Cities in Flight

“But death is still inevitable, Chris. If there isn’t an accident, there may be cancer, which we can’t prevent yet—oh, ascomycin attacks tumors so strongly that cancer doesn’t kill people any longer, in fact the drug even offers quite a lot of protection against hard radiation; but cancer can still make life so agonizing that death is the only humane treatment. Or a man can die of starvation, or of being unable to get the anti-agathics. Or he can die of a bullet—or of overwork. We Uve long lives in the cities, sure; but there is no such thing as immortality. It’s as mythical as the unicorn. Not even the universe itself is going to last forever.”

This, at last, was the opportunity Chris had been hoping for, though he still hardly knew how to grasp it.

“Are—are the drugs ever stopped, once a man’s been made a citizen?”

“Deliberately? I’ve never heard of such a case,” Anderson said, frowning. “Not on our town. If the City Fathers want a man dead, they shoot him. Why let him linger for the rest of his seventy-year stanza? That would be outrageously cruel. What would be the reason for such a procedure?”

“Well, no tests are foolproof. I mean, supposing they make a man a citizen, and then discover that he really isn’t—uh—as big a genius as they thought he was?”

The perimeter sergeant looked at Chris narrowly, and there was quite a long silence, during which Chris could clearly hear the pulsing of his own blood in his temples. At last Anderson said slowly:

“I see. It sounds to me like somebody’s been feeding you spin-dizzy whistle. Chris, if only geniuses could become citizens, how long do you think a city could last? The place’d be depopulated in one crossing. That isn’t how it works at all. The whole reason for the drugs is to save skills—and it doesn’t matter one bit what the skills are. All that matters is whether or not it would be logical to keep a man on, rather than training a new one every four or five decades.

“Take me for an example, Chris. I’m nobody’s genius; I’m only a boss cop. But I’m good at my job, good enough so that the City Fathers didn’t see any reason to bother raising and training another one from the next generation; they kept this one, which is me; but a cop is, all the same, all I am. Why not? It suits me, I like the work, and when Amalfi needs a boss cop he calls me or Dulany—not any officer on the force, because none of them have the scores of years of experience at this particular job that we do under their belts. When the Mayor wants a perimeter sergeant he calls me; when he wants a boarding squad he calls Dulany; and when he wants a specific genius, he calls a genius. There’s one of everything on board this town—partly because it’s so big—and so long as the system works, no need for more than one. Or more than X, X being whatever number you need.”

Chris grinned. “You seemed to remember the details all right.”

“I remembered them all,” Anderson admitted. “Or all that they gave me. Once the City Fathers put a thing into your head, it’s hard to get rid of.”

As he spoke, there was a pure fluting sound, like a brief tune, somewhere in the apartment. The perimeter sergeant’s heavy head tipped up; then he, too, grinned.

“We’re about to have a demonstration,” he said. He was obviously pleased. He touched a button on the arm of his chair.

“Anderson?” a heavy voice said. Chris thought instantly that the father bear in the ancient myth of Goldilocks must have sounded much like that.

“Yes—Here, sir.”

“We’re coming up on a contract. It looks fairly good to me and the City Fathers, and I’m about to sign it. Better come up here and familiarize yourself with the terms, just in case: This’ll be a rough one, Joel.”

“Right away.” Anderson touched the button, and his grin became broader and more boyish than ever.

“The Mayor!” Chris burst out.

“Yep.”

“But what did he mean?”

“That he’s found some work for us to do. Unless there’s a hitch, we should be landing in just a few days.”

CHAPTER SIX: A Planet Called Heaven

NOTHING could be seen of Heaven from the air. As the city descended cautiously, the spindizzy field became completely outlined as a bubble of boiling black clouds, glaring with blue-green sheets and slashes of lightning, and awash with streams of sleet and rain. At lower altitude the sleet disappeared, but the rain increased.

After so many months of starlit skies and passing suns, the grumbling, closed-in darkness was oppressive, even alarming. Sitting with Piggy on an old pier at the foot of Gansevoort Street, from which Herman Melville had sailed into the distant South Sea marvels of Typee, Ormo and Mardi, Chris stared at the globe of thunder around the city as nervously as though he had never seen weather before. Piggy, for once, was in no better shape, for he never had seen weather before; this was New York’s first planetfall since he had been born.