Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “I’ll bet,” Amalfi said. “Do you speak Interlingua? Good, my Russian is rudimentary these days. That ‘sort of a flash’ was a photon explosion. It was the only way we could figure on being sure of getting you out alive. We thought of trying gas, but if they had had gas masks, they would have been able to kill you anyhow.”

  “I haven’t actually seen any masks, but I’m sure they have them. There are traveling volcanic gas clouds in this part of the planet, they say; they must have evolved some absorption device—charcoal is well known here. Lucky we were so far underground, or we’d be blind, too, then. You people must be engineers.”

  “More or less,” Amalfi agreed. “Strictly, we’re miners and petroleum geologists, but we’ve developed a lot of side lines since we went aloft—like any Okie. On Earth we were a port city and did just about everything, but aloft you have to specialize. Here’s our rocket—crawl in. It’s rough, but it’s transportation. How about you?”

  “Agronomists. Our mayor thought there was a good field for it out here along the periphery—teaching the abandoned colonies and the offshoots how to work poisoned soil and manage low-yield crops without heavy machinery. Our side line was waxmans.”

  “What are those?” Amalfi said, adjusting the harness around the wasted body.

  “Soil-source antibiotics. It was those the bindlestiff wanted—and got. The filthy swine. They can’t bother to keep a reasonably sanitary city; they’d rather pirate some honest outfit for drugs when they have an epidemic. Oh, and they wanted germanium, too, of course. They blew us up when they found we didn’t have any—we’d converted to a barter economy as soon as we got out of the last commerce lanes.”

  “What about your passenger?” Amalfi said with studied nonchalance.

  “Doctor Beetle? Not that that was his name—I couldn’t pronounce that even when I had my tongue. I don’t imagine he survived. We had to keep him in a tank even in the city, and I can’t quite see him living through a lifeship journey. He was a Myrdian—smart cookies all of them, too. That no-fuel drive of his—”

  Outside, a shot cracked, and Amalfi winced. “We’d best take off—they’re getting their eyesight back. Talk to you later. Hazleton, any incidents?”

  “Nothing to speak of, boss. Everybody stowed?”

  “Yep. Kick off.”

  There was a volley of shots, and then the rocket coughed, roared, and stood on its tail. Amalfi pulled a deep sigh loose from the acceleration and turned his head toward the rational man.

  He was still securely strapped in, and looked quite relaxed. A brass-nosed slug had come through the side of the ship next to him and had neatly removed the top of his skull.

  Working information out of the madmen was a painfully long, anxious process. Even after the manic case had been returned to a semblance of rationality, he could contribute very little.

  The life ship had not come to He because of Hazleton’s Dirac warning, he said. The life ship and the burned Okie had not had any Dirac equipment to the best of his knowledge. The life ship had come to He, as Amalfi had predicted, because it was the only possible planetfall in the desert of the Rift. Even so, the refugees had had to use deep-sleep and strict starvation rationing to make it.

  “Did you see the ’stiff again?”

  “No, sir. If they heard your Dirac warning, they probably figured the police had spotted them and scrammed—or maybe they thought there was a military base or an advanced culture here on the planet.”

  “You’re guessing,” Amalfi said gruffly. “What happened to Doctor Beetle?”

  The man looked startled. “The Myrdian in the tank? He got blown up with the city, I suppose.”

  “He wasn’t put off in another life ship?”

  “Doesn’t seem very likely. But I was only a pilot. Could be that they took him out in the mayor’s gig for some reason.”

  “You don’t know anything about his no-fuel drive?”

  “First I heard of it.”

  Amalfi was far from satisfied; he suspected that there was still a short circuit somewhere in the man’s memory. But that was all that could be gotten from him, and Amalfi had to accept the fact. All that remained to be done was to get some assessment of the weapons available to the bindlestiff; on this subject the ex-manic was ignorant, but the city’s neurophysiologist said cautiously that something might be extracted from the catatonic within a month or two; but thus far, he hadn’t even succeeded in capturing the man’s attention.

  Amalfi accepted the estimate also, since it was the best he could get. With Moving Day for He coming near, he couldn’t afford to worry overtime about another problem. He had already decided that the simplest answer to vulcanism, which otherwise would be inevitable when the planet’s geophysical balance was changed, would be to reinforce the crust. At two hundred points on the surface of He, drilling teams were now sinking long, thin, slanting shafts, reaching toward the stress-fluid of the world’s core. The shafts interlocked intricately, and thus far only one volcano had been created by the drilling. In general, the lava pockets which had been tapped had already been anticipated, and the flow had been bled off into many intersecting channels without ever reaching the surface. After the molten rock had hardened, the clogged channels were re-drilled, with mesotron rifles set to the smallest possible dispersion.

  None of the shafts had yet tapped the stress-fluid; the plan was to complete them all simultaneously. At that point, specific volcanic areas, riddled with channel intersections, would give way, and immense plugs would be forced up toward the crust, plugs of iron, connected by ferrous cantilevers through the channels between. The planet of He would wear a cruel corset, permitting only the slightest flexure—it would be stitched with threads of steel, steel that had held even granite in solution for geological ages.

  The heat problem was tougher, and Amalfi was not sure whether or not he had hit upon the solution. The very fact of structural resistance would create high temperatures, and any general formation of shearplanes would cut the imbedded girders at once. The method being prepared to cope with that was rather drastic, and its aftereffects largely unknown.

  On the whole, however, the plans were simple, and putting them into effect had seemed heavy but relatively uncomplicated labor. Some opposition, of course, had been expected from the local bandit towns.

  But Amalfi had not expected to lose nearly 20 per cent of his crews during the first month after the raid on Fabr-Suithe.

  It was Miramon who brought the news of the latest work camp found slaughtered. Amalfi was sitting under a tree fern on high ground overlooking the city, watching a flight of giant dragonflies and thinking about heat transfer in rock.

  “You are sure they were adequately protected?” Miramon asked cautiously. “Some of our insects—”

  Amalfi thought the insects, and the jungle, almost disturbingly beautiful. The thought of destroying it all occasionally upset him. “Yes, they were,” he said shortly. “We sprayed out the camp areas with dicoumarins and fluorine-substituted residuals. Besides—do any of your insects use explosives?”

  “Explosives! There was dynamite used? I saw no evidence—”

  “No. That’s what bothers me. I don’t like all those felled trees you describe; that sounds more like TDX than dynamite or high explosive. We use TDX ourselves to get a cutting blast—it has the property of exploding in a flat plane.”

  Miramon goggled. “Impossible. An explosion has to expand evenly in all directions that are open to it.”

  “Not if the explosive is a piperazohexynitrate built from polarized carbon atoms. Such atoms can’t move in any direction but at right angles to the gravity radius. That’s what I mean. You people are up to dynamite, but not to TDX.”

  He paused, frowning. “Of course some of our losses have just been to bandit raids, with missile weapons and ordinary bombs—your friends from Fabr-Suithe and their allies. But these camps where there was an explosion and no crater to show for it—”

  He fell silent. There w
as no point in mentioning the gassed corpses. It was hard even to think about them. Somebody on this planet had a gas which was a regurgitant, a sternutatory, and a vesicant all in one. The men had been forced out of their masks—which had been designed solely to protect them from volcanic gases—to vomit, had taken the stuff into their lungs by convulsive sneezing, and had blistered into great sacs of serum inside and out. That, obviously, had been the multiple-benzene-ring gas Hawkesite; it had been very popular during the days of the warring stellar “empires,” when it had been called “polybathroomfloorine” for no discoverable reason. But what was it doing on He?

  There was only one possible answer, and for a reason which he did not try to understand, it made Amalfi breathe a little easier. All around him the jungle sighed and swayed, and humming clouds of gnats made rainbows over the dew-laden pinnae of the ferns. The jungle, almost always murmurously quiet, had never seemed like the real enemy—and now Amalfi knew that his intuition had been right. The real enemy had at last declared itself, stealthily, but with a stealth with was naïveté itself in comparison with the ancient guile of the jungle.

  “Miramon,” Amalfi said tranquilly, “we’re in a spot. That criminal city I told you about—the bindlestiff—is already here. It must have landed even before my city arrived, long enough ago to hide itself very thoroughly. Probably it came down at night in some taboo area. The tramps in it have leagued themselves with Fabr-Suithe anyhow, that much is obvious.”

  A moth with a two-meter wing spread blundered across the clearing, piloted by a gray-brown nematode which had sunk its sucker above the ganglion between the glittering creature’s pinions. Amalfi was in a mood to read parables into things, and the parasitism reminded him of how greatly he had underestimated the enemy. The bindlestiff evidently knew, and was skillful with, the secret of manipulating a new culture. A shrewd Okie never attempts to overwhelm a civilization by direct assault, but instead pilots it, as indetectably as possible, doing no apparent harm, adding no apparent burden, but turning history deftly and tyrannically aside at the crucial instant …

  Amalfi snapped the belt switch of his ultraphone. “Hazleton?”

  “Here, boss.” Behind the city manager’s voice was the indistinct rumble of heavy mining. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing yet. Are you having any bandit trouble out there?”

  “No. We’re not expecting any, either, with all this artillery.”

  “Famous last words,” Amalfi said. “The ’stiff’s here, Mark—and it’s no stranger, either.”

  There was a short silence. In the background, Amalfi could hear the shouts of Hazleton’s crew. When the city manager’s voice came in again, it was moving from word to word very carefully, as if it expected each one to break under its weight. “You imply that the ’stiff was already on He when our Dirac broadcast went out. Right? I’m not sure these losses of ours can’t be explained some simpler way, boss; the theory … uh … lacks elegance.”

  Amalfi grinned tightly. “A heuristic criticism,” he said. “Go to the foot of the class, Mark, and think it over. Thus far they’ve out-thought us six ways for Sunday. We may be able to put your old scheme about the women into effect still, but if it’s to work, we’ll have to smoke the ’stiff out into the open.”

  “How?”

  “Everybody here knows that there’s going to be a drastic change in the planet when we finish what we’re doing, but we’re the only ones who know exactly what we’re going to do. The ’stiffs will have to stop us, whether they’ve got Doctor Beetle or not. So I’m forcing their hand. Moving Day is hereby advanced by one thousand hours.”

  “What! I’m sorry, boss, but that’s flatly impossible.”

  Amalfi felt a rare spasm of anger. “That’s as may be,” he growled. “Nevertheless, spread it around; let the Hevians hear it. And just to prove that I’m not kidding, Mark, I’m turning the City Fathers back on at M plus 1100. If you’re not ready to spin before then, you may well swing instead.”

  The click of the belt switch to the off position was unsatisfying. Amalfi would much have preferred to have concluded the interview with something really final—a clash of cymbals, for instance. He swung suddenly on Miramon.

  “What are you goggling at?”

  The Hevian shut his mouth, flushing. “Your pardon,” he said. “I was hoping to understand your instructions to your assistant, in the hope of being of some use. But you spoke in such incomprehensible terms that it sounded like a theological dispute. As for me, I never argue about politics or religion.” He turned on his heel and stamped off through the trees.

  Amalfi watched him go, cooling off gradually. This would never do. He must be getting to be an old man. All during the conversation with Hazleton he had felt his temper getting the better of his judgment, yet he had felt sodden and inert, unwilling to make the effort of opposing the momentum of his anger. At this rate, the City Fathers would soon depose him and appoint some stable character to the mayoralty—not Hazleton, certainly, but some unpoetic youngster who would play everything by empirics. Amalfi was in no position to be threatening anyone else with liquidation, even as a joke.

  He walked toward the grounded city, heavy with sunlight, sunk in reflection. He was now about nine hundred years old, give or take fifty; strong as an ox, mentally alert and active., in good hormone balance, all twenty-eight senses sharp, his own special psi faculty—orientation—still as infallible as ever, and all in all as sane as a compulsively peripatetic starman could be. The anti-agathics would keep him in this shape indefinitely, as far as anyone knew—but the problem of patience had never been solved.

  The older a man became, the more quickly he saw answers to tough questions because the more experience he had to bring to bear on them; and the less likely he was to tolerate slow thinking among his associates. If he were sane, his answers were generally right answers—if he were unsane, they were not; but what mattered was the speed of the thinking itself. In the end, both the sane and the unsane became equally dictatorial, less and less ready to explain why they picked one answer over another.

  It was funny: before death had been indefinitely postponed, it had been thought that memory would turn longevity into a Greek gift, because not even the human brain could remember a practical infinity of accumulated facts. Nowadays, however, nobody bothered to remember many facts. That was what the City Fathers and like machines were for: they stored data. Living men memorized nothing but processes, throwing out obsolete ones for new ones as invention made it necessary. When they needed facts, they asked the machines.

  In some cases, even processes were wiped from human memory to make more room if there were simple, indestructible machines to replace them—the slide rule, for instance. Amalfi wondered suddenly if there was a single man in the city who could multiply, divide, take square root, or figure p H in his head or on paper. The thought was so novel as to be alarming—as novel as if an ancient astrophysicist had seriously wondered how many of his colleagues could run an abacus.

  No, memory was no problem. But it was hard to be patient after a thousand years.

  The bottom of an airlock drifted into his field of view, plastered with brown tendrils of mud. He looked up. The lock, drilled directly into the great granite disc which was the foundation of the city, was a severed end of what had been a subway line running out of Manhattan centuries ago; this one evidently had been the Astoria line of the BMT, a lock seldom used, since it was too far from both the Empire State and City Hall, the city’s two present centers of control. It was certainly a long way around the perimeter from where Amalfi had expected to go back on board. Feeling like a stranger, he went in.

  Inside, the corridor rang with bloodcurdling shrieks which echoed endlessly. It was as if somebody were flaying a live dinosaur, or, better, a pack of them. Underneath the noise there was a sound like water being expelled under high pressure, and someone was laughing hysterically. Alarmed, Amalfi ran up the nearest steps; the noise got louder. He hunched his bull sh
oulders and burst through the door behind which the butchery seemed to be going on.

  Surely there had never been such a place in the city. It was a huge, steamy chamber, walled with some ceramic substance placed in regular tiles. The tiles were slimy and stained, hence, old—very old. On the floor, smaller hexagonal white tiles made an endlessly repeating mosaic, reminding Amalfi at once of the structural formula of Hawkesite.

  Hordes of nude women ran aimlessly back and forth in the chamber, screaming, battering at the wall, dodging wildly, or rolling on the mosaic floor. Every so often a thick stream of water caught one of them, bowling her howling away. Overhead, long banks of nozzles sprayed needles of mist into the air; Amalfi was soaking wet almost at once. The laughter got louder.

  The mayor bent quickly, threw off his muddy shoes, and stalked the laughter, his toes gripping the slippery tiles. The heavy column of water swerved toward him, then was warped away again.

  “John! Do you need a bath so badly? Come join the party!”

  It was Dee Hazleton. She was as nude as any of her victims, and was gleefully plying an enormous hose. She looked lovely; Amalfi turned his mind determinedly away from that thought.

  “Isn’t this fun? We just got a new batch of these creatures. I got Mark to have the old fire hose connected, and I’ve been giving them their first wash.”

  It did not sound much like the old Dee. Amalfi expressed his opinion of women who lost their inhibitions with such drastic thoroughness. He went on at some length, and Dee made as if to turn the hose on him again.

  “No, you don’t,” he growled, wresting it from her. It proved extremely hard to manage. “What is this place, anyhow? I don’t recall any such torture chamber in the plans.”