Cities in Flight

had been known to trip him now and then even when he had been in practice. In particular, it was suspiciously easy to see what steps ought to be taken in the present situation; that was not the test; it was his ancient skill as a cultural historian—in short, as a diagnostician—which would stand or fall by what he did now … and just incidentally, he might lose or save from three to a quarter of a million lives, one of them Estelle’s.

Gently then, gently—but precisely and with decision, like a surgeon confronted with cardiac arrest. Waste no time debating alternate courses; you have four minutes to save the patient’s life, if you are lucky; the bone-saw is whining in your hand—slash open the rib-cage, and slash it quick.

The City Fathers were already warmed up. He told them: “Communications. Get me Jorn the Apostle—for the survival of the city.”

It would take a little while for the City Fathers to reach Jorn; though they would scan the possibilities in under a minute and select out only those worlds with high probability ratings for Jorn’s presence, the chances of their getting him on the first call were not very high. Amalfi regretted that it would be then necessary to talk to Jorn on the Dirac communicator, since it would make anyone who was listening anywhere in the Cloud—or anywhere else in the known universe where the apparatus existed, for that matter—privy to the conversations; but over interstellar distances the ultraphone was out of the question for twoway exchanges, since its velocity of information propagation was only 125 per cent of the speed of light, and even this was achieved only by a trick called negative phase velocity, since the carrier wave was electromagnetic and moved at light speed and no faster.

While he waited, Amalfi ticked over the possibilities. This was all in all developing into a most curious affair, quite unlike anything he had ever been involved in before. It thus far consisted mostly of interludes and transitions, with only a small scatter of decision-points upon which action might be possible. In this sense even the events which most recalled to him the events of his earlier life seemed to be reshaping themselves into the pattern of his old age, not only allowing for but requiring a much greater exercise of reflection and an intensive weighing of values. Reflexive action was out of the question; it was possible only from some fixed guiding principle, such as “the survival of the city”; such an axiom, if it persists and dominates for a long time, allows many decisions to be reached via the reflex arc with almost no intervening intellection—one automatically jumped in the right direction, like a cat turning itself over in mid-air. No such situation existed now; the values to be weighed were mutually contradictory.

It had to be assumed, first of all, that Jorn did not know the situation on New Earth in detail; he had simply reacted as a good strategist should to capitalize upon an unexpected victory in an unexpected quarter, and almost surely did not know that his blockading fleet was holding three hostages, let alone who those hostages were. It would be impossible to intimidate him on this matter; it would be wiser not to give him the information at all. After all, the first intent of the call was to get the bumpkin army disbanded and the dismounted spindillies out of action; but it would not do to convince him out of hand that his coup on New Earth could not possibly stick, since that would result in his withdrawing his blockade and the hostages with it. Better to serve both ends, if it could be swung that way: to convince Jorn that the putsch had better be abandoned forthwith, but not so thoroughly as to alarm him into thinking he might lose part of his navy if he took his time about calling the putsch off.

It looked like a large order. It meant that the danger which Jorn the Apostle would have to be made to suspect would have to be as much ideological as it was military. As a military commander of considerable proven ability, Jorn could not but be familiar with the corruption of an occupying force by the standards and customs of the nation that it occupies—and jehads and crusades were particularly subject to this kind of corrosion. Whether he was wholly a believer in the brand of Fundamentalism he preached, or not, he would not want his followers to lose faith in the doctrine under which he had sailed so successfully thus far; that was the hold over them that he had chosen to exercise, so that if they lost that, he himself would have nothing left, regardless of what his personal beliefs might be.

Unhappily, there was no ideology available on New Earth which looked capable of corrupting the Warriors of God; they would doubtless indulge in a good deal of wristwatch collecting, a very ancient term for a timeless syndrome of a peasant army holding a territory relatively rich in consumer goods, but Jorn would anticipate that and discount it; but there was no idea inherent in the culture of New Earth which seemed strong enough to sway the Warriors from their simple, direct and centrally oriented point of view. One would have to be manufactured; at least there was no lack of raw materials.

One apparent pitfall in this course was that of taking Jorn the Apostle at his own public valuation and attempting to reach into and alarm that part of his mind where his real religion lived. Amalfi had no way of knowing whether this would work or not, and prudence dictated that it not be tried; he had to assume instead that a man as successful as Jorn had been in the world of affairs was a sophisticated man on most subjects, whether he was sophisticated as a theologian or not. The latter was even beside the point; wherever the truth lay, he would be quick to detect any attempt to push his religious buttons, since he had proven that he knew the art himself.

And, Amalfi thought suddenly, if Jorn were to turn out to be exactly as devout in his back-cluster superstitions as his public utterances suggested, pushing that button might well result in a genuine disaster. With such people, that button is a demolition button; if you touch it successfully, you shatter the man. Of course if would be necessary to treat Jorn pro forma as if every public word Jorn had uttered had been uttered in the utmost sincerity and out of the deepest kind of belief, not only because Jorn too would know that unknown numbers of others might be listening in, but to avoid attacking the man’s image of himself irrelevantly and to no purpose. The forms had no bearing on the final outcome; it would be dangerous to assume that Jorn was identical personally with his public self only in the substance of Amalfi’s approach to him. There would be no harm in acknowledging to him, implicitly, his claim to be every inch a Fundamentalist; but it would be fatal to expect him to panic if he got a Dirac ’cast claiming to be from Satan—

“READY WITH JORN THE APOSTLE, MR. MAYOR.”

Amalfi suddenly found himself thinking at emergency speed; the City Fathers’ excusable lapse—doubtless nobody had bothered to tell them that Amalfi had not been Mayor since the problem of the Ginnangu-Gap had arisen—reminded him that he had failed to decide whether or not to identify himself to Jorn. There was a small possibility that Jorn came of the peasant stock which the Okies had found sweating under the tyranny of the bindlestiff city of IMT; a slightly larger possibility that he was a descendant of the rulers of IMT itself; but by far the greatest likelihood was that he was a child or grandchild of Amalfi’s own people and so would know very well indeed who Amalfi was. To identify himself, then, would give Amalfi a certain leverage, but it would also present certain disadvantages—

However, the die was already cast; the City Fathers had called him the Mayor on the circuit, so Jorn had better be told at once that it was not Hazleton he was talking to. Bluff it out? Possible; but there lay the danger of using the Dirac: the instrument made it possible for any listener to tell Jorn, now or later, whatever facts Amalfi attempted for strategic reasons to withhold—

“READY, MR. MAYOR.”

Well, there was no help for that now. Amalfi said into the microphone:

“Go ahead.”

Immediately, the screen came alight. He was getting old; he had forgotten to tell the City Fathers to limit the call to audio only, so in actuality he had never had the option of withholding his identity. Well, regret was futile; and in fact he watched the face of Jorn the Apostle swimming into view before him with the keenest curiosity.

It was, startlingly, a very old face, narrow, bony and deeply lined, with bushy white eyebrows emphasizing the sunken darkness of the eyes. Jorn had been off the anti-agathics for at least fifty years, if indeed he had ever taken one. The realization was a profound and unexpected visceral shock.

“I am Jorn the Apostle,” the ancient face said. “What do you want of me?”

“I think you should pull off of New Earth,” Amalfi said. It was not at all what he had intended to say; it was in fact wholly contrary to the entire chain of reasoning he had just worked through. But there was something about the face that compelled him to say what was on his mind.

“I am not on New Earth,” Jorn said. “But I take your meaning. And I take it there are many people on New Earth who share your opinion, Mr. Amalfi, as is only natural. This does not affect me.”

“I didn’t expect it to, just as a simple statement of opinion,” Amalfi said. “But I can offer you good reasons.”