Cities in Flight

“Mr. Mayor, we’ve gotten an ultracast from some outfit claiming to be refugees from another Okie city—they claim they hit a bindle-stiff and got broken up. They’ve crash-landed on this planet up north, and they’re being mobbed by one of the local bandit towns. They were holding ’em off and yelling for help, and then they stopped transmitting. I thought you ought to know.”

Amalfi heaved himself to his feet almost instantly. “Did you get a bearing on that call?” he demanded.

“Yes sir.”

“Give me the figures. Come on, Mark. That’s our life craft from the city with the no-fuel drive. We need those boys.”

Amalfi and Hazleton grabbed a cab to the edge of the city, and went the rest of the way to the Hevian town on foot, across the supersonics-cleared strip of bare turf which surrounded the walls. The turf felt rubbery. Amalfi suspected that some rudimentary form of friction-field was keeping the mud in a state of stiff gel. He had visions of foot soldiers sinking suddenly into slowly-folding ooze as the fields were turned off, and quickened his pace.

Inside the gates, the Hevian guards summoned a queer, malodorous vehicle which seemed to be powered by the combustion of hydrocarbons, and the Okies were roared through the streets toward Miramon. Throughout the journey, Amalfi clung to a cloth strap in an access of nervousness. Traveling right on a surface at any good speed was a rare experience for him, and the way things zipped past the windows made him jumpy.

“Is this bird out to smash us up?” Hazleton demanded petulantly. “He must be doing all of four hundred kilos an hour.”

“I’m glad you feel the same way,” Amalfi said, relaxing a little. “Actually, I’ll bet he’s doing less than two hundred. It’s just the way the—”

The driver, who had been holding his car down to a conservative fifty out of deference to the strangers from the Great Age, wrenched the machine around a corner and halted it neatly before Miramon’s door. Amalfi got out, his knees wobbly. Hazleton’s face was a delicate puce.

“I’m going to figure out a way to make our cabs operate outside the city,” he muttered. “Every time we make a new planetfall, we have to ride on ox carts, the backs of bull kangaroos, in hot air balloons, steam-driven air-screws, things that drag you feet first and face down through tunnels, or whatever else the natives think is classy transportation. My stomach won’t stand much more.”

Amalfi grinned and raised his hand to Miramon, whose expression suggested laughter smothered with great difficulty.

“What brings you here?” the Hevian said. “Come in. I have no chairs, but—”

“No time,” Amalfi said. “Listen closely, Miramon, because this is going to be complex to explain, and I’m going to have to give it to you fast. You already know that our city isn’t the only one of its type. Well, the fact is that we aren’t even the first Okie city to enter the Rift; there were two others ahead of us. One of them, a criminal city that we call a bindlestiff, attacked and destroyed the other; we were too far away to prevent it. Do you follow me?”

“I think so,” Miramon said. “This bindlestiff is like our bandit cities—”

“Yes, precisely. And as far as we know, it’s still in the Rift, somewhere. Now the city that the ’stiff destroyed had something that we want very badly, and that we must have before the ’stiffs get it. We know that the dead city put off some life craft, and that one of those craft has just landed on your world—and has fallen afoul of one of your own bandit cities. We’ve got to rescue them. They’re the sole survivors of the dead city as far as we know, and it’s vital for us to question them. We need to know what they know about the thing we want—the no-fuel drive—and what they know about where the bindlestiff is now.”

“I see,” Miramon said thoughtfully. “Will this—this bindlestiff follow them to He?”

“We think it will. And it’s powerful—it packs all the stuff we have and more besides. We have to pick up these survivors first, and work out some way to defend ourselves and you people against the ’stiff when it gets here. And above all, we must prevent the ’stiff from getting the secret of that fuelless drive!”

“What would you like me to do?” Miramon said gravely.

“Can you locate the Hevian town that’s holding these people prisoner? We have a fix on it, but only a blurred one. If you can, we’ll be able to get them out of there ourselves.”

Miramon went back into his house—actually, like all the other living quarters in the town, it was a dormitory housing twenty-five men of the same trade or profession—and returned with a map. The map-making conventions of He were anything but self-explanatory, but after a while Hazleton was able to figure out the symbolism involved. “There’s your city, and here’s ours,” he said to Miramon, pointing. “Right? And this peeled-orange thing is a butterfly grid. I’ve always claimed that it was a lot more faithful to spherical territory than our Geographic projection, boss.”