Cities in Flight

It never occurred to Amalfi to admire the children’s concealment of their disappointment at leaving so precipitately, since he did not realize that they were disappointed. He simply listened without listening. One middle-sized boy caught his attention mainly because from the moment he had arrived Amalfi had noticed that the child had kept his eyes riveted on the guest of honor. It was disconcerting. Amalfi suspected he had forgotten to don some essential garment or to doff some trace of his party preparations. When the child who had caused him to rub his chin and smooth his eyebrows and finger his ears to see if there were still soapsuds in them spoke up, Amalfi paid attention.

“Webster Hazleton, sir, and I hope to be seeing you again on a matter of the greatest importance,” the boy said. He said it as if he had been rehearsing it for weeks, with a ringing conviction that almost impelled Amalfi to fix an appointment then and there.

Instead, he growled, “Webster, eh?”

“Yes, sir. I was put on the Great List to be born when Webster wanted off.”

Amalfi was considerably jolted. So long ago as that! Webster had been the pile engineer who had elected to leave the city before the landing on Utopia, around 3600. Of course it had taken a long time to fill up the gaps in the city’s roster after the murderous attempt of the bandit cities to prevent fulfillment of their contract on He, and the considerable losses in boarding the plague city in the Acolyte jungle; and then there had been so many girls born at first. Webster had been an unconscionably long time in coming, though. He could not be more than fourteen, from the looks of him.

Dee intervened. “Actually, John, Web arrived a long time after the Great List was abandoned. It pleases him to have his patron citizen, that’s all, just like in the old days.”

The boy turned his clear brown eyes on Dee briefly, and then, as if dismissing her from their male universe, he said, “Good night, sir.” Amalfi bridled a little. Nobody could write Dee off, not even Amalfi; he knew; once he had tried.

The procession continued while he lapsed back into inattention, and eventually he found himself closeted with Dee and Mark—if closeted was the word in a room so large and echoing with so many strong personalities. The aura of furious domesticity remained behind on the Hazleton hearth, and came between Amalfi and what he was trying to say, so that his exposition was unwontedly stumbling; and it was then that Hazleton had asked him what he expected to gain.

“Gain?” Amalfi said. “I don’t expect to gain anything. I’d just like to be aloft again, that’s all.”

“But, John,” Dee said. “Think about it a minute. Suppose you do succeed in persuading a few people from the old days to go in with you. It all doesn’t have any meaning any more. You’ll just turn yourself into a sort of Flying Dutchman, sailing under a curse, going nowhere and doing nothing.”

“Maybe so,” Amalfi said. “The picture doesn’t frighten me, Dee. As a matter of fact, it gives me a sort of perverse satisfaction, if you must know. I shouldn’t mind becoming a legend; at least that would fit me back into history again—give me a role to play comparable to roles I’ve played in the past. And besides, I’d be aloft again, which is the important thing. I’m beginning to believe that nothing else is important to me any more.”

“Does it matter what’s important to us?” Hazleton said. “For one thing, such a venture would leave the Cloud without a mayor. I don’t know how important that is to you any more—I seem to remember that it was pretty important to you back when we were on our way here—but whether it matters to you any more or not, you ran for the job, you connived for it, you even rigged the election-Carrel and I were supposed to be the only candidates, and the office we were running for was city manager, but you had the City Fathers hornswoggled into believing that it was a mayoralty election, so of course they elected you.”

“Do you want the job?” Amalfi said.

“Gods of all stars, no! I want you to keep it. You exercised considerable ingenuity to get it, and I’m not alone in expecting you to hold it down now that you’ve got it. Nobody else is bidding for the job; they expect you to handle it, as you undertook to do.”