Cities in Flight

“The city was yours,” she said tonelessly. “And now it’s grown up and gone away and left you. I saw you grieving, John, and I couldn’t bear it—oh, I don’t mean that I was pretending. I love you, I think I always have. But I should have known that the time for us had gone by. There’s nothing at all left for me to give you that you haven’t had in full measure.”

She bowed her head, and he stroked her hair awkwardly, wishing it had never begun, since it had to end like this. “And what now?” he said. “Now that life with father has turned out to be nothing more than that? Can you leave home again and go to Mark?”

“Mark? He doesn’t even know I’ve been … away. As his wife, I’m dead and buried,” she said in a low voice. “Living seems to be a process of continually being born again. I suppose the trick is to learn how to make that crucial exit without suffering the trauma each time. Good-bye, John.”

She didn’t look as if she were being too successful at mastering the trick, but he made no move to help her. She was going to have to find her own way back; she was beyond his aid now.

He thought that what she had said was probably the truth—for a woman. For a man, he knew, life is a process of dying, again and again; and the trick, he thought, is to do it piecemeal, and ungenerously.

For the first time in weeks, he walked the streets of New Manhattan again. He had never felt so utterly done with the purpose he had sowed in his people. Now that it was coming to fruition, he urgently needed to be seeking some purpose far removed from theirs.

Inevitably, he found himself leaving cats, birds, svengalis, dogs and Dee for the dilapidated streets of the Okie city. He was almost all the way down to the banks of the City Fathers, when a suspicion that he was again being followed turned into a certainty. For a panic moment he feared it might be Dee, spoiling both her exit and his; but it was not.

“All right, who is it?” he said. “Stop skulking and name yourself.”

“You wouldn’t remember me, Mr. Mayor,” a frightened voice said in several registers at once.

“Remember you? Of course I do. You’re Webster Hazleton. Who’s your friend? What are you doing here in the old city? It’s off limits for children.”

The boy drew himself up to his full height.

“This is Estelle. She and I are in this together.” Web appeared to have some difficulty in going on. “There’s been talk—I mean, Estelle’s father, he’s Jake Freeman, kind of hinted about it—that is, if the city’s really going up again. Mr. Mayor—”

“Maybe it is. I don’t know yet. What of it?”

“If it is, we want on,” the boy said in a rush.

Amalfi had had no further plans to try and convert Jake, who certainly appeared to be as lost a cause as Hazleton himself; but the Freeman-Hazleton partnership represented by Web and Estelle meant that he would have to broach the subject again to Jake sooner or later. Of course it was out of the question that the children should be allowed to go—and yet it was not within the bounds of fairness to forbid them out of hand, without knowing what their elders thought of it. Children had gone adventuring on Okie cities many a time before; but of course that had been back in the old days, when the cities had been as well equipped as any earthbound community to take good care of them, at least most of the time. Every thread he touched these days, it seemed to Amalfi, had knots in it.

Temporarily, however, the fates allowed him to shelve that part of the problem; for Jake was waiting for him again in the computation section, in a state of excitement so febrile that the sight of his daughter and Web tagging behind Amalfi barely raised his eyebrows.

“You’re just in time,” he said as though there had been some prior appointment. “You recall the nova I was talking to you about? Well, it isn’t a nova at all, and at this point it’s no longer an astronomical problem; in fact, it’s your problem.”

“What do you mean?” Amalfi said. “If it isn’t a nova, what is it?”

“Just what I was asking myself,” Jake said. One of his more irritating failings was his inability to get to a point by any but a preselected route. “I have a remarkable collection of spectrographs for this thing; if you looked at them without any clue as to what they were, you’d think they represented a stellar catalogue, rather than a single object—and a catalogue containing stars from all over the Russell diagram, too. On top of which, all of them show a blue shift in the absorption lines, particularly in the lines contributed by New Earth’s own atmosphere, which made no sense whatsoever, up to now.”

“It still doesn’t make any sense to me,” Amalfi admitted.