Cities in Flight

Amalfi thought about it. Now that the city was permanently cut off from the home galaxy, no work that it could do for money would mean a great deal to it; what was needed first of all was oil, so that the city could eat. Work that would yield good returns in the local currency would have to come much later. Right now the city would have to work for payment in drilling permits.

At the first contact that had seemed to be easy enough. This planet’s natives had never been able to get below the biggest and most obvious oil-domes, so there should be plenty of oil left for the city. In turn, the city could throw up enough low-grade molybedenum and wolfram as a byproduct of drilling to satisfy the terms of the Proctors.

But if there was no oil to crack for food …

“Sink two more shafts,” Amalfi said. “You’ve got an oil-bearing till down there, anyhow. We’ll pressure jellied gasoline into it and split it. Ride along a Number Eleven gravel to hold the seam open. If there’s no dome, we’ll boil the oil out.”

“Steak yesterday and steak tomorrow,” Hazleton murmured. “But never steak today.”

Amalfi swung upon the city manager, feeling the blood charging upward through his thick neck. “Do you think you’ll get fed any other way?” he growled. “This planet is going to be home for us from now on. Would you rather take up farming like the natives? I thought you outgrew that notion after the raid on Gort.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Hazleton said quietly. His heavily space-tanned face could not pale, but it blued a little under the taut, weathered bronze. “I know just as well as you do that we’re here for good. It just seemed funny to me that settling down on a planet for good should begin just like any other job.”

“I’m sorry,” Amalfi said, mollified. “I shouldn’t be so jumpy. Well, we don’t know yet how well off we are. The natives never have mined this planet to anything like paydirt depth, and they refine stuff by throwing it into a stewpot. If we can get past this food problem, we’ve still got a good chance of turning this whole Cloud into a tidy corporation.”

He turned his back abruptly on the derricks and began to walk slowly away from the city. “I feel like a walk,” he said. “Like to come along, Mark?”

“A walk?” Hazleton looked puzzled. “Why—sure. Okay, boss.”

For a while they trudged in silence over the heath. The going was rough; the soil was clayey and heavily gullied, particularly deceptive in the early morning light. Very little seemed to grow on it: only an occasional bit of low, starved shrubbery, a patch of tough, nettlelike stalks, a few clinging weeds like crab grass.

“This doesn’t strike me as good farming land,” Hazleton said. “Not that I know a thing about it.”

“There’s better land farther out, as you saw from the city,” Amalfi said. “But I agree about the heath. It’s blasted land. I wouldn’t even believe it was radiologically safe until I saw the instrument readings with my own eyes.”

“A war?”

“Long ago, maybe. But I think geology did most of the damage. The land was let alone too long; the topsoil’s all gone. It’s odd, considering how intensively the rest of the planet seems to be farmed.”

They half-slid into a deep arroyo and scrambled up the other side. “Boss, straighten me out on something,” Hazleton said. “Why did we adopt this planet, even after we found that it had people of its own? We passed several others that would have done as well. Are we going to push the local population out? We’re not too well set up for that, even if it were legal or just.”

“Do you think there are Earth cops in the Greater Magellanic, Mark?”

“No,” Hazleton said. “But there are Okies, and if I wanted justice, I’d go to Okies, not to cops. What’s the answer, Amalfi?”

“We may have to do a little judicious pushing,” Amalfi said, squinting ahead. The double suns were glaring directly in their faces. “It’s all in knowing where to push, Mark. You heard the character some of the outlying planets gave this place when we spoke to them on the way in.”

“They hate the smell of it,” Hazleton said, carefully removing a burr from his ankle. “It’s my guess that the Proctors made some early expeditions unwelcome. Still—”

Amalfi topped a rise and held out one hand. The city manager fell silent almost automatically, and clambered up beside him.

The cultivated land began only a few meters away. Watching them were two—creatures.

One, plainly, was a man—a naked man, the color of chocolate, with matted blue-black hair. He was standing at the handle of a single-bladed plow, which looked to be made of the bones of some large animal. The furrow that he had been opening stretched behind him beside its fellows, and farther back in the field there was a low hut. The man was standing, shading his eyes, evidently looking across the dusky heath toward the Okie city. His shoulders were enormously broad and muscular, but bowed even when he stood erect, as now.