streets as I knew about Scranton—and maybe find out that I hate it even worse. And I don’t like being swapped, like—like a barrel of scrap.”
“Well, maybe I can’t blame you for that—though it’s standard Okie procedure, not anything that Lutz thought up in his own head. Do you know where the ‘rule of descretion’ came from?”
“No.”
“From the trading of players between baseball teams. It’s that old —more than a thousand years. The contract law that sanctions it is supposed to be a whale of a lot older, even.”
“All right,” Chris said. “It could even be Roman, I suppose. But Frad, I’m not a barrel of scrap and I still don’t want to be swapped.”
“Now that part of it,” the big man said patiently, “is just plain silly. You’ve got no future in Scranton, and you ought to know it by now. On a really big town you could probably find something to do—and the least you’ll get is some schooling. All our schools are closed, for good and forever. And another thing: We’ve only been aloft a year, and it’s a cinch we’ve got some hard times ahead of us. An older town would be a darn sight safer—not absolutely safe, no Okie ever is; but safer.”
“Are you going, too?”
Haskins laughed. “Not a chance. Amalfi must have ten thousand of the likes of me. Besides, Lutz needs me. He doesn’t know it, but he does.”
“Well… then … I’d rather stay with you.”
Haskins smote one fist into the other palm in exasperation. “Look, Red … Cripes, what do you say to this kid? Thanks, Chris; I—I’ll remember that. But if I’m lucky, I’ll have a boy of my own some day. This isn’t the day. If you don’t face facts right now, you aren’t going to get a second chance. Listen, I’m the only guy who knows where you are, yet, but how long can that last? Do you know what Frank will do when he roots you out of a hole full of caches of food?
Chris’s stomach felt as though he had just been thrown out of a window.
“I guess I never thought of that.”
“You need practice. I don’t blame you for that. But I’ll tell you what Frank will do:
There was a long silence. At last, Chris said quietly:
“All right. Maybe it is better this way. I’ll go.”
“That’s using your head,” Haskins said gruffly. “Come on, then. We’ll tell Frank you were sick. You
“Can I take my books?”
“They’re not yours, they’re Boyle Warner’s,” Frad said impatiently. “I’ll get ’em back to him later. Pick up the torch and let’s go—you’ll find plenty of books where you’re going.” He stopped suddenly and glared at Chris through the dim light. “Not that you care where you’re going! You haven’t even asked the name of the town.”
This was true; he had not asked, and now that he came to think about it, he didn’t care. But his curiosity came forward even through the gloom of the maze, and even through his despair. He said, “So I haven’t. What is it?”
“New York.”
CHAPTER FOUR: Schoolroom in the Sky
THE SIGHT from the gig was marvelous beyond all imagination: an island of towers, as tall as mountains, floating in a surfaceless, bottomless sea of stars. The gig was rocket-powered, so that Chris was also seeing the stars from space in all their jeweled majesty for the first time in his life; but the silent pride of the great human city, aloof in its spindizzy bubble—which was faintly visible from the outside —completely took precedence. Behind the gig, Scranton looked in comparison like a scuttleful of old stove bolts.
The immigrants were met at the perimeter by a broad-shouldered, crew-cut man of about forty, in a uniform which made all of Chris’s hackles rise; cops were natural enemies, here as everywhere. But the perimeter sergeant, who gave his name as Anderson, did no more than herd them all into separate cubicles for interviews.
There was nobody in Chris’s cubicle but Chris himself. He was seated before a small ledge or banquette, facing a speaker grille which was set into the wall. From this there issued the questions, and into this he spoke his answers. Most of the questions were simple matters of vital statistics—his name, his age, point of origin, date of boarding Scranton and so on—but he rather enjoyed answering them; the fact was that never before in his life had anyone been interested enough in him to ask them. In fact he himself did not know the answers to some of them.
It was also interesting to speculate on the identity of the questioner. It was a machine, Chris was almost sure, and one speaking not from any vocabulary of prerecorded words sounded by a human voice, but instead from some store of basic speech sounds which it combined and recombined as it went along. The result was perfectly understandable and nonmechanical, carrying many of the stigmata of real human speech—for example, the sentences emerged in natural speech rhythms, and with enough inflection so that key words and even punctuation could be distinguished—yet all the same he would never have mistaken it for a human voice. Whatever the difference was, he thought of it as though the device were speaking all in capital letters.
Even in an age long dominated by computers, to the exclusion, in many cases, of human beings, Chris had never heard of a machine with intelligence enough to be able to construct its speech in this fashion, let alone one intelligent enough to be given the wide discretionary latitude implied by the conduct of this interview. He had never before heard of a machine which referred to itself as “we,” either.
“HOW MUCH SCHOOLING HAD YOU HAD BEFORE YOU WERE IMPRESSED, M R. DE F ORD?”
“Almost none.”
“DID YOU RECEIVE ANY SCHOOLING ABOARD SCRANTON ?”
“A little. Actually it was only just tutoring—the kind of thing I used to get from my father, when he felt up to it.”
“I T IS RATHER LATE TO START, BUT WE CAN ARRANGE SCHOOLING FOR YOU IF YOU WISH—”
“Boy, do I!”
“T HAT IS THE QUESTION. A N ACCELERATED SECONDARY EDUCATION IS PHYSICALLY VERY TRYING. I T IS POSSIBLE THAT YOU WOULD HAVE NO NEED OF IT HERE, DEPENDING UPON YOUR GOALS. D O YOU WISH TO BE A PASSENGER, OR A CITIZEN?”
On the surface, this was a perfectly easy question. What Chris most wanted to do was to go home and back to being a citizen of nothing more complicated than the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Western Common Market, Terran Confederation. He had had many bad nights spent wondering how his family was doing without him, and what they had thought of his disappearance, and he was sure that he would have many more. Yet by the same token, by now they had doubtless made whatever adjustment was possible for them to the fact of his being gone; and an even more brutal fact was that he was now sitting on a metropolis of well over a million people which was floating in empty space a good twenty light-years away from Sol, bound for some destination he could not even guess. This monstrous and wonderful construct was not going to turn itself into his personal Tin Cabby simply because he said he wanted to go home, or for any other reason.
So if Chris was stuck with the city, he reasoned, he might as well be a citizen. There was no point in being a passenger when he had no idea where he was going, or whether it would be worth the fare when he got there. Being a citizen, on the other hand, sounded as though it conferred some privileges; it would be worth while knowing what they were. It would also be worth knowing whether or not the two terms the machine had used carried some special technical meaning of which he ought to be wary.
“Who’m I talking to?”
“THE CITY F ATHERS.”
This reply nearly threw him completely off course; he tabled the baker’s dozen of questions it raised only by a firm exercise of will. What was important about it right now was that it told him that he was talking to a responsible
