Cities in Flight

“When I got back, I found that I was damn lucky not to have thought like you. My first failure to comprehend your whole plan—and your training method of leaving me to puzzle things out alone—apparently had doomed me in your mind. You had written me off, and you were training Carrel as my successor.”

“All this is accurate reportage,” Amalfi said. “If you mean to accuse me of keeping a hard school—”

“—a fool will learn in no other?”

“No. A fool won’t learn at all. But I don’t deny keeping a hard school. Go on.”

“I haven’t far to go, now. I learned in the Gort-Utopia system that thinking the way you think can sometimes be deadly for me. I got off Utopia by thinking my way, not yours. The confirmation came when we hit He; had I been thinking entirely like you in that situation, we’d still be on the planet.”

“Mark, you still haven’t made your point. I can tell. It’s perfectly true that we often relied on your plans, and precisely because they come from a mind most unlike my own. What of it?”

“This of it. You’re now out to rub out whatever trace of originality I have. You used to value it, as you say. You used to use it for the city, and defend it against the City Fathers when they had an attack of conservatism. But now you’ve changed, and so have I.

“These days, I seem to be tending toward thinking more and more like a human being, with human concerns. I don’t feel like Hazleton the master conniver any more, except in flashes. The opposite change is taking place in you. You’re becoming more and more alienated from human concerns. When you look at people, you see—machines. After a little more of this, we won’t be able to tell you from the City Fathers.”

Amalfi tried to think about it. He was very tired, and he felt old. It was not yet time for his anti-agathic shot, not by more than a decade, but knowing that he would probably not get it made the centuries he had already traversed weigh heavily upon his back.

“Or maybe I’m beginning to think that I’m a god,” he said. “You accused me of that on Murphy. Have you ever tried to imagine, Mark, how completely crippling it is to any man’s humanity to be the mayor of an Okie city for hundreds of years? I suppose you have—your own responsibilities aren’t lighter than mine, only a little different. Let me ask you this, then: isn’t it obvious that this change in you dates from the day when Dee first came on board?”

“Of course it’s obvious,” Hazleton said, looking up sharply. “It dates from the Utopia-Gort affair. That’s when Dee came on board; she was a Utopian. Are you about to tell me that she’s to blame?”

“Shouldn’t it also be obvious,” Amalfi continued, with weary implacability, “that the converse change in me dates from that same event? Gods of all stars, Mark, don’t you know that I love Dee, too?”

Hazleton froze and went white. He looked rigidly with suddenly blind eyes at the remains of Amalfi’s miserable supper. After a long time, he laid his slide rule on the table as delicately as if it were made of spun sugar.

“I do know,” he said, at long last. “I did know. But I didn’t—want to know that I knew.”

Amalfi spread his big hands in a gesture of helplessness he had not had to use for more than half a century. The city manager did not seem to notice.

“That being the case,” Hazleton resumed, his voice suddenly much tighter, “that being so, Amalfi, I—”

He stopped.

“You needn’t rush, Mark. Actually it doesn’t change things much. Take your time.”

“Amalfi— I want off.”

Each evenly spaced word struck Amalfi like the strokes of a mallet against a gong, the strokes which, timed exactly to the gong’s vibration period, drive it toward shattering. Amalfi had expected anything but those three words. They told him that he had had no real idea of how helpless he had become.

I want off was the traditional formula by which a starman renounced the stars. The Okie who spoke them cut himself off forever from the cities, and from the long swooping lines of the ingeodescis that the cities followed through space-time. The Okie who spoke them became planet-bound.

And—it was entirely final. The words were seared into Okie law. I want off could never be refused—nor retracted.

“You have it,” Amalfi said. “Naturally. I won’t tax you with being hasty, since it’s too late.”

“Thanks.”

“Well, where do you want it? On the nearest planet, or at the city’s next port of call?”

These, too, were merely the traditional alternatives, but Hazleton didn’t seem to relish either of them. His lips were white, and he seemed to be trembling slightly.

“That,” he said, “depends on where you’re planning to go next. You haven’t yet told me.”