Cities in Flight

For a moment, Amalfi sat stunned. He had gotten too much information too fast; and he was much older now than he had been on like occasions in the past. He had never expected that such an occasion would arise again— but here it was.

A jehad against He? No, not likely—at least, not directly. Jorn the Apostle would be wary of tackling a world so completely mysterious to him, especially with forces more mob than military. But New Earth was wholly vulnerable; it was a logical first step to invest that planet. And now Jorn had Dee and the children.

Move!

How to move was another matter; it needed to be done in a vessel which no possible Warrior cordon would have the strength to attack, but no such vessel existed on He. The only other alternative was a very small, very fast ship with a low detectability index; but that was equally impossible across so long a distance, since there is a minimum size for even one spindizzy. Or was there? Carrel was on He, and Carrel had had considerable experience in designing relatively small spindizzy-powered proxies; one such had followed the March of Earth all the way, without anybody’s paying the slightest attention to it. Of course the proxy had been magnificently, noisily detectable by ordinary standards, and only Carrel’s piloting of it had kept the massed cities from distinguishing between the traces that it made and the traces that were made adventitiously by ordinary interstellar matter ….

“Can you do that again, Carrel? Remember that this time you won’t have a flock of massive cities to confuse the issue. The gamut you’ll have to run will be one thin shell of orbiting warships, around one planet—and we don’t know how many of them there are, what arms they mount, how careful a watch they keep—”

“Assume the worst,” Carrel said. “They caught the recall ship, after all, and they didn’t even know we’d sent it. I can do it, Mr. Amalfi, if you’ll let me do the maneuvering when the chips are down; otherwise I think you’ll be caught, no matter how small the ship is.”

“Helleshin!” But there was no way around it; Amalfi would have to subject himself to at least two days of Carrel’s violent evasive-confusive maneuvers, without once touching the space-stick himself. It was going to be a rough do for an old man, but Carrel was quite right, there was no other available course.

“All right,” he said. “Just make sure I’m alive when I touch down.”

Carrel grinned. “I’ve never lost a cargo,” he said. “Providing it’s been properly secured. Where do you want to land?”

That was not an easy question either. In the long run, Amalfi settled for a landing in Central Park, in the heart of the old Okie city. This was perhaps dangerously close to the Warriors’ center of operations, but Amalfi did not want to be forced to trek across a thousand miles of New Earth just for a meeting with Hazleton; and there was a fair chance that the old city would be taboo for the bumpkins, or at least avoided instinctively. Jorn the Apostle would not have overlooked patrolling such an obvious rallying-point for the ousted, but presumably Jorn was somewhere at the other end of the Cloud with his main body.

Since there is, even with spindizzies, a limit to the amount of power that can be stored in a small hull, the trip was more than long enough for Amalfi to catch up, via ultraphone, on the Cloud events he had closeted himself away from on He. The picture Mark had given him had been accurate, if perhaps a little distorted in emphasis. Jorn the Apostle’s real concerns were still far away from New Earth, and his jehad had been announced against unbelievers everywhere, not just against the Hevians. The Hevians were simply the article in the indictment which applied specifically to New Earth—that, and New Earth’s unannounced but unconcealed intention of plumbing the end of time, which was blasphemy. It was Amalfi’s guess that the uprising on New Earth and the seizure of the central government there had been an unplanned byproduct of the proclamation of which Jorn was unprepared to take full advantage. Had he been planning on it, or militarily able to capitalize on it, he would have rushed in his main body on the double; as matters stood he had only—and belatedly—set up a token blockade. If his followers’ coup stuck, all well and good; if it did not, he would withdraw the blockade in a hurry, to save ships and men for another, more auspicious day.

Or so Amalfi reasoned; but he was uncomfortably aware that in Jorn the Apostle he was for the first time dealing with an enemy whose thought-processes might be utterly unlike his, from first to last.

The ship shifted abruptly from spindizzy to ion-blast drive. Amalfi stopped thinking entirely and just hung on.

Once in the atmosphere, the craft was back in Amalfi’s hands; back on He, Carrel had relinquished his remote Dirac control over the space-stick. Amalfi was able to make a thistledown nightside landing in south Central Park, in a broad irregular depression which legend said had once been a lake. The landing was without incident; apparently it had been undetected. In the morning the abandoned proxy might be spotted by a Warrior flyer, but the old city was littered with such ambiguous mechanical objects; one had to be a student of the city, as knowledgeable as Schliemann was about the nine Troys, to know which was new and which was not. Amalfi was confident enough of this to leave the proxy behind without an attempt to camouflage it.

Now the problem was, How to get in touch with Mark? Presumably he was still under arrest, or the next thing to it; “corrective discipline” was what the Warrior voice Amalfi had overheard had said. Did that mean that they were going to make the lazy, cerebral Hazleton make beds, sweep floors and pray six hours a day? Not very likely, especially the prayer part. Then what—?

Suddenly, trudging south along a moonlit, utterly deserted Fifth Avenue toward the city’s control tower, Amalfi was sure he had it. Running a galaxy, even a small and mostly unexplored satellite galaxy like this one, is not simply a matter of taking papers out of the “IN” tray and transferring them to the “OUT” tray. It requires centuries of experience and a high degree of familiarity with the communications, data-filing and other machines which must do 98 per cent of the donkey-work. In the Okie days, for instance, it sometimes happened—though not very often—that a mayor was swapped to another city under the “rule of discretion” after he had lost an election; and generally it took him five to ten years to get used to running the new one, even in such a subordinate post as assistant to the city manager. It was not an art that a bumpkin, no matter how divinely inspired, could master in a week.

Mark’s most likely theater of “corrective discipline,” then, would be his own office. He would be running the Cloud for the Warriors—and no doubt doing a far worse job of it than they would detect, even were they sensible enough, as they surely were, to suspect such sabotage. Amalfi, himself a master of making the wheels run backwards when necessary, would yield precedence in that art to Hazleton at any time; Hazleton had been known to work the trick on his friends, just to keep his hand in, or perhaps just out of habit.

Very good; then the problem of getting in touch with Mark was solved, clearing the way for the hard questions: How to discombobulate, and, if possible, oust the Warriors; and how to get Dee and the children back unharmed?

It would be difficult to decide which of these two hard questions was the harder. As Mark had pointed out, the uprooted spindillies in the hand of the rank-and-file Warriors were considerably more dangerous than muskets or pitchforks. Used with precision, the machine could degravitate a single opponent and send him shrieking skyward under the contrifugal thrust of New Earth’s rotation on its axis; or the same effect could be used against a corner or a wall of a building, if one wanted to demolish a strong point. But the menace lay in the fact that in the hands of a plowboy the spindilly would not be used with precision. It had been designed, not as a weapon, but as an adjunct to home weather control, and was somewhat larger, heavier and more ungainly than a Twentieth-Century home oil-burner. Considering the difficulties involved in toting this object at all, especially on foot, the temptation would be almost overwhelming to set it at maximum output before it was even unbolted from its cement pedestal in the cellar, and leave it set there, so that the strained arm and back muscles of the bearer would thereafter have to do nothing with it to make it function but point it—more or less—and push the starter button. This meant that every time one of the plowboys lost his temper or detected heresy in some casual remark, or fired nervously at a shadow or a sudden unfamiliar sound or a svengali, he might level two or three city blocks before he remembered where the “kill” button was; or the machine, dropped and abandoned in panic, might go on to level two or three more blocks before it discharged its accumulators and shut itself off of its own accord.

Saving Dee and the children was certainly highly important, but disarming the Warriors would have to take precedence.

He caught himself bouncing a little as he stepped out of the spindizzy lift shaft onto the resilient concrete floor of the control room, and grinned ruefully. He felt alive again, after far too many years of grousing, browsing, vegetating. This was the kind of problem he had been formed for, the kind he approached with the confidence born of gusto. The end of time was certainly sizable enough as a problem; he would never find a bigger, and he was grateful for that; but it provided him with nobody with whom to negotiate and, if possible, swindle a little.

It had been a long time; he had better be on his guard against overconfidence. That