Cities in Flight

For a moment after he fell against the concrete of the sidewalk, he was ready to get up and throw himself over still another cliff. His hands and his forehead were as seared as if they had been dipped in boiling oil, and inside his telfon shoes his feet seemed to be bubbling like lumps of fat in a rendering vat. On the solid ground, a belated vertigo knotted him helplessly for long, valuable minutes.

The building whose flank he had traversed began to groan.

All along the street, men stood in contorted attitudes. It was like the lowest circle of hell. Amalfi got up, retching, and lurched toward the control tower. The bumblebee sound filled the universe.

“Amalfi! Gods of all stars, what happened to you—”

Someone took Amalfi’s arm. Serum from the enormous blister which was his forehead flooded his eyes.

“Mark—”

“Yes, yes. What’s the matter—how did you—”

“Get aloft. Get—”

Pain wrenched him into a ringing darkness.

After a while he felt his head and hands being laved with something cool. The touch was very delicate and soothing. He swallowed and tried to breathe.

“Easy, John. Easy.”

John. No one called him that. A woman’s voice. A woman’s hands.

“Easy.”

He managed a croaking sound, and then a word or two. The hands stroked the coolness across his forehead, gently, monotonously. “Easy, John. It’s all right.”

“Aloft?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s … that? Mark—”

“No,” said the voice. It laughed, surprisingly, a musical sound. “This is Dee, John. Hazleton’s girl.”

“The Hamiltonian girl.” He allowed himself to be silent for a while, savoring the coolness. But there were too many things that needed to be done. “The cops. They should have the planet.”

“They have it. They almost had us. They don’t keep their bargains very well. They charged us with aiding Utopia; that was treason, they said.”

“What happened?”

“Doctor Schloss made the invisibility machine work. Mark says the machine must have been damaged in transit, so the Lyrans didn’t cheat you after all. He hid Doctor Schloss in it—that was your idea, wasn’t it?—and Schloss got bored and amused himself trying to figure out what the machine was for; nobody had told him. He found out. He made the whole city invisible for nearly half an hour before his patchwork connections burned out.”

“Invisible? Not just opaque?” Amalfi tried to think about it. And he had nearly had Schloss killed! “If we can use that—”

“We did. We sailed right through the police ring, and they looked right through us. We’re on our way to the next star system.”

“Not far enough,” Amalfi said, stirring uneasily. “Not if we’re charged with technical treason. Cops will detect us, follow us. Tell Mark to head for the Rift.”

“What is the Rift, John?”

At the word, the bottom seemed to fall out of things, and Amalfi was again sinking into that same pit in which he had been floundering in dream the night that Hazleton had come back to the city. How do you tell a planetbound colonial girl what the Rift is? How do you teach her, in just a few words, that there is a place in the universe so empty and lightless that even an Okie dreams about it? Let it go.

“The Rift is a hole. It’s a place where there aren’t any stars. I can’t explain it any better. Tell Mark we have to go there, Dee.”

There was a long silence. She was frightened, that much was plain. But at last she said, “The Rift. I’ll tell him.”

“He’ll argue. Say it’s an order.”

“Yes, John. The Rift; it’s an order.”

And then she was silent. Somehow she had accepted it. Amalfi was surprised; but the steady, uneventful passage of the cool hands was putting him to sleep. Yet there was still something more …

“Dee?”

“Yes, John.”

“You said— we’re on our way.”

“Yes, John.”

“You, too? Even to the Rift?”

The girl made her fingertips trace a smile upon his forehead. “Me, too,” she said. “Even to the Rift. The Hamiltonian girl.”

“No,” Amalfi said. He sighed. “Not any more, Dee. Now you’re an Okie.”

There was no answer, but the movement of the cool fingers did not hesitate. Under Amalfi the city soared outward, humming like a bee, into the raw night.

CHAPTER THREE: The Rift

EVEN to the men of the flying city, the Rift was awesome beyond all human experience. Loneliness was natural between the stars, and starmen of all kinds were used to it—the star-density of the average cluster was more than enough to give a veteran Okie claustrophobia. But the enormous empty loneliness of the Rift was unique.

To the best of Amalfi’s knowledge, no human being, let alone a city, had ever crossed the Rift before. The City Fathers, who knew everything, agreed. Amalfi was none too sure that it was wise, for once, to be a pioneer.

Ahead and behind, the walls of the Rift shimmered, a haze of stars too far away to resolve into individual points of light. The walls curved gently toward a starry floor, so many parsecs “beneath” the granite keel of the city that it seemed to be hidden in a rising haze of star dust.