Cities in Flight

The way he said it made it sound fit only to be scrawled on sidewalks. The phone was silenced; Amalfi hung it on its hook on the railing and thudded back down the archaic stone steps which led from the belfry/bridge.

Hazleton was waiting for him in the mayor’s office, drumming slim fingers upon the desk top. The current city manager was an excessively tall, slender, disjointed sort of man. Something in the way his limbs were distributed over Amalfi’s chair made him also look lazy. If taking devious pains was a sign of laziness, Amalfi was quite willing to call Hazleton the laziest man in the city.

Whether he was lazier than anybody outside the city didn’t matter. Nothing that went on outside the city was of real importance any more.

Hazleton said, “Well?”

“Well enough.” Amalfi grunted. “It’s a nice yellow dwarf star, with all the fixings.”

“Sure,” Hazleton said with a wry smile. “I don’t see why you insist on taking a personal look at every star we go by. There are screens right here in the office, and the City Fathers have all the data. We knew even before we could see this sun what it was like.”

“I like a personal look,” said Amalfi. “I haven’t been mayor here for five hundred years for nothing. I can’t really tell about a sun until I see it with my own eyes. Then I know. Images don’t mean a thing—no feel to ’em.”

“Nonsense,” Hazleton said, without malice. “And what does your feelership say about this one?”

“It’s a good sun; I like it. We’ll land.”

“All right, suppose I tell you what’s going on out there?”

“I know, I know,” Amalfi said. His heavy voice took on a finicky, nervous tone, his own exaggerated version of the mechanical speech of the City Fathers. “ ‘THE POLITICAL SIT-UATION IS VER-Y DISTURBING.’ It’s the food situation that I’m worried about.”

“Oh? Is it so bad, then?”

“It’s not bad yet. It will be, unless we land. There’s been another mutation in the Chlorella tanks; must have started when we passed through that radiation field near Sigma Draconis. We’re getting a yield of about twenty-two hundred kilograms per acre in terms of fats.”

“That’s not bad.”

“Not bad, but it’s dropping steadily, and the rate of decrease is accelerating. If it’s not arrested, we won’t have any algae crops at all in a year or so. And there’s not enough crude-oil reserve to tide us over to the next nearest star. We’d hit there eating each other.”

Hazleton shrugged. “That’s a big if, boss,” he said. “We’ve never had a mutation we couldn’t get under control before. And it’s very nasty on those two planets.”

“So they’re having a war. We’ve been through that kind of situation before. We don’t have to take sides. We land on the planet best suited—”

“If it were an ordinary interplanetary squabble, okay. But as it happens, one of those worlds—the third from the sun—is a sort of free-living polyp of the old Hruntan Empire, and the inner one is a survivor of the Hamiltonians. They’ve been fighting for a century, on and off, without any contact with Earth. Now—the Earth’s found them.”

“And?” Amalfi said.

“And it’s cleaning them both out,” Hazleton said grimly. “We’ve just received an official police warning to get the hell out of here.”

Above the city the yellow sun was now very much smaller. The Okie metropolis, skulking out from the two warm warring worlds under one-quarter drive, crept steadily into hiding within the freezing blue-green shadow of one of the ruined giant planets of the system. Tiny moons, a quartet of them, circled in a gelid minuet against the chevrons of ammonia-storms that banded the gas giant.

Amalfi watched the vision screens tensely. This kind of close maneuvering, involving the balancing of the city against a whole series of conflicting gravitational fields, was very delicate, and not the kind of thing to which he was accustomed; the city generally gave gas giants a wide berth. His own preternatural “feel” for the spatial conditions in which he spent his life must here be abetted by every electronic resource at its command.

“Too heavy, Twenty-third Street,” he said into the mike. “You’ve got close to a two-degree bulge on your arc of the screen. Trim it.”

“Trim, boss.”

Amalfi watched the image of the giant planet and its chill handmaidens. A needle tipped gently.

“Cut!”

The whole city throbbed once and went silent. The silence was a little frightening: the distant hum of the spindizzies was a part of the expected environment, and when it was damped, one felt a strange shortness of breath, as if the air had gone bad. Amalfi yawned involuntarily, his diaphragm sucking against an illusory shortage of oxygen.

Hazleton yawned, too, but his eyes were glittering. Amalfi knew that the city manager was enjoying himself now; the plan had been his, and so he no longer cared that the city might be in serious danger from here on out. He was taking lazy folks’ pains.