Cities in Flight

“We’ll send out a call on the Dirac,” he said. “To all Okies, everywhere. ‘We’re all going back to Earth,’ we’ll say. We’re going home to get an accounting. We’ve done Earth’s heavy labor all over the galaxy, and Earth’s paid us by turning our money into waste paper. We’re going home to see that Earth does something about it’—we’ll set a date—‘and any Okie with starman’s guts will follow us.’ How does that sound, eh?”

Dee’s grip on Amalfi’s hand was now tighter than any pressure he would have believed she could exert. Amalfi did not speak to the King; he simply looked back at him, his eyes metallic.

From somewhere fairly far back in the throne room, a newly familiar voice called, “The mayor of the nameless city has asked a pertinent question. From the point of view of Earth, we’re a dangerous collection of potential criminals at worst. At best we’re discontented jobless people, and undesirable in large numbers anywhere near the home planet.”

Hazleton pushed up to the front row, on the other side of Dee, and glared belligerently up at the King. The King, however, had looked away again, over Hazleton’s head.

“Anybody got a better idea?” the immense black man said dryly. “Here’s good old Vega down here; he’s full of ideas. Let’s hear his idea. I’ll bet it’s colossal. I’ll just bet he’s a genius, this Vegan.”

“Get up there, boss,” Hazleton hissed. “You’ve got ’em!”

Amalfi released Dee’s hand—he had some difficulty in being gentle about it—bounded clumsily but without real effort onto the dais, and turned to face the crowd.

“Hey there, mister,” someone shouted. “You’re no Vegan!”

The crowd laughed uneasily.

“Never said I was,” Amalfi retorted. Hazleton’s face promptly fell. “Are you all a pack of children? No mythical fort is going to bail you out of this. Neither is any fool mass flight on Earth. There isn’t any easy way out. There is one tough way out, if you’ve got the guts for it.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Speak up!”

“Let’s get it over with.”

“All right,” Amalfi said. He walked back to the immense throne of the Hapsburgs and sat down in it, catching the King flatfooted. Standing, Amalfi, despite his bulk, was a smaller man than the King, but on the throne he made the King look not only smaller but also quite irrelevant. From the back of the dais, his voice boomed out as powerfully as before.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “our germanium is worthless now. So is our paper money. Even the work we do doesn’t seem to be worth while now, on any standard. That’s our trouble, and there isn’t much that Earth can do about it—they’re caught in the collapse, too.”

“A professor,” the King said, his seamed lips twisting.

“Shaddap. You asked me up here. I’m staying up here until I’ve had my say. The commodity we all have to sell is labor. Hand labor, heavy work, isn’t worth anything. Machines can do that. But brain-work can’t be done with anything but brains; art and pure science are beyond the compass of any machine.

“Now, we can’t sell art. We can’t produce it; we aren’t artists and aren’t set up as such; there’s an entirely different segment of galactic society that supplies that need. But brainwork in pure science is something we can sell, just as we’ve always sold brainwork in applied sciences. If we play our cards right, we can sell it anywhere, for any price we ask, regardless of the money system involved. It’s the ultimate commodity, and in the long run it’s a commodity which no one but the Okies could merchandise successfully.

“Selling that commodity, we could take over the Acolytes or any other star system. We could do it better in a general depression than we could ever have done it before, because we can now set any price on it that we choose.”

“Prove it,” somebody called.

“That’s easy. We have here around three hundred cities. Let’s integrate and use their accumulated knowledge. This is the first time in history that so many City Fathers have been gathered together in one place, just as it’s the first time that so many big organizations specializing in different sciences have ever been gathered together. If we were to consult with each other, pool our intellectual resources, we’d come out technologically at least a thousand years ahead of the rest of the galaxy. Individual experts can be bought for next to nothing now, but no individual expert— nor any individual city or planet— could match what we’d have.

“That’s the priceless coin, gentlemen, the universal coin: human knowledge. Look now: there are eighty-five million undeveloped worlds in this galaxy ready to pay for knowledge of the current vintage, the kind we all share right now, the kind that runs about a century behind Earth on the average. But if we were to pool our knowledge, then even the most advanced planets, even Earth itself, would see their coinages crumble in the face of their eagerness to buy what we would have to offer.”

“Question!”

“You’re Dresden-Saxony back there, right?” Amalfi said. “Go ahead, Mayor Specht.”