Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “None, sir, at the moment,” said the cops’ Command HQ. “They’ve stopped, and appear to be willing to listen to reason. I have assigned Commander Eisenstein to cover their camp against any possible disturbance.”

  “Admiral, these cities have broken the law. They’re here in defiance of our approach limits, and the very size of their gathering is illegal. Are you aware of that?”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Command HQ said respectfully. “If you wish me to order individual arrests—”

  “No, no, we can’t jail a whole pack of flying tramps. I want action, Admiral. These people need to be taught a lesson. We can’t have fleets of cities approaching Earth at will—it’s a bad precedent. It indicates a decline of interstellar morality. Unless we return to the virtues of the pioneers, the lights will go out all over Earth, and grass will grow in the space lanes.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Command HQ. “Well spoken, if you will permit me to say so. I stand ready for your orders, Mr. President.”

  “My orders are to do something. That camp is a festering sore on our heavens. I hold you personally responsible.”

  “Yes, sir.” The Admiral’s voice was very crisp. “Commander Eisenstein, proceed with Operation A. Command Eighty-two, red alert; red alert.”

  “Command Eighty-two acknowledging red alert.”

  “Eisentein calling Command HQ.”

  “Command HQ.”

  “MacMillan, I’m taping my resignation over to you. The President’s instructions don’t specify Operation A. I won’t be responsible for it.”

  “Follow orders, Commander,” Command HQ said pleasantly. “I will accept your resignation—when the maneuver is completed.”

  The cities hung poised tensely in their orbits. For seconds, nothing happened.

  Then pear-shaped, bumpy police battleships began springing out of nothingness around the jungle. Almost instantly, four cities raved into boiling clouds of gas.

  The Dinwiddie pickup in the proxy backed itself hurriedly down the intensity scale until it could see again through the glare. The cities were still hanging there, seemingly stunned—as was Amalfi, for he had not imagined that Earth could have come to such a pass. Only an ideal combination of guilt and savagery could have produced so murderous a response; but evidently the president and MacMillan made up between them the necessary combination …

  Click.

  “Fight!” the King’s voice roared. “Fight, you lunkheads! They’re going to wipe us out! Fight!”

  Another city went up. The cops were using Bethé blasters; the Dinwiddie circuit, stopped down to accommodate the hydrogen-helium explosions, could not pick up the pale guide beams of the weapons; it would have been decidedly difficult to follow the King’s order effectively.

  But the city of Buda-Pesht was already sweeping forward out of the head of the cone, arcing toward Earth. It spat murder back at the police ships, and actually caught one. The mass of incandescent, melting metal appeared as a dim blob in Amalfi’s helmet, then faded out again. A few cities followed the King; then a larger number; and then, suddenly, a great wave.

  Click.

  “MacMillan, stop them! I’ll have you shot! They’re going to invade—”

  New police craft sprang into being every second. A haze gradually began to define the area of the Okie encampment: a planetary nebula of gas molecules, dust, and condensations of metal and water vapor. Through it the Bethé guide beams played, just on the edge of visibility now, but the sun, too, was acting on the cloud, and the whole mass was beginning to re-radiate, casting a deepening luminous veil over the whole scene, about which the Dinwiddie circuit could do very little. The whole spectacle reminded Amalfi of NGC 1435 in Taurus, with exploding cities substituting novas for the Pleiades.

  But there were more novas than the cities could account for, novas outside the cone of the encampment. The police craft, Amalfi noted with amazement, were beginning to burst almost as fast as they appeared. The swarming, disorganized cities were fighting back; but their inherent inefficiency as fighting machines ruled them out as the prime causes of such heavy police losses. Something else, something new was happening—something utterly deadly was loose among the cops …

  “Command Eighty-two, Operation A sub a—on the double!”

  A police monitor blew up with an impossible, soundless flare.

  The cities were winning. Any police battleship could handle any three cities without even beginning to breathe hard, and there had been at least five battleships per city when the pogrom had started. The cities hadn’t had a chance.

  Yet they were winning. They streamed on toward Earth, boiling with rage, and the police ships, with their utterly deadly weapons, exploded all over the sky like milkweed.

  And, a little bit ahead of the maddened cities, an enormous silver sphere wallowed toward Earth, apparently out of control.

  Amalfi could now see Earth herself as the tiniest of blue-green dots. He did not try to see it any better, though it was growing to a disc with fantastic speed. He did not want to see it. His eyes were already fogged enough with sentimental tears at the sight of the home sun.

  But his eyes kept coming back to it. At its pole he caught the shine of ice …

  … beep …

  The sound shocked him. The buzzer had already sounded, without his having heard it. The city would cross the solar system within the next two and a half seconds— or less, for he had no idea how many beeps had probed at his ears without response during his hypnotic struggle with the blue-green planet.

  He could only guess, with the fullest impact of his intuition, that now was the time …

  Click.

  “PEOPLE OF EARTH. US THE CITY OF SPACES CALLS UPON YOU …”

  He moved the space stick out and back in a flat loop about three millimeters long. The City Fathers instantly snatched the stick out of his hand. Earth vanished. So did Earth’s sun. Hern VI began to accelerate rapidly, regaining the screeching velocity across the face of the galaxy for which two Okie cities had died.

  “… YOUR NATURAL MASTERS TO OKAY, THE MANS OF STARS, WHO THE UNIVERSE-UNDERSTANDING LONG-LIFE-UNDERSTANDING INHERITORS, THE INFERIOR HOMESTAYING DECADENT EARTH PEOPLES THEREOVER, THE NEW RULERS OF, ARE ABOUT TO BE BECOMING. US INSTRUCTS YOU SOON TO PREPARE —”

  The mouthy voice abruptly ceased to exist. The blue fleck of light which had been Amalfi’s last sight of his ancestral planet had already been gone for long seconds.

  The whole of Hern VI lurched and rang. Amalfi was thrown heavily to the floor of the balcony. The heavy helmet fell askew on his head and shoulders, cutting off his view of the battle in the jungle.

  But he didn’t care. That impact, and the death of that curious voice, meant the real end of the battle in the jungle. It meant the end of any real threat that might have existed for Earth. And it meant the end of the Okie cities—not just those in the jungle, but all of them, as a class, including Amalfi’s own.

  For that impact, transmitted to the belfry of City Hall through the rock of Hern VI, meant that Amalfi’s instant of personal control had been fair and true. Somewhere on the leading hemisphere of Hern VI there was now an enormous white-hot crater. That crater, and the traces of metal salts which were dissolved in its molten lining, held the grave of the oldest of all Okie legends:

  The Vegan orbital fort.

  It would be forever impossible now to know how long the summated, distilled, and purified power of the Vegan military, conquered once only in fact, had been bowling through the galaxy, awaiting this one unrepeatable clear lane to a strike. Certainly no answer to that question could be found on the degenerate planets of Vega itself; the fort was as much a myth there as it had been anywhere else in the galaxy.

  But it had been real all the same. It had been awaiting its one chance to revenge Vega upon Earth, not, certainly, in the hope of re-asserting the blue-white glory of Vega over every other star, but simply to smash the average planet of the average sun which had so inexplicably prevailed o
ver Vega’s magnificence. Not even the fort could have expected to prevail against Earth by itself—but in the confusion of the Okies’ March on Earth, and under the expectation that Earth would hesitate to burn down its own citizen-cities until too late, it had foreseen a perfect triumph. It had swung in from its long, legend-blurred exile, disguised primarily as a city, secondarily as a fable, to make its last bid.

  Residual tremors, T-waves, made the belfry rock gently. Amalfi got to his feet, steadying himself on the railing.

  “O’Brian, cast us off. The planet goes on as she is. Switch the city to the alternate orbit.”

  “To the Greater Magellanic?”

  “That’s right. Make fast any quake damage; pass the word to Mr. Hazleton and Mr. Carrel.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Vegan fortress had nearly won, at that; only the passage of a forlorn and outcast-piloted little world had defeated it. But the Earth would never know more than a fraction of that, only the fraction which was the passage of Hern VI across the solar system. All the rest of the evidence was now seething and amalgamating in a cooling crater on the leading hemisphere of Hern VI; and Amalfi meant to see to it that Hern VI would be lost to Earth forever … As the Earth was lost to Okies, from now on.

  Everyone was in the old office of the mayor: Dee, Hazleton, Carrel, Dr. Schloss, Sergeant Anderson, Jake, O’Brian, the technies; and, by extension, the entire population of the city, through a city-wide, two-way P.A. hook-up; even the City Fathers. It was the first such gathering since the last election; that election having been the one which put Hazleton into office, few present now remembered the occasion very well, except for the City Fathers—and they would be the least likely of all to be able to apply that memory fruitfully to the present meeting. Undertones were not their forte.

  Amalfi began to speak. His voice was gentle, matter-of-fact, impersonal; it was addressed to everyone, to the city as an organism. But he was looking directly at Hazleton.

  “First of all,” he said, “it’s necessary for everyone to understand our gross physical and astronomical situation. When we cut loose from Hern VI a while back, that planet was well on its way toward the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, which, for those of you who come from the northerly parts of the galaxy, is one of two small satellite galaxies moving away from the main galaxy along the southern limb. Hern Six is still on its way there, and unless something unlikely happens to it, it will go right on to the Cloud, through it, and on into deep intergalactic space.

  “We left on it almost all the equipment we had accumulated from other cities while we were in the jungle because we had to. We hadn’t the room to take much of it on board our own city; and we couldn’t stick with Hern VI because Earth will almost certainly chase the planet, either until the planet leaves the galaxy, or until they’re sure we aren’t on it any longer.”

  “Why, sir?” several voices from the G.C. speaker said, almost simultaneously.

  “For a long list of reasons. Our flying the planet across the face of the solar system—as well as our flying it through a number of other systems and across main interstellar traffic areas—was a serious violation of Earth laws. Furthermore, Earth has us chalked up as having sideswiped a city as we went by; they don’t know the real nature of that ‘city.’ And incidentally, it’s important that they never find out, even if keeping it a secret results in our being written up in the history books as murderers.”

  Dee stirred protestingly. “John, I don’t see why we shouldn’t take the credit. Especially since it really was a pretty big thing we did for the Earth.”

  “Because we’re not through doing it yet. To you, Dee, the Vegans are an ancient people you first heard about only three centuries ago. Before that, on Utopia, you were cut off from the main stream of galactic history. But the fact is that Vega ruled much of the galaxy before Earth did, and that the Vegans always were, and have just shown us that they still are, dangerous people to get involved with. That fort didn’t just exist in a vacuum. It had to touch port now and then, just as we do. And being a military machine, it needed more service and maintenance than it could take care of by itself.

  “Somewhere in the galaxy there is a colony of Vega which is still dangerous. That colony must be kept in utter ignorance of what happened to its major weapon. It must be made to live on faith; to believe that the fort failed on its first attempt but may some day be back for another try. It must not know that the fort is destroyed, or it will build another one.

  “The second one will succeed where the first one failed. The first one failed because of the nature of the nomadic kind of culture on which Earth has been depending up to now; the Okies defeated it. We happened to have been the particular city to do the job, but it was no accident that we were on hand to do it.

  “But for quite a while to come, Okies are not going to be effective or even welcome factors in the galaxy as a whole; and the galaxy, Earth in particular, is going to be as weak as a baby all during that period because of the depression. If the Vegans hear that their fort did strike at Earth, and came within a hair’s breadth of knocking it out, they’ll be building another fort the same day they get the news. After that …

  “No, Dee, I’m afraid we’ll have to keep the secret.”

  Dee, still a little rebellious, looked at Hazleton for support; but he shook his head.

  “Our own situation, right now, is neither good nor bad,” Amalfi continued. “We still have Hern VI’s velocity. It’s enough slower than the velocity we hit when we flew the planet of He to make us readily maneuverable, even though clumsily, especially since we’re so much less massive than a planet. We will be able to make any port of call which is inside the cone our trajectory would describe if we rotated it. Finally, Earth has figures only on the path of Hern VI; it has none on the present path of the city.

  “Cast up against that the fact that our equipment is old and faltering, and will never carry us anywhere again under our own steam. When we land at the next port of call, we will be landed for good. We have no money to buy new equipment; without new equipment, we can’t make money. So it will pay us to pick our next stop with great care. That’s why I’ve asked everybody to sit in on this conference.”

  One of the technies said, “Boss, are you sure it’s as bad as all that? We should be able to make some kind of repairs—”

  “THE CITY WILL NOT SURVIVE ANOTHER LANDING,” the City Fathers said flatly. The technie swallowed and subsided.

  “Our present orbit,” Amalfi said, “would lead us eventually out into the greater of the two Magellanic clouds. At our present velocity, that’s about twenty years’ journey away still. If we actually want to go there, we’ll have to plan on that period stretching on by another six years, since the clip at which we’re traveling now is so great that we’d blow out every driver on board if we undertook normal deceleration.

  “I propose that the Greater Magellanic Cloud is exactly where we want to go.”

  Tumult.

  The whole city roared with astonishment. Amalfi raised his hand; those actually in the room quieted slowly, but elsewhere in the city the noise went on for quite a while. It did not seem to be a sound of general protest, but rather the angry buzzing of large numbers of people arguing among themselves.

  “I know how you feel,” Amalfi said when he could be sure most of them could hear him again. “It’s a long way to go, and though there are supposed to be one or two colonies on the near side of the Cloud, there can be no real interstellar commerce there, and certainly no commerce with the main body of the galaxy. We would have to settle down—maybe even take to dirt farming; it would be a matter of giving up being an Okie, and giving up being a starman. That’s a lot to give up, I know.

  “But I want you all to remember that there’s no longer any work, or any hope of work, for us anywhere in the main body of the galaxy, even if by some miracle we manage to put our beat-up old city back into good order again. We have no choice. We must find a planet of our own to settle down
on, a planet we can claim as our own.”

  “ESTABLISH THIS POINT,” the City Fathers said.

  “I’m prepared to do so. You all know what has happened to the galactic economy. It’s collapsed completely. As long as the currency was stable in the main commerce lanes, there was some pay we could work for; but that doesn’t exist any longer. The drug standard which Earth has rigged up now is utterly impossible for the cities, because the cities have to use those drugs as drugs, not as money, in order to stay alive long enough to do business at all. Entirely aside from the possibility of plague—and you’ll remember, I think, what we saw of that not so long ago—there’s the fact that we live, literally, on longevity. We can’t trade on it, too.

  “And that’s only the beginning. The drug standard will collapse, and sooner and more finally than the germanium standard did. The galaxy’s a huge place. There will be new monetary standards by the dozens before the economy gets back onto some stable basis. And there will be thousands of local monetary systems in operation before that happens. The interregnum will last at least a century—”

  “AT LEAST THREE CENTURIES.”

  “Very well, three centuries. I was being optimistic. In either case, it’s plain that we can’t make a living in an economy which isn’t at least reasonably stable, and we can’t afford to sweat out the waiting period before the galaxy jells again. Especially since we don’t know whether the eventual stabilization will have any corner in it for Okies or not.

  “Frankly, I don’t think the Okies have a prayer of surviving. Earth will be especially hard on them after this ‘march,’ which I took pains to encourage all the same because I was pretty sure we could suck in the Vegans with it. But even if there had been no march, the Okies would have been made obsolete by the depression. The histories of depressions show that a period of economic chaos is invariably followed by a period of extremely rigid economic controls —during which all the variables, the only partially controllable factors like commodity speculation, unlimited credit, free marketing, and competitive wages get shut out.