Cities in Flight

“I’m going to ask Lutz that question myself,” Dr. Warner said, when Chris proposed it. “It’s no help to me; in fact, it takes all the fun out of being an astronomer in free space. And there’s no time like the present. Come along, Crispin—I can’t very well leave you in charge, and the only other logical place for Lutz to see an apprentice of mine is with me.”

It seemed to Chris that nobody aboard Scranton ever said anything officially to him but “Come along,” but he went. He did not relish the prospect of seeing the city manager again, but it was probably true that he would be safer under the astronomer’s wing than he would be anyplace else; in fact, he was both surprised by, and a little admiring of, Dr. Warner’s boldness.

But if Boyle Warner ever asked the question, Chris never heard the answer.

Frank Lutz did not believe in making people who came to see him on official business wait in ante-chambers. It wasted his time as well as theirs, and he at least had none to waste—and they had better not have. Nor were there many details of his administration that he thought he needed to keep secret, not now that those who might oppose him no longer had any place to run to. To remind his people who was boss, he occasionally kept the mayor waiting out of earshot, but everyone else came and went quite freely when he held court.

Dr. Warner and Chris sat in the rearmost benches—for Lutz’s “court” was actually held in what once had been a courtroom—and waited patiently to work their way forward to the foot of the city manager’s desk. In the process, the astronomer fell into a light doze; Frank Lutz’s other business was nothing to him, and in addition his hearing was no better than usual for a man his age. Both Chris’s curiosity and his senses, on the other hand, shared the acuity of his youth, and the latter had been sharpened by almost a lifetime of listening and watching for the rustle of small animals in the brush; and the feeling of personal danger with which Frank Lutz had filled him on their first encounter was back again, putting a razor edge upon hearing and curiosity alike.

“We’re in no position to temporize,” the city manager was saying. “This outfit is big—the biggest there is—and it’s offering us a fair deal. The next time we meet it, it may not be so polite, especially if we give it any sass this time around. I’m going to talk turkey with them.”

“But what do they want?” someone said. Chris craned his neck, but he did not know the man who had spoken. Most of Lutz’s advisers were nonentities, in any event—except for those like Huggins, who were outright thugs.

“They want us to veer off. They’ve analyzed our course and say we’re headed for a region of space that they’d had staked out long before we showed up. Now this, let me point out, is actually all to the good. They have a preliminary survey of the area, and we don’t—everything ahead of us is all alike, until we’ve had some experience of it. Furthermore, one of the things they offer in payment is a new course which they say will take us into an iron-bearing star cluster, very recently settled, where there’s likely to be plenty of work for us.”

“So they say.”

“And I believe them,” Lutz said sharply. “Everything they’ve said to me, they’ve also said on the open air, by Dirac transmitter. The cops have heard every word, not only locally, but wherever in the whole universe that there’s a Dirac transceiver. Big as they are, they’re not going to attempt to phony an open contract. The only question in my mind is, what ought to be the price?”

He looked down at the top of his desk. Nobody seemed to have any suggestions. Finally he looked up again and smiled coldly.

“I’ve thought of several, but the one I like best is this: They can help us run up our supplies. We haven’t got the food to reach the cluster that they’ve designated—I’d hoped we’d make a planetfall long before we had to go that far—but that’s something that they can’t know, and that I’m not going to tell them.”

“They’ll know when you ask for the food, Frank—”

“I’m not such an idiot. Do you think any Okie city would ever sell food at any price? You might as well try to buy oxygen, or money. I’m going to ask them to throw in some minor piece of machinery or other, it doesn’t matter what, and two or three technicians to man and service it; and as an evidence of good faith, I’ll offer back for these oh-so-valuable technicians a big batch of our people—people that are of no use to us. There won’t be so many of them that a town that size would have any difficulty in absorbing them—but to us, they’ll represent just the number of extra mouths to feed that would prevent us from reaching the iron-bearing cluster that Amalfi’s offered to guide us to. Food will never be mentioned. It’ll be just a standard swap of personnel, under the usual Okie ‘rule of discretion.’”

There was a long minute of respectful silence. Even Chris was forced to admire the ingenuity of the scheme, insofar as he understood it. Frank Lutz smiled again and added:

“And this way we get rid of every single one of those useless bums and red-necks we had to take aboard under the impressment laws. The cops will never know it; and neither will Amalfi; he has to carry enough food and, ah, medicines to maintain a crew of well over a million. He’ll swallow another three hundred yokels without as much effort as you’d swallow an aspirin, and probably think it a fair trade for two technies and a machine that are useless to him. The most beautiful part of it all is, it might even be a fair trade—which brings me to my next point—”

But Chris did not stay to hear the next point. After a last, quick, regretful glance at the drowsing astronomer who had befriended him, he stole out of the court as silently as any poacher, and went to ground.

The hole was structurally an accident. Located in a warehouse at the edge of the city nearest the university, it was in the midst of an immense stack of heavy crates which evidently had shifted during the first few moments of take-off, thus forming a huge and unpredictable three-dimensional maze which no map of the city would ever show. By worrying a hole in the side of one crate with a pocket-knife, Chris had found that it contained mining machinery (and, evidently, so did all the others, since they all bore the same stenciled code number). The chances were good, he thought, that the crates would not be unstacked until Scranton made its first planetfall; the city in flight would have nothing to dig into.

Nor did Chris have any reason to leave the hole, at least for now. The warehouse itself had a toilet he could visit, and seemed to be unfrequented; and of course it didn’t need a watchman—Who would bother to steal heavy machinery, and where would they run with it? If he was careful not to set any fires with his candles—for the hole, although fairly well ventilated through the labyrinth, was always pitch dark—he would probably be safe until his food ran out. After that, he would have to take his chances … but he had been a poacher before.

But nothing in his plans had allowed for a visitor.

He heard the sounds of the approach from some distance and blew out his candle at once. Maybe it was only a casual prowler; maybe even only a strayed child—maybe, at the worst, another refugee from Lutz’s flesh-trading deal, looking for a hole. There were plenty of holes amid the piled-up crates, and the way to this one was so complex that two of them could live in the heap for weeks without encountering each other.

But his heart sank as he realized how quietly the footsteps were approaching. The newcomer was negotiating the maze with scarcely a false turn, let alone a noisy blunder.

Someone knew where he was—or at least knew where his hole was.

The footsteps became louder, slowed, and stopped. Now he could distinctly hear someone breathing.

Then the beam of a hand torch caught him full in the face.

“Hell, Chris. Make a light, huh?”

The voice was that of Frad Haskins. Anger and relief flooded through Chris at the same time. The big man had been his first friend, and almost his name-brother—for after all, Fradley O. Haskins is not much more ridiculous a name than Crispin deFord— but that blow of light in the face had been like a betrayal.

“I’ve only got candles. If you’d set the flashlight on end, it’d be just as good—maybe better.”

“Okay.” Haskins sat down on the floor, placing the torch on the small crate Chris used for a table, so that it made a round spot of light on the boards overhead. “Now tell me something. Just what do you think you’re doing?”

“Hiding,” Chris said, a little sullenly.

“I can see that. I knew what this place was from the day I saw you toting books into it. I have to keep in practice on this press-gang dodge; I’ll need it some day on some other planet. But in your case, what’s the sense? Don’t you want to be transferred to a bigger city?”

“No, I don’t. Oh, I can’t say that Scranton’s been like home to me. I hate it. I wish I could really go home. But Frad, at least I’m getting to know the place. I already knew part of it, back while it was on the ground. I don’t want to be kidnapped twice, and go through it all again—aboard some city where I don’t know even as much about the