Cities in Flight

“Easier still to express what you want to remember as a topological relationship,” Amalfi said impatiently. “Nobody ever confuses a table of symbols with the territory. Show Miramon where the signals came from.”

“Up here, on this wing of the butterfly.”

Miramon frowned. “There is only one city there—Fabr-Suithe. A very bad place to approach, even in the military sense. But if you insist on trying, we will help you. Do you know what the end result will be?”

“We’ll rescue our friends, I hope. What else?”

“The bandit cities will come out in force to hinder the Great Work. They oppose it; the jungle is their life.”

“Then why haven’t they impeded us before now?” Hazleton said. “Are they scared?”

“No. They fear nothing—we think they take drugs—but they have seen no way to attack you without huge losses, and their reasons for attacking you have not been sufficiently compelling to make them take the risk up to now. But if you attack one of them, that will give them reason enough. They learn hatred very quickly.”

“I think we can handle them,” Hazleton said coldly.

“I am sure you can,” Miramon said. “But you should be warned that Fabr-Suithe is the leader of all the bandit cities. If Fabr-Suithe attacks you, so will they all.”

Amalfi shrugged. “We’ll chance it. We’ll have to: we must have those men. Maybe we can make it quick enough to crush resistance before it starts. We can pick our own town up and go calling on Fabr-Suithe; if they don’t want to deliver up these Okies—”

“Boss—”

“Eh?”

“How are you going to get us off the ground?”

Amalfi could feel his ears turning red, and swore. “I forgot that Twenty-third Street machine. Miramon, we’ll have to have a task force of your own rockets. Hazleton, how are we going to work this? We can’t fit anything really powerful into a Hevian rocket plane—a pile would go into one easily enough, but a frictionator or a naval-size mesotron rifle wouldn’t, and there’d be no point in taking popguns. Do you suppose we could gas Fabr-Suithe?”

“You couldn’t carry enough gas in a Hevian rocket either. Or carry enough men to make a raid in force.”

“Excuse me,” Miramon said, “but it is not even certain that the priests will authorize the use of our planes against Fabr-Suithe. We had best drive directly over to the temple and ask them for permission.”

“Belsen and bebop!” Amalfi said. It was the oldest oath in his repertoire.

Talk, even with electronic aids, was impossible inside the little rocket. The whole machine roared like a gigantic tam-tam to the vibration of the Venturis. Morosely Amalfi watched Hazleton connecting the mechanism in the nose of the plane with the power-leads from the pile—no mean balancing feat, considering the way the craft pitched in its passage through the tortured Hevian crosswinds. The pile itself, of course, was simple enough to handle; it consisted only of a tank about the size of a glass brick, filled with a fine white froth: heavy water containing uranium ²³⁵ hexafluoride in solution, damped by bubbles of cadmium vapor. Most of its weight was shielding and the peripheral capillary network of the heat-exchanger.

There had been no difficulty with the priests about the little rocket task force itself; the priests had been delighted at the proposal that the emissaries from the Great Age should teach an apostate Hevian city the errors of its ways. Amalfi suspected that the straight-faced Miramon had invented the need for priestly permission just to get the two Okies back into the smelly ground car again and watch their faces during the drive to the temple. Still, the discomforts of that ride had been small compared to this one.

The pilot shifted his feet on the treadles, and the deck pitched. A metal trap rushed back under Amalfi’s nose, and he found himself looking through misty air at a crazily canted jungle. Something long, thin, and angry flashed over it and was gone. At the same time there was a piercing, inhuman shriek, sharp enough to dwarf for a long instant the song of the rocket.

Then there were more of the same: ptsouiiirrr! ptsouiiirrr! ptsouiiirrr! The machine jerked to nearly every one and then shook itself violently, twisting and careening across the jungle top. Amalfi had never felt so helpless before in his life. He did not even know what the noise was; he could only be sure that it was ill-tempered. The coarse blaam of high explosive, when it began, was recognizable—the city had often had occasion to blast on jobs—but nothing in his experience went kerchowkerchowkerchowkerchow, like a demented vibratory drill, and the invisible thing that screamed its own pep yell as it flew— eeeeeeeeyokKRCHackackarackarackaracka— seemed wholly impossible.