Cities in Flight

“Yeah, I guess so,” the lieutenant said. He detached the bar of faded, dismal purple from over his pocket with clumsy eagerness and put it on the desk. A second later, Hazleton silently handed him the check, which he pocketed without seeming to notice it at all. “Well, be sure you keep a straight course, Okie. C’mon, you guys, let’s get back to the boat.”

The three thugs eased themselves tentatively into the lift shaft and slithered down out of sight through the friction-field wearing expressions of sternly repressed alarm. Amalfi grinned. Quite obviously the principle of molar valence, and frictionators and other gadgets using the principle, were still generally unknown.

Hazleton walked over to the shaft and peered down. Then he said, “Boss, that damn thing is a good-conduct ribbon. The Earth cops issued them by the tens of thousands about three centuries ago to any rookie who could get up out of bed when the whistle blew three days running. Since when is it worth five hundred Oc?”

“Never, until now,” Amalfi said tranquilly. “But the lieutenant wanted to be bribed, and it’s always wise to appear to be buying something when you’re bribing someone. I put the price so high because he’ll have to split it with his men. If I hadn’t offered the bribe, I’m sure he’d have wanted to look at our Violations docket.”

“I figured that; and ours is none too clean, as I’ve been pointing out. But I think you wasted the money, Amalfi. The Violations docket should have been the first thing he asked to see, not the last. Since he didn’t ask for it at the beginning, he wasn’t interested in it.”

“That’s probably exactly so,” Amalfi admitted. He put the cigar back and pulled on it thoughtfully. “All right, Mark, what’s the pitch? Suppose you tell me.”

“I don’t know yet. I can’t square the maintenance of an alert guard, so many parsecs out from the actual Acolyte area, with that slob’s obvious indifference to whether or not we might be on the shady side of the law—or even be bindlestiff. Hell, he didn’t even ask who we were.”

“That rules out the possibility that the Acolytes have been alerted against some one bindlestiff city.”

“It does,” Hazleton agreed. “Lerner was far too easily bribed, for that matter. Patrols that are really looking for something specific don’t bribe, even in a fairly corrupt culture. It doesn’t figure.”

“And somehow,” Amalfi said, pushing a toggle to off, “I don’t think the City Fathers are going to be a bit of help. I had the whole conversation up to now piped down to them, but all I’m going to get out of them is a bawling out for spending money, and a catechism about my supposed hobby. They never have been able to make anything out of voice tone. Damn! We’re missing something important, Mark, something that would be obvious once it hit us. Something absolutely crucial. And here we are plunging on toward the Acolytes without the faintest idea of what it is!”

“Boss,” Hazleton said.

The cold flatness of his voice brought Amalfi swiveling around in his chair in a hurry. The city manager was looking up again at the big screen, on which the Acolyte stars had now clearly separated into individual points. “What is it, Mark?”

“Look there—in the mostly dark area on the far side of the cluster. Do you see it?”

“I see quite a lot of star-free space there, yes.” Amalfi looked closer. There’s also a spectroscopic double, with a red dwarf standing out some distance from the other components—”

“You’re warm. Now look at the red dwarf.”

There was also, Amalfi began to see, a faint smudge of green there, about as big as the far end of a pencil. The screen was keyed to show Okie cities in green, but no city could possibly be that big. The green smudge covered an area that would blank out an average Sol-type solar system.

Amalfi felt his big square front teeth beginning to bite his cigar in two. He took the dead object out of his mouth.

“Cities,” he muttered. He spat, but the bitterness in his mouth did not seem to be tobacco juice after all. “Not one city. Hundreds.”

“Yes,” Hazleton said. “There’s your answer, boss, or part of it. It’s a jungle.

“An Okie jungle.”

Amalfi gave the jungle a wide berth, but he had O’Brian send proxies as soon as the city was safely down below top speed. Had he released the missiles earlier, they would have been left behind and lost, for they were only slightly faster than the city itself. Now they showed a fantastic and gloomy picture.