Cities in Flight

“Above” there was nothing; a nothing as final as the slamming of a door. It was the empty ocean of space that washes between galaxies.

The Rift was, in effect, a valley cut in the face of the galaxy. A few stars swam in it, light millennia apart—stars which the tide of human colonization could never have reached. Only on the far side was there likely to be any inhabited planet, and, consequently, work for the city.

On the near side there was still the police. It was not, of course, the same contingent which had consolidated Utopia and the Duchy of Gort; such persistence by a single squadron of cops, over a trail which had spanned nearly three centuries, would have been incredible for so small a series of offenses on the city’s part. Nevertheless, there was a violation of a Vacate order still on the books, and a little matter of a trick … and the word had been passed. To turn back was out of the question for the city.

Whether or not the police would follow the city even as far as the Rift, Amalfi did not know. It was, however, a good gamble. Crossing a desert of this size would probably be impossible for so small an object as a ship, out of a sheer inability to carry enough supplies; only a city which could grow its own had much chance of surviving such a crossing.

Soberly Amalfi contemplated the oppressive chasm which the screens showed him. The picture came in from a string of proxies, the leader of which was already parsecs out across the gap. And still the far wall was featureless, just beginning to show a faintly granular texture which gave promise of resolution into individual stars at top magnification.

“I hope the food holds out,” he muttered. “If we make this one, it’ll make the most colossal story any Okie ever had to tell. They’ll be calling us the Rifters from one end of the galaxy to the other.”

Beside him, Hazleton drummed delicately upon the arm of his chair. “And if we don’t,” he said, “they’ll be calling us the biggest damned fools that ever got off the ground—but we won’t be in a position to care. Still, we do seem to be in good shape for it, boss. The oil tanks are almost full, and the Chlorella crops are flourishing. Both breeders are running, so there’ll be no fuel problem. And I doubt that we’ll have any mutation trouble in the crops out here—isn’t free-field incidence supposed to vary directly with star-density?”

“Sure,” Amalfi said, irritated. “We won’t starve if everything goes right.” He paused; there had been a stir behind him, and he turned around. Then he smiled.

There was something about Dee Hazleton that relaxed him. She had not yet seen enough actual space cruising to acquire the characteristic deep Okie star-burn, nor yet to lose the wonder of being now, by Utopian standards, virtually immortal, and so she seemed still very pink and young and unharried.

Someday, perhaps, the constant strain of wandering from star to star, from crisis to crisis, would tell on her, as it did upon all Okies. She would not lose the wanderlust, but the wanderlust would take its toll.

Or perhaps her resiliency was too great even for that. Amalfi hoped so.

“Go ahead,” she said. “I’m only kibitzing.”

The word, like a great part of Dee’s vocabulary, was a mystery to Amalfi. He grinned and turned back to Hazleton. “If we hadn’t been sound enough to risk crossing,” he went on, “I’d have let us be captured; we could have paid the fine on the Vacate violation, just barely, and with luck we could have gotten a show-cause injunction against breaking us up slapped on the cops for that ‘treason’ charge. But just look at that damned canyon, Mark. We’ve never been as long as fifty years without a planetfall before, and this crossing is going to take all of the hundred and four the Fathers predicted. The slightest accident, and we’ll be beyond help—we’ll be out where no ship could reach us.”

“There’ll be no accident,” Hazleton said confidently.

“There’s fuel decomposition—we’ve never had a flash fire before, but there’s always a first time. And if that Twenty-third Street spin-dizzy conks out again, it’ll damn near double the time of the crossing—”

He stopped abruptly. Through the corner of his eye, a minute pinprick of brightness poked insistently into his brain. When he looked directly at the screen, it was still there, though somewhat dimmed as its image moved off the fovea centralis of his Retma. He pointed.

“Look—is that a cluster? No, it’s too small and sharp. If that’s a single free-floating star, it’s close.”

He snatched up a phone. “Give me Astronomy. Hello, Jake. Can you figure me the distance of a star from the source of an ultraphone videocast?”

“Why, yes,” the voice on the phone said. “Wait, and I’ll pick up your image. Ah—I see what you’re after: something at ten o’clock, can’t tell what yet. Dinwiddie pickups on your proxies? Intensity will tell the tale.” The astronomer chuckled like a parrot on the rim of a cracker barrel. “Now if you’ll just tell me how many proxies you have ahead, and how far they—”