Cities in Flight

With a shrug, Amalfi cut the City Fathers back in. There was no need for a human being to land a city as long as the landing presented no problem in policy. There were more than enough human uses for human beings; routine operations were the proper province of the City Fathers.

“First planetfall since He,” Hazleton said. He seemed to be brightening a little. “It’ll feel good to stretch our legs.”

“No leg-stretching or any other kind of calisthenics,” Amalfi said. “Not until we get more information. I haven’t gotten a yeep out of this planet yet. For all we know, we may be restricted to our own premises by the local customs.”

“Wouldn’t the tower have said so?”

“No tower would be empowered to deliver a message like that to all comers. It might scare off an occasional legitimate customer. But it could still be so, Mark; you should know that. Let’s do some snooping first.”

Amalfi picked up his mike. “Get me the perimeter sergeant … Anderson? This is the mayor. Arm ten good men from the boarding squad, and meet the city manager and me at the Cathedral Parkway lookout. Station your men at the adjacent sally ports, well out of sight of the localities, if there are any such around …. Yes, that’d be just as well, too …. Right.”

Hazleton said, “We’re going out.”

“Yes. And, Mark— this star cluster may well be the last stop that we’ll ever make. Will you remember that ?”

“I’ll have no difficulty remembering it,” Hazleton said, looking directly at Amalfi with eyes as gray as ice, “seeing that it’s exactly what I told you four days ago. I have my own notions of the proper way to cope with the possibility, and they probably won’t jibe with yours. Four days ago you were explaining to me that I was being excessively defeatist. Now you’ve expropriated my conclusion because something has forced it on you—and I know you better than to expect you to tell me what that something is—and so now you’re telling me to ‘Remember Thor Five’ again. You can’t have it both ways, Amalfi.”

For a second, the two men’s glances remained locked, pupil with pupil.

“You two,” Dee’s voice said, “might just as well be married.”

From the skywalk of the graving dock in which the city rested at last, a walk level with the main deck of the city, the world of Murphy presented to Amalfi the face of a desolate mechanical wilderness.

It was an elephant’s graveyard of cranes, hoists, dollies, spur lines, donkey engines, cables, scaffolding, pallets, half-tracks, camel-backs, chutes, conveyors, bins, tanks, hoppers, pipelines, waldoes, spin-dizzies, trompers, breeders, proxies, ehrenhafts, and half a hundred other devices of as many ages which might at some time be needed in servicing some city.

Much of the machinery was rusty, or fallen in upon itself, or whole on the surface but forever dead inside, with a spurious wholeness that so simple an instrument as the dosimeter every man wore on his left wrist could reveal as submicroscopic scandal. Much of it, too, was still quite usable. But all of it had the look of machinery which no one really expected to use.

On the near horizon, the other city, the one Amalfi had seen from aloft, stood tall and straight. Tiny mechanisms puttered about it.

And far below the skywalk, on the cluttered surface of Murphy, in the shadow of the bulge of Amalfi’s city, a tiny and merely human figure danced and gesticulated.

Amalfi led the way down the tight spiral of the metal staircase, Hazleton and Sergeant Anderson behind him. Their steps were muffled in the thin air. He watched his own carefully; on a low-gravity world it was just as well to temper the use of one’s muscles. The fact that one fell slower on such worlds did not much lessen the thump at the end of the fall, and Amalfi had found long ago that, away from the unvarying one-G field of the city, his bull strength often betrayed him even when he was being normally careful.

The dancing doll proved to be a short, curly-haired technie in a clean but mussed uniform. Possibly he had slept in it; at least it seemed clear that he had never done any work in it. He had a smooth, chubby face, dark of complexion, greasy and stippled with clogged pores. He glared at Amalfi truculently with eyes like beer-bottle ends.

“What the hell?” he said. “How’d you get here?”

“We swam, how else? When do we get some service?”

“I’ll ask the questions, bum. And tell your sergeant to keep his hand off his gun. He makes me nervous, and when I’m nervous, there’s no telling what I’ll do. You’re after repairs?”

“What else?”

“We’re busy,” the garageman said. “No charity here. Go back to your jungle.”