Cities in Flight

“For a long list of reasons. Our flying the planet across the face of the solar system—as well as our flying it through a number of other systems and across main interstellar traffic areas—was a serious violation of Earth laws. Furthermore, Earth has us chalked up as having sideswiped a city as we went by; they don’t know the real nature of that ‘city.’ And incidentally, it’s important that they never find out, even if keeping it a secret results in our being written up in the history books as murderers.”

Dee stirred protestingly. “John, I don’t see why we shouldn’t take the credit. Especially since it really was a pretty big thing we did for the Earth.”

“Because we’re not through doing it yet. To you, Dee, the Vegans are an ancient people you first heard about only three centuries ago. Before that, on Utopia, you were cut off from the main stream of galactic history. But the fact is that Vega ruled much of the galaxy before Earth did, and that the Vegans always were, and have just shown us that they still are, dangerous people to get involved with. That fort didn’t just exist in a vacuum. It had to touch port now and then, just as we do. And being a military machine, it needed more service and maintenance than it could take care of by itself.

“Somewhere in the galaxy there is a colony of Vega which is still dangerous. That colony must be kept in utter ignorance of what happened to its major weapon. It must be made to live on faith; to believe that the fort failed on its first attempt but may some day be back for another try. It must not know that the fort is destroyed, or it will build another one.

“The second one will succeed where the first one failed. The first one failed because of the nature of the nomadic kind of culture on which Earth has been depending up to now; the Okies defeated it. We happened to have been the particular city to do the job, but it was no accident that we were on hand to do it.

“But for quite a while to come, Okies are not going to be effective or even welcome factors in the galaxy as a whole; and the galaxy, Earth in particular, is going to be as weak as a baby all during that period because of the depression. If the Vegans hear that their fort did strike at Earth, and came within a hair’s breadth of knocking it out, they’ll be building another fort the same day they get the news. After that …

“No, Dee, I’m afraid we’ll have to keep the secret.”

Dee, still a little rebellious, looked at Hazleton for support; but he shook his head.

“Our own situation, right now, is neither good nor bad,” Amalfi continued. “We still have Hern VI’s velocity. It’s enough slower than the velocity we hit when we flew the planet of He to make us readily maneuverable, even though clumsily, especially since we’re so much less massive than a planet. We will be able to make any port of call which is inside the cone our trajectory would describe if we rotated it. Finally, Earth has figures only on the path of Hern VI; it has none on the present path of the city.

“Cast up against that the fact that our equipment is old and faltering, and will never carry us anywhere again under our own steam. When we land at the next port of call, we will be landed for good. We have no money to buy new equipment; without new equipment, we can’t make money. So it will pay us to pick our next stop with great care. That’s why I’ve asked everybody to sit in on this conference.”

One of the technies said, “Boss, are you sure it’s as bad as all that? We should be able to make some kind of repairs—”

“THE CITY WILL NOT SURVIVE ANOTHER LANDING,” the City Fathers said flatly. The technie swallowed and subsided.

“Our present orbit,” Amalfi said, “would lead us eventually out into the greater of the two Magellanic clouds. At our present velocity, that’s about twenty years’ journey away still. If we actually want to go there, we’ll have to plan on that period stretching on by another six years, since the clip at which we’re traveling now is so great that we’d blow out every driver on board if we undertook normal deceleration.

“I propose that the Greater Magellanic Cloud is exactly where we want to go.”

Tumult.

The whole city roared with astonishment. Amalfi raised his hand; those actually in the room quieted slowly, but elsewhere in the city the noise went on for quite a while. It did not seem to be a sound of general protest, but rather the angry buzzing of large numbers of people arguing among themselves.

“I know how you feel,” Amalfi said when he could be sure most of them could hear him again. “It’s a long way to go, and though there are supposed to be one or two colonies on the near side of the Cloud, there can be no real interstellar commerce there, and certainly no commerce with the main body of the galaxy. We would have to settle down—maybe even take to dirt farming; it would be a matter of giving up being an Okie, and giving up being a starman. That’s a lot to give up, I know.