Cities in Flight

“Set up the return port for decontamination. Nobody gets back on board our town until he’s been boiled alive—understand? I want the works.”

There was a brief silence. Then: “Mr. Mayor, the city manager already has that in the works.”

Amalfi grimaced wryly in the darkness. Anderson said, “Pardon me, sir, but—how did Mr. Hazleton guess?”

“Why, that’s not too hard to see, at least after the fact, sergeant. This city we’re on was desperately poor. And being poor under the new money system means being low on drugs. The end result, as Mr. Hazleton saw, and I should have seen, is—plague.”

“The sons of bitches,” the sergeant said bitterly. The epithet seemed intended to apply to every non-Okie in the universe.

At the same moment, a lurid scarlet glare splashed over his face and the front of his suit, and red lanes of light checkered the street. There was an almost-simultaneous flat crash, without weight in the thin air, but ugly-sounding.

“TDX!” Anderson shouted, involuntarily.

“Dulany? Dulany! Damn it all, I told the man to take it easy with that probe. Whoever survived on that squad, report!”

Underneath the ringing in Amalfi’s ears, someone began to laugh. It was as ugly a sound as the TDX explosion had been. There was no other answer.

“All right, Anderson, surround this place. Communications, get the rest of the boarding squad and half the security police over here on the double.”

The nasty laughter got louder.

“Whoever you are that’s putting out that silly giggle, you’re going to learn how to make another kind of noise when I get my hands on you,” Amalfi added viciously. “Nobody uses TDX on my men, I don’t care whether he’s an Okie or a cop. Get me? Nobody!”

The laughter stopped. Then a cracked voice said, “You lousy damned vultures.”

“Vultures, is it?” Amalfi snapped. “If you’d answered our calls in the first place, there’d have been no trouble. Why don’t you come to your senses? Do you want to die of the pestilence?”

“Vultures,” the voice repeated. It carried an overtone of sinister idiocy. “Eaters of carrion. The gods of all stars will boil your bones for soup.” The cackling began again.

Amalfi felt a faint chill. He switched to tight-beam. “Anderson, keep your men at a respectable distance, and wait for the reinforcements. This place is obviously mined to the teeth, and I don’t know what other surprises our batty friend has for us.”

“I could lob a gas grenade through that window—”

“Don’t you suppose they’re wearing suits, too? Just ring the place and sit tight.”

“Check.”

Amalfi squatted down upon his hams behind the aircab, sweating. There just might be enough power left in the accumulators here to put up a Bethé fender around the building, but that wasn’t the main thing on his mind. This business of boarding another Okie city was easily the hardest operation he had ever had to direct. Every move went against the grain. The madman’s accusation had hit him in his most vulnerable spot.

After what seemed like a whole week, his helmet ultraphone said, “Proxy room. Mr. Mayor, the jungle beat off Lerner’s first wave. I didn’t think they could do it. They got in one good heavy lick at the beginning—blew two heavy cruisers right out of the sky—and the Acolytes act scared green. The admiral’s launch has run out completely, and left Lerner holding the bag.”

“Losses?”

“Four cities definitely wiped out. We haven’t enough proxies out to estimate cities damaged with any accuracy, but Lerner had a group of about thirty towns enfiladed when the first cruiser got it.”

“You haven’t got the big drone out there, have you?” the mayor said in sudden alarm.

“No, sir; Communications ordered that one left berthed. I’m waiting now to see when the next Acolyte wave gets rolling; I’ll call you as—”

The proxy pilot’s voice snapped off, and the stars went out.

There was a shout of alarm from some technie in the party. Amalfi got up cautiously and looked overhead. The single window in the big building which had shown a light was blacked out now, too.

“What the hell happened, Mr. Mayor?” Anderson’s voice said quietly.

“A local spindizzy screen, at at least half-drive. Probably they’ve dropped their main screen entirely. Everybody keep to cover—there may be flares.”

The laughter began again.

“Vultures,” the voice said. “Little mangy vultures in a big tight cage.”

Amalfi cut back in on the open radio band. “You’re going to wreck your city,” he said steadily. “And once you tear this section of it loose, your power will fail and your screen will go down again. You can’t win, and you know it.”

The street began to tremble. It was only a faint trembling now, but there was no telling how long the basic structure of the dead city could hold this one small area in place against the machine that was trying to fling it away into space. Hazleton, of course, would rush over a set of portable nutcrackers as soon as he had seen what had happened—but whether this part of the city would still be here when the nutcrackers arrived was an open question.