Cities in Flight

After so many months of starlit skies and passing suns, the grumbling, closed-in darkness was oppressive, even alarming. Sitting with Piggy on an old pier at the foot of Gansevoort Street, from which Herman Melville had sailed into the distant South Sea marvels of Typee, Ormo and Mardi, Chris stared at the globe of thunder around the city as nervously as though he had never seen weather before. Piggy, for once, was in no better shape, for he never had seen weather before; this was New York’s first planetfall since he had been born.

How Amalfi could see where he was going was hard to imagine; but the city continued to go down anyhow; it had a contract with Heaven, and work was work. Besides, there would have been no point in waiting for the storms to clear away. It was always and everywhere like this on Heaven, except when it was worse. The settlers said so.

“Wow!” Chris said, for the twelfth or thirteenth time. “What a blitzkrieg of a storm! Look at that! How far up are we still, Piggy?”

“How should I know?”

“D’you think Amalfi knows? I mean really knows?”

“Sure, he knows,” Piggy said miserably. “He always does the tough landings. He never misses.”

WHAM!

For a second the whole sphere of the spindizzy field seemed to be crawling with electric fire. The noise was enormous and bounded back again and again from the concrete sides of the towers behind them. It had never occurred to Chris that a field which could protect a whole city from the hard radiation, the hard stones and the hard vacuum of space might pass noise when there was air outside it as well as inside—but it surely did. The descent already seemed to have been going on forever.

After a while, Chris found that he was beginning to enjoy it. Between thunder rolls, he shouted maliciously:

“He must be flying sidewise this time. But he’s lost.”

“What do you know about it? Shut up.”

“I’ve seen thunderstorms. You know what? We’re going to be up here forever. Sailing under a curse, like IMT.” The sky ht. WHAM! “Hey, what a beauty!”

“If you don’t shut up,” Piggy said with desperate grimness, “I’m going to poke you right in the snoot.”

This was hardly a very grave threat, for although Piggy out-weighed Chris by some twenty pounds, most of it was blubber. Amid the excitement of the storm Chris almost made the mistake of laughing at him; but at the same instant, he felt the boards of the ancient pier begin to shudder beneath them to the tramp of steel boots. Startled, he looked back over his shoulder, and then jumped up.

Twenty men in full space armor were behind them, faceless and bristling, like a phalanx of giant robots. One of them came forward, making the planks of the pier groan and squeal under the weight, and suddenly spoke to him.

The voice was blarey and metallic, as though the gain had been turned up in order to shout across acres of ground and through cannonades of thunder, but Chris had no difficulty in recognizing it. The man in the armor was his guardian.

“CHRIS!” The volume of sound suddenly went down a little. “Chris, what are you doing here? And Kingston- Throop’s kid! Piggy, you ought to know better than this. We’re landing in twenty minutes—and this is a sally port. Beat it—both of you.”

“We were only looking,” Piggy said defiantly. “We can look if we want.”

“I’ve got no time to argue. Are you going or not?”

Chris pulled at Piggy’s elbow. “Come on, Piggy. What’s the sense of being in the way?”

“Let go. I’m not in the way. They can walk right by me. I don’t have to go just because he says so. He’s not my guardian—he’s only a cop.”

A steel arm reached out, and steel pincers opened at the end of it. “Give me your card,” Anderson’s voice said harshly. “I’ll let you know later what you’re charged with. If you won’t move now, I’ll assign two men to move you —though I can’t spare the men, and when that winds up on your card you may spend the rest of one lifetime wishing it hadn’t.”

“Oh, all right. Don’t throw your weight around. I’m going.”

The bulbous steel arm remained stiffly extended, the pincers menacingly open. “I want the card.”

“I said I was going!”

“Then go.”

Piggy broke and ran. After a puzzled look at the armored figure of his guardian, Chris followed, dodging around and through the massive blue-steel statues standing impassively along almost the whole length of the pier.

Piggy had already vanished. As Chris ran for home, his mind full of bewilderment, the city grounded in a fanfare of lightning bolts.

Unfortunately, so far as Chris was concerned the City Fathers took no notice of the landing: his schooling went on regardless, so that he got only the most confused picture of what was going on. Though the municipal pipeline, WNYC, had five-minute news bulletins on tap every hour for anyone who wanted to dial into them, decades of the uneventfulness of interstellar travel had reduced the WNYC news bureau to a state of vestigial ineptitude—the pipeline’s only remaining real function was the broadcasting of the city’s inexhaustible library of music and drama; Chris suspected that most “ of the citizens found the newscasts almost as dim-witted and uninformative as he did. What little meaningful information he was able to garner, he got from Sgt. Anderson, and that was not very much, for the perimeter sergeant was hardly ever home now; he was too busy consolidating the beachhead on Heaven. Nevertheless, Chris picked up a few fragments, mostly from conversations between the sergeant and Carla:

“What they want us to do is to help them industrialize the planet. It sounds easy, but the kicker is that their social setup is feudal—the sixty-six thousand people they call the Elect are actually only free landholders or franklins, and below them there’s a huge number of serfs—nobody’s ever bothered to count them. The Archangels want it to stay that way even after they’ve got their heavy industries established.”

“It sounds impossible,” Carla said.

“It is impossible, as they’ll find out when we’ve finished the job. But that’s exactly the trouble. We’re not allowed to change planets’ social systems, but we can’t complete this contract without starting a revolution—along, slow one, sure, but a revolution all the same. And when the cops come here afterward and find that out, well have a Violation to answer for.”

Carla laughed musically. “The cops! My dear, is that still a three-letter word for you? What else are you? How many more centuries is it going to take you to get used to it?”

“You know what I mean,” Anderson said, frowning. “So all right, I’m a cop. But I’m not an Earth cop, I’m a city cop, and that makes all the difference. Well, we’ll see. What’s for lunch? I’ve got to go in half an hour.”

The storm, as predicted, went on all the time. When he had the chance, Chris watched the machinery being uncrated and readied, and followed it to the docks at the working perimeter of the city, beyond which always bobbed and crawled a swarm of the glowing swamp vehicles of the colonists of Heaven. Though these came in all sizes, they were all essentially of the same design: a fat cylinder of some transparent cladding, ribbed with metal, provided on both sides with caterpillar treads bearing cleats so large that they could also serve as paddles where the going underfoot became especially sloppy. The shell was airtight, for buoyancy, but Chris was sure that the vessel could make little or no headway afloat, even if it were equipped somewhere with a screw propeller; under those circum stances it probably could do no more than try to maintain its position as best it could while it radioed for help. It was certainly well studded with antennae. Mainly, it seemed to be designed to shed water, rather than to swim in it.

How could any sort of industry be possible under these soggy conditions? He could not imagine how even an agricultural society could survive amidst these perpetual torrents, especially since there was very little land area above water on the planet. But then he recalled a little of the history of the colonization of Venus, which had presented somewhat similar problems. There, farming eventually had been taken beneath the sea; but even that needed an abundance of energy, and besides, the people of Heaven hadn’t even gotten that far—they seemed to be living mostly on fish and mudweed.

He listened as closely as possible to the conversations of the colonists on the docks—not the conversations in