Cities in Flight

He heard the sounds of the approach from some distance and blew out his candle at once. Maybe it was only a casual prowler; maybe even only a strayed child—maybe, at the worst, another refugee from Lutz’s flesh-trading deal, looking for a hole. There were plenty of holes amid the piled-up crates, and the way to this one was so complex that two of them could live in the heap for weeks without encountering each other.

But his heart sank as he realized how quietly the footsteps were approaching. The newcomer was negotiating the maze with scarcely a false turn, let alone a noisy blunder.

Someone knew where he was—or at least knew where his hole was.

The footsteps became louder, slowed, and stopped. Now he could distinctly hear someone breathing.

Then the beam of a hand torch caught him full in the face.

“Hell, Chris. Make a light, huh?”

The voice was that of Frad Haskins. Anger and relief flooded through Chris at the same time. The big man had been his first friend, and almost his name-brother—for after all, Fradley O. Haskins is not much more ridiculous a name than Crispin deFord— but that blow of light in the face had been like a betrayal.

“I’ve only got candles. If you’d set the flashlight on end, it’d be just as good—maybe better.”

“Okay.” Haskins sat down on the floor, placing the torch on the small crate Chris used for a table, so that it made a round spot of light on the boards overhead. “Now tell me something. Just what do you think you’re doing?”

“Hiding,” Chris said, a little sullenly.

“I can see that. I knew what this place was from the day I saw you toting books into it. I have to keep in practice on this press-gang dodge; I’ll need it some day on some other planet. But in your case, what’s the sense? Don’t you want to be transferred to a bigger city?”

“No, I don’t. Oh, I can’t say that Scranton’s been like home to me. I hate it. I wish I could really go home. But Frad, at least I’m getting to know the place. I already knew part of it, back while it was on the ground. I don’t want to be kidnapped twice, and go through it all again—aboard some city where I don’t know even as much about the streets as I knew about Scranton—and maybe find out that I hate it even worse. And I don’t like being swapped, like—like a barrel of scrap.”

“Well, maybe I can’t blame you for that—though it’s standard Okie procedure, not anything that Lutz thought up in his own head. Do you know where the ‘rule of descretion’ came from?”

“No.”

“From the trading of players between baseball teams. It’s that old —more than a thousand years. The contract law that sanctions it is supposed to be a whale of a lot older, even.”

“All right,” Chris said. “It could even be Roman, I suppose. But Frad, I’m not a barrel of scrap and I still don’t want to be swapped.”

“Now that part of it,” the big man said patiently, “is just plain silly. You’ve got no future in Scranton, and you ought to know it by now. On a really big town you could probably find something to do—and the least you’ll get is some schooling. All our schools are closed, for good and forever. And another thing: We’ve only been aloft a year, and it’s a cinch we’ve got some hard times ahead of us. An older town would be a darn sight safer—not absolutely safe, no Okie ever is; but safer.”

“Are you going, too?”

Haskins laughed. “Not a chance. Amalfi must have ten thousand of the likes of me. Besides, Lutz needs me. He doesn’t know it, but he does.”

“Well… then … I’d rather stay with you.”

Haskins smote one fist into the other palm in exasperation. “Look, Red … Cripes, what do you say to this kid? Thanks, Chris; I—I’ll remember that. But if I’m lucky, I’ll have a boy of my own some day. This isn’t the day. If you don’t face facts right now, you aren’t going to get a second chance. Listen, I’m the only guy who knows where you are, yet, but how long can that last? Do you know what Frank will do when he roots you out of a hole full of caches of food? Think, please, will you?”

Chris’s stomach felt as though he had just been thrown out of a window.

“I guess I never thought of that.”

“You need practice. I don’t blame you for that. But I’ll tell you what Frank will do: He’ll have you shot. And nobody else in town’ll even raise an eyebrow. In the Okie lawbook, hoarding food comes under the head of endangering the survival of the city. Any such crime is a capital crime—and not only in Scranton, either.”

There was a long silence. At last, Chris said quietly:

“All right. Maybe it is better this way. I’ll go.”

“That’s using your head,” Haskins said gruffly. “Come on, then. We’ll tell Frank you were sick. You look sick, right enough. But we’ll have to hustle—the gigs leave in two hours.”

“Can I take my books?”