Cities in Flight

And when the meteors had burned away, the sun was growing.

The world of He was on spindizzy drive, its magnetic moment transformed into momentum. It was the biggest Okie “city” that had ever flown. There was no time to feel alarm. The sun flashed by and was dwindling to a point before the fact could be grasped. Then it was gone. The far wall of the Rift began to swell and separate into individual points of light.

The planet of He was crossing the Rift.

Appalled, Amalfi fought to understand the scale of speed. He failed. The planet of He was moving, that was all he could comprehend. It was moving at a proper cruising speed for a “city” of its size—a speed that gulped down light years as if they were gnats. Even to think of controlling such a flight was ridiculous.

Stars began to wink past He like fireflies. They had reached the other side of the Rift. The planet began to curve gradually away from the main cloud. Then the stars were all behind.

The surface of the saucer that was the galaxy began to come into view.

“Boss! We’re going out of the galaxy! Look—”

“I know it. Get me a fix on He’s old sun as soon as we’re high enough above the Rift to see it again. After that it’ll be too late.”

Hazleton worked feverishly. It took him only half an hour, but during that time, the massed stars receded far enough to make plain the gray scar of the Rift as a long shadow on a spangled ground. At the end the Hevian sun was only a tenth-magnitude point in it.

“Got it, I think. But we can’t swing the planet back. It’ll take us thousands of years to cross to the next galaxy. We’ll have to abandon He, boss, or we’re sunk.”

“All right. Get us aloft. Full drive.”

“Our contract—”

“Fulfilled—take my word for it now. Spin!”

The city sprang aloft. The planet of He did not dwindle in the city’s sky. It simply vanished, snuffed out in the intergalactic gap. Miramon, if he lived, would be the first of a totally new race of pioneers.

Amalfi moved then, back towards the controls, the barium casing cracking and falling off him as he came back to life. The air of the city still stank of Hawkesite, but the concentration of the gas already had been taken down below the harmful level by the city’s purifiers. The mayor began to edge the city away from the vector of He’s flight and the city’s own, back toward the home lens.

Hazleton stirred restlessly.

“Your conscience bothering you, Mark?”

“Maybe,” Hazleton said. “Is there some escape clause in our contract with Miramon that lets us desert him like this? If there is I missed it, and I read the fine print pretty closely.”

“No, there’s no escape clause,” Amalfi said abstractedly, shifting the space stick by a millimeter or two. “The Hevians won’t be hurt. The spindizzy screen will protect them from loss of heat and atmosphere—their volcanoes will keep them warmer than they’ll probably like, and their technology is up to producing all the light they’ll need. But they won’t be able to keep the planet well enough lit to satisfy the jungle. That will die. By the time Miramon and his friends reach the star that suits them in the Andromedan galaxy, they’ll understand the spindizzy well enough to put their planet back into the proper orbit. Or maybe they’ll like roaming better by that time, and will decide to be an Okie planet. Either way, we licked the jungle for them, just as we promised to do, fair and square.”

“We didn’t get paid,” the city manager pointed out. “And it’ll take a lot of fuel to get back to any part of our own galaxy. The bindlestiff got off ahead of us, and got carried way out of range of the cops in the process, right on our backs—with plenty of germanium, drugs, women, the no-fuel drive, everything.”

“No, they didn’t,” Amalfi said. “They blew up the moment we moved He.”

“All right,” Hazleton said resignedly. “You could detect that where I couldn’t, so I’ll take your word for it. But you’d better be able to explain it!”

“It’s not hard to explain. The ’stiffs had captured Doctor Beetle. I was pretty sure they had; after all, they came to He for no other reason. They needed the no-fuel drive, and they knew Doctor Beetle had it because they heard the agronomists’ SOS, just as we did. So they snatched Doctor Beetle when he was landed—do you remember what a big fuss their bandit-city allies made about the other agronomist lifeship, to divert us? It worked, too—and in the meantime they cooked the secret out of him. Probably in his own tank.”

“So?”

“So,” Amalfi said, “the tramps forgot that any Okie city always has passengers like Doctor Beetle—people with big ideas only partially worked out, ideas that need the finishing touches that can only be provided by some other culture. After all, a man doesn’t take passage on an Okie city unless he’s a third-rater, hoping to make his everlasting fortune on some planet where the inhabitants know much less than he does.”