Cities in Flight

The nomad cities offered no better way of escape. More often than not, Chris had read, star roving was simply another form of starvation, without even the company of a blue sky, a scrub forest or a patch of ground to grow turnips in. Otherwise, why did almost every city which had ever left the Earth fail to come back home? Pittsburgh had made its fortune on Mars, to be sure—but it was a poor sort of fortune that kept you sitting in a city all your life, with nothing to see beyond the city limits but an ochre desert, a desert with no air you could breathe, a desert that would freeze you solid only a few minutes after the tiny sun went down. Sooner or later, too, his father said, Pittsburgh would have to leave the solar system as all the other cities had—not, this time, because it had exhausted the iron and the oxygen, but because there would be too few people left on the Earth to buy steel. There were already too few to justify Pittsburgh’s coming back to the once-golden triangle of rivers it had abandoned thirty years ago; Pittsburgh had wealth, but was finding it increasingly hard to spend on the Earth, even for necessities. The nomad cities seemed, like everything else, to be a dead end.

Nevertheless Chris sat on the embankment and watched, for only a single, simple reason: Something was going on. If he envied the city its decision to leave the valley, he was unaware of it. He was there simply to see something happen, for a change.

A brief rustle of shrubbery behind him made him turn. A dog’s head peered across the roadbed at him from the foot of the mountainside, surrounded incongruously by the trumpets of tiger lilies; it looked a little as if it were being served up on a platter. Chris grinned.

“Hello, Kelly. Look out for bees.”

The dog whuffed and came trotting to him, looking foolishly proud of itself—as it probably was, for Kelly was usually not very good at finding anything, even his own way home. Bob, whose dog Kelly officially was, said that Kelly was a combination of Kerry blue and collie—hence the name—but Chris had never seen a pure sample of either breed, and Kelly did not look anything like the pictures of either. He looked, in point of fact, like a shaggy mutt, which was fortunate for him, since that was what he was.

“What do you make of it, handsome? Think they’ll ever get that thing off the ground?”

Kelly gave an imitation of a dog trying to think, registered pain, wagged his tail twice, woofed at a butterfly and sat down, panting. It had obviously always been his impression that he belonged to Chris, an impression Bob had wisely never tried to discourage. Explaining something that abstract to Kelly was (a) a long and complicated task, and (b) utterly hopeless anyhow. Kelly earned his own keep—he caught rabbits—which made up for the nuisance he was when he caught a porcupine; so nobody in the family but Chris much cared whom he thought he belonged to.

There was at last some activity around the parching city. Small groups of men, made so tiny by distance that they were almost invisible except for their bright yellow steelworkers’ helmets, were patrolling the bare perimeter. There was probably a law about that, Chris reflected. Equally probably it would be the last Earth law Scranton would ever be obliged to observe—no matter how many of them the city fathers took into space of their own free will. No doubt the patrol was looking for rubbernecks who might be standing too close for safety.

He imagined it so vividly that for a moment he had the illusion of hearing their voices. Then he realized with a start that it was not an illusion. A flash of yellow hard hats revealed another group of patrollers working their way through the shacks at the foot of the embankment and coming in his direction.

With the ingrained prudence of the lifelong poacher, he took at once to the bushes on the other side of the roadbed. Not only would he be invisible from there, but, of course, he could no longer see the patrol; however, he could still hear it.

“… anybody in these shacks. Ask me, it’s a waste of time.”

“The boss says look, so we look, that’s all. Myself, I think we’d make out better in Nixonville.”

“Them tramps? They can smell work ten miles away. People on this side of town, they used to look for work. Not that there ever was any.”

Chris cautiously parted the shrubbery and peered out. The gang was still out of sight, but there was another group coming toward him from the other direction, walking along the old roadbed. He let the bushes swing closed hastily, wishing that he had retreated farther up the mountainside. It was too late for that now, though. The new patrol was close enough to hear the brush rustle, and would probably see him too if he was in motion.