Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “Our city represents nearly the ultimate in competitive labor. Even if it lasts through the interregnum—which it can’t—it will be an anachronism in the new economy. It will almost surely be forced to berth down on some planet selected by the government. My own proposition is simply that we select our own berth, long before the government gets around to enforcing its own selection; that we pick a place hundreds of parsecs away from the outermost boundary-surface that government will think to claim; a place which is retreating steadily and at good speed from the center of that government and everything it will eventually want to claim; and that once we get there, we dig in. There’s a new imperialism starting where we used to be free; to stay free, we’ll have to go out beyond any expectable frontier and start our own little empire.

  “But let’s face it. The Okies are through.”

  Nobody said anything. Stunned faces scanned stunned faces.

  Then the City Fathers said calmly, “THE POINT IS ESTABLISHED. WE ARE NOW MAKING AN ANALYSIS OF THE SELECTED AREA, AND WILL HAVE A REPORT FROM THE ASSIGNED SECTION IN FOUR TO FIVE WEEKS.”

  Still the silence persisted in the big chamber. The Okies were testing it—almost tasting it. No more roaming. A planet of their own. A city at rest, and a sun to come up and go down over it on a regular schedule; seasons; a quietness free of the eternal whirling of gravity fields. No fear, no fighting, no defeat, no pursuit; self-sufficiency—and the stars only points of light forever.

  A planetbound man presented with a similar revolution in his habits would have rejected it at once, terrified. The Okies, however, were used to change; change was the only stable factor in their lives. It is the only stable factor in the life of a planetbound man, too, but the planetbound man has never had his nose rubbed in it.

  Even so, had they not been in addition virtually immortal—had they been, like the people of the old times before space travel, pinned like insects on a spreading-board to a lifespan of less than a century—Amalfi would have been afraid of the outcome. A short lifespan leads to restlessness; somewhere within the next few years, there has to be some El Dorado for the ephemerid. But the conquest of age had almost eliminated that Faustian frenzy. After three or four centuries, people grew tired of searching for the un-namable; they learned—they began to think of the future not as holding a haven of placidity and riches, but simply as the realm of things that had not happened yet. They became interested in the budding, the unfolding present, and thought about the future only with an attitude of indifferent acceptance toward whatever catastrophe it might bring. They no longer burned out their lives seeking catastrophe, under the name of “security.”

  In short, they grew a little more realistic, and more than a little tired.

  Amalfi waited with calm confidence. The smallest objections, he knew, would come first. He was not anxious to have to cope with them, and the silence had lasted so much longer than he had expected that he began to wonder if his argument had become too abstract toward the end. If so, a note of naive practicality at this point should be proper ….

  “This solution should satisfy almost everyone,” he said briskly. “Hazleton has asked to be relieved of his post, and this will certainly relieve him of it most effectively. It takes us out of the jurisdiction of the cops. It leaves Carrel as city manager if he still wants the post, but it leaves him manager of a grounded city, which satisfies me, since I’ve no confidence in Carrel as a pilot. It—”

  “Boss, let me interrupt a minute.”

  “Go ahead, Mark.”

  “What you say is all very well, but it’s too damned extreme. I can’t see any reason why we have to go so far afield. Granted that the Greater Magellanic is off the course Hern VI is following; granted that it’s pretty remote, granted that even if the cops do go looking for us there, it’s too big and unpopulated and complex for them to hope to find us. But couldn’t we accomplish the same thing without leaving the galaxy? Why do we have to take up residence in a cloud that’s moving away from the galaxy at some colossal speed—”

  “THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR MILES PER SECOND.”

  “Oh, shut up. All right, so that’s not very fast. Still and all, the cloud is a long way away—and if you give me the exact figures, I’ll bust all your tubes—and if we ever want to get back to the galaxy again, we’ll have to fly another planet to do it.”

  “All right,” Amalfi said. “What’s your alternative?”

  “Why don’t we hide out in a big cluster in our own galaxy? Not a picayune ball of stars like the Acolyte cluster, but one of the big jobs like the Great Cluster in Hercules. There must be at least one such in the cone of our present orbit; there might even be a Cepheid cluster where spindizzy navigation would be impossible for anybody who didn’t know the local space strains. We’d be just as unlikely to be traced by the cops, but we’d still be on hand inside our own galaxy if conditions began to look up.”

  Amalfi did not choose to contest the point. Logically, it should be Carrel, who was being deprived of the effective command of a flying city, who should be raising this objection. The fact that the avowedly retired Hazleton had brought it up first was enough for Amalfi.

  “I don’t care if conditions ever do look up,” Dee said, unexpectedly. “I like the idea of our having a planet of our own, and I’d want it to be as far away from the cops as we could possibly make it. If that planet really does become ours, would it make any difference to us whether Okie cities become possible again two or three centuries from now? We wouldn’t need to be Okies any longer.”

  “You’d say that,” Hazleton said, “because you haven’t lived more than two or three centuries yet, and because you’re still used to living on a planet. Some of the rest of us are older; some of the rest of us like wandering. I’m not speaking for myself, Dee, you know that. I’ll be happy to get off this junk pile. But this whole proposition has a faint smell to me. Amalfi, are you sure you aren’t forcing us to set down simply to block a change of administration? It won’t, you know.”

  Amalfi said, “Of course, I know. I’m submitting my resignation along with yours the moment we touch ground. Right now I’m still an officer of this city, and I’m doing the job I’ve been assigned to do.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. Let it go. What I still want to know is why we have to go all the way out to the Greater Magellanic.”

  “Because it’ll be ours,” Carrel said abruptly. Hazleton swung on him, obviously astonished; but Carrel’s rapt eyes did not see the older man. “Not only our planet—whichever one we choose—but our galaxy. Both the Magellanics are galaxies in little. I know; I’m a southerner, I grew up on a planet where the Magellanics went across the night sky like tornadoes of sparks. The Greater Magellanic even has its own center of rotation; I couldn’t see it from my home planet because we were too close, but from Earth it has a distinct Milne spiral. And both clouds are moving away, taking on their own independence from the main galaxy. Hell, Mark, it isn’t a matter of one planet. That’s nothing. We won’t be able to fly the city, but we can build spaceships. We can colonize. We can settle the economy to suit ourselves. Our own galaxy! What more could you want?”

  “It’s too easy,” Hazleton said stubbornly. “I’m used to fighting for what I want. I’m used to fighting for the city. I want to use my head, not my back; your spaceships, your colonization, those things are going to be preceded by a lot of plain and simple weeding and plowing. There’s the core of my objection to this scheme, Amalfi. It’s wasteful. It commits us to a situation where most of what we’ll have to do will be outside of our experience.”

  “I disagree,” Amalfi said quietly. “There are already colonies in the Greater Magellanic. They weren’t set up by spaceships. They were set up by cities. No other mechanism could have made the trip at all in those days.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s no chance that we’ll be able to settle down placidly and get out our hoes. We’ll have to fight to make any part of the Cloud our own. It’s goi
ng to be the biggest fight we’ve ever had, because we’ll be fighting Okies—Okies who probably have forgotten most of their history and their heritage, but Okies all the same, Okies who had this idea long before we did and who are going to defend their patent.”

  “As they have a right to do. Why should we poach on them when a giant cluster would serve us just as well? Or nearly as well?”

  “Because they are poachers themselves—and worse. Why would a city go all the way to the Greater Magellanic in the old days, when cities were solid citizens of the galaxy? Why didn’t they settle down in a giant cluster? Think, Mark! They were bindlestiffs. Cities who had to go to the Greater Magellanic because they had committed crimes that made every star in the main galaxy their enemies. You could name one such city yourself, and one you know must be out there in that cloud: the Interstellar Master Traders. And not only because Thor Five still remembers it, but because every sentient being in the galaxy burns for the blood of every last man on board it. Where else could it have gone but the Greater Magellanic, even though it starved itself for fifty years to make the trip?”

  Hazleton began kneading his hands, slowly, but with great force. His knuckles went alternately white and red as his fingers ground over them.

  “Gods of all stars,” he said. His lips thinned. “The Mad Dogs. Yes. They went there if they went any place. Now there’s an outfit I’d like to meet.”

  “Bear in mind that you might not, Mark. The Cloud’s a big place.”

  “Sure, sure. And there may be a few other bindlestiffs, too. But if the Mad Dogs are out there, I’d like to meet them. I remember being taken for one of them on Thor Five; that’s a taste I’d like to get out of my mouth. I don’t care about the others. Except for them, the Greater Magellanic is ours, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “A galaxy,” Dee murmured, almost soundlessly. “A galaxy with a home base, a home base that’s ours.”

  “An Okie galaxy,” Carrel said.

  The silence sifted back over the city. It was not a contentious silence now. It was the silence of a crowd in which each man is thinking for and to himself.

  “HAVE MESSRS. HAZLETON AND CARREL ANY FURTHER ADDITIONS TO THEIR PLATFORMS?” the City Fathers blared, their vodeur-voice penetrating flatly into every cranny of the hurtling city. As Amalfi had expected, the extended discussion of high policy had convinced the City Fathers that the election was for the office of mayor, rather than for that of city manager. “IF NOT, AND IF THERE ARE NO ADDITIONAL CANDIDATES, WE ARE READY TO PROCEED WITH THE TABULATION.”

  For a long instant, everyone looked very blank. Then Hazleton too recognized the mistake the City Fathers had made. He began to chuckle.

  “No additions,” he said. Carrel said nothing; he simply grinned, transported.

  Ten seconds later, John Amalfi, Okie, was the mayor-elect of an infant galaxy.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: IMT

  THE city hovered, and then settled silently through the early morning darkness toward the broad expanse of heath which the planet’s Proctors had designated as its landing place. At this hour, the edge of the misty acres of diamonds which were the Lesser Magellanic Cloud was just beginning to touch the western horizon; the whole cloud covered nearly 35º of the sky. The cloud would set at 0512; at 0600 the near edge of the home galaxy would rise, but during the summer, the suns rose earlier.

  All of which was quite all right with Amalfi. The fact that no significant amount of the home galaxy could begin to show in the night sky for months to come was one of the reasons why he had chosen this planet to settle on. The situation confronting the dying city now, and its citizens, too, posed problems enough without its being recomplicated by an unsatisfiable homesickness.

  The city grounded, and the last residual hum of the spindizzies stopped. From below there came a rapidly rising and more erratic hum of human activity, and the clank and roar of heavy equipment getting under way. The geology team was losing no time, as usual.

  Amalfi, however, felt no disposition to go down at once. He remained on the balcony of City Hall looking at the thickly set night sky. The star-density in the Greater Magellanic was very high, even outside the clusters—often, the distances between stars were matters of light months rather than light years. Even should it prove impossible to move the city itself again—which was inevitable, considering that the Sixtieth Street spindizzy had just followed the Twenty-third Street machine into the junk pit—it should be possible to set interstellar commerce going here by cargo ship. The city’s remaining drivers, ripped out and remounted on a one-per-hull basis, would provide the nucleus of quite a respectable little fleet.

  It would not be much like cruising among the far-scattered, various civilizations of the Milky Way had been, but it would be commerce of a sort, and commerce was the Okies’ oxygen.

  He looked down. The brilliant starlight showed that the blasted heath extended all the way to the horizon in the west; in the east it stopped about a mile away and gave place to land regularly divided into tiny squares. Whether each of these minuscule fields represented an individual farm he could not tell, but he had his suspicions. The language the Proctors had used in giving the city permission to land had had decidedly feudal overtones.

  While he watched, the black skeleton of some tall structure erected itself swiftly near by, between the city and the eastern stretch of the heath. The geology team already had its derrick in place. The phone at the balcony’s rim buzzed, and Amalfi picked it up.

  “Boss, we’re going to drill now,” the voice of Hazleton said. “Coming down?”

  “Yes. What do the soundings show?”

  “Nothing very hopeful, but we’ll know for sure shortly. This does look like oil land, I must say.”

  “We’ve been fooled before,” Amalfi grunted. “Start boring; I’ll be right down.”

  He had barely hung up the phone when the burring roar of the molar drill violated the still summer night, echoing calamitously among the buildings of the city. It was almost certainly the first time any planet in the Greater Magellanic had heard the protest of collapsing molecules, though the technique had been a century out of date back in the Milky Way.

  Amalfi was delayed by one demand and another all the way to the field, so that it was already dawn when he arrived. The test bore had been sunk and the drill was being pulled up again; the team had put up a second derrick, from the top of which Hazleton waved to him. Amalfi waved back and went up in the lift.

  There was a strong, warm wind blowing at the top, which had completely tangled Hazleton’s hair under the earphone clips. To Amalfi, it could make no such difference, but after years of the city’s precise airconditioning, it did obscure things to his emotions.

  “Anything yet, Mark?”

  “You’re just in time. Here she comes.”

  The first derrick rocked as the long core sprang from the earth and slammed into its side girders. There was no answering black fountain. Amalfi leaned over the rail and watched the sampling crew rope in the cartridge and guide it back down to the ground. The winch rattled and choked off, its motor panting.

  “No soap,” Hazleton said disgustedly. “I knew we shouldn’t have trusted the damned Proctors.”

  “There’s oil under here somewhere all the same,” Amalfi said. “We’ll get it out. Let’s go down.”

  On the ground, the senior geologist had split the cartridge and was telling his way down the boring with a mass-pencil. He shot Amalfi a quick reptilian glance as the mayor’s blocky shadow fell across the table.

  “No dome,” he said succinctly.

  Amalfi thought about it. Now that the city was permanently cut off from the home galaxy, no work that it could do for money would mean a great deal to it; what was needed first of all was oil, so that the city could eat. Work that would yield good returns in the local currency would have to come much later. Right now the city would have to work for payment in drilling permits.

  At the first contact that had seemed to be easy enough. Th
is planet’s natives had never been able to get below the biggest and most obvious oil-domes, so there should be plenty of oil left for the city. In turn, the city could throw up enough low-grade molybedenum and wolfram as a byproduct of drilling to satisfy the terms of the Proctors.

  But if there was no oil to crack for food …

  “Sink two more shafts,” Amalfi said. “You’ve got an oil-bearing till down there, anyhow. We’ll pressure jellied gasoline into it and split it. Ride along a Number Eleven gravel to hold the seam open. If there’s no dome, we’ll boil the oil out.”

  “Steak yesterday and steak tomorrow,” Hazleton murmured. “But never steak today.”

  Amalfi swung upon the city manager, feeling the blood charging upward through his thick neck. “Do you think you’ll get fed any other way?” he growled. “This planet is going to be home for us from now on. Would you rather take up farming like the natives? I thought you outgrew that notion after the raid on Gort.”

  “That isn’t what I meant,” Hazleton said quietly. His heavily space-tanned face could not pale, but it blued a little under the taut, weathered bronze. “I know just as well as you do that we’re here for good. It just seemed funny to me that settling down on a planet for good should begin just like any other job.”

  “I’m sorry,” Amalfi said, mollified. “I shouldn’t be so jumpy. Well, we don’t know yet how well off we are. The natives never have mined this planet to anything like paydirt depth, and they refine stuff by throwing it into a stewpot. If we can get past this food problem, we’ve still got a good chance of turning this whole Cloud into a tidy corporation.”