Cities in Flight

Around them, there was a murmuring of voices, hushed with disaster, and with something else, too—something so old, and so new, that it hardly had a name on the planet that IMT had ruled. It was called freedom.

“On Earth?” Karst repeated. He and the mayor climbed painfully to their feet. “What do you mean? This is not Earth—”

Across the Barrens, the Okie city glittered—the city that had pitched camp to mow some lawns. A cloud of stars was rising behind it.

“It is now,” Amalfi said. “We’re all Earthmen, Karst. Earth is more than just one little planet, buried in another galaxy than this. Earth is much more important than that.

“Earth isn’t a place. It’s an idea.”

THE TRIUMPH OF TIME

To Lester and Evelyn del Rey

Bismillahi ’rrahmani ’rrahim

When the day that must come shall have come suddenly,

None shall treat that sudden coming as a lie:

Day that shall abase! Day that shall exalt!

When the earth shall be shaken with a shock,

And the mountains shall be crumbled with a crumbling,

And shall become scattered dust,

And into three bands shall ye be divided: …

Before thee have we granted to a man a life that shall last

forever:

If thou then die, shall they live forever?

Every soul shall taste of death: …

But it shall come on them suddenly and shall confound them; and they shall not be able to put it back, neither shall they be respited.

—The Koran; Sura LVI, Sura XXI

PROLOGUE