Cities in Flight

“It was a public bath, Mark says. There’s another one downtown, in the Baruch Houses district, and another one on Forty-first Street beside the Port Authority Terminal, and quite a few others. Mark says they must have been closed up when the city first went aloft. I’ve been using this one to sluice off these women before they’re sent to Medical.”

“With city water?” Even the thought of such waste made his hackles rise.

“Oh no, John, I know better than that. The water’s pumped in from the river to the west.”

“Water for bathing!” Amalfi said. “No wonder the ancients sometimes didn’t have enough to drink. Still, I’d thought the static jet was older than that.”

He surveyed the Hevian women, who, now that the water was turned off, were huddled in the warmest part of the echoing chamber. None of them shared Dee’s gently curved ripeness, but, as usual, some of them showed promise. Hazleton was prescient, it had to be granted. Of course it had been expectable that the Hevians would turn out to be human. Only eleven non-human civilizations had ever been discovered, and of these, only the Lyrans and the Myrdians had any brains to speak of (unless one counted the Vegans; Earth-men did not think of them as human, but all the non-human cultures did; anyhow, they were extinct as a civilization).

But to have the Hevians turn over complete custody of their women to the Okies, without so much as a preliminary conference, at the first contact, had been a colossal break. Hazleton had advanced his proposal to use any possible women as bindlestiff-bait years before any Okie could have known that there were people on He at all.

Well, that was Hazleton’s own psi gift: not true clairvoyance, but an ability to pluck workable plans out of logically insufficient data. Time after time only the seemingly miraculous working-out of some obvious flight of fancy had prevented Hazleton’s being jettisoned by the blindly logical City Fathers.

“Dee, come to Astronomy with me,” Amalfi said. “I’ve got something to show you. And for my sake, put on something, or the men will think I’m out to found a dynasty.”

“All right,” Dee said reluctantly. She was not yet used to the odd Okie standards of exposure, and sometimes appeared nude when it wasn’t customary—a compensation, Amalfi supposed, for her Utopian upbringing, which had taught her that nudity had a deleterious effect upon the purity of one’s politics. The Hevian women moaned and hid their heads while she put on her shorts. Most of them had been stoned for inadvertently covering themselves at one time or another, for in Hevian society women were not people but reminders of damnation, doubly evil for the slightest taint of secretiveness.

History, Amalfi thought, would be more instructive a teacher if it were not so stupefyingly repetitious. He led the way up the corridor, searching for a lift shaft, disturbingly conscious of Dee’s wet soles padding cheerfully behind him.

In Astronomy, Jake was, as usual, peering wistfully at a galaxy somewhere out on the marches of nowhen, trying to turn spiral arms into elliptical orbits without recourse to the calculations section. He looked up as Amalfi and the girl entered.

“Hello,” he said dismally. “Amalfi, I really need some help here. How can a man work without machines? If only you’d turn the City Fathers back on—”

“Shortly. How long has it been since you looked back the way we came, Jake?”

“Not since we started across the Rift. Why, should I have? The Rift is just a scratch in a saucer; you need real distance to work on basic problems.”

“I know that. But let’s take a look. I have an idea that we’re not as alone in the Rift as we thought.”

Resignedly, Jake went to his control desk and thumbed the buttons that moved his telescope. “What do you expect to find?” he demanded. “A haze of iron filings, or a stray meson? Or a fleet of police cruisers?”

“Well,” Amalfi said, pointing to the screen, “those aren’t wine bottles.”

The police cruisers, so close that the light of He’s star had begun to twinkle on their sides, shot across the screen in a brilliant stream, contrails of false photons striping the Rift behind them.

“So they aren’t,” Jake said, not much interested. “Now may I have my scope back, Amalfi?”

Amalfi only grinned. Cops or no cops, he felt young again.

Hazleton was mud up to the thighs. Long ribands of it trailed behind him as he hurtled up the lift shaft to the control room. Amalfi watched him coming, noting the set whiteness of the city manager’s face as he looked up at Amalfi’s bent head.

“What’s this about cops?” Hazleton demanded while still in flight. “The message didn’t get to me straight. We were raided, and all hell’s broken loose everywhere. I nearly didn’t get here straight myself.” He sprang into the room, his boots shedding gummy clods.

“I saw some of the fighting,” Amalfi said. “Looks like the Moving Day rumor reached the ’stiffs, all right.”

“Sure. What’s this about cops?”