Cities in Flight

Still the city manager did not go. “Boss,” he said at last, “the outfit is heavily armed. They could muscle in on us with no trouble.”

“Mark, I’d call you yellow if I didn’t know you were just lazy,” Amalfi growled. He stopped suddenly and peered up the length of Hazleton’s figure to his sardonic, horselike face. “Or are you leading up to something?”

Hazleton grinned like a small boy caught stealing jam. “Well, I did have something in mind. I don’t like ’stiffs, especially killers. Are you willing to entertain a small scheme?”

“Ah,” Amalfi said, relaxing. “That’s better. Let’s hear it.”

“It centers on women. Women are the best possible bindlestiff bait.”

“I grant you that,” Amalfi said. “But what women would you use? Ours? Nix.”

“No, no,” Hazleton said. “This is predicated on there being an inhabited planet going around that star. Are you still with me?”

“I think,” Amalfi said slowly, “that I may even be a meter or so ahead of you.”

The wild star, hurling itself through the Rift on a course that would not bring it to the far wall for another ten thousand Earth years, carried with it six planets, of which only one was even remotely Earthlike. That planet shone deep chlorophyll green on the screens long before it had grown enough to assume a recognizable disc shape. The proxies, called in now, arrived one by one, circling the new world like a swarm of five-meter footballs, eyeing it avidly.

It was everywhere the same: savagely tropical, in the throes of a geological period roughly comparable to Earth’s Carboniferous Era. Plainly, the only habitable planet would be nothing but a way station; there would be no work for pay there.

Then the proxies began to pick up weak radio signals.

Nothing, of course, could be made of the language; Amalfi turned that problem over to the City Fathers at once. Nevertheless, he continued to listen to the strange gabble while he warped the city into an orbit. The voices sounded ritualistic, somehow.

The City Fathers said:

“THIS LANGUAGE IS A VARIANT OF HUMANOID PATTERN G, BUT THE SITUATION IS AMBIGUOUS. GENERALLY WE WOULD SAY THAT THE RACE WHICH SPEAKS IT IS INDIGENOUS TO THE PLANET, A RARE OCCURRENCE, BUT BY NO MEANS UNHEARD OF. THERE ARE TRACES OF FORMS WHICH MIGHT BE DEGENERATES OF ENGLISH, HOWEVER, AS WELL AS STRONG EVIDENCES OF DIALECT MIXTURES SUGGESTING A TRIBAL SOCIETY. THIS LATTER FACT IS NOT CONSONANT WITH THE POSSESSION OF RADIO NOR WITH THE UNDERLYING SAMENESS OF THE PATTERN. UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, WE MUST POSITIVELY FORBID ANY MACHINATION BY MR. HAZLETON ON THIS VENTURE.”

“I didn’t ask them for advice,” Amalfi said. “And what good is a lesson in etymology at this point? Still, Mark, watch your step—”

“‘Remember Thor Five,’” Hazleton said, mimicking the mayor’s father-bear voice to perfection. “All right. Do we land?”

For answer, Amalfi grasped the space stick, and the city began to settle. Nothing that appeared to answer as a ready-made landing area offered itself, and the mayor had already decided that nothing would. He sidled the city downward gently, guiding himself mainly by the increasingly loud chanting in his earphones.

At four thousand meters there was a brief glitter from amid the dark green waves of the treetops. The proxies converged on it slowly, cautious of their prim electronic lives, and on the screens a turreted roof showed—then two, four, a dozen. There was a city there—not an Okie, but a homebody, grown from the earth. Closer views showed it to be walled, the wall standing just inside a clear ring where nothing grew; the greenery between the towers was camouflage.

At three thousand, a flight of small ships burst from the native city like frightened birds, molting feathers of flame. “Gunners!” Hazleton snapped into his mike. “Posts!”

Amalfi shook his head, and continued to bring his city closer to the ground. The fire-tailed birds wheeled around them, weaving a pattern in smoky plumes; yet an Earthman would have thought, not of birds, but of the nuptial flight of drone bees.

Amalfi, who had not seen an Earthly bird or bee for nearly a millennium now, nevertheless sensed the ceremony in the darting cortege. With fitting solemnity, he brought the city to a stop not far from its jungle counterpart, hovering just above the tops of the giant cycads. Then, instead of clearing a landing area with the usual quick scythe of the mesotron rifles, he polarized the spindizzy screen.

The base and apex of the Okie city grew dim. What happened to the giant ferns and horsetails directly beneath it could not be seen—they were flattened into synthetic fossils in the muck in a split second—but those just beyond the rim of the city were stripped of their fronds and splintered, and farther out, in a vast circle, the whole forest bowed low away from the city to a clap of sunlit thunder.