Cities in Flight

Amalfi turned his attention back to the controls. Hazleton was subtle; but one consequence of his subtlety was that he tended to expend unnecessary amounts of time speculating about situations the facts of which would soon become evident in any case.

The city was now approaching the local garage world, which bore the unlikely name of Murphy, and maneuvering among the close-packed stars of the cluster was a job delicate enough to demand the mayor’s own hand upon the space stick. The City Fathers, of course, could have teetered the city through the conflicting gravitic fields to a safe landing on Murphy, but they would have taken a month at the job. Hazleton would have gone faster, but the City Fathers would have monitored his route all the way, and snatched control from him at the slightest transgression of the margins of error they had calculated. They were not equipped to respect short cuts.

Of course, they were also unequipped to appreciate the direct intuition of spatial distances and mass pressures which made Amalfi a master pilot. But over Amalfi they had no authority, except the ultimate authority of the revocation of his office.

As Murphy grew on the screen, technicians began to file into the control room, activating with personal keys desks which had been disconnected for more than three centuries—ever since the last new spindizzy had been brought on board. Readying the city’s drive machinery for new equipment was a major project. Every other spindizzy on board would have to be retuned to the new machine. In the present case, the job would be further complicated by the radioactivity of the defective unit. While the garagemen should have special equipment to cope with that problem—de-gaussing, for instance, was the usual first step—no garage would know the machinery involved as well as the Okies who used it. Every city is unique.

Murphy, as Amalfi saw it on his own screen, was a commonplace enough world. It was just slightly above the size of Mars, but pleasanter to live on, since it was closer to its primary by a good distance.

But it looked deserted. As the city came closer, Amalfi could see the twenty-mile pockmarks which were the graving docks typical of a garage; but every one of those perfectly regular, machinery-ringed craters in the planet’s visible hemisphere turned out to be empty.

“That’s bad,” he heard Hazleton murmur. It was certainly unpromising. The planet turned slowly under his eyes.

Then a city slid up over the horizon. Hazleton’s breath sucked sharply through his teeth. Amalfi could also hear a soft stirring sound, and then footsteps—several of the technicians had come up behind him to peer over his shoulder.

“Posts!” he growled. The technicians scattered like leaves.

On the idle service world, the grounded city was startlingly huge. It thrust up from the ground like an invader—but a naked giant, fallen and defenseless, without its spindizzy screens. There was, of course, every good reason why the screens should not be up, but still, a city without them was a rare and disconcerting sight, like a flayed corpse in a tank. There seemed to be some activity at its perimeter. Amalfi could not resist thinking of that activity as bacterial.

“Doesn’t that answer the question Dee’s way?” Hazleton suggested at last. “There’s an outfit that has dough for repairs, so money from outside the Acolyte area must still be good. It’s having the repairs made, so it can’t be quite hopeless—it thinks it has someplace to go from here. And it’s a cinch to be a smart outfit, well worth consulting. It’s prevented the Acolytes from fleecing it—and some form of Acolyte swindle is the only remaining explanation for the existence of the jungle. We’d best get in touch with it before we land, boss, and find out what to expect.”

“No,” Amalfi said. “Stick to your post, Mark.”

“Why? Surely it can’t do any harm.”

Amalfi didn’t answer. His own psi sense had already told him something that knocked Hazleton’s argument into a cocked helmet, but that something showed on Hazleton’s own instruments, if Hazleton cared to look. The city manager had allowed an extrapolation to carry him off into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.

Abruptly the board began to wink with directional signals. Automatic guides from the control tower on Murphy were waving the city to a readied dock. Amalfi shifted the space stick obediently, awaiting the orange blinker that would announce some living intelligence ready with an opinion as to the desirability of Okies on Murphy.

But neither opinion nor blinker had yet asked for his attention even when Amalfi had begun to float the city for its planting in the unpromising soil below. Evidently business was so poor on Murphy that the garage had lost most of its staff to more “going” projects. In that case, no entities but the automatics in the tower would be on hand to supervise an unexpected landing.