Cities in Flight

Hazleton scratched his head ruefully. “That’s right. We had the same experience with the Lyran invisibility machine. It never worked until we took Doc Schloss on board.”

“Exactly. The ’stiffs were in too much of a hurry. They didn’t carry their stolen no-fuel drive with them until they found some culture which could perfect it. They tried to use it right away. They were lazy. And they tried to use it inside the biggest spindizzy field ever generated. What happened? It blew up. I felt it happen—and the top of my head nearly came off then and there. If we hadn’t left the ’stiffs parsecs behind in the first split second, Doctor Beetle’s drive would have blown up He at the same time. It doesn’t pay to be lazy, Mark.”

“Who ever said it did?” Hazleton said. After a moment’s more thought, he began to plot the point at which the city would probably re-enter its own galaxy. That point turned out to be a long way away from the Rift, in an area that, after a mental wrench to visualize it backwards from the usual orientation, promised a fair population.

“Look,” he said, “we’ll hit about where the last few waves of the Acolytes settled—remember the Night of Hadjjii?”

Amalfi didn’t, since he hadn’t been born then, but he remembered the history, which was what the city manager had meant. He said, “Good. I want to take us to garage and get that Twenty-third Street machine settled for good and all. I’m tired of its blowing out in the pinches, and it’s going sour for fair now. Hear it?”

Hazleton cocked his head intently. In the lull, Amalfi saw suddenly that Dee was standing in the doorway, still completely en-swathed in her anti-gas suit except for the faceplate.

“Is it over?” she said.

“Well, our stay on He is over. We’re still on the run, if that’s what you mean. The cops never give up, Dee; you’ll learn that sooner or later.”

“Where are we going?”

She asked the question in the same tone in which she had once said, “What is a volt, John?” For an astonishing moment Amalfi was almost overwhelmed with an urge to send Hazleton from the room on some excuse, to return almost bodily to those days of her innocence, to relive all the previous questions that she had asked—the moments when he had known the answers better.

There was, of course, no real answer to this one. Where would an Okie go? They were going, that was all. If there was a destination, no one could know what it was.

He endured the surge of emotion stoically. In the end, he only shrugged.

“By the way,” he said, “what’s the operational day?”

Hazleton looked at the clock. “M plus eleven twenty-five.”

With a sidelong glance, Amalfi leaned forward, resumed the helmet he had cast aside on He, and turned on the City Fathers.

The helmet phones shrilled with alarm. “All right, all right,” he growled. “What is it?”

“MAYOR AMALFI, HAVE YOU TIPPED THIS PLANET?”

“No,” Amalfi said. “We sent it on its way as it was.”

There was a short silence, humming with computation. It was probably just as well, Amalfi thought, that the machines had been turned oft for a while; they had not had a rest in many centuries. They would probably emerge into consciousness a little saner for it.

“VERY WELL. WE MUST NOW SELECT THE POINT AT WHICH WE LEAVE THE RIFT. STAND BY FOR DETERMINATION.”

Hazleton and Amalfi grinned at each other. Amalfi said, “We’re coming in on the last Acolyte stars, and we’ll need to decelerate far beyond spindizzy safety limits. We urgently need an overhaul on the Twenty-third Street driver. Give us a determination for the present social setup there, please—”

“YOU ARE MISTAKEN. THAT CLUSTER IS NOWHERE NEAR THE RIFT. FURTHERMORE, THE POPULACE THERE HAS A LONG RECORD OF MASS XENOPHOBIA AND HAD BEST BE AVOIDED. WE WILL GIVE YOU A DETERMINATION FOR THE FAR RIFT WALL. STAND BY.”

Amalfi removed the headset gently.

“The Rift wall,” he said, moving the microphone away from his mouth. “That was long ago—and far away.”

CHAPTER FIVE: Murphy

ASPINDIZZY going sour makes the galaxy’s most unnerving noise. The top range of the sound is inaudible, but it feels like a multiple toothache. Just below that, there is a screech like metal tearing, which blends smoothly into a composite cataract of plate glass, slate, and boulders; this is the middle register. After that, there is a painful gap in the sound’s spectrum, and the rest of the noise comes into one’s ears again with a hollow round dinosaurian sob and plummets on down into the subsonics, ending in frequencies which induce diarrhea and an almost unconquerable urge to bite one’s thumbs.

The noise was coming, of course, from the Twenty-third Street spindizzy, but it permeated the whole city. It was tolerable only so long as the hold which contained the moribund driver was kept sealed. Amalfi knew better than to open that hold. He surveyed the souring machine via instruments, and kept the audio tap prudently closed. The sound fraction which was thrumming through the city’s walls was bad enough, even as far up as the control chamber.