Cities in Flight

“I think there must be more to it than that,” Amalfi said. “The city was powerful, is powerful still; the central pile is good for a million years yet at a minimum, and some of the spindizzies must still be operable—providing that we ever again find anything big enough to need all the lifting power we’ve got concentrated down below in the hold.”

“Why should we?” the astronomer said, obviously not very much interested. “That’s all past and done with.”

“But is it? I keep thinking that no machine of the sophistication and complexity of the city can ever go quite out of use. And I don’t mean just marginal uses, like occasionally consulting the City Fathers, or tapping the pile for some fraction of its total charge. This city was meant to fly, and by God it ought to be flying still.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Maybe for exploration, maybe for work, the kind of work we used to do. There must be some jobs in the Cloud for which nothing less than a machine of this size is suitable—though obviously we haven’t hit such a job yet Maybe it would be worth cruising and looking for one.”

“I doubt it,” Jake said. “Anyhow, she’s gotten pretty tumbledown since we had our little difference with IMT, what with all those rocket bombs they threw at us—and letting her be rained on steadily ever since hasn’t helped, either. Besides, I seemed to remember that that old 23rd St. spindizzy blew for good and all when we landed here. I hardly think she’d stir at all now if you tried to lift her, though no doubt she’d groan a good deal.”

“I wasn’t proposing to pick up the whole thing, anyhow,” Amalfi said. “I know well enough that that couldn’t be done. But the city’s over -sophisticated for a field of action as small as the Cloud; there’s a lot you coud leave behind. Besides, we’d have a great deal of difficulty in scaring up anything more than a skeleton crew, but if we could rehabilitate only a part of her, we might still get her aloft again—”

“Part of her?” Jake said. “How do you propose to section a city with a granite keel? Particularly one composed as a unit on that keel? You’d find that many of the units that you most needed in your fraction would be in the outlying districts and couldn’t be either cut off or transported inward; that’s the way she was built, as a piece.”

This of course was true. Amalfi said, “But supposing it could be done? How would you feel about it, Jake? You were an Okie for nearly five centuries; don’t you miss it, a little, now?”

“Not a bit,” the astronomer said briskly. “To tell you the truth, Amalfi, I never liked it. It was just that there was no place else to go. I thought you were all crazy with your gunning around the sky, your incessant tangles with the cops, and your wars, and the periods of starvation and all the rest, but you gave me a floating platform to work from and a good close look at stars and systems I could never have seen as well from a fixed observatory with any possible telescope, and besides, I got fed. So I was reasonably satisfied. But do it again, now that I have a choice? Certainly not. In fact, I only came over here to get some computational work done on this new star that’s cropped up just beyond the Lesser Cloud; it’s behaving outrageously—in fact, it’s the prettiest theoretical problem I’ve encountered in a couple of centuries. I wish you’d let me know when you’re through with the boards; I really do need the City Fathers, when they’re available.”

“I’m through now,” Amalfi said, getting off the stool. As an afterthought, he turned back to the boards and cleared the instruction circuits of the problem he had been setting up, a problem which he now knew all too well to be a dummy.

He left Jake humming contentedly as he set up his nova problem, and wandered without real intention or direction down into the main body of the city, trying to remember it as it had been as a living and vibrant organism; but the empty streets, the blank windows, the flat quiet of the very air under the blue sky of New Earth, was like an insult. Even the feeling of gravity under his feet seemed in these familiar surroundings a fleeting denial of the causes and values to which he had given most of his life; a smug gravity, so easily maintained by sheer mass, and without the constant distant sound of spindizzies which always before—since his distant, utterly unrememberable youth—had signified that gravity was a thing made by man, and maintained by man.