Cities in Flight

“All right,” Jake said, “try this on for size; when the spectra turned out to be far too dim for an object of the apparent magnitude of this thing—remember, it’s been getting brighter all the time—I asked Schloss and his crew to neglect anti-matter long enough to do a wave-trap analysis of the incoming light. It turns out to be about seventy-five per cent false photons; the thing must be leaving behind a tremendous contrail, if we were only in a position to see it—”

“Spindizzies!” Amalfi shouted. “And under damn near full deceleration! But how could an object that size—no, wait a minute; do you actually know the size yet?”

The astronomer chuckled, a noise which from Jake never failed to remind Amalfi of a demented parrot. “I think we have the size, and all the rest of the answers, at least as far as astronomy is concerned,” he said. “The rest, as I said, is your problem. The thing is a planetary body, roughly seventy-five hundred miles in diameter, and much closer than we thought it was—right now, in fact, it’s actually inside the Greater Magellanic, and coming our way, directly for the system of New Earth. The change in spectra simply means that it’s shining by the reflected light of the different suns it’s passing, and the blue shift in the Frauenhofer lines strongly suggests an atmosphere very much like ours. I don’t know offhand what that reminds you of, but I know what it should remind you of—and the City Fathers agree with me.”

Web Hazleton could contain himself no longer. “I know, I know! It’s the planet He! It’s coming home! Isn’t that it, Mr. Mayor?”

The boy knew his city history well; nobody from the old days could have been confronted with such a set of data as Jake had just trotted out without responding with the same wild surmise. The planet He had been one of the city’s principal jobs of work, the outcome of which, for very complicated reasons, had entailed the installation on the planet itself of a number of spindizzies sufficient to rip He from her orbit around her home sun and send her careening, wholly out of control, out of the galaxy and into intergalactic space. The city had been carried a considerable distance with her, enabling it to re-enter the galaxy far away from any area where New York, N. Y., was being actively sought by the cops, but it had been a near thing. She, herself, presumably, had been hurtling toward the Andromeda galaxy ever since that moment in 3850 when she and the city had parted company, each vanishing to the other as abruptly and finally as a blown-out candle-flame.

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Amalfi said. “The tipping of He took place only a century and a half ago—and at that time the Hevians didn’t have the technology or the resources to master controlled spindizzy flight; in fact, they weren’t very far from being savages. Smart savages, I grant you, but still savages. Is this planet that’s coming our way truly dirigible, or don’t you know yet?”

“It looks that way,” Jake said. “That’s what first tipped me off that there was something unnatural about the object. It kept changing velocity and line of flight erratically—in fact, in a totally irrational way, unless one assumed that the changes were in fact rational. Whoever they are, they know enough to prevent that world of theirs from zigging when they want to zag. And they’re headed our way, Amalfi.”

“Have you made any attempt to get in touch with them, whoever they are?” Amalfi said.

“No, indeed. In fact, I haven’t even told anybody else about it yet. Not even Mark. Somehow it struck me as peculiarly your baby.”

“That was just a waste of pussyfooting, Jake. Dr. Schloss isn’t an idiot; surely he can read his own figures as well as you can and draw obvious conclusions from the very question you asked him; he must have told Mark by now, and a good thing, too. Mark is probably calling your object right now; let’s go directly up to the control room and find out.”

They made an oddly assorted procession through the haunted streets of the Okie city: the bald-headed keg-chested mayor with his teeth deeply sunk in a dead cigar, the bird-like and slightly crestfallen astronomer, the bright-eyed skipping youngsters now darting ahead of them, then falling behind to wait to be shown the way. Their eagerness moved Amalfi unexpectedly, bringing home to him the realization that their dream of the city back in flight had always been, like this, a very fragile one; and that this incoming dirigible planet, whatever else it might portend, would probably put the quietus to it, serious business and the dull cold morning light it thrived in being immemorially fatal to dreams.