Cities in Flight

The mayor’s suppressed sympathy for the blinded men evaporated when he got a look at the imprisoned Okies. They had been systematically mauled to begin with, and after that sundry little attentions had been paid to them which combined the best features of savagery and decadence. One of them, mercifully, had been strangled by his comrades early in the “questioning.” Another, a basket case, should have been rescued, for he could still talk rationally, but he pleaded so persistently for death that Amalfi had him shot in a sudden fit of sentimentality. Of the other three men, all could walk and talk, but two were mad. The catatonic was carried out on a stretcher, and the manic was bound, gagged, and led gingerly away.

“How did you do it?” asked the rational man in Russian, the dead universal language of Earth. He was a human skeleton, but he radiated an amazing personal force. He had lost his tongue early in the “questioning,” but had already taught himself to talk by the artificial method—the result was weird, but it was intelligible. “The savages were coming down to kill us as soon as they heard your rockets. Then there was a sort of flash, and they all started screaming—a pretty sound, let me tell you.”

“I’ll bet,” Amalfi said. “Do you speak Interlingua? Good, my Russian is rudimentary these days. That ‘sort of a flash’ was a photon explosion. It was the only way we could figure on being sure of getting you out alive. We thought of trying gas, but if they had had gas masks, they would have been able to kill you anyhow.”

“I haven’t actually seen any masks, but I’m sure they have them. There are traveling volcanic gas clouds in this part of the planet, they say; they must have evolved some absorption device—charcoal is well known here. Lucky we were so far underground, or we’d be blind, too, then. You people must be engineers.”

“More or less,” Amalfi agreed. “Strictly, we’re miners and petroleum geologists, but we’ve developed a lot of side lines since we went aloft—like any Okie. On Earth we were a port city and did just about everything, but aloft you have to specialize. Here’s our rocket—crawl in. It’s rough, but it’s transportation. How about you?”

“Agronomists. Our mayor thought there was a good field for it out here along the periphery—teaching the abandoned colonies and the offshoots how to work poisoned soil and manage low-yield crops without heavy machinery. Our side line was waxmans.”

“What are those?” Amalfi said, adjusting the harness around the wasted body.

“Soil-source antibiotics. It was those the bindlestiff wanted—and got. The filthy swine. They can’t bother to keep a reasonably sanitary city; they’d rather pirate some honest outfit for drugs when they have an epidemic. Oh, and they wanted germanium, too, of course. They blew us up when they found we didn’t have any—we’d converted to a barter economy as soon as we got out of the last commerce lanes.”

“What about your passenger?” Amalfi said with studied nonchalance.

“Doctor Beetle? Not that that was his name—I couldn’t pronounce that even when I had my tongue. I don’t imagine he survived. We had to keep him in a tank even in the city, and I can’t quite see him living through a lifeship journey. He was a Myrdian—smart cookies all of them, too. That no-fuel drive of his—”

Outside, a shot cracked, and Amalfi winced. “We’d best take off—they’re getting their eyesight back. Talk to you later. Hazleton, any incidents?”

“Nothing to speak of, boss. Everybody stowed?”

“Yep. Kick off.”

There was a volley of shots, and then the rocket coughed, roared, and stood on its tail. Amalfi pulled a deep sigh loose from the acceleration and turned his head toward the rational man.

He was still securely strapped in, and looked quite relaxed. A brass-nosed slug had come through the side of the ship next to him and had neatly removed the top of his skull.

Working information out of the madmen was a painfully long, anxious process. Even after the manic case had been returned to a semblance of rationality, he could contribute very little.

The life ship had not come to He because of Hazleton’s Dirac warning, he said. The life ship and the burned Okie had not had any Dirac equipment to the best of his knowledge. The life ship had come to He, as Amalfi had predicted, because it was the only possible planetfall in the desert of the Rift. Even so, the refugees had had to use deep-sleep and strict starvation rationing to make it.

“Did you see the ’stiff again?”

“No, sir. If they heard your Dirac warning, they probably figured the police had spotted them and scrammed—or maybe they thought there was a military base or an advanced culture here on the planet.”

“You’re guessing,” Amalfi said gruffly. “What happened to Doctor Beetle?”

The man looked startled. “The Myrdian in the tank? He got blown up with the city, I suppose.”

“He wasn’t put off in another life ship?”

“Doesn’t seem very likely. But I was only a pilot. Could be that they took him out in the mayor’s gig for some reason.”