was still streaming doggedly toward the mother planet. Though the outsize drone was as obvious a body as a minor moon, so far not a single Okie had taken a pot shot at it. O’Brian had kept it darting through and about the marchers in a double-sine curve in three dimensions, at its top speed and with progressive modulations of the orbit. If the partial traces which it made on any individual city’s radar screen were not mistaken for meteor tracks, predicting its course closely enough to lay a gun on it would keep any ordinary computer occupied full time.
It was a superb job of piloting. Amalfi made a mental note to see to it that the task of piloting the city itself was split off from the city manager’s job when Hazleton stepped down. Carrel was not a born pilot, and O’Brian was obviously the man Carrel would need.
At the beginning of the Hern VI conversion, the City Fathers had placed E-Day—the day of arrival of the marchers within optical telescope distance of Earth—at one hundred fifty-five years, four months, twenty days. Each report which came in from the big drone’s pilot cut this co-ordinate-set back toward the flying present as the migrating jungle lost its laggards and became more and more compact, more and more able to put on speed as a unit. Amalfi consumed cigars faster and drove his men and machines harder every time the new computation was delivered to his desk.
But a full year had gone by since installation had started on Hern VI before O’Brian sent up the report he had been dreading and yet counting upon to arrive sooner or later.
“The march has lost two more cities to greener pastures, Mr. Amalfi,” the proxy pilot said. “But that’s routine. We’ve gained a city, too.”
“Gained one?” Amalfi said tensely. “Where’d it come from?”
“I don’t know. The course I’ve got the drone on doesn’t allow me to look in any one direction more than about twenty-five seconds at a time. I have to take a census every time I pass her through the pack. The last time I went around, there was this outfit on the screen, just as if it had been there all the time. But that isn’t all. It’s the damnedest looking city I’ve ever seen, and I can’t find anything like it in the files, either.”
“Describe it.”
“For one thing, it’s enormous. I’m not going to have to worry about anybody spotting my drone for a while. This outfit must have every detector in the jungle screaming blue bloody murder. Besides, it’s closed up.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It’s got a smooth hull all around, Mr. Mayor. It isn’t the usual platform with buildings on it and a spindizzy screen around both. It’s more like a proper spaceship, except for its size.”
“Any communication between it and the pack?”
“About what you’d expect. Wants to join the march; the King gave it the okay. I think he was pleased; it’s the very first answer he’s had to his call for a general mobilization of Okies, and this one really looks like a top-notch city. It calls itself Lincoln-Nevada.”
“It would,” Amalfi said grimly. He mopped his face. “Give me a look at it, O’Brian.”
The screen lit up. Amalfi mopped his face again.
“All right. Back your drone off a good distance from the march and keep that thing in sight from now on. Get ‘Lincoln-Nevada’ between you and the pack. It won’t shoot at your drone; it doesn’t know it doesn’t belong there.”
Without waiting for O’Brian’s acknowledgment, Amalfi switched over to the City Fathers. “How much longer is this job going to take?” he demanded.
“ANOTHER SIX YEARS, MR. MAYOR.”
“Cut it to four at a minimum. And give me a course from here to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, one that crosses Earth’s orbit.”
“MR. MAYOR, THE LESSER MAGELLANIC CLOUD IS TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY THOUSAND LIGHT YEARS AWAY FROM THE ACOLYTE CLUSTER!”
“Thank you,” Amalfi said sardonically. “I have no intention of going there, I assure you. All I want is a course with those three points on it.”
“VERY WELL. COMPUTED.”
“When would we have to spin, to cross Earth’s orbit on E-Day?”
“FROM FIVE SECONDS TO FIFTEEN DAYS FROM TODAY, FIGURING FROM THE CENTER OF THE CLOUD TO EITHER EDGE.”
“No good. We can’t start within those limits. Give me a perfectly flat trajectory from here to there.”
“THAT ARC INVOLVES NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-EIGHT DIRECT COLLISIONS AND FOUR HUNDRED ELEVEN THOUSAND AND TWO GRAZES AND NEAR-MISSES.”
“Use it.”
The City Fathers were silent. Amalfi wondered if it were possible for machinery to be stunned. He knew that the City Fathers would never use the crow-flight arc, since it conflicted with their most ineluctable basic directive:
And as a matter of fact, it was just fourteen months later when Amalfi’s hand closed on the master space stick for Hern VI, and he said:
The career of Hem VI from its native Acolyte cluster across the center of the galaxy made history—particularly in the field of instrumentation. Hern VI was a tiny world, considerably smaller than Mercury, but nevertheless it was the most monstrous mass ever kicked past the speed of light within the limits of the inhabited galaxy. Except for the planet of He, which had left the galaxy from its periphery and was now well on its way toward Messier 31 in Andromeda, no such body had ever before been flown under spindizzy or any other drive. Its passage left permanent scars in the recording banks of every detecting instrument within range, and the memories of it graven into the brains of sentient observers were no less drastic.
Theoretically, Hern VI was following the long arc laid out for it by Amalfi’s City Fathers, an arc leading from the fringe of the Acolyte cluster all the way across the face of the galaxy to the center of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. (Its mass center, of course; both clouds had emerged too recently from the galaxy as a whole to have developed the definite orbital dead centers characteristic of “spiral” nebulae.) The mean motion of the flying planet followed that arc scrupulously.
But at the speed at which Hern VI was traveling—a velocity which could not be expressed comfortably even in multiples of C, the old arbitrary velocity of light—the slightest variation from that orbit became a careening side jaunt of horrifying proportions before even the micro-second reactions of the City Fathers could effect the proper corrections.
Like other starmen, Amalfi was accustomed enough to traveling at transphotic speeds—in space, a medium ordinarily without enough landmarks to make real velocity very apparent. And, like all Okies, he had traveled on planets in creeping ground vehicles which seemed to be making dangerous speed simply because there were so many nearby reference points to make that speed seem great. Now he was finding out what it was like to move among the stars at a comparable velocity.
For at the velocity of Hern VI, the stars became almost as closely spaced as the girders beside a subway track—with the added hazard that the track frequently swerved enough to place two or three girders in a row between the rails. More than once Amalfi stood frozen on the balcony in the belfry of City Hall, watching a star that had been invisible half a second before cannoning directly at his head, swelling to fill the whole sky with glare—
Blackness.
Amalfi felt irrationally that there should have been an audible
There was nothing the matter, of course, with the orbit corrections of the City Fathers. The difficulty was simply that Hern VI was not a responsive enough space craft to benefit by really quick orbital corrections. It took long seconds for the City Fathers’ orders to be translated into enough vector thrust to affect the flight of the dead planet over parsecs of its shambling, paretic stride. And there was another, major reason: when all of Hern VI’s axial rotation had been converted to orbital motion, all of a considerable axial liberation had also been converted, and there was nothing that could be done about the kinks this put in the planet’s course.
