Cities in Flight

than his size or his bluffness suggested. That much was becoming clearer every minute. “As for these samples, I don’t suppose they can do anything. They never can.”

The deceptively mild hazel eyes, watery and inoffensive, swung suddenly to bear on the red-neck. “What’s your name?”

“Who wants to know? That’s what I want to know. You got no right—”

“Don’t buck me, bum, I haven’t got the time. So you’ve got no name. Have you a trade?”

“I’m no bum, ’m a puddler,” the red-neck said indignantly. “A steel puddler.”

“Same thing. Anything else?”

“I been a puddler twenty years. ’M a Master Puddler, fair an’ square. I got seniority, see? I don’ need to be anything else, see? I got a trade. Nobody knows it like I do.”

“Been working lately?” the city manager said quietly.

“No. But I got seniority. And a card. ’M no bum, ’m a craftsman, see?”

“If you were a Genius Puddler I couldn’t use you, buddy … not even if, as and when we ever see any steel again. This is a Bessemer-process town, and it was one even back when you were an apprentice. You didn’t notice? Tough. Barney, Huggins, this one’s for the slag heaps.”

This order was not executed without a good deal of renewed shouting and struggling, during which Lutz looked back down at his papers, as obviously harmless a critter as a skunk which had just happened upon a bird’s egg and was wondering if it might bite, his small hands moving tentatively. When the noise was over, he said:

“I hope your luck was better, Frad. How about it, sonny? Have you got a trade?”

“Yes,” Chris said instantly. “Astronomy.”

“What? At your age?” The city manager stared at Haskins. “What’s this, Frad—another one of your mercy projects? Your judgment gets worse every day.”

“It’s all news to me, boss,” Haskins said with complete and obvious honesty. “I thought he was just a scratcher. He never said anything else to me.”

The city manager drummed delicately on the top of his desk. Chris held his breath. His claim was ridiculous and he knew it, but he had been able to think of nothing else to answer which would have had a prayer of interesting the boss of a nomad city. Insofar as he had been able to stay awake past dusk, Chris had read a little of everything, and of his reading he had retained best the facts and theories of history; but Haskins had cautioned him to espouse something which might be useful aboard an Okie city, and plainly it didn’t qualify. The fragments of economics he had picked up from his father might possibly have been more useful had there been more of them, and those better integrated into recent history, but his father had never been well enough to do that job since Chris had reached the age of curiosity. He was left with nothing but his smattering of astronomy, derived from books, most of which had been published before he was born, and from many nights spent lying on his back in the fields, breathing clover and counting meteors.

But he had no hope that it would work. A nomad city would need astronomy for navigation, primarily, a subject about which he knew nothing—indeed he lacked even the rudimentary trigonometry necessary to approach it. His knowledge of the parent subject, astronomy, was purely descriptive, and would become obsolete the minute Scranton was far enough away from the Sun to make the constellations hard to recognize—which in fact had probably happened already.

Nevertheless, Frank Lutz seemed to be a little bit baffled, for the first time. He said slowly:

“A Lakebranch kid who claims he’s an astronomer! Well, at least it’s new. Frad, you’ve let the kid sell you a hobby. If he ever got through grammar school I’ll eat your tin hat, paint and all.”

“Boss, I swear I never heard a word of all this until now.”

“Hmm. All right, sonny. Name the planets, going outward from the Sun.”

That was easy, but the next ones would surely be harder. “Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Proserpine.”

“You left out a few, didn’t you?”

“I left out about five thousand,” Chris said, as steadily as he could manage. “You said planets—not asteroids or satellites.”

“All right, what’s the biggest satellite? And the biggest asteroid?”

“Titan, and Ceres.”

“What’s the nearest fixed star?”

“The Sun.”

The city manager grinned, but he did not seem to be much amused. “Oho. Well, it won’t be, not much longer. How many months in a light-year?”

“Twelve, just like any other year. A light-year isn’t a measure of time, it’s a measure of distance—the distance light travels in a year. Months don’t have anything to do with it. You might as well ask how many weeks there are in an inch.”

“There are fifty-two weeks to the inch—or it’ll seem like that, once you’re as old as I am.” Lutz drummed on the desk again. “Where’d you get all this stuff? You won’t pretend you had any schooling in Lakebranch, I hope?”

“My father taught almost all his life at the University, till it was shut down,” Chris said. “He was the best there was. I got most of it from him. The rest I read about, or got from observation, and paper and pencil.”

Here Chris was on firm ground, provided only that he be allowed one lie: the substitution of astronomy for economics. The next question did not bother him in the least, for it was thoroughly expectable:

“What’s your name?”

“Crispin deFord,” he said reluctantly.

There was a surprised guffaw from the remainder of the audience, but Chris did his best to ignore it. His ridiculous name had been a burden to him through so many childhood fights with the neighbors that he was now able to carry it with patience, though still not very gladly. He was surprised, however, to see Haskins raising his bushy bleached eyebrows at him with every evidence of renewed interest. What that meant, Chris had no idea; the part of his brain that did his guessing was almost worn out already.

“Check that, somebody,” the city manager said. “We’ve got a couple of people left over from the S. U. faculty, at least. By Hoffa, Boyle Warner was a Scranton prof, wasn’t he? Get him up here, and let’s close this thing out.”

“What’s the matter, boss?” Haskins said, with a broad grin. “Running out of trick questions?”

The city manager smiled back, but again the smile was more than a little frosty. “You could call it that,” he said, with surprising frankness. “But well see if the kid can fool Warner.”

“The ole bassar must be good for something,” somebody behind Chris mumbled. The voice was quiet, but the city manager heard it; his chin jerked up, and his fist struck a sudden, terrible blow on the top of his desk.

“He’s good for getting us where we’re going, and don’t you forget it! Steel is one thing, but stars are another —we may never see another lie or another ingot without Boyle. Next to him we’re all puddlers, just like that red-neck. And that may go for the kid here, too.”

“Ah, boss, don’t lay it on. What can he know?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Lutz said, in a white fury. “What do you know about it? Anybody here know what a geodesic is?”

Nobody answered.

“Red, do you know?”

Chris swallowed. He knew the answer, but he found it impossible to understand why the city manager considered it worth all this noise.

“Yes, sir. It’s the shortest distance between two points.”

“Is that all?” somebody said incredulously.

“It’s all there is between us and starvation,” Lutz said. “Frad, take the kid below and see what Boyle says about him; on second thought, I don’t want to pull Boyle out of the observatory, he must be up to his eyebrows in course-corrections. Get to Boyle as soon as he’s got some free time. Find out if there ever was any Professor deFord at S. U.; and then get Boyle to ask the kid some hard questions. Real hard. If he makes it, he can be an apprentice. If he doesn’t, there are always the slag heaps; this has taken too long already.”