Cities in Flight

CHAPTER ONE: New Earth

IN THESE later years it occasionally startled John Amalfi to be confronted by evidence that there was anything in the universe that was older than he was, and the irrationality of his allowing himself to be startled by such a truism startled him all over again. This crushing sensation of age, of the sheer dead weight of a thousand years bearing down upon his back, was in itself a symptom of what was wrong with him—or, as he preferred to think of it, of what was wrong with New Earth.

He had been so startled while prowling disconsolately through the grounded and abandoned hulk of the city, itself an organism many millennia older than he was, but—as befitted such an antiquity—now only a corpse. It was, indeed, the corpse of a whole society; for nobody on New Earth now contemplated building any more space-cruising cities or in any other way resuming the wandering life of the Okies. Those of the original crew on New Earth, spread very thin among the natives and their own children and grandchildren, now looked back on that entire period with a sort of impersonal, remote distaste, and would certainly recoil from the very idea of returning to it, should anyone have the bad manners to broach such a notion. As for the second and third generations, they knew of the Okie days only as history, and looked upon the hulk of the flying city that had brought their parents to New Earth as a fantastically clumsy and outmoded monster, much as the pilot of an ancient atmospheric liner might have regarded a still more ancient quinquireme in a museum.

No one except Amalfi even appeared to take any interest in what might have happened to the whole of Okie society back in the home lens, the Milky Way galaxy of which the two Magellanics were satellites. To give them credit, finding out what had happened would in any event have been an almost impossible task; all kinds of broadcasts—literally millions of them—could be picked up easily from the home lens if anyone cared to listen, but so much time had elapsed since the colonization of New Earth that sorting these messages into a meaningful picture would require years of work by a team of experts, and none could be found who would take any interest in so fruitless and essentially nostalgic a chore. Amalfi had in fact come into the city with the vague notion of turning the task over to the City Fathers, that enormous bank of computing and memory-storage machines to which had been intrusted all the thousands of routine technical, operational and governmental problems of the city when it had been in flight. What Amalfi would do with the information when and if he got it he had no idea; certainly there was no possibility of interesting any of the other New Earthmen in it, except in the form of half an hour’s idle chatter.

And after all, the New Earthmen were right. The Greater Magellanic Cloud was drawing steadily away from the home lens, at well over 150 miles per second—a trifling velocity in actuality, only a little greater than the diameter of the average solar system per year, but symbolic of the new attitude among the New Earthmen; people’s eyes were directed outward, away from all that ancient history. There was considerably more interest in a nova which had flared into being in intergalactic space, somewhere beyond the Lesser Magellanic, than there was in the entire panoply of the home lens, visibly though the latter dominated the night sky from horizon to horizon during certain seasons of the year. There was, of course, still space flight, for trade with other planets in the little satellite galaxy was a necessity; the trade was conducted for the most part in large cargo hulls, and there were a number of larger units such as mobile processing plants which still needed to be powered by gravitronpolarity generators or “spindizzies”; but for the most part the trend was toward the development of local, self-sufficient industries.

It was while he was setting up the City Fathers for the problem in analysis of the million-fold transmission from the home lens, alone in what had once been his Mayor’s Office, that Amalfi had suddenly had thrown at him the fragment from the writings of a man dead eleven centuries before Amalfi had been born. Possibly the uttering of the unexpected fragment had been simply an artifact of the warming-up process—like most computers of their age and degree of complexity, it took the City Fathers two to three hours to become completely sane after they had been out of service for a while—or perhaps Amalfi’s fingers, working with sure automatism even after all these years, had been wiser than his head, and without the collusion of Amalfi’s consciousness had built into the problem elements of what was really troubling him: the New Earthmen. In either event, the quotation was certainly apposite: