Cities in Flight

“Fast, huh? And it’d throw you much farther, Red. In a few minutes, it’ll be lifting a whole city. So don’t go by how things look. Right where you stand, you’re not even on the Earth any more.”

Chris looked at the mountains for a moment, and then back at the line of boiling dust. Then he turned away and resumed marching toward Scranton.

And yet they were now on a street Chris had traveled a score of times before, carrying fifty cents for the Sunday paper’s Help Wanted ads, or rolling a wheel-barrow not quite full of rusty scrap, or bringing back a flat package of low-grade ground horsemeat. The difference lay only in the fact that just beyond the familiar corner the city stopped, giving place to the new desert of the perimeter—and all in the overarching shadow which was not a shadow at all.

The patrol leader stopped and looked back. “We’ll never make it from here,” he said finally. “Take cover. Barney, watch that red-neck. I’ll take the kid with me; he looks sensible.”

Barney started to answer, but his reply was drowned out by a prolonged fifty-decibel honking which made the very walls howl back. The noise was horrifying; Chris had never before heard anything even a fraction so loud, and it seemed to go on forever. The press-gang boss herded him into a doorway.

“There’s the alert. Duck, you guys. Stand still, Red. There’s probably no danger—we just don’t know. But something might just shake down and fall—so keep your head in.”

The honking stopped; but in its place Chris could again hear the humming, now so pervasive that it made his teeth itch in their sockets. The shadow deepened, and out in the bare belt of earth the seething dust began to leap into the air in feathery plumes almost as tall as ferns.

Then the doorway lurched and went askew. Chris grabbed for the frame; and just in time, for a second later, the door jerked the other way; and then, back again. Gradually, the quakes became periodic, spacing themselves farther apart in time, and slowly weakening in violence.

After the first quake, however, Chris’s alarm began to dwindle into amazement, for the movements of the ground were puny compared to what was going on before his eyes. The whole city seemed to be rocking heavily, like a ship in a storm. At one instant, the street ended in nothing but sky; at the next, Chris was staring at a wall of sheared earth, its rim looming clifflike, fifty feet or more above the new margin of the city; and then the blank sky was back again—

These huge pitching movements should have brought the whole city down in a roaring avalanche of steel and stone. Instead, only these vague twitchings and shudderings of the ground came through, and even those seemed to be fading away. Now the city was level again, amidst an immense cloud of dust, through which Chris could see the landscape begin to move solemnly past him. The city had stopped rocking, and was now turning slowly. There was no longer even the slightest sensation of movement; the illusion that it was the valley that was revolving around the city was irresistible and more than a little dizzying.

I can see where the spindizzy got its name, Chris thought. Wonder if we go around like a top all the time we’re in space? How’ll we see where we’re going, then?

But now the high rim of the valley was sinking. In a breath, the distant roadbed of the railroad embankment was level with the end of the street; then the lip of the street was at the brow of the mountain; then with the treetops … and then here was nothing but blue sky, becoming rapidly darker.

The big press-gang leader released an explosive sigh. “By thunder,” he said, “we got her up.” He seemed a little dazed. “I guess I never really believed it till now.”

“Not so sure I believe it yet,” the man called Barney said. “But I don’t see any cornices falling—we don’t have to hang around here any longer. The boss’ll have our necks for being even this late.”

“Yeah, let’s move. Red, use your head and don’t give us any more trouble, huh? You can see for yourself, there’s no place to run to now.”

There was no doubt about that. The sky at the end of the street, and overhead too, was now totally black; and even as Chris looked up, the stars became visible—at first only a few of the brightest, but the others came out steadily in their glorious hundreds. From their familiar fixity Chris could also deduce that the city was no longer rotating on its axis, which was vaguely reassuring, somehow. Even the humming had faded away again; if it was still present, it was now inaudible in the general noise of the city.

Oddly, the sunlight was still as intense as ever. From now on, “day” and “night” would be wholly arbitrary terms aboard the city: Scranton had emerged into the realm of Eternal Daylight-Saving Time.