Cities in Flight

“Mayor Amalfi,” the girl said. Amalfi turned unwillingly. “You said when I first met you that there was a place for women in this city. Do you remember?”

“I remember,” Amalfi said. “But you wouldn’t like our politics, I’m sure. This is not a Hamiltonian state. It’s stable, self-sufficient, static—a beachcomber by the seas of history. We’re Okies. Not a nice name.”

The girl said, “It may not always be so.”

“I’m afraid it will. Even the people don’t change much, Dee. I suspect that you haven’t been told this before, but the great majority of them are well over a century old. I myself am nearly seven hundred. And you would live as long if you joined us.”

Dee’s face was a study in mixed shock and incredulity, but she said doggedly, “I’ll stay.”

The sky began to pale slightly. No one spoke. Aloft, the stars were dimming, and there was no sign to show that a tiny fleet of ships was dwindling away into the boundless universe.

Hazleton cleared his throat. “What’s for me to do, boss?” he said hoarsely.

“Plenty. I’ve been making do with Carrel, but though he’s willing, he lacks experience. First of all, make us ready to take off at the very first notice. Then cudgel your brains to think up something to tell the Hruntans about this Utopian fleet. You can fancy up my excuse, or think up one of your own—I don’t care which. You’re better at that kind of thing than I ever was.”

“So what’s supposed to happen at noon?”

Amalfi grinned. He realized with a subdued shock that he felt good. Getting Hazleton back was like finding a flawed diamond that you’d thought you’d lost—the flaw was still there and would never go away, but still the diamond had been the cleanest-cutting tool in the house, and had had a certain sentimental value.

“It goes like this. Carrel sold the Hruntans on building a master friction-field generator for the whole planet—said it would make their machines consume less power, or some such nonsense. The plans he gave them call for a generator at least twice as powerful as the Hruntans think it is, and with nearly all the controls left off. It will run only one way: full positive. Tomorrow at noon they’re scheduled to give it a trial run.

“In the meantime, there’s a Hruntan named Schloss who probably has the machine tabbed for what it actually is, and we’ve set up the old double-knife trick to get him out of the picture. It’s my guess that this should start a big enough rhubarb among the scientists to keep them from prying until it’s too late. Since this whole deal looked as though it would work out the same way that the Utopian landing would have, I also called the cops according to your timetable and got a safe-conduct. Simple?”

Halfway through the explanation, Hazleton was far enough back to normal to begin looking amused. When it was over, he was chuckling.

“That’s a honey,” he said. “Still, I can see why you weren’t too satisfied with Carrel. Amalfi, you’re a prime bluffer. Telling me to go off with Savage in that dramatic fashion! Do you know that your fancy plot isn’t going to come off?”

“Why, Mark?” Dee said. “It sounds perfect to me.”

“It’s clever, but it’s full of loose ends. You have to look at these things like a dramatist; a climax that almost comes off is no climax. We’d better—”

In the bedroom, Amalfi’s private phone chimed melodiously, and a neon bulb went on over the balcony doorway. Amalfi frowned and flicked a switch on the railing.

“Mr. Mayor?” a concealed speaker said nervously. “Sorry to wake you up, but there’s trouble. First of all, at least twenty ships were over here a while back; we were going to call you for that, but they went away on their own. But now we’ve got a sort of a refugee, a Hruntan who calls himself Doctor Schloss. He claims the other Hruntans are all out to get him and he wants to work for us. Shall I send him to Psych or what? It might just be true.”

“Of course it’s true,” Hazleton said. “There’s your first loose end, Amalfi.”

The affair of Dr. Schloss proved difficult to untangle; Amalfi had not studied his man closely enough. Carrel’s agent had done a thorough job of counterfeiting local politics. It was always preferable, when the city needed a man’s death, to so arrange matters that the actual killing was done by an outsider, and in this case that had proven absurdly easy to arrange. There were four separate cliques within the scientific hierarchy of Gort, all of them undercutting each other with fanatical perseverance, like shipmates trying to do for each other by boring holes in the hull. In addition, the court itself did not trust Dr. Schloss, and took sides sporadically when the throat-cutting became overt.

It had been simple enough to set currents in motion which would sweep Dr. Schloss away, but Schloss had declined to be swept. The moment he became aware of any threat, he had come with disconcerting directness to the city.