Cities in Flight

“Okay. Now if it had been me, I would have just stopped the boat right there, and gotten out, and told the cops what I’d heard. Let them drag it out of the guys you’d locked up. You know how the City Fathers cram all that junk into our heads in class—well, they can take stuff out the same way. Dad says it’s darned unpleasant for the victim, but they get it.”

Chris could only shrug helplessly. “You’re right. That would have been the sensible thing to do. And it seems obvious the way you tell it. But all I can say is, it didn’t occur to me.” He thought a moment, and then added: “But in a way I’m not too sorry, Piggy. That way, I never would have gotten to Castle Wolfwhip at all—sure, it would have been better if I hadn’t—but it sure was exciting while I was there.”

“Boy, I’ll bet it was! I wish I’d been there!” Piggy began to shadowbox awkwardly. “I wouldn’t have hidden in any cell, believe you me. I’d have showed ’em!”

Chris did his best not to laugh. “Going by what I heard, if you’d gone along with the sergeants—if they’d let you—you’d have been killed by your own friends. Those weren’t just rotten eggs they were throwing around.”

“All the same, I’ll bet-Hullo, we’re lifting.”

The city had not lifted yet, but Chris knew what Piggy meant; he too could hear the deepening hum of the spindizzies. “So we are. That three months sure went by in a hurry.”

“Three months isn’t much in space. We’ll be eighteen before we know it.”

“That,” Chris said gloomily, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.”

“Well, I don’t give a darn. This whole deal about your running off with the boat proves that they don’t mean what they say about earning citizenship. Like I say, the whole thing’s just a scheme to keep kids in line, so they won’t have to be watched so much. The minute you actually do something for the survival of the city, bingo! the roof falls on you. Never mind that, it was a good thing to do and shows you’ve got guts—you’ve caused them trouble, and that’s what the system’s supposed to prevent.”

There was, Chris saw, something to be said for the theory, no matter how exaggerated Piggy’s way of putting it was. In Chris’s present state of discouragement, it would be a dangerously easy point of view to adopt.

“Well, Piggy, what I want to know is, what are you going to do if you’re wrong? I mean, supposing the City Fathers decide not to make you a citizen, and it turns out that they can’t be fixed? Then you’ll be stuck with being a passenger for the rest of your life—and it’d only be a normal lifetime, too.”

“Passengers aren’t as helpless as they think,” Piggy said darkly. “Some one of these days the Lost City is going to come back, and when that happens, all of a sudden the passengers are going to be top dog.”

“The Lost City? I never heard of it.”

“Of course you haven’t. And the City Fathers won’t ever tell you about it, either. But word gets around.”

“Okay, don’t be mysterious,” Chris said. “What’s it all about?”

Piggy’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “Do you swear not to tell anybody else, except another passenger?”

“Sure.”

Piggy looked elaborately over both shoulders before going on. As usual, they were the only youngsters on the street, and none of the adults were paying the slightest attention to them.

“Well,” he said in the same tone of voice, “it’s like this. One of the first cities ever to take off was a big one. Nobody knows its name, but I think it was Los Angeles. Anyhow, it got lost, and ran out of drugs, and then out of food, way off in some part of space that was never colonized, so it couldn’t find any work either. But then they made a planetfall on a new world, something nobody had ever seen before. It was like Earth—bigger, but the same gravity, and a little more oxygen in the air, and a perfect climate—like spring all year round, even at the poles. If you planted seeds there, you had to jump back in a hurry or the plant would hit you under the chin, they grew so fast.

“But that wasn’t the half of it.”

“It sounds like plenty,” Chris said.

“That was all good, but they found something else even better. There was a kind of grain growing wild there, and when they analyzed it to see whether or not it was good to eat, they found it contained an antideath drug—not any of ours, but better than all of ours rolled into one. They didn’t even have to extract it—all they had to do was make bread out of the plant.”

“Wow. Piggy, is this just a story?”

“Well, I can’t give you an affidavit,” Piggy said, offended. “Do you want to hear the rest or don’t you?”

“Go ahead,” Chris said hastily.