of dying, again and again; and the trick, he thought, is to do it piecemeal, and ungenerously.
For the first time in weeks, he walked the streets of New Manhattan again. He had never felt so utterly done with the purpose he had sowed in his people. Now that it was coming to fruition, he urgently needed to be seeking some purpose far removed from theirs.
Inevitably, he found himself leaving cats, birds, svengalis, dogs and Dee for the dilapidated streets of the Okie city. He was almost all the way down to the banks of the City Fathers, when a suspicion that he was again being followed turned into a certainty. For a panic moment he feared it might be Dee, spoiling both her exit and his; but it was not.
“All right, who is it?” he said. “Stop skulking and name yourself.”
“You wouldn’t remember me, Mr. Mayor,” a frightened voice said in several registers at once.
“Remember you? Of course I do. You’re Webster Hazleton. Who’s your friend? What are you doing here in the old city? It’s off limits for children.”
The boy drew himself up to his full height.
“This is Estelle. She and I are in this together.” Web appeared to have some difficulty in going on. “There’s been talk—I mean, Estelle’s father, he’s Jake Freeman, kind of hinted about it—that is, if the city’s really going up again. Mr. Mayor—”
“Maybe it is. I don’t know yet. What of it?”
“If it is,
Amalfi had had no further plans to try and convert Jake, who certainly appeared to be as lost a cause as Hazleton himself; but the Freeman-Hazleton partnership represented by Web and Estelle meant that he would have to broach the subject again to Jake sooner or later. Of course it was out of the question that the children should be allowed to go—and yet it was not within the bounds of fairness to forbid them out of hand, without knowing what their elders thought of it. Children had gone adventuring on Okie cities many a time before; but of course that had been back in the old days, when the cities had been as well equipped as any earthbound community to take good care of them, at least most of the time. Every thread he touched these days, it seemed to Amalfi, had knots in it.
Temporarily, however, the fates allowed him to shelve that part of the problem; for Jake was waiting for him again in the computation section, in a state of excitement so febrile that the sight of his daughter and Web tagging behind Amalfi barely raised his eyebrows.
“You’re just in time,” he said as though there had been some prior appointment. “You recall the nova I was talking to you about? Well, it isn’t a nova at all, and at this point it’s no longer an astronomical problem; in fact, it’s your problem.”
“What do you mean?” Amalfi said. “If it isn’t a nova, what is it?”
“Just what I was asking myself,” Jake said. One of his more irritating failings was his inability to get to a point by any but a preselected route. “I have a remarkable collection of spectrographs for this thing; if you looked at them without any clue as to what they were, you’d think they represented a stellar catalogue, rather than a single object—and a catalogue containing stars from all over the Russell diagram, too. On top of which, all of them show a blue shift in the absorption lines, particularly in the lines contributed by New Earth’s own atmosphere, which made no sense whatsoever, up to now.”
“It still doesn’t make any sense to me,” Amalfi admitted.
“All right,” Jake said, “try this on for size; when the spectra turned out to be far too dim for an object of the apparent magnitude of this thing—remember, it’s been getting brighter all the time—I asked Schloss and his crew to neglect anti-matter long enough to do a wave-trap analysis of the incoming light. It turns out to be about seventy-five per cent false photons; the thing must be leaving behind a tremendous contrail, if we were only in a position to see it—”
“Spindizzies!” Amalfi shouted. “And under damn near full deceleration! But how could an object that size—no, wait a minute; do you actually know the size yet?”
The astronomer chuckled, a noise which from Jake never failed to remind Amalfi of a demented parrot. “I think we have the size, and all the rest of the answers, at least as far as astronomy is concerned,” he said. “The rest, as I said, is your problem. The thing is a planetary body, roughly seventy-five hundred miles in diameter, and much closer than we thought it was—right now, in fact, it’s actually inside the Greater Magellanic, and coming our way, directly for the system of New Earth. The change in spectra simply means that it’s shining by the reflected light of the different suns it’s passing, and the blue shift in the Frauenhofer lines strongly suggests an atmosphere very much like ours. I don’t know offhand what that reminds you of, but I know what it should remind you of—and the City Fathers agree with me.”
Web Hazleton could contain himself no longer. “I know, I know! It’s the planet He! It’s coming home! Isn’t that it, Mr. Mayor?”
The boy knew his city history well; nobody from the old days could have been confronted with such a set of data as Jake had just trotted out without responding with the same wild surmise. The planet He had been one of the city’s principal jobs of work, the outcome of which, for very complicated reasons, had entailed the installation on the planet itself of a number of spindizzies sufficient to rip He from her orbit around her home sun and send her careening, wholly out of control, out of the galaxy and into intergalactic space. The city had been carried a considerable distance with her, enabling it to re-enter the galaxy far away from any area where New York, N. Y., was being actively sought by the cops, but it had been a near thing. She, herself, presumably, had been hurtling toward the Andromeda galaxy ever since that moment in 3850 when she and the city had parted company, each vanishing to the other as abruptly and finally as a blown-out candle-flame.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Amalfi said. “The tipping of He took place only a century and a half ago—and at that time the Hevians didn’t have the technology or the resources to master controlled spindizzy flight; in fact, they weren’t very far from being savages. Smart savages, I grant you, but still savages. Is this planet that’s coming our way truly dirigible, or don’t you know yet?”
“It looks that way,” Jake said. “That’s what first tipped me off that there was something unnatural about the object. It kept changing velocity and line of flight erratically—in fact, in a totally irrational way, unless one assumed that the changes were in fact rational. Whoever they are, they know enough to prevent that world of theirs from zigging when they want to zag. And they’re headed our way, Amalfi.”
“Have you made any attempt to get in touch with them, whoever they are?” Amalfi said.
“No, indeed. In fact, I haven’t even told anybody else about it yet. Not even Mark. Somehow it struck me as peculiarly your baby.”
“That was just a waste of pussyfooting, Jake. Dr. Schloss isn’t an idiot; surely he can read his own figures as well as you can and draw obvious conclusions from the very question you asked him; he must have told Mark by now, and a good thing, too. Mark is probably calling your object right now; let’s go directly up to the control room and find out.”
They made an oddly assorted procession through the haunted streets of the Okie city: the bald-headed keg- chested mayor with his teeth deeply sunk in a dead cigar, the bird-like and slightly crestfallen astronomer, the bright-eyed skipping youngsters now darting ahead of them, then falling behind to wait to be shown the way. Their eagerness moved Amalfi unexpectedly, bringing home to him the realization that their dream of the city back in flight had always been, like this, a very fragile one; and that this incoming dirigible planet, whatever else it might portend, would probably put the quietus to it, serious business and the dull cold morning light it thrived in being immemorially fatal to dreams.
On an impulse, he stopped at a station that he knew and called for an aircab, partly, he assured himself, to see whether or not the City Fathers still considered that service worth maintaining at this stage in the city’s long death. In due course one came, to the obvious delight of the children, leaving Amalfi with the rueful realization that his had not been a fair test; a million years from now, with the last ergs of energy remaining in the pile, the City Fathers would of course still send a cab for the mayor; if he wanted to know whether or not the entire garage was still alive, he would have to ask the City Fathers directly.
But Web and Estelle were so delighted at soaring through the silent canyons of the city in the metal and crystal bubble, and in exploring the limited and very respectful repartee of the Tin Cabby, that they fell entirely off their precarious adolescent dignity with squeals of laughter, alternating with gasps of not very real alarm as the cab cut around corners and came close to grazing the structures of the city which familiarity had worn smooth to the point of contempt inside the Tin Cabby’s flat little black box of a brain. It was, in a way, a shame that, as the cab cut
