Cities in Flight

At least, that was the hope. What was certain was that there was no more iron ore on Earth worth processing. The voracious Second Millennium—the books called it the “Age of Waste”—had used it all up, except for such artificial mines as used-car dumps and other deposits of scrap and rust. There was still native iron on Mars, of course, but none of that was available for Scranton. Pittsburgh was already on Mars, as well equipped with guns as with blast furnaces. Besides Mars was too small a planet to support more than one steel town, not because the red world was short of iron, but because it was short of oxygen, which was also essential for the making of steel.

Any work Scranton might find to do now would have to lie beyond the reaches of the solar system. There was no iron on Venus or Mercury that a steel town could afford to process—and no iron at all on the other six planets, the five gas giants and the remote ice ball that was Pluto.

The man in the kitchen garden straightened, leaned his hoe against the back of his shack, and went inside. Now the valley outside the raw-earth circle looked deserted indeed, and it suddenly occurred to Chris that this might be more than an appearance. Was there something dangerous about being too close to a city under a spindizzy field? Were he and the lone gardener being foolhardy?

At the moment, the whole world was silent except for the distant grumbling of Scranton itself. He knew he had nothing to fear from the rail bed behind him, for the tracks had been torn up long ago to feed the furnaces. There was a legend in the valley that on quiet nights one could still hear the Phoebe Snow going by, but Chris scoffed at such fairy tales. (Besides, his father had told him, that had been a daytime train. ) Even the ties were gone, burned as firewood by the shack dwellers through generations of harsh Pennsylvania winters.

He racked his memory for what little he knew about the behavior of spindizzies, but could come up with nothing but that they were machines and that they lifted things. Though his schooling had been poor and spasmodic, he was a compulsive reader, devouring even the labels on cans if there was nothing else available; but the physics of interstellar flight is an impossible discipline to grasp even for an advanced student without a first-rate teacher to help, and the closest Chris had even come to a good teacher was Scranton’s public librarian. She had tried hard; but she did not know the subject.

As a result, Chris stayed where he was. He would probably have done so even had he known positively that there was some danger; for in the valley, anything new was a change—even the fact, disastrous though it was, that Scranton was about to go as permanently out of his life and world as Betelgeuse. His own life thus far had held little but squirrel trapping; stealing eggs from neighbors as badly off as his own family; hunting scrap to sell to the mills; helping Bob nurse their father through repeated bouts of an illness which, but for the fact that there was no one in thirty-second-century America to diagnose it, would have been recognized as the ancient African scourge of kwashiorkor or malignant malnutrition; keeping the little girls out of the berry patch; fishing for fingerlings; and watching the rockets of the rich howl remotely through the highest reaches of the indifferent sky.

He had often thought of leaving, though he had no trade to practice and knew of no place in the world where his considerable but utterly untrained brute strength could be sold at any price. But there was loyalty and love in the motherless family, and it had often before sustained them when there had been nothing to eat but fried dough and green tomatoes, and no warmth against the Christmas snows but huddling with the little kids under a heap of the old rags that were their clothes; and in the end, Chris stuck by it as stubbornly and devotedly as Bob always had. In all the depopulated Earth there was no place to which he owed more loyalty, and no place which could offer him more in return—the worse possible substratum for dreams of escape, even for a temperament as naturally sunny and sanguine as Chris’s. In a world where a Ph.D. in economics could find no one to teach, nor use his knowledge of how the economy wagged to find any other niche in it—a world in which a thousand penny-ante jobs left him no time even to tend his wife’s grave, yet all the same paid him less and less every year—what hope could his boys reasonably cherish for any better future? The answer, alas, was all too obvious; and for the little girls, the foreseeable future was even more grim.