Cities in Flight

There was no punishment for failures, since the City Fathers’ pedagogy made failure of memory impossible, and it was only his memory that they seemed to be exploiting here. Instead, punishment was continuous: It lay in the certainty that though today’s dose had been fiendish, tomorrow’s would be worse.

“Now there you’re wrong,” Dr. Braziller told him. “Dead though they are, the machines aren’t ignorant of human psychology—far from it. They know very well that some students respond better to reward than to punishment, and that others have to be driven by fear. The second kind is usually the less intelligent, and they know that too; how could they not know it after so many generations of experience? You’re lucky that they’ve put you in the first category.”

“You mean they’re rewarding me?” Chris squeaked indignantly.

“Certainly.”

“But how?”

“By letting you go on studying even when they’re not satisfied with your progress. That’s quite a concession, Chris.”

“Maybe so,” Chris said glumly. “But I’d get the point faster if they handed out lollipops instead.”

Dr. Braziller had never heard of lollipops; she was an Okie. She only responded, a little primly: “You’d get it fast enough if they decided on a punishment system for you instead. They’re rigidly just, but know nothing about mercy; and leniency with children is utterly foreign to them—which is one reason why I’m here.”

The city hummed onward, and so did the days—and the months. Only Chris seemed to be making no progress in any visible direction.

No, that wasn’t quite true. Piggy was going nowhere, either, as far as Chris could see. But there the situation was even more puzzling and full of complications. To begin with, ever since Chris had first met him, Piggy had been denying that he cared about what happened to him when he turned eighteen; so it was odd—though not entirely surprising—to discover that he did care, after all. In fact, though his situation appeared to be now quite hopeless, Piggy was full of loud self-confidence, belied in the next breath by dark hints of mysterious plans to cinch what was supposed to be cinched already, and even darker hints of awful things to come if it didn’t turn out to be cinched. It was all more than Chris could manage to sort out, especially considering his inability to see more than half a minute into his own future. Some days he felt as though Piggy’s old accusation—“Boy, you are dumb!”—were written on his forehead in letters of fire.

Although Piggy said almost nothing about it, Chris gathered that he had already approached his father on the subject of biasing the City Fathers in his favor on the Citizenship Tests, and had been rebuffed with a loud roar, only slightly tempered by the intervention of his mother. There was of course no way to study for the Tests, since they measured nothing but potentials, not achievements; which meant, in turn, that there was no such thing as a pony or a crib for them.

Now, it was obvious, Piggy was thinking back to Chris’s adventure on Heaven. Judging by the questions he asked about it, Chris deduced that Piggy was searching for something heroic to do, in order to do it much better than Chris had. Chris was human enough to doubt that Piggy could make a much better showing, but in any event the city was still in space, so no opportunity offered itself.

Occasionally, too, he would disappear after class for several days running. On his return, his story was that he had been prowling around the city eavesdropping on the adult passengers. They were, Piggy said, up to something—just possibly, the building of a secret Dirac transmitter with which to call the Lost City. Chris did not believe a word of this, nor did he think Piggy did either.

The simple, granite-keel facts were that time was running out for both of them, and that desperation was setting in: for Piggy because he had never tried, and for Chris because nothing he tried seemed to get him anywhere. All around them their younger schoolmates seemed to be opening into talents with the violence and unpredictability of popcorn, turning everything the memory cells fed them into salt and savor no matter how high the heat was turned up. In comparison, Chris felt as retarded as a dinosaur, and just as clumsy and gigantic.

It was in this atmosphere of pervasive, incipient failure that Sgt. Anderson one evening said calmly:

“Chris, the Mayor wants to talk to you.”

From anyone else, Chris would have taken such an announcement as a practical joke, too absurd to be even upsetting. From Sgt. Anderson he did not know how to take it; he simply stared.

“Relax—it isn’t going to be an ordeal, and besides I didn’t say he wanted to see you. Sit back down and I’ll explain.”

Numbly, Chris did so.