Cities in Flight

He walked toward the grounded city, heavy with sunlight, sunk in reflection. He was now about nine hundred years old, give or take fifty; strong as an ox, mentally alert and active., in good hormone balance, all twenty-eight senses sharp, his own special psi faculty—orientation—still as infallible as ever, and all in all as sane as a compulsively peripatetic starman could be. The anti-agathics would keep him in this shape indefinitely, as far as anyone knew—but the problem of patience had never been solved.

The older a man became, the more quickly he saw answers to tough questions because the more experience he had to bring to bear on them; and the less likely he was to tolerate slow thinking among his associates. If he were sane, his answers were generally right answers—if he were unsane, they were not; but what mattered was the speed of the thinking itself. In the end, both the sane and the unsane became equally dictatorial, less and less ready to explain why they picked one answer over another.

It was funny: before death had been indefinitely postponed, it had been thought that memory would turn longevity into a Greek gift, because not even the human brain could remember a practical infinity of accumulated facts. Nowadays, however, nobody bothered to remember many facts. That was what the City Fathers and like machines were for: they stored data. Living men memorized nothing but processes, throwing out obsolete ones for new ones as invention made it necessary. When they needed facts, they asked the machines.

In some cases, even processes were wiped from human memory to make more room if there were simple, indestructible machines to replace them—the slide rule, for instance. Amalfi wondered suddenly if there was a single man in the city who could multiply, divide, take square root, or figure p H in his head or on paper. The thought was so novel as to be alarming—as novel as if an ancient astrophysicist had seriously wondered how many of his colleagues could run an abacus.

No, memory was no problem. But it was hard to be patient after a thousand years.

The bottom of an airlock drifted into his field of view, plastered with brown tendrils of mud. He looked up. The lock, drilled directly into the great granite disc which was the foundation of the city, was a severed end of what had been a subway line running out of Manhattan centuries ago; this one evidently had been the Astoria line of the BMT, a lock seldom used, since it was too far from both the Empire State and City Hall, the city’s two present centers of control. It was certainly a long way around the perimeter from where Amalfi had expected to go back on board. Feeling like a stranger, he went in.

Inside, the corridor rang with bloodcurdling shrieks which echoed endlessly. It was as if somebody were flaying a live dinosaur, or, better, a pack of them. Underneath the noise there was a sound like water being expelled under high pressure, and someone was laughing hysterically. Alarmed, Amalfi ran up the nearest steps; the noise got louder. He hunched his bull shoulders and burst through the door behind which the butchery seemed to be going on.

Surely there had never been such a place in the city. It was a huge, steamy chamber, walled with some ceramic substance placed in regular tiles. The tiles were slimy and stained, hence, old—very old. On the floor, smaller hexagonal white tiles made an endlessly repeating mosaic, reminding Amalfi at once of the structural formula of Hawkesite.

Hordes of nude women ran aimlessly back and forth in the chamber, screaming, battering at the wall, dodging wildly, or rolling on the mosaic floor. Every so often a thick stream of water caught one of them, bowling her howling away. Overhead, long banks of nozzles sprayed needles of mist into the air; Amalfi was soaking wet almost at once. The laughter got louder.

The mayor bent quickly, threw off his muddy shoes, and stalked the laughter, his toes gripping the slippery tiles. The heavy column of water swerved toward him, then was warped away again.

“John! Do you need a bath so badly? Come join the party!”

It was Dee Hazleton. She was as nude as any of her victims, and was gleefully plying an enormous hose. She looked lovely; Amalfi turned his mind determinedly away from that thought.

“Isn’t this fun? We just got a new batch of these creatures. I got Mark to have the old fire hose connected, and I’ve been giving them their first wash.”

It did not sound much like the old Dee. Amalfi expressed his opinion of women who lost their inhibitions with such drastic thoroughness. He went on at some length, and Dee made as if to turn the hose on him again.

“No, you don’t,” he growled, wresting it from her. It proved extremely hard to manage. “What is this place, anyhow? I don’t recall any such torture chamber in the plans.”