Cities in Flight

we’d blow out every driver on board if we undertook normal deceleration.

“I propose that the Greater Magellanic Cloud is exactly where we want to go.”

Tumult.

The whole city roared with astonishment. Amalfi raised his hand; those actually in the room quieted slowly, but elsewhere in the city the noise went on for quite a while. It did not seem to be a sound of general protest, but rather the angry buzzing of large numbers of people arguing among themselves.

“I know how you feel,” Amalfi said when he could be sure most of them could hear him again. “It’s a long way to go, and though there are supposed to be one or two colonies on the near side of the Cloud, there can be no real interstellar commerce there, and certainly no commerce with the main body of the galaxy. We would have to settle down—maybe even take to dirt farming; it would be a matter of giving up being an Okie, and giving up being a starman. That’s a lot to give up, I know.

“But I want you all to remember that there’s no longer any work, or any hope of work, for us anywhere in the main body of the galaxy, even if by some miracle we manage to put our beat-up old city back into good order again. We have no choice. We must find a planet of our own to settle down on, a planet we can claim as our own.”

“ESTABLISH THIS POINT,” the City Fathers said.

“I’m prepared to do so. You all know what has happened to the galactic economy. It’s collapsed completely. As long as the currency was stable in the main commerce lanes, there was some pay we could work for; but that doesn’t exist any longer. The drug standard which Earth has rigged up now is utterly impossible for the cities, because the cities have to use those drugs as drugs, not as money, in order to stay alive long enough to do business at all. Entirely aside from the possibility of plague—and you’ll remember, I think, what we saw of that not so long ago—there’s the fact that we live, literally, on longevity. We can’t trade on it, too.

“And that’s only the beginning. The drug standard will collapse, and sooner and more finally than the germanium standard did. The galaxy’s a huge place. There will be new monetary standards by the dozens before the economy gets back onto some stable basis. And there will be thousands of local monetary systems in operation before that happens. The interregnum will last at least a century—”

“AT LEAST THREE CENTURIES.”

“Very well, three centuries. I was being optimistic. In either case, it’s plain that we can’t make a living in an economy which isn’t at least reasonably stable, and we can’t afford to sweat out the waiting period before the galaxy jells again. Especially since we don’t know whether the eventual stabilization will have any corner in it for Okies or not.

“Frankly, I don’t think the Okies have a prayer of surviving. Earth will be especially hard on them after this ‘march,’ which I took pains to encourage all the same because I was pretty sure we could suck in the Vegans with it. But even if there had been no march, the Okies would have been made obsolete by the depression. The histories of depressions show that a period of economic chaos is invariably followed by a period of extremely rigid economic controls —during which all the variables, the only partially controllable factors like commodity speculation, unlimited credit, free marketing, and competitive wages get shut out.

“Our city represents nearly the ultimate in competitive labor. Even if it lasts through the interregnum—which it can’t—it will be an anachronism in the new economy. It will almost surely be forced to berth down on some planet selected by the government. My own proposition is simply that we select our own berth, long before the government gets around to enforcing its own selection; that we pick a place hundreds of parsecs away from the outermost boundary-surface that government will think to claim; a place which is retreating steadily and at good speed from the center of that government and everything it will eventually want to claim; and that once we get there, we dig in. There’s a new imperialism starting where we used to be free; to stay free, we’ll have to go out beyond any expectable frontier and start our own little empire.

“But let’s face it. The Okies are through.”

Nobody said anything. Stunned faces scanned stunned faces.

Then the City Fathers said calmly, “THE POINT IS ESTABLISHED. WE ARE NOW MAKING AN ANALYSIS OF THE SELECTED AREA, AND WILL HAVE A REPORT FROM THE ASSIGNED SECTION IN FOUR TO FIVE WEEKS.”

Still the silence persisted in the big chamber. The Okies were testing it—almost tasting it. No more roaming. A planet of their own. A city at rest, and a sun to come up and go down over it on a regular schedule; seasons; a quietness free of the eternal whirling of gravity fields. No fear, no fighting, no defeat, no pursuit; self-sufficiency— and the stars only points of light forever.

A planetbound man presented with a similar revolution in his habits would have rejected it at once, terrified. The Okies, however, were used to change; change was the only stable factor in their lives. It is the only stable factor in the life of a planetbound man, too, but the planetbound man has never had his nose rubbed in it.

Even so, had they not been in addition virtually immortal—had they been, like the people of the old times before space travel, pinned like insects on a spreading-board to a lifespan of less than a century—Amalfi would have been afraid of the outcome. A short lifespan leads to restlessness; somewhere within the next few years, there has to be some El Dorado for the ephemerid. But the conquest of age had almost eliminated that Faustian frenzy. After three or four centuries, people grew tired of searching for the un-namable; they learned—they began to think of the future not as holding a haven of placidity and riches, but simply as the realm of things that had not happened yet. They became interested in the budding, the unfolding present, and thought about the future only with an attitude of indifferent acceptance toward whatever catastrophe it might bring. They no longer burned out their lives seeking catastrophe, under the name of “security.”

In short, they grew a little more realistic, and more than a little tired.

Amalfi waited with calm confidence. The smallest objections, he knew, would come first. He was not anxious to have to cope with them, and the silence had lasted so much longer than he had expected that he began to wonder if his argument had become too abstract toward the end. If so, a note of naive practicality at this point should be proper ….

“This solution should satisfy almost everyone,” he said briskly. “Hazleton has asked to be relieved of his post, and this will certainly relieve him of it most effectively. It takes us out of the jurisdiction of the cops. It leaves Carrel as city manager if he still wants the post, but it leaves him manager of a grounded city, which satisfies me, since I’ve no confidence in Carrel as a pilot. It—”

“Boss, let me interrupt a minute.”

“Go ahead, Mark.”

“What you say is all very well, but it’s too damned extreme. I can’t see any reason why we have to go so far afield. Granted that the Greater Magellanic is off the course Hern VI is following; granted that it’s pretty remote, granted that even if the cops do go looking for us there, it’s too big and unpopulated and complex for them to hope to find us. But couldn’t we accomplish the same thing without leaving the galaxy? Why do we have to take up residence in a cloud that’s moving away from the galaxy at some colossal speed—”

“THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR MILES PER SECOND.”

“Oh, shut up. All right, so that’s not very fast. Still and all, the cloud is a long way away—and if you give me the exact figures, I’ll bust all your tubes—and if we ever want to get back to the galaxy again, we’ll have to fly another planet to do it.”

“All right,” Amalfi said. “What’s your alternative?”

“Why don’t we hide out in a big cluster in our own galaxy? Not a picayune ball of stars like the Acolyte cluster, but one of the big jobs like the Great Cluster in Hercules. There must be at least one such in the cone of our present orbit; there might even be a Cepheid cluster where spindizzy navigation would be impossible for anybody who didn’t know the local space strains. We’d be just as unlikely to be traced by the cops, but we’d still be on hand inside our own galaxy if conditions began to look up.”

Amalfi did not choose to contest the point. Logically, it should be Carrel, who was being deprived of the effective command of a flying city, who should be raising this objection. The fact that the avowedly retired Hazleton had brought it up first was enough for Amalfi.

“I don’t care if conditions ever do look up,” Dee said, unexpectedly. “I like the idea of our having a planet of our own, and I’d want it to be as far away from the cops as we could possibly make it. If that planet really does become ours, would it make any difference to us whether Okie cities become possible again two or three centuries from