Cities in Flight

“But what do they want?” someone said. Chris craned his neck, but he did not know the man who had spoken. Most of Lutz’s advisers were nonentities, in any event—except for those like Huggins, who were outright thugs.

“They want us to veer off. They’ve analyzed our course and say we’re headed for a region of space that they’d had staked out long before we showed up. Now this, let me point out, is actually all to the good. They have a preliminary survey of the area, and we don’t—everything ahead of us is all alike, until we’ve had some experience of it. Furthermore, one of the things they offer in payment is a new course which they say will take us into an iron-bearing star cluster, very recently settled, where there’s likely to be plenty of work for us.”

“So they say.”

“And I believe them,” Lutz said sharply. “Everything they’ve said to me, they’ve also said on the open air, by Dirac transmitter. The cops have heard every word, not only locally, but wherever in the whole universe that there’s a Dirac transceiver. Big as they are, they’re not going to attempt to phony an open contract. The only question in my mind is, what ought to be the price?”

He looked down at the top of his desk. Nobody seemed to have any suggestions. Finally he looked up again and smiled coldly.

“I’ve thought of several, but the one I like best is this: They can help us run up our supplies. We haven’t got the food to reach the cluster that they’ve designated—I’d hoped we’d make a planetfall long before we had to go that far—but that’s something that they can’t know, and that I’m not going to tell them.”

“They’ll know when you ask for the food, Frank—”

“I’m not such an idiot. Do you think any Okie city would ever sell food at any price? You might as well try to buy oxygen, or money. I’m going to ask them to throw in some minor piece of machinery or other, it doesn’t matter what, and two or three technicians to man and service it; and as an evidence of good faith, I’ll offer back for these oh-so-valuable technicians a big batch of our people—people that are of no use to us. There won’t be so many of them that a town that size would have any difficulty in absorbing them—but to us, they’ll represent just the number of extra mouths to feed that would prevent us from reaching the iron-bearing cluster that Amalfi’s offered to guide us to. Food will never be mentioned. It’ll be just a standard swap of personnel, under the usual Okie ‘rule of discretion.’”

There was a long minute of respectful silence. Even Chris was forced to admire the ingenuity of the scheme, insofar as he understood it. Frank Lutz smiled again and added:

“And this way we get rid of every single one of those useless bums and red-necks we had to take aboard under the impressment laws. The cops will never know it; and neither will Amalfi; he has to carry enough food and, ah, medicines to maintain a crew of well over a million. He’ll swallow another three hundred yokels without as much effort as you’d swallow an aspirin, and probably think it a fair trade for two technies and a machine that are useless to him. The most beautiful part of it all is, it might even be a fair trade—which brings me to my next point—”

But Chris did not stay to hear the next point. After a last, quick, regretful glance at the drowsing astronomer who had befriended him, he stole out of the court as silently as any poacher, and went to ground.

The hole was structurally an accident. Located in a warehouse at the edge of the city nearest the university, it was in the midst of an immense stack of heavy crates which evidently had shifted during the first few moments of take-off, thus forming a huge and unpredictable three-dimensional maze which no map of the city would ever show. By worrying a hole in the side of one crate with a pocket-knife, Chris had found that it contained mining machinery (and, evidently, so did all the others, since they all bore the same stenciled code number). The chances were good, he thought, that the crates would not be unstacked until Scranton made its first planetfall; the city in flight would have nothing to dig into.

Nor did Chris have any reason to leave the hole, at least for now. The warehouse itself had a toilet he could visit, and seemed to be unfrequented; and of course it didn’t need a watchman—Who would bother to steal heavy machinery, and where would they run with it? If he was careful not to set any fires with his candles—for the hole, although fairly well ventilated through the labyrinth, was always pitch dark—he would probably be safe until his food ran out. After that, he would have to take his chances … but he had been a poacher before.

But nothing in his plans had allowed for a visitor.