Cities in Flight

“Nobody takes any offer less than sixty,” it said. “The class A cities will ask one hundred and twenty-four for the Hern Six job, and grade B cities don’t get to underbid them until the goddam trader has all the A’s she’ll take. If she picks all six from the A’s, that’s tough. No C ’s are to bid at all on the Hern Six deal. We’ll take care of anybody that breaks ranks, either right away …”

The image came through. Amalfi goggled at it.

“… or after the cops leave. That’s all for now.”

The image faded. The twisted, hairless man in the ancient metal-mesh cape stood in Amalfi’s memory for quite a while afterwards.

The Okie King was a man made of lava. Perhaps he had been born at one time, but now he looked like a geological accident, a column of black stone sprung from a fissure and contorted roughly into the shape of a man.

And his face was shockingly disfigured and scarred by the one disease that still remained unconquered, unsolved, though it no longer killed.

Cancer.

A voice murmured inside Amalfi’s head, coming from the tiny vibrator imbedded in the mastoid bone behind the mayor’s right ear. “That’s just what the City Fathers said he would say,” Hazleton commented softly from his post uptown in the control tower. “But he can’t be as naïve as all that. He’s an old-timer; been aloft since back before they knew how to polarize spindizzy screens against cosmic radiation. Must be eight hundred years old at a minimum.”

“You can lay up a lot of cunning in that length of time,” Amalfi agreed in a similarly low voice. He was wearing throat mikes under a high military collar. As far as the screens were concerned, he was standing motionless, silent, and alone; though he was an expert at talking without moving his lips, he did not try to do so now, for the fuzziness of local transmission conditions made it unlikely that his murmuring would be detected. “It doesn’t seem likely that he means what he says. But we’d best sit tight for the moment.”

He glanced into the auxiliary battle tank, a three-dimensional chart in which color-coded points of lights moved, showing each city, the nearby sun, and the Acolyte vessels, not to scale, but in their relative positions. The tank was camouflaged as a desk and could be seen into only from behind; hence it was out of sight of any eye but Amalfi’s. In it the Acolyte force showed itself to consist of one trader’s ship and four police craft; one of the latter was a command cruiser, very probably Lerner’s, and the others were light cruisers.

It was not much of a force, but then, there was no real need for a full squadron here. With a minimum of organization, the Okies could run Lerner and his ward out of the jungle, even at some cost to their own numbers—but where would the Okies run to after Lerner had yelled for navy support? The question answered itself.

A string of twenty-three small “personal” screens came on now, high up along the curve of the far wall. Twenty-three faces looked down at Amalfi—the mayors of all but one of the class A cities in the jungle; Amalfi’s own city was the twenty-fourth. Amalfi valved the main audio gain back up again.

“Are we ready to begin?” the Acolyte woman said. “I’ve got codes here for twenty-four cities, and I see you’re all here. Small courage among Okies these days—twenty-four out of three hundred of you for a simple job like this! That’s the attitude that made Okies of you in the first place. You’re afraid of honest work.”

“We’ll work,” the King’s voice said. His screen, however, remained gray-green. “Look over the codes and take your pick.”

The trader looked for the voice. “No insolence,” she said sharply. “Or I’ll ask for volunteers from the grade B’s. It would save me money, anyhow.”

There was no reply. The trader frowned and looked at the code list in her hand. After a moment, she called off three numbers, and then, with greater hesitation, a fourth. Four of the screens above Amalfi went blank, and in the tank, four green flecks began to move outward from the red dwarf star.

“That’s all we need for Hern Six except for a pressure job,” the woman said slowly. “There are eight cities listed here as pressure specialists. You there—who are you, anyhow?”

“Bradley-Vermont,” one of the faces above Amalfi said.

“What would you ask for a pressure job?”

“One hundred and twenty-four,” Bradley-Vermont’s mayor said sullenly.

“O-ho! You’ve a high opinion of yourself, haven’t you? You may as well float here and rot for a while longer, until you learn something more about the law of supply and demand. You—you’re Dresden-Saxony, it says here. What’s your price? Remember, I only need one.”

Dresden-Saxony’s mayor was a slight man with high cheekbones and glittering black eyes. He seemed to be enjoying himself, despite his obvious state of malnutrition; at least, he was smiling a little, and his eyes glittered over the dark shadows which made them look large.

“We ask one hundred and twenty-four,” he said with malicious indifference.