Cities in Flight

Even so, had they not been in addition virtually immortal—had they been, like the people of the old times before space travel, pinned like insects on a spreading-board to a lifespan of less than a century—Amalfi would have been afraid of the outcome. A short lifespan leads to restlessness; somewhere within the next few years, there has to be some El Dorado for the ephemerid. But the conquest of age had almost eliminated that Faustian frenzy. After three or four centuries, people grew tired of searching for the un-namable; they learned—they began to think of the future not as holding a haven of placidity and riches, but simply as the realm of things that had not happened yet. They became interested in the budding, the unfolding present, and thought about the future only with an attitude of indifferent acceptance toward whatever catastrophe it might bring. They no longer burned out their lives seeking catastrophe, under the name of “security.”

In short, they grew a little more realistic, and more than a little tired.

Amalfi waited with calm confidence. The smallest objections, he knew, would come first. He was not anxious to have to cope with them, and the silence had lasted so much longer than he had expected that he began to wonder if his argument had become too abstract toward the end. If so, a note of naive practicality at this point should be proper ….

“This solution should satisfy almost everyone,” he said briskly. “Hazleton has asked to be relieved of his post, and this will certainly relieve him of it most effectively. It takes us out of the jurisdiction of the cops. It leaves Carrel as city manager if he still wants the post, but it leaves him manager of a grounded city, which satisfies me, since I’ve no confidence in Carrel as a pilot. It—”

“Boss, let me interrupt a minute.”

“Go ahead, Mark.”

“What you say is all very well, but it’s too damned extreme. I can’t see any reason why we have to go so far afield. Granted that the Greater Magellanic is off the course Hern VI is following; granted that it’s pretty remote, granted that even if the cops do go looking for us there, it’s too big and unpopulated and complex for them to hope to find us. But couldn’t we accomplish the same thing without leaving the galaxy? Why do we have to take up residence in a cloud that’s moving away from the galaxy at some colossal speed—”

“THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR MILES PER SECOND.”

“Oh, shut up. All right, so that’s not very fast. Still and all, the cloud is a long way away—and if you give me the exact figures, I’ll bust all your tubes—and if we ever want to get back to the galaxy again, we’ll have to fly another planet to do it.”

“All right,” Amalfi said. “What’s your alternative?”

“Why don’t we hide out in a big cluster in our own galaxy? Not a picayune ball of stars like the Acolyte cluster, but one of the big jobs like the Great Cluster in Hercules. There must be at least one such in the cone of our present orbit; there might even be a Cepheid cluster where spindizzy navigation would be impossible for anybody who didn’t know the local space strains. We’d be just as unlikely to be traced by the cops, but we’d still be on hand inside our own galaxy if conditions began to look up.”

Amalfi did not choose to contest the point. Logically, it should be Carrel, who was being deprived of the effective command of a flying city, who should be raising this objection. The fact that the avowedly retired Hazleton had brought it up first was enough for Amalfi.

“I don’t care if conditions ever do look up,” Dee said, unexpectedly. “I like the idea of our having a planet of our own, and I’d want it to be as far away from the cops as we could possibly make it. If that planet really does become ours, would it make any difference to us whether Okie cities become possible again two or three centuries from now? We wouldn’t need to be Okies any longer.”

“You’d say that,” Hazleton said, “because you haven’t lived more than two or three centuries yet, and because you’re still used to living on a planet. Some of the rest of us are older; some of the rest of us like wandering. I’m not speaking for myself, Dee, you know that. I’ll be happy to get off this junk pile. But this whole proposition has a faint smell to me. Amalfi, are you sure you aren’t forcing us to set down simply to block a change of administration? It won’t, you know.”

Amalfi said, “Of course, I know. I’m submitting my resignation along with yours the moment we touch ground. Right now I’m still an officer of this city, and I’m doing the job I’ve been assigned to do.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. Let it go. What I still want to know is why we have to go all the way out to the Greater Magellanic.”