Cities in Flight

“But I want you all to remember that there’s no longer any work, or any hope of work, for us anywhere in the main body of the galaxy, even if by some miracle we manage to put our beat-up old city back into good order again. We have no choice. We must find a planet of our own to settle down on, a planet we can claim as our own.”

“ESTABLISH THIS POINT,” the City Fathers said.

“I’m prepared to do so. You all know what has happened to the galactic economy. It’s collapsed completely. As long as the currency was stable in the main commerce lanes, there was some pay we could work for; but that doesn’t exist any longer. The drug standard which Earth has rigged up now is utterly impossible for the cities, because the cities have to use those drugs as drugs, not as money, in order to stay alive long enough to do business at all. Entirely aside from the possibility of plague—and you’ll remember, I think, what we saw of that not so long ago—there’s the fact that we live, literally, on longevity. We can’t trade on it, too.

“And that’s only the beginning. The drug standard will collapse, and sooner and more finally than the germanium standard did. The galaxy’s a huge place. There will be new monetary standards by the dozens before the economy gets back onto some stable basis. And there will be thousands of local monetary systems in operation before that happens. The interregnum will last at least a century—”

“AT LEAST THREE CENTURIES.”

“Very well, three centuries. I was being optimistic. In either case, it’s plain that we can’t make a living in an economy which isn’t at least reasonably stable, and we can’t afford to sweat out the waiting period before the galaxy jells again. Especially since we don’t know whether the eventual stabilization will have any corner in it for Okies or not.

“Frankly, I don’t think the Okies have a prayer of surviving. Earth will be especially hard on them after this ‘march,’ which I took pains to encourage all the same because I was pretty sure we could suck in the Vegans with it. But even if there had been no march, the Okies would have been made obsolete by the depression. The histories of depressions show that a period of economic chaos is invariably followed by a period of extremely rigid economic controls —during which all the variables, the only partially controllable factors like commodity speculation, unlimited credit, free marketing, and competitive wages get shut out.

“Our city represents nearly the ultimate in competitive labor. Even if it lasts through the interregnum—which it can’t—it will be an anachronism in the new economy. It will almost surely be forced to berth down on some planet selected by the government. My own proposition is simply that we select our own berth, long before the government gets around to enforcing its own selection; that we pick a place hundreds of parsecs away from the outermost boundary-surface that government will think to claim; a place which is retreating steadily and at good speed from the center of that government and everything it will eventually want to claim; and that once we get there, we dig in. There’s a new imperialism starting where we used to be free; to stay free, we’ll have to go out beyond any expectable frontier and start our own little empire.

“But let’s face it. The Okies are through.”

Nobody said anything. Stunned faces scanned stunned faces.

Then the City Fathers said calmly, “THE POINT IS ESTABLISHED. WE ARE NOW MAKING AN ANALYSIS OF THE SELECTED AREA, AND WILL HAVE A REPORT FROM THE ASSIGNED SECTION IN FOUR TO FIVE WEEKS.”

Still the silence persisted in the big chamber. The Okies were testing it—almost tasting it. No more roaming. A planet of their own. A city at rest, and a sun to come up and go down over it on a regular schedule; seasons; a quietness free of the eternal whirling of gravity fields. No fear, no fighting, no defeat, no pursuit; self-sufficiency—and the stars only points of light forever.

A planetbound man presented with a similar revolution in his habits would have rejected it at once, terrified. The Okies, however, were used to change; change was the only stable factor in their lives. It is the only stable factor in the life of a planetbound man, too, but the planetbound man has never had his nose rubbed in it.