Cities in Flight

Nothing essential remained to be done now in the jungle but to turn the march into a stampede.

By the time he reached his own city, Amalfi found he was suddenly intensely tired. He berthed the second gig Hazleton had had the perimeter sergeant send for him and went directly to his room, where he ordered his supper sent up.

This last move, he was forced to conclude, had been a mistake. The city’s stores were heavily diminished, and the table that was set for him—set, as it would have been for anyone else in the city, by the City Fathers with complete knowledge of his preferences—was meager and uninteresting. It included fuming Rigellian wine, which he despised as a drink for barbarians; such a choice could only mean that there was nothing else to drink in the city but water.

His weariness, the solitude, the direct transition from the audience hall of the Hapsburgs to his bare new room under the mast in the Empire State Building—it had been an elevator-winch housing until the city had converted to friction-fields—and the dullness of the meal combined to throw him into a rare and deep state of depression. What he thought he could see of the future of Okie cities did not exactly cheer him, either.

It was at this point that the door to his room irised open, and Hazleton stalked silently through it, hooking his chromoclav back into his belt.

They looked at each other stonily for a moment. Amalfi pointed to a chair.

“Sorry, boss,” Hazleton said, without moving. “I’ve never used my key before except in an emergency, you know that. But I think maybe this is an emergency. We’re in a bad way—and the way you’re dealing with the problem strikes me as crazy. For the survival of the city, I want to be taken into your confidence.”

“Sit down,” Amalfi said. “Have some Rigel wine.”

Hazleton made a wry face and sat down.

“You’re in my confidence, as always, Mark. I don’t leave you out of my plans except where I think you might shoot from the hip if I didn’t. You’ll agree that you’ve done that occasionally—and don’t throw up the Thor Five situation again, because there I was on your side; it was the City Fathers that objected to that particular Hazleton gimmick.”

“Granted.”

“Good,” Amalfi said. “Tell me what you want to know, then.”

“Up to a point I understand what you’re out to do,” Hazleton said without preamble. “Your use of Dee as a safe-conduct in and out of the meeting was a shrewd trick. Considering the political threat we represented to the King, it was probably the only thing you could have done. Understand, I resent it personally and I may yet pay you off for it. But it was necessary, I agree.”

“Good,” the mayor said wearily. “But that’s a minor point, Mark.”

“Granted, except on the personal level. The main thing is that you threw away the whole chance you schemed so hard to get. The knowledge-pooling plan was a good one, and you had two major chances to put it across. First of all, the King set you up to claim we were Vegan—nobody has ever actually seen that fort, and physically you’re enough unlike the normal run of humanity to pass for a Vegan without much trouble. Dee and I don’t look Vegan, but we might be atypical, or maybe renegades.

“But you threw that one away. Then the mayor from Dresden-Saxony set you up to swing almost everybody our way by letting them know our name. If you’d followed through, you would have carried the voting. Hell, you’d probably have wound up king of the jungle to boot.

“And you threw that one away, too.”

Hazleton took his slide rule out of his pocket and moodily pushed the slide back and forth in it. It was a gesture frequent enough with him, but ordinarily it preceded or followed some use of the rule. Tonight it was obviously just nervous play.

“But Mark, I didn’t want to be king of the jungle,” Amalfi said slowly. “I’d much rather let the present incumbent hold that responsibility. Every crime that’s ever been committed, or will be committed in the near future, in this jungle, will be laid at his door eventually by the Earth cops. On top of that, the Okies here will hold him personally responsible for every misfortune that comes their way while they’re in the jungle. I never did want that job; I only wanted the King to think that I wanted it …. Incidentally, did you try to raise that city out on the perimeter, the one that said it had mass chromatography?”

“Sure,” Hazleton said. “They don’t answer.”

“Okay. Now, about this knowledge-pooling plan: it wouldn’t work, Mark. First of all, you couldn’t keep a pack of Okies working at it long enough to get any good out of it. Okies aren’t philosophers, and they aren’t scientists except in a limited way. They’re engineers and merchants; in some respects they’re adventurers, too, but they don’t think of themselves as adventurers. They’re practical— that’s the word they use. You’ve heard it.”

“I’ve used it,” Hazleton said edgily.