Cities in Flight

“I’m kind of confused. It ought to be the same kind of story as the others—something people are afraid of. Like meeting up some day with a planet, like the Vegan system, where the people have more on the ball than we do and will gobble us up the way we did Vega—”

Anderson’s big fist crashed down on the dinner table, making all the plates jump. “Precisely!” he crowed. “Look there, Carla—”

Carla’s own hands reached out and covered the sergeant’s fist gently. “Dear, Chris isn’t through yet. You didn’t give him a chance to finish.”

“I didn’t? But—sorry, Chris. Go ahead.”

“I don’t know whether I’m through or not,” Chris said, embarrassed and floundering. “This one story just confuses me. It’s not as simple as the others; I think I’m sure of that.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, it’s sensible to be afraid of meeting somebody stronger than yourself. It might well happen. And there is a real Vegan orbital fort, or at least there was one. The other stories don’t have that much going for them that’s real—except the things people are actually afraid of, the things the stories actually are about. Does this make sense?”

“Yes. The things the stories symbolize.”

“That’s the word. To be afraid of the fort is to be afraid of a real thing. But what does the story symbolize? It’s got to be the same kind of thing in the end—the fear people have of themselves. The story says, ‘I’m tired of working to be a citizen, and obeying the Earth cops, and protecting the city, and living a thousand years with machines bossing me, and taking sass from colonists, and I don’t know what all else. If I had a great big city that I could run all by myself, I’d spend the next thousand years smashing things up!’”

There was a long, long silence, during which Chris became more and more convinced that he had again talked out of turn, and far too much. Carla did not seem to be upset, but her husband looked stunned and wrathful.

“There is something wrong with the apprenticeship system,” he growled at last, though he did not appear to be speaking to either of them. “First the Kingston-Throop kid-and now this. Carla! You’re the brains in the family. Did it ever occur to you that that fort legend had anything to do with education?”

“Yes, dear. Long ago.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“I would have said so as soon as we had a child; until then, it wasn’t any of my business. Now Chris has said it for me.”

The perimeter sergeant turned a lowering face on Chris. “You,” he said, “are a holy terror. I set out to teach you, as I was charged to do, and you wind up teaching me. Not even Amalfi knows this side of the fort story, I’ll swear to that—and when he hears it, there’s going to be a real upheaval in the schools.”

“I’m sorry,” Chris said miserably. He did not know what else to say.

“Don’t be sorry!” Anderson roared, surging to his feet. “Stick to your guns! Let the other guy be afraid of ghosts—you know the one thing about ghosts that you need to know, no matter what kind of ghosts they are: They have nothing to do with the dead. It’s always themselves that people are afraid of.”

He looked about distractedly. “I’ve got to go topside. Here’s my hurry—where’s my hat?” He roared out, banging one hand against the side of the door, leaving Chris frozen with alarm.

Then Carla began to laugh all over again.

CHAPTER NINE: The Tramp

BUT if the errand on behalf of which Sgt. Anderson had undertaken his rhinoceros-charge exit had really had anything to do with education, Chris had yet to see it reflected in his own. That got steadily harder, as the City Fathers, blindly and impersonally assuming that he had comprehended what they had already stuffed into his head, began to build his store of knowledge toward some threshold where it would start to be useful for the survival of the city. As this process went forward, Chris’s old headaches dwindled into the category of passing twinges; these days, he sometimes felt actively, physically sick from sheer inability to make sense of what was being thrust upon him. In a moment of revulsion, he told the City Fathers so.

“I T WILL PASS. T HE NORMAL HUMAN BEING FEELS AN AVERAGE OF TWENTY SMALL PAINS PER HOUR. I F ANY PERSIST, REPORT TO M EDICAL. ”

No, he was not going to do that; he was not going to be invalided out of his citizenship if he could help it. Yet it seemed to him that what he was suffering couldn’t fairly be called “small pains.” What to do, since he feared that Medical’s cure would be worse than the disease? He didn’t want to worry the Andersons, either—he had repaid their kindnesses with enough trouble already.