Cities in Flight

“Sinner Hazleton,” a young and desperately frightened voice said, almost at once, “you have been found out. By the Word of Jorn, you—you are ordered to corrective discipline. Are you gone-tuh—will you submit humbly?”

“If you fire that thing in here,” Hazleton’s voice said, quite loudly—he was obviously projecting for the benefit of the mike—“you’ll uproot half the city. What good will that do you?”

“We will die in the Warriors,” the other voice said. It was still tense, but now that it spoke of dying it seemed more self-assured. “You will go to the flames.”

“And all the other people—?”

“Sinner Hazleton, we do not threaten,” a deeper, older voice said. “We think there is some good in everyone. Jorn commands us to redeem, and that we will do. We have hostages for your good conduct.”

“Where are they?”

“They were picked up by the Warriors of God,” the deep voice said. “Jorn in his blessedness was kind enough to grant us a cordon sanitaire for this Godless world. Will you yield, for the salvation of this woman and these two helpless children? I advise you, Sinner—hey, what the hell, that phone’s open! Jody, smash that switch, and fast! What did I ever do to be saddled with a cadre of lousy yokels—”

The speaker began a thin howl and went dead before the cry was properly born.

For a moment, Amalfi sat stunned. He had gotten too much information too fast; and he was much older now than he had been on like occasions in the past. He had never expected that such an occasion would arise again—but here it was.

A jehad against He? No, not likely—at least, not directly. Jorn the Apostle would be wary of tackling a world so completely mysterious to him, especially with forces more mob than military. But New Earth was wholly vulnerable; it was a logical first step to invest that planet. And now Jorn had Dee and the children.

Move!

How to move was another matter; it needed to be done in a vessel which no possible Warrior cordon would have the strength to attack, but no such vessel existed on He. The only other alternative was a very small, very fast ship with a low detectability index; but that was equally impossible across so long a distance, since there is a minimum size for even one spindizzy. Or was there? Carrel was on He, and Carrel had had considerable experience in designing relatively small spindizzy-powered proxies; one such had followed the March of Earth all the way, without anybody’s paying the slightest attention to it. Of course the proxy had been magnificently, noisily detectable by ordinary standards, and only Carrel’s piloting of it had kept the massed cities from distinguishing between the traces that it made and the traces that were made adventitiously by ordinary interstellar matter ….

“Can you do that again, Carrel? Remember that this time you won’t have a flock of massive cities to confuse the issue. The gamut you’ll have to run will be one thin shell of orbiting warships, around one planet—and we don’t know how many of them there are, what arms they mount, how careful a watch they keep—”

“Assume the worst,” Carrel said. “They caught the recall ship, after all, and they didn’t even know we’d sent it. I can do it, Mr. Amalfi, if you’ll let me do the maneuvering when the chips are down; otherwise I think you’ll be caught, no matter how small the ship is.”

“Helleshin!” But there was no way around it; Amalfi would have to subject himself to at least two days of Carrel’s violent evasive-confusive maneuvers, without once touching the space-stick himself. It was going to be a rough do for an old man, but Carrel was quite right, there was no other available course.

“All right,” he said. “Just make sure I’m alive when I touch down.”

Carrel grinned. “I’ve never lost a cargo,” he said. “Providing it’s been properly secured. Where do you want to land?”

That was not an easy question either. In the long run, Amalfi settled for a landing in Central Park, in the heart of the old Okie city. This was perhaps dangerously close to the Warriors’ center of operations, but Amalfi did not want to be forced to trek across a thousand miles of New Earth just for a meeting with Hazleton; and there was a fair chance that the old city would be taboo for the bumpkins, or at least avoided instinctively. Jorn the Apostle would not have overlooked patrolling such an obvious rallying-point for the ousted, but presumably Jorn was somewhere at the other end of the Cloud with his main body.