Cities in Flight

“They’re not yours, they’re Boyle Warner’s,” Frad said impatiently. “I’ll get ’em back to him later. Pick up the torch and let’s go—you’ll find plenty of books where you’re going.” He stopped suddenly and glared at Chris through the dim light. “Not that you care where you’re going! You haven’t even asked the name of the town.”

This was true; he had not asked, and now that he came to think about it, he didn’t care. But his curiosity came forward even through the gloom of the maze, and even through his despair. He said, “So I haven’t. What is it?”

“New York.”

CHAPTER FOUR: Schoolroom in the Sky

THE SIGHT from the gig was marvelous beyond all imagination: an island of towers, as tall as mountains, floating in a surfaceless, bottomless sea of stars. The gig was rocket-powered, so that Chris was also seeing the stars from space in all their jeweled majesty for the first time in his life; but the silent pride of the great human city, aloof in its spindizzy bubble—which was faintly visible from the outside —completely took precedence. Behind the gig, Scranton looked in comparison like a scuttleful of old stove bolts.

The immigrants were met at the perimeter by a broad-shouldered, crew-cut man of about forty, in a uniform which made all of Chris’s hackles rise; cops were natural enemies, here as everywhere. But the perimeter sergeant, who gave his name as Anderson, did no more than herd them all into separate cubicles for interviews.

There was nobody in Chris’s cubicle but Chris himself. He was seated before a small ledge or banquette, facing a speaker grille which was set into the wall. From this there issued the questions, and into this he spoke his answers. Most of the questions were simple matters of vital statistics—his name, his age, point of origin, date of boarding Scranton and so on—but he rather enjoyed answering them; the fact was that never before in his life had anyone been interested enough in him to ask them. In fact he himself did not know the answers to some of them.

It was also interesting to speculate on the identity of the questioner. It was a machine, Chris was almost sure, and one speaking not from any vocabulary of prerecorded words sounded by a human voice, but instead from some store of basic speech sounds which it combined and recombined as it went along. The result was perfectly understandable and nonmechanical, carrying many of the stigmata of real human speech—for example, the sentences emerged in natural speech rhythms, and with enough inflection so that key words and even punctuation could be distinguished—yet all the same he would never have mistaken it for a human voice. Whatever the difference was, he thought of it as though the device were speaking all in capital letters.

Even in an age long dominated by computers, to the exclusion, in many cases, of human beings, Chris had never heard of a machine with intelligence enough to be able to construct its speech in this fashion, let alone one intelligent enough to be given the wide discretionary latitude implied by the conduct of this interview. He had never before heard of a machine which referred to itself as “we,” either.

“HOW MUCH SCHOOLING HAD YOU HAD BEFORE YOU WERE IMPRESSED, M R. DE F ORD?”

“Almost none.”

“DID YOU RECEIVE ANY SCHOOLING ABOARD SCRANTON ?”

“A little. Actually it was only just tutoring—the kind of thing I used to get from my father, when he felt up to it.”

“I T IS RATHER LATE TO START, BUT WE CAN ARRANGE SCHOOLING FOR YOU IF YOU WISH—”

“Boy, do I!”

“T HAT IS THE QUESTION. A N ACCELERATED SECONDARY EDUCATION IS PHYSICALLY VERY TRYING. I T IS POSSIBLE THAT YOU WOULD HAVE NO NEED OF IT HERE, DEPENDING UPON YOUR GOALS. D O YOU WISH TO BE A PASSENGER, OR A CITIZEN?”

On the surface, this was a perfectly easy question. What Chris most wanted to do was to go home and back to being a citizen of nothing more complicated than the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Western Common Market, Terran Confederation. He had had many bad nights spent wondering how his family was doing without him, and what they had thought of his disappearance, and he was sure that he would have many more. Yet by the same token, by now they had doubtless made whatever adjustment was possible for them to the fact of his being gone; and an even more brutal fact was that he was now sitting on a metropolis of well over a million people which was floating in empty space a good twenty light-years away from Sol, bound for some destination he could not even guess. This monstrous and wonderful construct was not going to turn itself into his personal Tin Cabby simply because he said he wanted to go home, or for any other reason.