Cities in Flight

Hazleton’s hand came over his left shoulder, stabbing a long finger at the recording thermocouple.

“She’s beginning to smoke now. Damned if I know how she’s lasted this long. The model was two hundred years old when we took it aboard—and the repair job I did on He was only an emergency rig.”

“What can we do?” Amalfi said. He did not bother to look around; the city manager’s moods were his own second nature. They had lived together a long time—long enough to learn what learning is, long enough to know that, just as habit is second nature, so nature—the seven steps from chance to meaning—is first habit. The hand which rested upon Amalfi’s right shoulder told him all he needed to know about Hazleton at this moment. “We can’t shut her down.”

“If we don’t, she’ll blow for good and all. That hold’s hot already.”

“Hot and howling …. Let me think a minute.”

Hazleton waited. After another moment, Amalfi said, “We’ll keep her shoving. If the City Fathers can push this much juice through her, maybe they can push just a little more. Maybe enough to get us down to a reasonable cruising speed. Besides—we couldn’t juryrig that spindizzy again. It’s radiating all up and down the line. The City Fathers could shut her down if we ordered it, but it’d take human beings to repair her and re-tune the setup stages. And it’s too late for that.”

“It’ll be a year before anything alive can go into that hold,” Hazleton agreed gloomily. “All right. How’s our velocity now?”

“Negligible, with reference to the galaxy as a whole. But as far as the Acolyte stars proper are concerned—we’d shoot through the whole cluster at about eight times the city’s top speed if we stopped decelerating now. It’s going to be damned tight, that’s for sure, Mark.”

“Excuse me,” Dee’s voice said behind them. She was hesitating just beyond the threshold of the lift shaft. “Is there something wrong? If you’re busy—”

“No busier than usual,” Hazleton said. “Just wondering about our usual baby.”

“The Twenty-third Street machine. I could tell by the curvature of your spines. Why don’t you have it replaced and get it over with?”

Amalfi and the city manager grinned at each other, but the mayor’s grin was short-lived.

“Well, why not?” he said suddenly.

“My gods, boss, the cost,” Hazleton said with incredulity. “The City Fathers would impeach you for suggesting it.” He donned the helmet. “Treasury check,” he told the microphone.

“They’ve never had to run her all by themselves under max overdrive before now. I predict that they’ll emerge from the experience clamoring to have her replaced, even if we don’t eat for a year to pay for it. Besides, we should have the money, for once. We dug a lot of germanium while we were setting up He to be de-wobbled. Maybe the time really has come when we can afford a replacement.”

Dee came forward swiftly, motes of light on the move in her eyes. “John, can that be true?” she said. “I thought we’d lost a lot on the Hevian contract.”

“Well, we’re not rich. We would have been, I’m still convinced, if we’d been able to harvest the anti-gathics on a decent scale.”

“But we didn’t,” Dee said. “We had to run away.”

“We ran away. But in terms of germanium alone, we can call ourselves well off. Well enough off to buy a new spindizzy. Right, Mark?”

Hazleton listened to the City Fathers a moment more, and then took off the bone-mikes. “It looks that way,” he said. “Anyhow, we can easily cover the price of an overhaul, or maybe even of a reconditioned second-hand machine of a later model. Depends on whether or not the Acolyte stars have a service planet, and what the garage fees are there.”

“The fees should be low enough to keep us solvent,” Amalfi said, thrusting his lower lip out thoughtfully. “The Acolyte area is a backwater, but it was settled originally by refugees from an anti-Earth pogrom in the Malar system—an aftermath of the collapse of Vega, as I recall. There’s a record of the pogrom in the libraries of most planets—you reminded me of it, Mark: the Night of Hadjjii—which means that the Acolytes aren’t far enough away from normal trading areas to be proper frontier stars.”

He paused, and his frown deepened. “Now that I come to think of it, the Acolytes were an important minor source of power metals for part of this limb of the galaxy at one time. They’ll have at least one garage planet, Mark, depend on it. They may even have work for the city to do.”

“Sounds good,” Hazleton said. “Too good, maybe. Actually, we’ve got to sit down in the Acolytes, boss, because that Twenty-third Street machine won’t carry us beyond them at anything above a snail’s pace. I asked the City Fathers that while I was checking the treasury. This is the end of the line for that gadget.”

He sounded tired. Amalfi looked at him.

“That’s not what’s worrying you, Mark,” he said. “We’ve always had that problem waiting for us somewhere in the future, and it isn’t one that’s difficult of solution. What’s the real trouble? Cops, maybe?”