Cities in Flight

“Are you sure accumulated technology is the answer? You yourself said that straight techniques are the province of machines. The ancient Gödel-Church theorems show that no machine or set of machines can score significant advances on human thought. The designer has to precede the machine, and has to have achieved the desired function before the machine can even be built.”

“What is this, a seminar?” the King demanded, “Let’s—”

“Let’s hear it,” someone called.

“After that mess today—”

“Let ’em talk—they make sense!”

Amalfi waited a moment and then said, “Yes, Mayor Specht. Go ahead.”

“I had about made my point. The machines can’t do the job you offer as the solution to our troubles. This is why mayors have authority over City Fathers, rather than the other way around.”

“That’s quite true,” Amalfi said. “And I don’t pretend that a completely cross-connective hookup among all our City Fathers would automatically bail us out. For one thing we’d have to set the hookup pattern very carefully as a topological problem, to be sure we didn’t get a degree of connectivity which would result in the disappearance of knowledge instead of its accumulation. There’s an example of just the kind of thing you were talking about: machines can’t handle topology because it isn’t quantitative.

“I said that this was the hard way of solving the problem, and I meant just that. After we’d pooled our machine-accumulated knowledge, furthermore, we’d have to interpret it before we could put it to some use.

“That would take time. Lots of time. Technicians will have to check the knowledge-pooling at every stage; they’ll have to check the City Fathers to be sure they can take in what’s being delivered to them—as far as we know, they have no storage limits, but that assumption hasn’t ever been tested before on the practical level. They’ll have to assess what it all adds up to in the end, run the assessments through the City Fathers for logical errors, assess the logic for supralogical bugs beyond the logics that the City Fathers use, check all the assessments for new implications needing complete rechecks—of which there will be thousands ….

“It’ll take more than two years, and probably closer to five years, to do even a scratch job. The City Fathers will do their part of it in a few hours, and the rest of the time will be consumed by human brainwork. While that part of it’s going on, we’ll have it thin. But we’ve got it damn thin already, and when it’s all over, we’ll be able to write our own tickets, anywhere in the galaxy.”

“A very good answer,” Specht said. He spoke quietly, but each word whistled through the still, sweat-humid air like a thin missile. “Gentlemen, I believe the mayor of the nameless city is right.”

“The hell he is!” the King howled, striding to the front of the dais and trying to wipe the air out of his way as he walked. “Who wants to sit for five years making like a pack of scientists while the Acolytes have us all digging ditches?”

“Who wants to be dispersed?” someone countered shrilly. “Who wants to pick a fight with Earth? Not me. I’ll stay as far away from the Earth cops as I can. That’s common sense for Okies.”

“Cops!” the King shouted. “Cops look for single cities. What if a thousand cities marched on Earth? What cop would bother with one city on one disorderly conduct charge? If you were a cop and you saw a mob coming down at you, would you try to bust it up by pinching one man in it who’d run out on a Vacate order, or shaded a three per cent fruit-freezing contract? If that’s common sense for Okies, I’ll eat it.

“You guys are chicken, that’s your trouble. You got knocked around today and you hurt. You’re tender. But you know damn well that the law exists to protect you, not scum like the Acolytes. It’s a cinch we can’t call the Earth cops here to protect us—the cops are too few for that, we’re too few, and besides, we would get nabbed individually for whatever we’ve got written against us. But in a march of thousands of Okies—a peaceful march, to ask Earth to give you what belongs to you—you couldn’t be touched individually. But you’re scared! You’d rather squat in a jungle and die by pieces!”

“Not us!”

“Us neither!”

“When do we start?”

“That’s more like it,” the King said.

Specht’s voice said, “Buda-Pesht, you’re trying to drum up a stampede. The question isn’t closed yet.”

“All right,” the King agreed. “I’m willing to be reasonable. Let’s take a vote.”

“We aren’t ready for a vote yet. The question is still open.”

“Well?” said the King. “You there on the overstuffed potty—you got anything more to say? Are you as afraid of a vote as Specht is?”

Amalfi got up with deliberate slowness.

“I’ve made my points, and I’ll abide by the voting,” he said, “if it’s physically possible for us to do so—our spindizzy equipment wouldn’t tolerate an immediate flight to Earth if the voting goes that way. I’ve made my point. A mass flight to Earth would be suicide.”