Cities in Flight

Nandór looked alarmed. He pulled a mike from among the pillows and spoke into it for a moment in his own tongue. The answer was inaudible to Amalfi, but after it came, the Hruntan looked less anxious, though his face was still clouded.

“What are you selling me, my man?” he said querulously. “There was no battle. The ships dropped no bombs, did no damage; they have been pursued out as far as the police englobement.”

“Does a deaf man recognize an argument?” Amalfi said. “And how do you dazzle a blind man? You people think that all weapons have to go ‘bang!’ to be deadly. If you’ll look at our power boards, you’ll see records of a million megawatt drain over one half hour at dawn—and we don’t chew up energy at that rate making soup!”

“That’s of no moment,” the Graf murmured. “Such records can be faked, and there are a good many ways of consuming energy anyhow—or wasting it. Let us suppose instead that these ships who ‘attacked’ you landed a spy—eh? And that subsequently a Hruntan scientist, a traitor to his emperor, was taken from your city, perhaps in the hope of carrying him back to Utopia?”

His face darkened suddenly. “You interstellar tramps are childishly stupid. Obviously the Hamiltonian rabble hoped to rescue your city, and were frightened off by our warriors. Schloss may have gone with them—or he may be hiding in the city somewhere. We will have our answer directly.”

He waved at the silent women, who crowded hastily out through the curtained doorway. “Do you care to tell me now where he is?”

“I keep no tabs on Hruntans,” Amalfi said evenly. “Sorting garbage is no part of my duties.”

Coolly Nandór threw the remainder of his wine in Amalfi’s face. The fuming stuff turned his eye sockets into fire. With a roar he stumbled forward, groping for the Hruntan’s throat. The man’s laughter retreated from him mockingly; then he felt heavy hands dragging his arms behind his back.

“Enough,” the Graf said. “Hazca’s chief questioner will make some underling babble, if we have to hang them all up by their noses.” A blast of thunder interrupted him; outside the penthouse, rain roared along the walls like surf, the first such shower the city had experienced in more than thirty years. Through a haze of pain, Amalfi found that he could see the lights again, although the rest of the world was a red blur. “But I think we’d best shoot this one at once—he talks rather more freely than pleases me. Give me your pistol, you there with the lance-corporal’s collar.”

Something moved across Amalfi’s clearing vision, a long shadow with a knot at the end of it—an arm with a pistol. “Any last words?” Nandór said pleasantly. “No? Tsk. Well, then—”

A thousand bumblebees took flight in the room. Amalfi felt his whole body jerk upward. Oddly, there was no pain, and he could still see—things continued to take on definition all around him. The clear sight of the dying? …

“Proszáchá!” Nandór roared. “Egz prá strasticzek Maria, d ó—”

The thunder cut him off again. Somewhere in the room one of the soldiers was whimpering with fright. To Amalfi’s fire-racked sight, everyone and everything seemed to be floating in mid-air. Nandór sprawled rigidly, half-erect, his body an inch or so off the cushions, his clothing standing away from him. The pistol was still pointed at Amalfi, but Nandór was not holding it; it hung immobile above the carpet, an inch away from his frozen fingers. The carpet itself was not on the floor but above it, a sea of fur, every filament of which bristled straight up. Pictures had sprung away from the walls and were suspended. The cushions had risen from the chair and moved away from each other a little, then stopped, as if caught by a stroboscopic camera in the first stages of an explosion; the chair itself was an inch above the rug. At the far side of the room, a bookshelf had burst, and the cans of microfilm were ranked neatly in front of the case, evenly spaced, supported by nothing but the empty air.

Amalfi took a cautious breath. His jacket, which, like Nandór’s, had ballooned away from his chest, creaked a little, but the fabric was elastic enough to stretch. Nandór saw the movement and made a frantic snatch for the pistol. His left forearm was glued to its position above the chair and could not be moved at all. The gun retreated from his free hand, then followed it back obediently as Nandór pulled back for another try.

The second try was an even greater fiasco. Nandór’s arm brushed one of the arms of the chair, and then it, too, was held firmly, an inch away from the wood. Amalfi chuckled.

“I would advise you not to move any more than you can help,” he said. “If you should bring your head too close to some other object, for instance, you would have to spend the rest of your time looking at the ceiling.”

“What … have you done?” Nandór said, choking. “When I get free—”