Cities in Flight

THE flying of the city normally was in Hazleton’s hands. In his absence—though it had never happened before—a youngster named Carrel took charge. Amalfi’s own hand rarely touched the stick except in spots where even the instruments could not be trusted.

Running the Earth blockade to the Hruntan planet was no easy job, especially for a green pilot like Carrel, but Amalfi did not greatly care. He huddled in his office and watched the screens through a gray mist, wondering if he would ever be warm again. The baseboards of the room were pouring out radiant heat, but it didn’t seem to do any good. He felt cold and empty.

“Ahoy the Okie city,” the ultraphone barked savagely. “You’ve had one warning. Pay up and clear out of here, or we’ll break you up.”

Reluctantly Amalfi tripped the toggle. “We can’t,” he said uninterestedly.

“What?” the cop said. “Don’t give me that. You’re in a combat area, and you’ve already landed on Utopia in defiance of a Vacate order. Pay your fine and beat it, or you’ll get hurt.”

“Can’t,” Amalfi said.

“We’ll see about that. What’s to prevent you?”

“We have a contract with the Hruntans.”

There was a long and very dead silence. At last the police vessel said, “You’re pretty sharp. All right, proof your contract over on the tape. I suppose you know that we’re about to blow the Hruntans to a thin haze.”

“Yep.”

“All right. Go ahead and land if you’ve got a contract. The more fools you. Make sure you stay for the full contract period. If you do get off before we reduce the planet, make sure you can pay your fine. If you don’t—good riddance, Okie!”

Amalfi managed a ghost of a grin. “Thanks,” he said. “We love you, too, flatfoot.”

The ultraphone growled and stopped transmitting. There was a world of frustration in that final growl. The Earth police accepted officially the Okie cities’ status as hobos—migratory workers—but unofficially and openly the cities were called tramps in the wardrooms of the police cruisers. Opportunities to break up a city did not come very often, and were met with relish; it must have been quite a blow to the cop to find the vanadium-clad, never-varying Contract in his way.

But now there were the Hruntans to cope with. This was the penultimate and most delicate stage of Hazleton’s plan—and Hazleton wasn’t on deck to administer it. As a matter of fact, if his Utopian friends had heard Amalfi admit to a contract with the Hruntans, he was probably in the hottest water of his career right now. Amalfi tried not to think about it.

The plan originally had not included signing any contracts with either planet; so long as the city was not committed legally, it could refuse jobs, leave them when it pleased, and generally exercise the freedom of the unemployed. But it hadn’t worked out that way. The speed with which the police had been reinforced had made it impossible even to approach the Hruntan planet without uncrackable legal protection.

At least the city’s stay on Utopia had accomplished some part of its purposes. The oil tanks were a little over half full, and the city’s treasury was comfortable, though still not exactly bulging. That left the rare-earth and the power metals still to be attended to; collecting and refining them was unavoidably time-consuming, and would take even longer on the Hruntan planet than on Utopia—the Imperial world, farther out from its sun than Utopia, had been given a correspondingly smaller allowance of heavy elements.

But there was no help for it. To stay on Utopia while the Hruntans were being conquered—or “consolidated,” as it was officially called on Earth—would have left the city completely at the mercy of the Earth forces. Even at best, it would have been impossible to leave the system without paying the fine for violating the Vacate order, and Amalfi was constitutionally unwilling to part with the money for which the city had labored. Even at the present state of the treasury, it might easily have bankrupted them, for work had been very scarce lately.

The intercom had been modestly calling attention to itself for several minutes. Answered, it said, “Sergeant Anderson, sir. We’ve got another visitor.”

“Yes,” Amalfi said. “That would be the Hruntan delegation. Send ’em up.”

While he waited, chewing morosely on a dead cigar, he checked the contract briefly. It was standard, requiring payment in germanium “or equivalent”—the give-away clause which had prevented its use on Utopia. It had been signed by ultraphone—the possession of that tight-beam device alone “placed” the Hruntans as to century—and the work the city was to do was left unspecified. Amalfi hoped devoutly that the Hruntans would in turn give themselves away when it came to being specific on that count.