Cities in Flight

“You can’t, not as long as your friends have their friction-field in operation,” Amalfi said. “The plans we gave you were accurate enough, except in one respect: your generator can be operated only in reverse. Instead of allowing molecular valence full play, it freezes molecular relationships as they stand, and creates adherence between all surfaces. If you had been able to put full power into that generator, you would have stopped molecular movement in place, and frozen all of us to death in a split second—but your power sources are rather puny.”

He realized suddenly that his feet were aching violently; the plastic membranes of his shoes were trying to stand away from his flesh, and pressing heavily against his skin. His jaw muscles were aching, too; only the fact that the field traveled over surfaces had protected him from having his teeth jammed away from each other, and even at that it was an effort to part his lips to talk against the pressure.

He inhaled slowly. The jacket creaked again. His ribs ground against his sternum. Then, suddenly, the fabric gave way, and the silver belt which had been stitched into it snapped into a tense hoop around his body. His soles hit the straining carpet heavily, and the air puffed out of his shoes.

He swung his arms experimentally, brushing his hands past his thighs. They moved freely. Only the silver belt maintained its implausible position, girdling the keg of his chest like a stave, soaking up the field.

“Good-by,” he said. “Remember not to move. The cops will let you go in a little while.”

Nandór was not listening. He was watching with bulging eyes the slow amputation of six of his fingers by the rings he was wearing.

There was now, Amalfi knew, no longer than fifteen minutes before the overdriven friction-field would begin to have more serious effects. Normal molecular cohesion could not be disturbed; homogeneous objects—stones, girders, planks—would remain as they were, but things which were made up of fitted parts would soon begin to yield to the pressure driving them away from each other. After that, structures joined by binders of smaller coherence than the coherence of their parts would begin to give way; older buildings, such as City Hall, would become taller and of greater volume as the ancient bricks pulled away from each other—and would collapse the moment the influence of the friction-field was removed. More modern constructions and machines would last only a little longer. By the time the cops inherited Gort, the planet would be a mass of rubble.

And eventually the human body, assembled of a thousand tubes, tunnels, caverns, and pockets, would strain, and swell, and burst—and only a few city men had the silver belt; there had not been time.

Puffing, Amalfi threw himself down the stairs, dodging among the paralyzed, floating guards. The bumblebee sound was very hard on the nerves. At the seventieth floor he found an unexpected problem; the lights on the elevator board told him that the car had been sealed in the shaft, probably by the action of the safety mechanisms when it had been derailed by the friction-field.

Going down by the stairs was out of the question. Even under normal conditions he could never have traveled seventy flights of stairs, and in the influence of the field, his feet moved as if in thick mud, for the belt could not entirely protect his extremities. Tentatively he touched the wall. The same nauseous sucking sensation enfolded his hand, and he pulled it away.

Gravity … the quickest way down …

He entered the nearest office, threading his way among the four suspended, moaning figures who belonged there, and kicked the window out. It was impossible to open it against the field, which had sprung it an inch from its lands; only the amazing lateral strength of glass had preserved the pane, but against a cross-sectional blow, it shattered at once. He climbed out.

It was twenty stories down to the next setback. He planted his feet against the metal, and then his hands. As an afterthought, he also laid his forehead against the wall. He began to slide.

The air whispered in his ears, and windows blinked past him. His palms were beginning to feel warm; they were not actually touching the metal, but the reluctant binding energies were exacting a toll. It was the penalty he had to pay for the heightened pull of friction.

As the setback rushed up to him, he flattened his whole body against the side of the building. The impact of the deck was heavy, but it did not seem to break any bones. He staggered to the parapet and climbed over, without allowing a split second for second thoughts. The long, whistling slide began again.