now? We wouldn’t need to be Okies any longer.”
“You’d say that,” Hazleton said, “because you haven’t lived more than two or three centuries yet, and because you’re still used to living on a planet. Some of the rest of us are older; some of the rest of us like wandering. I’m not speaking for myself, Dee, you know that. I’ll be happy to get off this junk pile. But this whole proposition has a faint smell to me. Amalfi, are you sure you aren’t forcing us to set down simply to block a change of administration? It won’t, you know.”
Amalfi said, “Of course, I know. I’m submitting my resignation along with yours the moment we touch ground. Right now I’m still an officer of this city, and I’m doing the job I’ve been assigned to do.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. Let it go. What I still want to know is why we have to go all the way out to the Greater Magellanic.”
“Because it’ll be ours,” Carrel said abruptly. Hazleton swung on him, obviously astonished; but Carrel’s rapt eyes did not see the older man. “Not only our planet—whichever one we choose—but our galaxy. Both the Magellanics are galaxies in little. I know; I’m a southerner, I grew up on a planet where the Magellanics went across the night sky like tornadoes of sparks. The Greater Magellanic even has its own center of rotation; I couldn’t see it from my home planet because we were too close, but from Earth it has a distinct Milne spiral. And both clouds are moving away, taking on their own independence from the main galaxy. Hell, Mark, it isn’t a matter of one planet. That’s nothing. We won’t be able to fly the city, but we can build spaceships. We can colonize. We can settle the economy to suit ourselves. Our own galaxy! What more could you want?”
“It’s too easy,” Hazleton said stubbornly. “I’m used to fighting for what I want. I’m used to fighting for the city. I want to use my head, not my back; your spaceships, your colonization, those things are going to be preceded by a lot of plain and simple weeding and plowing. There’s the core of my objection to this scheme, Amalfi. It’s wasteful. It commits us to a situation where most of what we’ll have to do will be outside of our experience.”
“I disagree,” Amalfi said quietly. “There are already colonies in the Greater Magellanic. They weren’t set up by spaceships. They were set up by cities. No other mechanism could have made the trip at all in those days.”
“So?”
“So there’s no chance that we’ll be able to settle down placidly and get out our hoes. We’ll have to fight to make any part of the Cloud our own. It’s going to be the biggest fight we’ve ever had, because we’ll be fighting Okies—Okies who probably have forgotten most of their history and their heritage, but Okies all the same, Okies who had this idea long before we did and who are going to defend their patent.”
“As they have a right to do. Why should we poach on them when a giant cluster would serve us just as well? Or nearly as well?”
“Because they are poachers themselves—and worse. Why would a city go all the way to the Greater Magellanic in the old days, when cities were solid citizens of the galaxy? Why didn’t
Hazleton began kneading his hands, slowly, but with great force. His knuckles went alternately white and red as his fingers ground over them.
“Gods of all stars,” he said. His lips thinned. “The Mad Dogs. Yes. They went there if they went any place. Now there’s an outfit I’d like to meet.”
“Bear in mind that you might not, Mark. The Cloud’s a big place.”
“Sure, sure. And there may be a few other bindlestiffs, too. But if the Mad Dogs are out there, I’d like to meet them. I remember being taken for one of them on Thor Five; that’s a taste I’d like to get out of my mouth. I don’t care about the others. Except for them, the Greater Magellanic is ours, as far as I’m concerned.”
“A galaxy,” Dee murmured, almost soundlessly. “A galaxy with a home base, a home base that’s ours.”
“An Okie galaxy,” Carrel said.
The silence sifted back over the city. It was not a contentious silence now. It was the silence of a crowd in which each man is thinking for and to himself.
“HAVE MESSRS. HAZLETON AND CARREL ANY FURTHER ADDITIONS TO THEIR PLATFORMS?” the City Fathers blared, their vodeur-voice penetrating flatly into every cranny of the hurtling city. As Amalfi had expected, the extended discussion of high policy had convinced the City Fathers that the election was for the office of mayor, rather than for that of city manager. “IF NOT, AND IF THERE ARE NO ADDITIONAL CANDIDATES, WE ARE READY TO PROCEED WITH THE TABULATION.”
For a long instant, everyone looked very blank. Then Hazleton too recognized the mistake the City Fathers had made. He began to chuckle.
“No additions,” he said. Carrel said nothing; he simply grinned, transported.
Ten seconds later, John Amalfi, Okie, was the mayor-elect of an infant galaxy.
CHAPTER EIGHT: IMT
THE city hovered, and then settled silently through the early morning darkness toward the broad expanse of heath which the planet’s Proctors had designated as its landing place. At this hour, the edge of the misty acres of diamonds which were the Lesser Magellanic Cloud was just beginning to touch the western horizon; the whole cloud covered nearly 35? of the sky. The cloud would set at 0512; at 0600 the near edge of the home galaxy would rise, but during the summer, the suns rose earlier.
All of which was quite all right with Amalfi. The fact that no significant amount of the home galaxy could begin to show in the night sky for months to come was one of the reasons why he had chosen this planet to settle on. The situation confronting the dying city now, and its citizens, too, posed problems enough without its being recomplicated by an unsatisfiable homesickness.
The city grounded, and the last residual hum of the spindizzies stopped. From below there came a rapidly rising and more erratic hum of human activity, and the clank and roar of heavy equipment getting under way. The geology team was losing no time, as usual.
Amalfi, however, felt no disposition to go down at once. He remained on the balcony of City Hall looking at the thickly set night sky. The star-density in the Greater Magellanic was very high, even outside the clusters—often, the distances between stars were matters of light months rather than light years. Even should it prove impossible to move the city itself again—which was inevitable, considering that the Sixtieth Street spindizzy had just followed the Twenty-third Street machine into the junk pit—it should be possible to set interstellar commerce going here by cargo ship. The city’s remaining drivers, ripped out and remounted on a one-per-hull basis, would provide the nucleus of quite a respectable little fleet.
It would not be much like cruising among the far-scattered, various civilizations of the Milky Way had been, but it would be commerce of a sort, and commerce was the Okies’ oxygen.
He looked down. The brilliant starlight showed that the blasted heath extended all the way to the horizon in the west; in the east it stopped about a mile away and gave place to land regularly divided into tiny squares. Whether each of these minuscule fields represented an individual farm he could not tell, but he had his suspicions. The language the Proctors had used in giving the city permission to land had had decidedly feudal overtones.
While he watched, the black skeleton of some tall structure erected itself swiftly near by, between the city and the eastern stretch of the heath. The geology team already had its derrick in place. The phone at the balcony’s rim buzzed, and Amalfi picked it up.
“Boss, we’re going to drill now,” the voice of Hazleton said. “Coming down?”
“Yes. What do the soundings show?”
“Nothing very hopeful, but we’ll know for sure shortly. This does look like oil land, I must say.”
“We’ve been fooled before,” Amalfi grunted. “Start boring; I’ll be right down.”
He had barely hung up the phone when the burring roar of the molar drill violated the still summer night, echoing calamitously among the buildings of the city. It was almost certainly the first time any planet in the Greater
