Cities in Flight

Between these eavesdroppings and the increasingly rare visits home of his guardian, Chris gradually built up a fuzzy picture of what the colonists seemed to want. As a citizen, he could have asked the City Fathers directly for the text of the contract, but access to this was denied to passengers. In general, however, he gathered that the Archangels proposed to establish an economy like that of Venus, complete with undersea farming and herding, with the aid of broadcast power of the kind that kept the city’s Tin Cabs in the air. The Okies were to do the excavating in the shifting, soaking terrain, and were to build the generator-transmitter station involved. They were also to use city facilities to refine the necessary power metals, chiefly thorium, of which Heaven had an abundance beyond its ability to process. After the economy was revamped, the Archangels hoped to have their own refineries, and to sell the pure stuffs to other planets. Curiously, they also had enough germanium to be willing to pay for the job in this metal, although it too was notoriously difficult to refine; this was fortunate for them, since without any present interstellar trade, they were woefully short of Oc dollars.

Once the whole operation had rumbled and sloshed out into the field and was swallowed up in the enveloping, eternal storm, Sgt. Anderson’s absences became prolonged, and the number of colonists to be found on the docks also diminished sharply. Now there were only a few of the swamp vehicles—inexplicably called swan boats—to be seen at the end of each day, when Chris was released from school, and these were mostly small craft whose owners were engaged in dickering with individual Okies for off-planet curios to give to their ladies. This commerce also was bogging down rather rapidly, for the single citizen had no use for money, and the lords and franklins of Heaven had few goods to barter. Soon the flow of information available to Chris had almost stopped, frustrating him intensely.

In this extremity he had an inspiration. He still carried with him a small, cheap clasp knife with a tiny compass embedded in its handle, the last of the exceedingly few gifts his father had ever been able to give him; perhaps it would have status here as an off-planet curio. When the notion first occurred to him, he rejected it with distress at even having thought of it—but when first Sgt. Dulany, and then his own guardian, were officially posted on the “Missing” list, he hesitated no longer. His only remaining doubt was whether or not the compass would work here, amid so much electrical activity (but then it had never worked very well on Earth, either).

He waited until he saw the lord of a six-man swan boat stalking disappointedly away from a deal he had been unable to close, and then approached him with the knife outstretched on his palm.

“Gospodin—”

The man, a huge burly fellow with a face like one of the eternal thunderclouds of his planet, stopped in his tracks and looked down. “Boy? Did you speak?”

“Yes sir. With your permission, I have here useful tool, earthly in origin. Would my lord care to examine?”

“But you speak our language,” the man said, still frowning. He took the knife abstractedly; it was plain that he was interested, but Chris’s stumbling Russian seemed to interest him more. “How is that?”

“By listening, lord. It is very hard, but I am trying. Please see object, it is from Earth, from kolkhoz of Pennsylvania. Genuine antique, touched once by human hands in factory.”

“Well, well. How does it work?”

Chris showed him how to pry out the two blades, but his attempts to explain the compass were dismissed with a brusque gesture. Either his command of the language was insufficient to make the matter clear, or the lord already had recognized that such a thing would be useless in the lightning-stitched ether of Heaven.

“Hmm. Sleazy, to be sure, but perhaps my lady would like it for her charm-necklace. What do you ask for it?”

“Lord, I would like to drive your swan boat one time, one distance. I ask no more.”

The colonist stared at him for a long moment, and then burst into deep guffaws of laughter. “Come along, come along,” he said when he had recovered a little. “Sharp traders, you tramps, but this is the best story yet—I’ll be telling it for years! Come along—you have a bargain.”

Still chortling, he led the way to the dock, where they were both stopped by a perimeter cop who recognized Chris. Between them, the boy and the lord explained the bargain, and the Okie guard dubiously allowed Chris to board the swan boat.

In the forward cabin of the bobbing cylinder, two other colonists confronted them at once, wearing expressions at once nervous and angry, but the owner shushed them with a swift slash of one hand. He still seemed to be highly amused.

“It’s only an infant. It traded me a bangle to learn how to mush the boat about. There’s nothing to that. Go on aft; I’ll join you in a minute.”