Cities in Flight

The woman’s lids slitted. “You do, eh? That’s a coincidence, isn’t it? And you?”

“The same,” the third mayor said, though with obvious reluctance.

The trader swung around and pointed directly at Amalfi. In the very old cities, such as the one the King operated, it would be impossible to tell who she was pointing at, but probably most of the cities in the jungle had compensating tri-di. “What’s your town?”

“We’re not answering that question,” Amalfi said. “And we’re not pressure specialists anyhow.”

“I know that, I can read a code. But you’re the biggest Okie I’ve ever seen, and I’m not talking about your belly either; and you’re modern enough for the purpose. The job is yours for one hundred—no more.”

“Not interested.”

“You’re a fool as well as a fat man. You just came into this hellhole and there are charges against—”

“Ah, you know who we are. Why did you ask?”

“Never mind that. You don’t know what a jungle is like until you’ve lived in it. You’d be smart to take the job and get out now while you can. You’d be worth one hundred and twelve to me if you could finish the job under the estimated time.”

“You’ve denied us immunity,” Amalfi said, “and you needn’t bother offering it, either. We’re not interested in pressure work for any price.”

The woman laughed. “You’re a liar, too. You know as well as I do that nobody arrests Okies on jobs. And you wouldn’t find it difficult to leave the job once it’s finished. Here now—I’ll give you one hundred and twenty. That’s my top offer, and it’s only four less than the pressure experts are asking. Fair enough?”

“It may be fair enough,” Amalfi said. “But we don’t do pressure work; and we’ve already gotten in reports from the proxies we sent to Hern Six as soon as Lieutenant Lerner said that was where the job was. We don’t like the look of it. We don’t want it. We won’t take it at one hundred and twenty, we won’t take it at one hundred and twenty-four—and we won’t take it at all. Understand?”

“Very well,” the woman said with concentrated viciousness. “You’ll hear from me again, Okie.”

The King was looking at Amalfi with an unreadable, but certainly unfriendly, expression. If Amalfi’s guess was right, the King thought Amalfi was somewhat overdoing Okie solidarity. It might also be occurring to him that the expression of so much independence might be a bid for power within the jungle itself. Yes, Amalfi was sure that that, at least, had occurred to the King.

The hiring of the class B cities was now all that remained, but nevertheless it took quite a while to get started. The woman, it emerged, was more than a trader; she was an entrepreneur of some importance. She wanted the cities, twenty of them, each for the same identical piece of dirty work: working low-grade carnotite lies on a small planet too near a hot star. Twenty mining cities working upon such a planet would reduce it to as small and sculptured a lump of trash as a meteorite before very many months. The method, obviously, was to get the work done fast without paying more than a pittance for it.

Then, startlingly, while the woman was still making up her mind, the voice came through. It was weak and. indistinct, and without any face to go with it.

“We’ll take the job. Take us.”

There was a murmuring from the screens, and across some of the faces there the same shadow seemed to run. Amalfi checked the tank, but it told him little. The signal had been too weak. All that could be made certain was that the voice belonged to some city far out on the periphery of the jungle—a city desperate for energy.

The Acolyte woman seemed momentarily nonplussed. Even in a jungle, Amalfi thought grimly, some crude rules had to be observed; evidently the woman realized that to take on the volunteer before interviewing the others might be—resented.

“Keep out of this,” the voice of the King said, so much more slowly and heavily than before that its weight was almost tangible upon the air. “Let the lady do her own picking. She’s got no use for a class C outfit.”

“We’ll take the job. We’re a mining town from way back, and we can refine the stuff, too, by gaseous diffusion, mass spectrography, mass chromatography, whatever’s asked. We can handle it. And we’ve got to have it.”

“So do the rest,” the King said, coldly unimpressed. “Take your turn.”

“We’re dying out here! Hunger, cold, thirst, disease!”

“Others are in the same state. Do you think any of us like it here? Wait your turn!”

“All right,” the woman said suddenly. “I’m sick of being told who I do and who I don’t want. Anything to get this over with. File your coordinates, whoever that is out there, and—”