Cities in Flight

“So have I. There’s a great deal of meaning packed into it. It means, among other things, that if you get Okies involved in a major analytical project, they’ll get restive. They want sets of applications of principles, not principles pure and useless. And it isn’t in their natures to sit still in one place for long. If you convince them that they should, they’ll try, and the whole thing will wind up in a terrific explosion.

“But that’s only point one. Mark, have you any idea of the real scope of the knowledge-pooling project? I’m not trying to put you on the spot, believe me. I don’t think anybody in that hall realized it. If they had, they’d have laughed me off the platform. There again, Okies aren’t scientists, and their outlook is too impatient to let them carry a really long chain of reasoning to a conclusion.”

“You’re an Okie,” Hazleton pointed out. “You carried it to a conclusion. You told them how long it would take.”

“I’m an Okie. I told them it would take from two to five years to do even a scratch job. As an Okie, I’m an expert at half-truths. It would take from two to five years even to get the project set up! And the rest of the job, Mark, would take centuries.”

“For a scratch job?”

“No such thing as a scratch job in this universe of discourse,” Amalfi said, reaching for the fuming wine and reconsidering at the last minute. “Those cities out there represent the accumulated scientific knowledge of all the high-technical-level cultures they’ve ever encountered. Even allowing for the usual information gaps, that’s about five thousand planets-full of data, at a minimum estimate. Sure, we could pool all that knowledge—just as I said at the meeting, the City Fathers could take it all in, and classify it, in only a little over an hour— after we’d spent two to five years setting them up to do it. And then we’d have to integrate it. And you’ve got to integrate it, Mark; you’ve got to know it thoroughly enough to be able to make it do something. You couldn’t offer it for sale unless you did that. Would you like the job?”

“No,” Hazleton said slowly, but at once. “But Amalfi, am I ever going to know what you’re doing if you persist in proceeding like this? You didn’t go to that meeting just to waste time; I can trust you that far. So I have to assume that the whole maneuver was a trick, designed to force the March on Earth, rather than to defeat it. You gave the cities a clearly defined, superficially sound, and less-attractive alternative. Once they had rejected the alternative, they had committed themselves to the King’s tactics, without knowing it.”

“That’s quite right.”

“If that’s right,” Hazleton said, looking up suddenly with a flat flash of almost-violet eyes, “I think it’s stupid. I think it’s stupid even though it was marvelously devious. There’s such a thing as outsmarting yourself.”

Amalfi said, “That could be. In any event, if the choice had been limited to marching on Earth versus staying in the jungle, the cities would have stayed in the jungle. Would it have been sensible to allow that?”

“We can’t afford to stay in the jungle, anyhow.”

“Of course we can’t. And by the same token, we couldn’t leave it by ourselves. The only way we could get free of this star cluster is in the middle of a mass movement. What else could I have been shooting for?”

“I don’t know,” Hazleton said. “But there’s something else besides that in the back of your head.”

“And your complaint is that you don’t know about it in advance. I know why you don’t know. You know, too.”

“Dee?” ‘

“Certainly,” Amalfi said. “You weren’t asking yourself the right question. You were emotionally driven to ask why I wanted Dee along. The question was pertinent enough, but it wasn’t exactly central. If you had stood back a little further from the whole problem, you’d have seen why I wanted the March on Earth to go through, too.”

“I’ll keep trying,” Hazleton said grimly. “Though I’d have preferred to be told. You and I are getting further apart every year, boss. It used to be that we thought very much alike; and it was then that you developed your habit of not telling me the whole story. It was a training device, I think now. The more I was made to worry about the total plan, the more I was required to think the thing out for myself—which meant trying to figure you out—the more training I got in thinking like you. And of course, to be a proper city manager, I had to think like you. You had to be sure that any decisions I made in your absence would be the decisions you would have made had you been around.

“All this hit me after our tangle with the Duchy of Gort. That incident was the first time that you and I had been out of touch with each other long enough for a situation of really major proportions to develop—a situation about which I knew very little until I could get back to the city from Utopia and get briefed.