Cities in Flight

“Check that, somebody,” the city manager said. “We’ve got a couple of people left over from the S. U. faculty, at least. By Hoffa, Boyle Warner was a Scranton prof, wasn’t he? Get him up here, and let’s close this thing out.”

“What’s the matter, boss?” Haskins said, with a broad grin. “Running out of trick questions?”

The city manager smiled back, but again the smile was more than a little frosty. “You could call it that,” he said, with surprising frankness. “But well see if the kid can fool Warner.”

“The ole bassar must be good for something,” somebody behind Chris mumbled. The voice was quiet, but the city manager heard it; his chin jerked up, and his fist struck a sudden, terrible blow on the top of his desk.

“He’s good for getting us where we’re going, and don’t you forget it! Steel is one thing, but stars are another—we may never see another lie or another ingot without Boyle. Next to him we’re all puddlers, just like that red-neck. And that may go for the kid here, too.”

“Ah, boss, don’t lay it on. What can he know?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Lutz said, in a white fury. “What do you know about it? Anybody here know what a geodesic is?”

Nobody answered.

“Red, do you know?”

Chris swallowed. He knew the answer, but he found it impossible to understand why the city manager considered it worth all this noise.

“Yes, sir. It’s the shortest distance between two points.”

“Is that all?” somebody said incredulously.

“It’s all there is between us and starvation,” Lutz said. “Frad, take the kid below and see what Boyle says about him; on second thought, I don’t want to pull Boyle out of the observatory, he must be up to his eyebrows in course-corrections. Get to Boyle as soon as he’s got some free time. Find out if there ever was any Professor deFord at S. U.; and then get Boyle to ask the kid some hard questions. Real hard. If he makes it, he can be an apprentice. If he doesn’t, there are always the slag heaps; this has taken too long already.”

CHAPTER THREE: “Like a Barrel of Scrap”

EVEN A CITY which has sloughed off its slums to go space flying has hidey holes, and Chris had lost no time in finding one of his own. He had located it with the simple instinct of a hunted animal going to ground.

Not that anybody was hunting for him—not yet. But something told him that it would be only a matter of time. Dr. Boyle Warner, the city’s astronomer, had been more than kind to him, but he had asked hard questions all the same; and these had revealed quickly enough that Chris’s knowledge of astronomy, while extraordinary in a youngster with no formal education worth mentioning, was too meager to be of any help to Dr. Warner or of any use to the city.

Dr. Warner signed him on as an apprentice anyhow, and so reported to the city manager’s office, but not without carefully veiled misgivings, and an open warning:

“I can think of very little for you to do around the observatory that would be useful, Crispin, I’m sorry to say. If I so much as set you to work sweeping the place, one of Frank Lutz’s henchmen would find out about it sooner or later; and Frank would point out quite legitimately that I don’t need so big a fellow as you for so light a task as that. While you’re with me, you’ll have to appear to be studying all the time.”

“I will be studying,” Chris said. That’s just what I’d like.”

“I appreciate that,” Dr. Warner said sadly. “And I sympathize. But Crispin, it can’t last forever. Neither I nor anyone else in Scranton can give you in two years the ten years of study that you’ve missed, let alone any part of what it took me thirty more years to absorb. I’ll do my best, but that best can only be a pretense—and sooner or later they’ll catch us at it.”

After that, Chris already knew, would come the slag heaps—hence the hidey hole. He wondered if they would send Dr. Warner to the slag heaps too. It didn’t seem very likely, for the frail, pot-bellied little astrophysicist could hardly last long at the wrong end of a shovel, and besides he was the only navigator the city had. Chris mentioned this guardedly to Frad Haskins.

“Don’t you believe it,” Frad said grimly. The fact is that we’ve got no navigator at all. Expecting an astronomer to navigate is about like asking a chicken to fry an egg. Doc Warner ought to be a navigator’s assistant himself, not a navigator-in-chief, and Frank Lutz knows it. If we ever run across another city with a spare real navigator to trade, Frank could send Boyle Warner to the slag heaps without blinking an eye. I don’t say that he would, but he might.”