far from its jungle counterpart, hovering just above the tops of the giant cycads. Then, instead of clearing a landing area with the usual quick scythe of the mesotron rifles, he polarized the spindizzy screen.

  The base and apex of the Okie city grew dim. What happened to the giant ferns and horsetails directly beneath it could not be seen—they were flattened into synthetic fossils in the muck in a split second—but those just beyond the rim of the city were stripped of their fronds and splintered, and farther out, in a vast circle, the whole forest bowed low away from the city to a clap of sunlit thunder.

  Unfortunately, the Twenty-third Street spindizzy blew out under the strain at the last minute, and the city dropped the last 150 meters in free fall. It arrived on the surface of the planet rather more cataclysmically than Amalfi had intended. Hazleton hung on to his bucket seat until the control tower had stopped swaying, and then wiped blood from his nose with a judicious handkerchief.

  “That,” he said, “was one dramatic touch too many. I’d best go have that spindizzy fixed again, just in case. Someday that machine is going to sour for good and all, boss.”

  Amalfi shut off the controls with a contented gesture. “If that bindlestiff should show now,” he said, “they’ll have a tough time amassing any prestige here for a while. But go ahead, Mark, it’ll keep you busy.”

  The mayor eased his barrel-shaped bulk into the lift shaft and let himself be slithered through the friction-field to the street. It was certainly a much faster and pleasanter way of traveling than elevators—or skidding down the face of a building using your forehead for a brake shoe. Outside, the face of the control tower shone with hot sunlight, reminding Amalfi that the front of City Hall faced the same way, and that on it the city’s motto would be clear even under its incrustation of verdigris. He hoped that the legend could not be read by any of the local folk—it would spoil the effect of the landing.