CHAPTER THREE: “Like a Barrel of Scrap”
EVEN A CITY which has sloughed off its slums to go space flying has hidey holes, and Chris had lost no time in finding one of his own. He had located it with the simple instinct of a hunted animal going to ground.
Not that anybody was hunting for him—not yet. But something told him that it would be only a matter of time. Dr. Boyle Warner, the city’s astronomer, had been more than kind to him, but he had asked hard questions all the same; and these had revealed quickly enough that Chris’s knowledge of astronomy, while extraordinary in a youngster with no formal education worth mentioning, was too meager to be of any help to Dr. Warner or of any use to the city.
Dr. Warner signed him on as an apprentice anyhow, and so reported to the city manager’s office, but not without carefully veiled misgivings, and an open warning:
“I can think of very little for you to do around the observatory that would be useful, Crispin, I’m sorry to say. If I so much as set you to work sweeping the place, one of Frank Lutz’s henchmen would find out about it sooner or later; and Frank would point out quite legitimately that I don’t need so big a fellow as you for so light a task as that. While you’re with me, you’ll have to appear to be studying all the time.”
“I will be studying,” Chris said. That’s just what I’d like.”
“I appreciate that,” Dr. Warner said sadly. “And I sympathize. But Crispin, it can’t last forever. Neither I nor anyone else in Scranton can give you in two years the ten years of study that you’ve missed, let alone any part of what it took me thirty more years to absorb. I’ll do my best, but that best can only be a pretense—and sooner or later they’ll catch us at it.”
After that, Chris already knew, would come the slag heaps—hence the hidey hole. He wondered if they would send Dr. Warner to the slag heaps too. It didn’t seem very likely, for the frail, pot-bellied little astrophysicist could hardly last long at the wrong end of a shovel, and besides he was the only navigator the city had. Chris mentioned this guardedly to Frad Haskins.
“Don’t you believe it,” Frad said grimly. The fact is that we’ve got no navigator at all. Expecting an astronomer to navigate is about like asking a chicken to fry an egg. Doc Warner ought to be a navigator’s assistant himself, not a navigator-in-chief, and Frank Lutz knows it. If we ever run across another city with a spare
It could hardly be argued that Haskins knew his boss, and after only one look of his own at Lutz, Chris was more than ready to agree. Officially, Chris continued to occupy the single tiny room at the university dormitory to which he had been assigned as Dr. Warner’s apprentice, but he kept nothing there but the books that Dr. Warner lent him, the mathematical instruments from the same source, and the papers and charts that he was supposed to be working on; plus about a quarter of the rough clothing and the even rougher food which the city had issued him as soon as he had been given an official status. The other three-quarters of both went into the hole, for Chris had no intention of letting himself be caught at an official address when the henchmen of Frank Lutz finally came looking for him.
He studied as hard in the hole as he did in the dormitory and at the observatory, all the same. He was firmly determined that Dr. Warner should not suffer for his dangerous kindness if there was anything that Chris could possibly do to avoid it. Frad Haskins, though his visits were rare—he had no real business at the university— detected this almost at once; but he said only:
“I knew you were a fighter.”
For almost a year Chris was quite certain that he was making progress. Thanks to his father, for example, he found it relatively easy to understand the economy of the city—probably better than most of its citizens did, and almost certainly better than either Frad Haskins or Dr. Warner. Once aloft, Scranton had adopted the standard economy of all tribes of highly isolated nomad herdsmen, to whom the only real form of wealth is grass: a commune, within which everyone helped himself to what he needed, subject only to the rules which established the status of his job in the community. If Frad Haskins needed to ride in a cab, for instance, he boarded it, and gave the Tin Cabby his social security number—but if, at the end of the fiscal year, his account showed more cab charges than was reasonable for his job, he would hear about it. And if he or anyone else took to hoarding physical goods— no matter whether they were loaves of bread or lock washers, they could not by definition be in anything but short supply on board an Okie city—he would do more than hear about it: The penalties for hoarding of any kind were immediate and drastic.
There was money aboard the city, but no ordinary citizen ever saw it or needed it. It was there to be used exclusively for foreign trade—that is, to bargain for grazing rights, or other privileges and supplies which the city did not and could not carry within the little universe bounded by its spindizzy field. The ancient herdsmen had accumulated gold and jewels for the same reason. Aboard Scranton, the equivalent metal was germanium, but there was actually very little of it in the city’s vaults; since germanium had been the universal metal base for money throughout this part of the galaxy ever since space flight had become practical, most of the city’s currency was paper—the same “Oc dollar” everyone used in trading with the colonies.
All this was new to Chris in the specific situation in which he now found himself, but it was far from new to him in principle. As yet, however, he was too lowly an object in Scranton to be able to make use of his understanding; and remembering the penury into which his father had been driven, back on Earth, he was far from sure that he would ever have a use for it.
As the year passed, so also did the stars. The city manager, according to Haskins, had decided not to cruise anywhere inside “the local group”—an arbitrary sphere fifty light-years in diameter, with Sol at its center. The planetary systems of the local group had been heavily settled during the great colonial Exodus of 2375—2400, mostly by people from Earth’s fallen Western culture who were fleeing the then world-wide Bureaucratic State. It was Lutz’s guess—quickly confirmed by challenges received by Scranton’s radio station—that the density of older Okie cities would be too high to let a newcomer into competition.
During this passage, Chris busied himself with trying to identify the stars involved by their spectra. This was the only possible way to do it under the circumstances, for of course their positions among the constellations changed rapidly as the city overtook them. So did the constellations themselves, although far more slowly.
It was hard work, and Chris was often far from sure his identifications were correct. All the same, it was impressive to know that those moving points of light all around him were the almost legendary stars of colonial times, and even more impressive to find that he had one of those storied suns in the small telescope. Their very names echoed with past adventure: Alpha Centauri, Wolf 359, RD—4° 4048’, Altair, 61 Cygni, Sirius, Kruger 60, Procyon, 40 Eridani. Only a very few of these, of course, lay anywhere near the city’s direct line of flight—indeed, many of them were scattered “astern” (that is, under the keel of the city), in the imaginary hemisphere on the other side of his home Sun. But most of them were at least visible from here, and the rest could be photographed. The city, whatever Chris thought of it as a home, had to be given credit for being a first-class observatory platform.
Lacking the theory, Chris’s only clue was that the stars from Scranton-in-flight looked to him much as they always had from a field in the Pennsylvania backwoods, where the surrounding Appalachians had screened him from the sky glare of Scranton-on-the-ground. From this he deducted that the spindizzy screen, though itself invisible, cut down the apparent brightness of the stars by about three magnitudes, as had the atmosphere of the Earth in the region where Chris had lived. Again he didn’t know the reason why, but he could see that the effect had some advantages. For instance, it blanked out many of the fainter stars completely to the naked eye, thus greatly reducing the confusing multitudes of stars which would otherwise have been visible in space. Was that really an unavoidable effect of the spindizzy field—or was it instead something imposed deliberately, as an aid to navigation?
