Cities in Flight

It was hard work, and Chris was often far from sure his identifications were correct. All the same, it was impressive to know that those moving points of light all around him were the almost legendary stars of colonial times, and even more impressive to find that he had one of those storied suns in the small telescope. Their very names echoed with past adventure: Alpha Centauri, Wolf 359, RD—4° 4048’, Altair, 61 Cygni, Sirius, Kruger 60, Procyon, 40 Eridani. Only a very few of these, of course, lay anywhere near the city’s direct line of flight—indeed, many of them were scattered “astern” (that is, under the keel of the city), in the imaginary hemisphere on the other side of his home Sun. But most of them were at least visible from here, and the rest could be photographed. The city, whatever Chris thought of it as a home, had to be given credit for being a first-class observatory platform.

How he saw the stars was another matter, and one that was a complete mystery to him. He knew that Scranton was now traveling at a velocity many times that of light, and it seemed to him that under these circumstances there should have been no stars at all still visible in the city’s wake, and those to the side and even straight ahead should be suffering considerable distortion. Yet in fact he could see no essential change in the aspect of the skies. To understand how this could be so would require at least some notion of how the spin-dizzies worked, and on this theory Dr. Warner’s explanations were even more unclear than usual… so much so that Chris suspected him of not understanding it any too well himself.

Lacking the theory, Chris’s only clue was that the stars from Scranton-in-flight looked to him much as they always had from a field in the Pennsylvania backwoods, where the surrounding Appalachians had screened him from the sky glare of Scranton-on-the-ground. From this he deducted that the spindizzy screen, though itself invisible, cut down the apparent brightness of the stars by about three magnitudes, as had the atmosphere of the Earth in the region where Chris had lived. Again he didn’t know the reason why, but he could see that the effect had some advantages. For instance, it blanked out many of the fainter stars completely to the naked eye, thus greatly reducing the confusing multitudes of stars which would otherwise have been visible in space. Was that really an unavoidable effect of the spindizzy field—or was it instead something imposed deliberately, as an aid to navigation?

“I’m going to ask Lutz that question myself,” Dr. Warner said, when Chris proposed it. “It’s no help to me; in fact, it takes all the fun out of being an astronomer in free space. And there’s no time like the present. Come along, Crispin—I can’t very well leave you in charge, and the only other logical place for Lutz to see an apprentice of mine is with me.”

It seemed to Chris that nobody aboard Scranton ever said anything officially to him but “Come along,” but he went. He did not relish the prospect of seeing the city manager again, but it was probably true that he would be safer under the astronomer’s wing than he would be anyplace else; in fact, he was both surprised by, and a little admiring of, Dr. Warner’s boldness.

But if Boyle Warner ever asked the question, Chris never heard the answer.

Frank Lutz did not believe in making people who came to see him on official business wait in ante-chambers. It wasted his time as well as theirs, and he at least had none to waste—and they had better not have. Nor were there many details of his administration that he thought he needed to keep secret, not now that those who might oppose him no longer had any place to run to. To remind his people who was boss, he occasionally kept the mayor waiting out of earshot, but everyone else came and went quite freely when he held court.

Dr. Warner and Chris sat in the rearmost benches—for Lutz’s “court” was actually held in what once had been a courtroom—and waited patiently to work their way forward to the foot of the city manager’s desk. In the process, the astronomer fell into a light doze; Frank Lutz’s other business was nothing to him, and in addition his hearing was no better than usual for a man his age. Both Chris’s curiosity and his senses, on the other hand, shared the acuity of his youth, and the latter had been sharpened by almost a lifetime of listening and watching for the rustle of small animals in the brush; and the feeling of personal danger with which Frank Lutz had filled him on their first encounter was back again, putting a razor edge upon hearing and curiosity alike.

“We’re in no position to temporize,” the city manager was saying. “This outfit is big—the biggest there is—and it’s offering us a fair deal. The next time we meet it, it may not be so polite, especially if we give it any sass this time around. I’m going to talk turkey with them.”