Cities in Flight

“Chris, do you know either of those guys?”

“Both of them, sir. The first one’s a small-time thug named Barney. I think he was the one who killed my brother’s dog when I was impressed, but I didn’t see who did it.”

“I know the type. Go ahead.”

“The other one is Frank Lutz. He was the city manager when I was aboard. It looks as if he still is.”

“What’s a city manager? Never mind, I’ll ask the machines. All right. He looks dangerous; is he?”

“Yes, sir, he is. He’s smart and he’s tricky—and he has no more feeling than a snake.”

“Sociopath,” Amalfi said. “Thought so. One more question: Does he know you?”

Chris thought hard before answering. Lutz had seen him only once, and had never had to think about him as an individual again—thanks to the lifesaving intervention of Frad Haskins. “Sir, he just might, but I’d say not.”

“Okay. Give the details to the City Fathers and let them calculate the probabilities. Meanwhile we’ll take no chances. Thanks, Chris. Joel, come topside, will you?”

“Yes, sir.” Anderson waited until he heard the Mayor’s circuit cut out. Then his image, too, seemed to be staring directly at Chris. In fact, it was.

“Chris, did you understand what Amalfi meant about taking no chances?”

“Uh—no, not exactly.”

“He meant that we’re to keep you out of this Lutz’s sight. In other words, no deFord expeditions on this job. Is that clear?”

It was all too clear.

CHAPTER TEN: Argus Asleep

THE ARGUS system was well named: It was not far inside a crowded and beautiful cluster of relatively young stars, so that the nights on its planet had indeed a hundred eyes, like the Argus of the myth. The youth of the cluster went far toward explaining the presence of Scranton, for like all third-generation stars, the sun of Argus was very rich in metals, and so were its planets.

Of these there were only a few—just seven, to be exact, of which only the three habitable ones had been given numbers, and only Argus III actually colonized; II was suitable only for Arabs, and IV for Eskimos. The other four planets were technically of the gas giant class, but they were rather undernourished giants; the largest of them was about the size of Sol’s Neptune. The closeness of the stars in the cluster to each other had swept up much of the primordial gas before planet formation had gotten a good start; the Argus system was in fact the largest yet to be encountered in the cluster.

Argus III, as the city droned down over it, looked heart-stoppingly like Pennsylvania; Chris began to feel a little sorry for the coming dispossession of Scranton—of which he had no doubts whatsoever—for surely the planet must have provided an intolerable temptation. It was mountainous over most of its land area, which was considerable; water was confined to many thousands of lakes, and a few small and intensely salty seas. It was also heavily wooded—almost entirely with conifers, or plants much like them, for evolution here had not yet gotten as far as a flowering plant. The firlike trees had thick boles and reared up hundreds of feet, noble monsters with their many shoulders hunched, as they had to be to bear their own weight in the two-G gravitation of this metal-heavy planet. The first sound Chris heard on Argus III after the city grounded was the explosion of a nearby seed cone, as loud as a crack of thunder. One of the seeds broke a window on the thirtieth floor of the McGraw-Hill Greenhouse, and the startled staff there had had to hack it to bits with fire axes to stop its germinating on the rug.

Under these circumstances it hardly mattered where the city settled; there was iron everywhere; and conversely there was no place on the planet which would be out of eavesdropping or of missile range of Scranton, to the mutual inconvenience of both parties. Nevertheless, Amalfi chose a site with great care, one just over the horizon from the great scar in the ground Scranton had made during its fumbled mining attempt, and with the highest points of an Allegheny-like range reared up between the two Okies. Only then did the machinery begin to rumble out into the forests.

Chris was beginning to practice thinking like Amalfi—not very confidently to be sure, since he had never seen the man, but at least it made a good game. The landing, Chris concluded tentatively, had been chosen mostly to prevent Scranton from seeing what the city was doing without sending over planes; and secondly to prevent foot traffic between the two cities. Probably it would never come to warfare between the two cities, anyhow, for nothing would be more likely to bring the cops to the scene in a hurry; and besides, it was already quite clear from New York’s history that Amalfi actively hated anything that did the city damage, whether it was bombs or only rust.