Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “Good,” Hazleton said, his chest collapsing to expel a heavy sigh.

  Amalfi heard neither the word nor the sigh.

  At the same instant, the big master screen, which had been showing the swelling, granulating mass of the Acolyte star cluster, flashed blinding scarlet over its whole surface, and the scrannel shriek of a police whistle made the air in the control room seethe.

  The cops swaggered and stomped on board the Okie city, and into Amalfi’s main office in City Hall, as if the nothingness of the marches of the galaxy were their personal property. Their uniforms were not the customary dress coveralls—actually, space-suit liners—of the Earth police, however. Instead, they were flashy black affairs, trimmed with silver braid, Sam Browne belt, and shiny boots. The blue-jowled thugs who had been jammed into these tight-fitting creations reminded Amalfi of a period which considerably antedated the Night of Hadjjii—or any other event in the history of space flight.

  And the thugs carried meson pistols. These heavy, cumbersome weapons could be held in one hand, but two hands were needed to fire them. They were very modern side arms to find in a border star cluster. They were only about a century out of date. This made them thoroughly up-to-date as far as the city’s own armament was concerned.

  The pistols told Amalfi several other things that he needed to know. Their existence here could mean only one thing: that the Acolytes had had a recent contact with one of those pollinating bees of the galaxy, an Okie city. Furthermore, the probability was not high that it had been the sole Okie contact the Acolytes had had for a long time, as Amalfi might otherwise have assumed.

  It took years to build up the technology to mass produce meson pistols so that ordinary cops could pack them. It took more years still, years spent in fairly frequent contact with other technologies, to make adoption of the pistol possible at all. The pistol, then, confirmed unusually frequent contact with other Okies, which, in turn, meant that there was a garage planet here, as Amalfi had hoped.

  The pistol also told Amalfi something else, which he did not much like. The meson pistol was not a good antipersonnel weapon.

  It was much more suitable for demolition work.

  The cops could still swagger in Amalfi’s office, but they could not stomp effectively. The floor was too thickly carpeted. Amalfi never used the ancient, plushy office, with its big black mahogany desk and other antiques, except for official occasions. The control tower was his normal on-duty habitat, but that was closed to non-citizens.

  “What’s your business?” the police lieutenant barked at Hazleton. Hazleton, standing beside the desk, said nothing, but merely jerked his head toward where Amalfi was seated, and resumed looking at the big screen back of the desk.

  “Are you the mayor of this burg?” the lieutenant demanded.

  “I am,” Amalfi said, removing a cigar from his mouth and looking the lieutenant over with lidless eyes. He decided that he did not like the lieutenant. His rump was too big. If a man is going to be barrel-shaped, he ought to do a good job of it, as Amalfi had. Amalfi had no use for top-shaped men.

  “All right, answer the question, Fatty. What’s your business?”

  “Petroleum geology.”

  “You’re lying. You’re not dealing with some isolated, type Four-Q podunk now, Okie. These are the Acolyte stars.”

  Hazleton looked with pointedly vague puzzlement at the lieutenant, and then back to the screen, which showed no stars at all within any reasonable distance.

  The by-play was lost on the cop. “Petroleum geology isn’t a business with Okies,” he said. “You’d all starve if you didn’t know how to mine and crack oil for food. Now give me a straight answer before I decide you’re a vagrant and get tough.”

  Amalfi said evenly, “Our business is petroleum geology. Naturally we’ve developed some side lines since we’ve been aloft, but they’re mostly natural outgrowths of petroleum geology—on which subject we happen to be experts. We trace and develop petroleum sources for planets which need the material.” He eyed the cigar judiciously and thrust it back between his teeth. “Incidentally, Lieutenant, you’re wasting your breath threatening us with a vagrancy charge. You know as well as we do that vagrancy laws are specifically forbidden by article one of the Constitution.”

  “Constitution?” the cop laughed. “If you mean the Earth Constitution, we don’t have much contact with Earth out here. These are the Acolyte stars, see? Next question: have you any money?”

  “Enough.”

  “How much is enough?”

  “If you want to know whether or not we have operating capital, our City Fathers will give you the statutory yes or no answer if you can give them the data on your system that they’ll need to make the calculation. The answer will almost assuredly be yes. We’re not required to report our profit pool to you, of course.”

  “Now look,” the lieutenant said. “You don’t need to play the space lawyer with me. All I want to do is get off this town. If you’ve got dough, I can clear you—that is, if you got it through legal channels.”

  “We got it on a planet called He, some distance from here. We were hired by the Hevians to rub out a jungle which was bothering them. We did it by regularizing their axis.”

  “Yeah?” the cop said. “Regularized their axis, eh? I guess that must have been some job.”

  “It was,” Amalfi said gravely. “We had to setacetus on He’s left-hand frannistan.”

  “Gee. Will your City Fathers show me the contract? Okay, then. Where are you going?”

  “To garage; we’ve a bum spindizzy. After that, out again. You people look like you’re well past the stage where you’ve much use for oil.”

  “Yeah, we’re pretty modernized here, not like some of these border areas you hear about. These are the Acolyte stars.” Suddenly it seemed to occur to him that he had somehow lost ground; his voice turned brusque again. “So maybe you’re all right, Okie. I’ll give you a pass through. Just be sure you go where you say you’re going, and don’t make stopovers, understand? If you watch your step, maybe I can lend you a hand here and there.”

  Amalfi said, “That’s very good of you, Lieutenant. We’ll try not to have to bother you, but just in case we do have to call on you, who shall we ask for?”

  “Lieutenant Lerner, Forty-fifth Border Security Group.”

  “Good. Oh, before you go, I collect medal ribbons—every man to his hobby, you know. And that royal violet one of yours is quite unusual—I speak as a connoisseur. Would you consent to sell it? It wouldn’t be like giving up the medal itself—I’m sure your corps would issue you another ribbon.”

  “I don’t know,” Lieutenant Lerner said doubtfully. “It’s against regs—”

  “I realize that, and naturally I’d expect to cover any possible fine you might incur. (Mark, would you call down for a check for five hundred Oc dollars?) No sum I could offer you would really be sufficient to pay for a medal for which you risked your life, but five hundred Oc is all our City Fathers will allow me for hobbies this month. Could you do me the favor of accepting it?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” the lieutenant said. He detached the bar of faded, dismal purple from over his pocket with clumsy eagerness and put it on the desk. A second later, Hazleton silently handed him the check, which he pocketed without seeming to notice it at all. “Well, be sure you keep a straight course, Okie. C’mon, you guys, let’s get back to the boat.”

  The three thugs eased themselves tentatively into the lift shaft and slithered down out of sight through the friction-field wearing expressions of sternly repressed alarm. Amalfi grinned. Quite obviously the principle of molar valence, and frictionators and other gadgets using the principle, were still generally unknown.

  Hazleton walked over to the shaft and peered down. Then he said, “Boss, that damn thing is a good-conduct ribbon. The Earth cops issued them by the tens of thousands about three centuries ago to any rookie who could get up out of bed when the whistle blew three days running. Since when is
it worth five hundred Oc?”

  “Never, until now,” Amalfi said tranquilly. “But the lieutenant wanted to be bribed, and it’s always wise to appear to be buying something when you’re bribing someone. I put the price so high because he’ll have to split it with his men. If I hadn’t offered the bribe, I’m sure he’d have wanted to look at our Violations docket.”

  “I figured that; and ours is none too clean, as I’ve been pointing out. But I think you wasted the money, Amalfi. The Violations docket should have been the first thing he asked to see, not the last. Since he didn’t ask for it at the beginning, he wasn’t interested in it.”

  “That’s probably exactly so,” Amalfi admitted. He put the cigar back and pulled on it thoughtfully. “All right, Mark, what’s the pitch? Suppose you tell me.”

  “I don’t know yet. I can’t square the maintenance of an alert guard, so many parsecs out from the actual Acolyte area, with that slob’s obvious indifference to whether or not we might be on the shady side of the law—or even be bindlestiff. Hell, he didn’t even ask who we were.”

  “That rules out the possibility that the Acolytes have been alerted against some one bindlestiff city.”

  “It does,” Hazleton agreed. “Lerner was far too easily bribed, for that matter. Patrols that are really looking for something specific don’t bribe, even in a fairly corrupt culture. It doesn’t figure.”

  “And somehow,” Amalfi said, pushing a toggle to off, “I don’t think the City Fathers are going to be a bit of help. I had the whole conversation up to now piped down to them, but all I’m going to get out of them is a bawling out for spending money, and a catechism about my supposed hobby. They never have been able to make anything out of voice tone. Damn! We’re missing something important, Mark, something that would be obvious once it hit us. Something absolutely crucial. And here we are plunging on toward the Acolytes without the faintest idea of what it is!”

  “Boss,” Hazleton said.

  The cold flatness of his voice brought Amalfi swiveling around in his chair in a hurry. The city manager was looking up again at the big screen, on which the Acolyte stars had now clearly separated into individual points. “What is it, Mark?”

  “Look there—in the mostly dark area on the far side of the cluster. Do you see it?”

  “I see quite a lot of star-free space there, yes.” Amalfi looked closer. There’s also a spectroscopic double, with a red dwarf standing out some distance from the other components—”

  “You’re warm. Now look at the red dwarf.”

  There was also, Amalfi began to see, a faint smudge of green there, about as big as the far end of a pencil. The screen was keyed to show Okie cities in green, but no city could possibly be that big. The green smudge covered an area that would blank out an average Sol-type solar system.

  Amalfi felt his big square front teeth beginning to bite his cigar in two. He took the dead object out of his mouth.

  “Cities,” he muttered. He spat, but the bitterness in his mouth did not seem to be tobacco juice after all. “Not one city. Hundreds.”

  “Yes,” Hazleton said. “There’s your answer, boss, or part of it. It’s a jungle.

  “An Okie jungle.”

  Amalfi gave the jungle a wide berth, but he had O’Brian send proxies as soon as the city was safely down below top speed. Had he released the missiles earlier, they would have been left behind and lost, for they were only slightly faster than the city itself. Now they showed a fantastic and gloomy picture.

  The empty area where the hobo cities had settled was well out at the edge of the Acolyte cluster, on the side toward the rest of the galaxy. The nearest star to the area, as Hazleton had pointed out, was a triple. It consisted of two type Go stars and a red dwarf, almost a double for the Sol-Alpha Centauri system. But there was one difference: the two Go stars were quite close to each other, constituting a spectroscopic doublet, separable visually only by the Dinwiddie circuits even at this relatively short distance; while the red dwarf had swung out into the empty area, and was now more than four light years away from its companions.

  Around this tiny and virtually heatless fire, more than three hundred Okie cities huddled. On the screen they passed in an endless, boundaryless flood of green specks, like a river of fantastic asteroids, bobbing in space and passing and repassing each other in their orbits around the dwarf star. The concentration was heaviest near the central sun, which was so penurious of its slight radiation that it had been masked almost completely by the Dinwiddie code lights when Hazleton first spotted the jungle. But there were late comers in orbits as far out as three billion miles—spindizzy screens do not take kindly to being thrust into close contact with each other.

  “It’s frightening,” Dee said, studying the screen intently. “I knew there were other Okie cities, especially after we hit the bindlestiff. But so many I could hardly have imagined three hundred in the whole galaxy.”

  “A gross underestimate,” Hazleton said indulgently. “There were about eighteen thousand cities at the last census, weren’t there, boss?”

  “Yes,” Amalfi said. He was as unable to look away from the screen as Dee. “But I know what Dee means. It scares the hell out of me, Mark. Something must have caused an almost complete collapse of the economy around this part of the galaxy. No other force could create a jungle of that kind. These bastardly Acolytes evidently have been exploiting it to draw Okies here, in order to hire the few they need on a competitive basis.”

  “At the lowest possible wages, in other words,” Hazleton said. “But what for?”

  “There you have me. Possibly they’re trying to industrialize the whole cluster, to make themselves self-sufficient before the depression or whatever it is hits them. About all we can be sure of at this juncture is that we’d better get out of here the moment the new spindizzy gets put in. There’ll be no decent work here.”

  “I’m not sure I agree,” Hazleton said, redeploying his lanky, apparently universal-jointed limbs over his chair. “If they’re industrializing here, it could mean that the depression is here, not anywhere else. Possibly they’ve overproduced themselves into a money shortage, especially if their distribution setup is as creaking, elaborate, and unjust as it usually is in these backwaters. If they’re using a badly deflated dollar, well be sitting pretty.”

  Amalfi considered it. It seemed to hold up.

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” he said. “You could well be right. But one cluster, even at its most booming stage, could never have hoped to support three hundred cities. The waste of technology involved would be terrific—and you don’t attract Okies to a money-short area, you draw them from one.”

  “Not necessarily. Suppose there’s an oversupply outside? Remember back in the Nationalist Era on Earth, artists and such low-income people used to leave the big Hamiltonian state, I’ve forgotten its name, to live in much smaller states where the currency was softer?”

  “That was different. They had mixed coinage then—”

  “Boys, may I break in on this bull session?” Dee said hesitantly, but with a trace of mockery in her voice. “It’s getting a little over my head. Suppose this whole end of this star-limb has had its economy wrecked. How, I’ll leave to you two; on Utopia, our economy was frozen at a fixed rate of turnover, and had been for as long as any of us could remember; so maybe I can be forgiven for not understanding what you’re talking about. But in any case, inflation or deflation, we can always leave when we have our new spin-dizzy.”

  Amalfi shook his head heavily. “That,” he said, “is what scares me, Dee. There are a hell of a lot of Okies in that jungle, and they can’t all be suffering from defects in their driving equipment. If there were someplace they could go where times are better, why haven’t they gone there? Why do they congregate in a jungle in this Godforsaken star cluster, for all the universe as if there were no place else where they could find work? Okies aren’t sedentary, or sociable, either.”

  Hazleton began drumming his
fingers lightly on the arm of his chair, and his eyes closed slightly. “Money is energy,” he said. “Still, I can’t say that I like that any better. The more I look at it, the more I think this is one fix we won’t get out of by any amount of cute tricks. Maybe we should have stuck with He.”

  “Maybe.”

  Amalfi turned his attention back to the controls. Hazleton was subtle; but one consequence of his subtlety was that he tended to expend unnecessary amounts of time speculating about situations the facts of which would soon become evident in any case.

  The city was now approaching the local garage world, which bore the unlikely name of Murphy, and maneuvering among the close-packed stars of the cluster was a job delicate enough to demand the mayor’s own hand upon the space stick. The City Fathers, of course, could have teetered the city through the conflicting gravitic fields to a safe landing on Murphy, but they would have taken a month at the job. Hazleton would have gone faster, but the City Fathers would have monitored his route all the way, and snatched control from him at the slightest transgression of the margins of error they had calculated. They were not equipped to respect short cuts.

  Of course, they were also unequipped to appreciate the direct intuition of spatial distances and mass pressures which made Amalfi a master pilot. But over Amalfi they had no authority, except the ultimate authority of the revocation of his office.

  As Murphy grew on the screen, technicians began to file into the control room, activating with personal keys desks which had been disconnected for more than three centuries—ever since the last new spindizzy had been brought on board. Readying the city’s drive machinery for new equipment was a major project. Every other spindizzy on board would have to be retuned to the new machine. In the present case, the job would be further complicated by the radioactivity of the defective unit. While the garagemen should have special equipment to cope with that problem—de-gaussing, for instance, was the usual first step—no garage would know the machinery involved as well as the Okies who used it. Every city is unique.