Cities in Flight

Now the guesswork had to begin, to be followed rapidly by the outright lying. “Sure you could. But we’d have to have our people back first—Piggy Kingston-Throop and the two women.”

Frad made a quick gesture of dismissal in the dim light. “I’d do that for a starter, not as part of a deal. But look, Chris, this is a complicated business. Your city landed here to do the job we defaulted on. If we do it after all, then somebody doesn’t get paid. Not a likely deal for Amalfi to make.”

“Mayor Amalfi isn’t offering any deal yet. But Frad, you know what our contract with Argus is like. Half of it is to do the job you didn’t do, sure. But the other half of it is to get rid of Scranton. If you turn into a decent town instead of a bindlestiff, we’ll get that part of the money—and it’s the bigger part, now. Naturally the Mayor’d rather do it by finagling than by fighting—if we fight, we’ll need all the money and more just to pay for the damages, both of us. Isn’t that logical?”

“Hmm. I guess it is. But if you want to keep me reasonable, you’d better lay off that word ‘bindlestiff.’ It’s true enough, but it makes me mad all the same. Either we treat as equals, or we don’t treat.”

“I’m sorry,” Chris said. “I don’t know a lot about this kind of thing. The Mayor would have sent somebody else if he’d had anybody who could have gotten in. But there wasn’t anyone but me.”

“Okay. I’m edgy, that’s all. But there’s one thing more, and that’s the colonists. They’re not going to trust us just because we’ve gotten rid of Frank. They don’t know that he’s the problem, and they’ll have no better reason to trust the next city manager. If we’re going to get back the mining part of the contract, Amalfi will have to guarantee it. Would he do that?”

Chris was already in far deeper waters than his conscience could possibly justify. He knew abruptly that he could push no farther into the untrue and the unknown.

“I don’t know, Frad. I never asked, and he didn’t say. I suppose he’d have to ask the City Fathers for an opinion first—and nobody knows what they might say.”

Frad squatted and thought about it, smacking one fist repeatedly into the other palm. After a moment, he seemed about to ask another question, but it never got out.

“Well,” he muttered finally, “every deal has one carrot in it. I guess we take the chance. You’ll have to stay here, Chris. I can knock Barney’s and Huggins’ heads together easy enough, but Frank’s something else again. When the shooting really starts, he might turn out to be a lot faster than I am—and besides, he won’t care what else he hits. If I manage to dump him I’ll come back for you soon enough—but you’d better stay out of sight until it’s over.”

Chris had expected nothing else, but the prospect of again missing all the excitement, while he simply sat and waited, disappointed him all the same. However, it also reminded him of something.

“I’ll stay here. But, Frad, if it doesn’t look as if it’s working, don’t wait till it’s hopeless. Let me know and I’ll try to get help.”

“Well … all right. But better not to have any outsiders visible if it’s going to stick. If anybody in this town sees New York’s finger in this even people who hate Frank’ll be on his side again. We’re all a little crazy around here lately.”

He stood up, his face somber, and picked up the flashlight.

“I hope you’ve got the straight goods,” he said. “I don’t like to do this. Frank trusts me—I guess I’m the last man he does trust. And for some reason I always liked him, even though I knew he was a louse from the very beginning. Some guys hit you that way. It’s not going to be fun, stabbing him in the back. He’s got it coming, sure—but all the same I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t trust you more.”

He swung to the exit into the labyrinth. Chris swallowed and said: “Thanks, Frad. Good luck.”

“Sit tight. I’ll see you.”

Of necessity, Chris did not stay in the hole every minute of the day, but even so he found that he quickly lost track of the passage of time. He ate when he seemed to need to—though most of the food had been removed from the hide-out, Frad had missed one compact cache—and slept as much as possible. That was not very much, however, for now that he was inactive he found himself a prey to more and more anxiety and tension, made worse by his total ignorance of what was going on outside.

Finally he was convinced that the deadline had passed. After this, all possibility of sleep vanished; from minute to minute he awaited the noises of battle joined, or the deepening drone which would mean that Scranton was carrying him off again. The close confines of the hole made the tension even more nightmarish. At the first faint sound in the labyrinth, he jumped convulsively, and would have started like a hare had there been any place to run to.

In the uncertain light of the flash, Frad looked ghastly: he had several days’ growth of beard and was haggard with sleeplessness. In addition, he had a beautiful black eye.