Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  Actually, however, no one of these things entered his mind. Hazleton had said, “I want off.” Amalfi was an Okie, and for an Okie, “I want off” is final.

  “No,” the mayor said, at once. “You’ve asked for off, and that’s the end of it. You’re no longer entitled to any knowledge of city policy or plans, except for what reaches you in the form of directives. Now’s the time when you can use your training in thinking like me, Mark—obviously you’ll have no difficulty in thinking like the City Fathers— because it’ll be your only source of information on policy from now on.

  “I understand,” Hazleton said formally. He stood silent a moment longer. Amalfi waited.

  “At the next port of call, then,” Hazleton said.

  “All right. Until then, you’re outgoing city manager. Put Carrel back into training as your successor, and begin feeding the City Fathers predisposing data toward him now. I don’t want any more fuss from them when the election is held than we had when you were elected.”

  Hazleton’s expression became slightly more set. “Right.”

  “Secondly, get the city moving toward the perimeter to intersect the town you couldn’t raise. I’ll want an orbit that gives us logarithmic acceleration, with all the real drive concentrated at the far end. On the way, ready two work teams: one for a fast spindizzy assessment, the other to run up whatever’s necessary on the mass chromatography equipment, whatever that may be. Include medium-heavy dismounting tools, below the graving dock size, but heavy enough to handle any job less drastic.”

  “Right.”

  “Also, ready Sergeant Anderson’s squad, in case that city isn’t quite as dead as it sounds.”

  “Right,” Hazleton said again.

  “That’s it,” Amalfi said.

  Hazleton nodded stiffly, and made as if to turn. Then, astonishingly, his stiff face exploded into a torrential passion of speech.

  “Boss, tell me this before I go,” he said, clenching his fists. “Was all this to push me into asking for off? Couldn’t you think of any way of keeping your plans to yourself but kicking me out—or making me kick myself out? I don’t believe this love story of yours, damned if I do. You know I’ll take Dee with me when I disembark. And the Great Renunciation is just slop, just pure fiction, especially coming from you. You aren’t any more in love with Dee than I am with you—”

  And then Hazleton turned so white that Amalfi thought for a moment that the man was about to faint.

  “Score one for you, Mark,” Amalfi said. “Evidently I’m not the only one who’s staging a Great Renunciation.”

  “Gods of all stars, Amalfi!”

  “There are none,” Amalfi said. “I can’t do anything more, Mark. I’ve said good-by to you a hell of a lot of times, but this has to be the last time—not by my election, but by yours. Go and get the jobs done.”

  Hazleton said, “Right.” He spun and strode out. The door reached full dilation barely in time.

  Amalfi sighed as deeply as a sleeping child. Then he flipped the treacher switch from set to clear. The treacher said, “Will that be all, sir?”

  “What do you want to do, poison me twice at the same meal?” Amalfi growled. “Get me an ultraphone line.”

  The treacher’s voice changed at once. “Communications,” it said briskly.

  “This is the mayor. Raise Lieutenant Lerner, Forty-fifth Acolyte Border Security Group. Don’t give up too easily; that was his last address, but he’s been upgraded since. When you get him, tell him you’re speaking for me. Tell him also that the cities in the jungle are organizing for some sort of military action, and that if he can get a squadron in here fast enough, he can break it up. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.” The Communications man read it back. “If you say so, Mayor Amalfi.”

  “Who else would say so? Be sure Lerner doesn’t get a fix on us. Send it pulse-modulated if you can.”

  “Can’t, boss. Mr. Hazleton just put us under way. Rut there’s a powerful Acolyte AM ultraphone station somewhere near by. I can get our message into synch with it, and make the cop’s detectors focus on the vector. Is that good enough?”

  “Better, even,” Amalfi said. “Hop to it.”

  “There’s one other thing, boss. That big drone you ordered last year is finally finished, and the shop says that it has Dirac equipment mounted in it and ready to go. I’ve inspected it and it looks fine, except that it’s as big as a life ship and just as detectable.”

  “All right, good; but that can wait. Get the message out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The voice cut out entirely. The incinerator chute gaped suddenly, and the dishes rose from the table and soared toward the opening in solemn procession. The goblet of wine left behind a miasmic trail, like a miniature comet.

  At the last minute, Amalfi jerked out of his reverie and made a wild grab in mid-air; but he was too late. The chute gulped down that final item and shut again with a satisfied slam.

  Hazleton had left his slide rule upon the table.

  The space-suited party moved cautiously and with grim faces through the black, dead streets of the city on the periphery. At the lead, Sergeant Anderson’s hand torch flashed into a doorway and flicked out again at once.

  No other lights whatsoever could be seen in the dark city, nor had there been any response to calls. Except for a weak spindizzy field, no power flowed in the city at all, and even the screen was too feeble to maintain the city’s air pressure above four pounds per square inch—hence the space suits.

  Inside Amalfi’s helmet O’Brian’s voice was saying, “The second phase is about to start in the jungle, Mr. Mayor. Lerner moved in on them with what looks from here like all of the Acolyte navy he dared to pull out of the cluster itself. There’s an admiral’s flagship in the fleet, but all the big brass is doing is relaying Lerner’s suggestions in the form of orders; he seems to have no ideas of his own.”

  “Sensible setup,” Amalfi said, peering ahead unsuccessfully in the gloom.

  “As far as it goes, sir. The thing is, the squadron itself is far too big for the job. It’s unwieldly, and the jungle detected it well in advance; we stood ready to give the alarm to the King as you ordered, but it didn’t prove necessary. The cities are drawing up in a rough battle formation now. It’s quite a sight, even through the proxies. First time in history, isn’t it?”

  “As far as I know. Does it look like it’ll work?”

  “No, sir,” the proxy pilot said promptly. “Whatever organization the King’s worked out, it’s functioning only partially, and damn sloppily. Cities are too clumsy for this kind of work even under the best hand, and his is a long way from the best, I’d judge. But we’ll soon see for ourselves.”

  “Right. Give me another report in an hour.”

  Anderson held up his hand and the party halted. Ahead was a huge pile of ultimately solid blackness, touched deceptively here and there with feeble stars where windows threw back reflections. Far aloft, however, one window glowed softly with its own light.

  The boarding-squad men deployed quickly along opposite sides of the street while the technies took cover. Amalfi sidled along the near wall to where the sergeant was crouching.

  “What do you think, Anderson?”

  “I don’t like it, Mr. Mayor. It stinks of mouse traps. Maybe everybody’s dead and the last man didn’t have the strength to turn out the light. On the other hand, just one light left burning for that reason, in the whole city?”

  “I see what you mean. Dulany, take five men down that side street where the facsimile pillar is, follow it until you’re tangent to the corner of this building up ahead, and stick out a probe. Don’t use more than a couple of micro-volts, or you might get burned.”

  “Yessir.” Dulany’s squad—the man himself might best be described as a detector-detector—slipped away soundlessly, shadows among shadows.

  “That isn’t all I stopped us for, Mr. Mayor,” Anderson said. There’s a grounded aircab just around the corner her
e. It’s got a dead passenger in it. I wish you’d take a look at him.”

  Amalfi took the proffered torch, covered its lens with the mitten of his suit so that only a thin shred of light leaked through and played it for half a second through the cab’s window. He felt his spine going rigid.

  Wherever the light touched the flesh of the hunched corpse, it—glistened.

  “Communications!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Set up the return port for decontamination. Nobody gets back on board our town until he’s been boiled alive—understand? I want the works.”

  There was a brief silence. Then: “Mr. Mayor, the city manager already has that in the works.”

  Amalfi grimaced wryly in the darkness. Anderson said, “Pardon me, sir, but—how did Mr. Hazleton guess?”

  “Why, that’s not too hard to see, at least after the fact, sergeant. This city we’re on was desperately poor. And being poor under the new money system means being low on drugs. The end result, as Mr. Hazleton saw, and I should have seen, is—plague.”

  “The sons of bitches,” the sergeant said bitterly. The epithet seemed intended to apply to every non-Okie in the universe.

  At the same moment, a lurid scarlet glare splashed over his face and the front of his suit, and red lanes of light checkered the street. There was an almost-simultaneous flat crash, without weight in the thin air, but ugly-sounding.

  “TDX!” Anderson shouted, involuntarily.

  “Dulany? Dulany! Damn it all, I told the man to take it easy with that probe. Whoever survived on that squad, report!”

  Underneath the ringing in Amalfi’s ears, someone began to laugh. It was as ugly a sound as the TDX explosion had been. There was no other answer.

  “All right, Anderson, surround this place. Communications, get the rest of the boarding squad and half the security police over here on the double.”

  The nasty laughter got louder.

  “Whoever you are that’s putting out that silly giggle, you’re going to learn how to make another kind of noise when I get my hands on you,” Amalfi added viciously. “Nobody uses TDX on my men, I don’t care whether he’s an Okie or a cop. Get me? Nobody!”

  The laughter stopped. Then a cracked voice said, “You lousy damned vultures.”

  “Vultures, is it?” Amalfi snapped. “If you’d answered our calls in the first place, there’d have been no trouble. Why don’t you come to your senses? Do you want to die of the pestilence?”

  “Vultures,” the voice repeated. It carried an overtone of sinister idiocy. “Eaters of carrion. The gods of all stars will boil your bones for soup.” The cackling began again.

  Amalfi felt a faint chill. He switched to tight-beam. “Anderson, keep your men at a respectable distance, and wait for the reinforcements. This place is obviously mined to the teeth, and I don’t know what other surprises our batty friend has for us.”

  “I could lob a gas grenade through that window—”

  “Don’t you suppose they’re wearing suits, too? Just ring the place and sit tight.”

  “Check.”

  Amalfi squatted down upon his hams behind the aircab, sweating. There just might be enough power left in the accumulators here to put up a Bethé fender around the building, but that wasn’t the main thing on his mind. This business of boarding another Okie city was easily the hardest operation he had ever had to direct. Every move went against the grain. The madman’s accusation had hit him in his most vulnerable spot.

  After what seemed like a whole week, his helmet ultraphone said, “Proxy room. Mr. Mayor, the jungle beat off Lerner’s first wave. I didn’t think they could do it. They got in one good heavy lick at the beginning—blew two heavy cruisers right out of the sky—and the Acolytes act scared green. The admiral’s launch has run out completely, and left Lerner holding the bag.”

  “Losses?”

  “Four cities definitely wiped out. We haven’t enough proxies out to estimate cities damaged with any accuracy, but Lerner had a group of about thirty towns enfiladed when the first cruiser got it.”

  “You haven’t got the big drone out there, have you?” the mayor said in sudden alarm.

  “No, sir; Communications ordered that one left berthed. I’m waiting now to see when the next Acolyte wave gets rolling; I’ll call you as—”

  The proxy pilot’s voice snapped off, and the stars went out.

  There was a shout of alarm from some technie in the party. Amalfi got up cautiously and looked overhead. The single window in the big building which had shown a light was blacked out now, too.

  “What the hell happened, Mr. Mayor?” Anderson’s voice said quietly.

  “A local spindizzy screen, at at least half-drive. Probably they’ve dropped their main screen entirely. Everybody keep to cover—there may be flares.”

  The laughter began again.

  “Vultures,” the voice said. “Little mangy vultures in a big tight cage.”

  Amalfi cut back in on the open radio band. “You’re going to wreck your city,” he said steadily. “And once you tear this section of it loose, your power will fail and your screen will go down again. You can’t win, and you know it.”

  The street began to tremble. It was only a faint trembling now, but there was no telling how long the basic structure of the dead city could hold this one small area in place against the machine that was trying to fling it away into space. Hazleton, of course, would rush over a set of portable nutcrackers as soon as he had seen what had happened—but whether this part of the city would still be here when the nutcrackers arrived was an open question.

  In the meantime, there was exactly nothing Amalfi could do about it. Even his contact with his own city was cut off.

  “It isn’t your city,” the voice said, suddenly deceptively reasonable. “It’s our city. You’re hijacking us. But we won’t let you.”

  “How were we supposed to know any of you were still alive?” Amalfi demanded angrily. “You didn’t answer our calls. Is it our fault if you didn’t hear them? We thought this town was open for salvage—”

  His voice was abruptly obliterated by a new one, enormous yet familiar, which came slamming into his helmet as if it intended to drive him out of his suit entirely.

  “EARTH POLICE AAEMERGENCY ACOLYTE CLUSTER CONDENSATION XIIIARM B ETA,” it thundered. “S YSTEM UNDER ATTACK BY MASS ARMY OF TRAMP CITIES. POLICE AID URGENTLY NEEDED. LERNER LIEUTENANT F ORTY-FIFTH BORDER SECURITY G ROUP ACTING COMMANDER CLUSTER DEFENSE FORCES. A CKNOWLEDGE. ”

  Amalfi whistled soundlessly through his teeth. There was evidently a Dirac transceiver in operation somewhere inside the close-drawn spindizzy screen, or his helmet phones wouldn’t have caught Lerner’s yell for help; Diracs were too bulky for the usual proxy, let alone for a space suit. By the same token, everybody else in the galaxy possessing Dirac equipment had heard that yell—it had been the instantaneous propagation of Dirac pulses that had dealt the death blow to the West’s hypercomplex relativity theories millennia ago.

  And if a Dirac sender was open inside this bubble …

  “LERNER ACOLYTE DEFENSE F ORCES YOUR MESSAGE IN. S QUADRON ASSIGNED YOUR CONDENSATION ON WAY. H ANG ON. BETA ARM COMMAND E ARTH. ”

  … then Amalfi could use it. He flipped the chest switch and shouted, “Hazleton, are your nutcrackers rolling?”

  “Rolling, boss,” Hazleton shot back instantly. “Another ninety seconds and—”

  “Too late, this sector will tear loose before then. Tune up our own screen to twenty-four per cent and hold—”

  He realized suddenly that he was shouting into a dead mike. The Okies here had caught on belatedly to what was happening, and had cut the power to their Dirac. Had that last, crucial, incomplete sentence gotten through, even a fragment of it? Or …

  Deep down under Amalfi’s feet an alarming sound began to rise. It was part screech, part monstrous rockslide, part prolonged and hollow groan. Amalfi’s teeth began to itch in their sockets, and his bowels stirred slightl
y. He grinned.

  The message had gotten through—or enough of it to enable Hazleton to guess the rest. The one spindizzy holding this field was going sour. Against the combined power of the nearby drivers of Amalfi’s city, it could no longer maintain the clean space-lattice curvature it was set for.

  “You’re sunk,” Amalfi told the invisible defenders quietly. “Give up now, and you’ll not be hurt. I’ll skip the TDX incident—Dulany was one of my best men, but maybe there was some reason on your side, too. Come on over with us, and you’ll have a city to call your own again. This one isn’t any good to you any more, that’s obvious.”

  There was no answer.

  Patterns began to race across the close-pressing black sky. The nutcrackers—portable generators designed to heterodyne a spin-dizzy field to the overload point—were being brought to bear. The single tortured spindizzy howled with anguish.

  “Speak up, up there,” Amalfi said. “I’m trying to be fair, but if you force me to drive you out—”

  “Vultures,” the cracked voice sobbed.

  The window aloft lit up with a searing glare and burst outward. A long tongue of red flame winnowed out over the street. The spindizzy screen went down at once, and with it the awful noise from the city’s power deck; but it was several minutes before Amalfi’s dazzled eyes could see the stars again.