Cities in Flight

“You have? Murder! There goes that one up the flue, Irish.”

“Complication,” Dulany agreed.

Anderson fell silent, leaving Chris to wonder what they had been talking about. Evidently they had been planning something which his news had torpedoed—though it was hard to imagine even the beginnings of such a plan, for their captors, out of a respect for the two Okies which Chris knew to be more than justified, had left them nothing but their underwear. At last the boy said hesitantly:

“What could I have done if my interview were still coming up?”

“Located our space suits,” Anderson said gloomily. “Not that they’d have let you search the place, that’s for sure, but you might have gotten a hint, or tricked them into dropping one. Even wary men sometimes underestimate youngsters. Now we’ll just have to think of something else.”

“There are dozens of space suits standing around the wall of that big audience chamber,” Chris said. “If you could only get there, maybe one of them would fit one of you.”

Dulany only smiled slightly. Anderson said: “Those aren’t suits, Chris; they’re armor—plate armor. Useless here, but they have some kind of heraldic significance; I think the Barons used to collect them from each other, like scalps.”

“That may be,” Chris said stubbornly, “but there were at least two real suits there. I’m sure of that.”

The two sergeants looked at each other. “Is it possible—?” Anderson said. “They’ve got the bravado for it, all right.”

“Could be.”

“By Sirius, there’s a bluff we’ve got to call! Get busy on that lock, Irish!”

“In my underwear? Nix.”

“What difference does that—oh, I see.” Anderson grimaced impatiently. “We’ll have to wait for lights out. Happily it won’t be long.”

“How are you going to bust the lock, Sergeant Dulany?” Chris asked. “It’s almost as big as my head!”

“Those are the easy kinds,” Dulany said loquaciously.

Chris in fact never did find out what Dulany did with the lock, for the operation was performed in the dark. Standing as instructed all the way to the back of the cell, he did not even hear anything until the huge, heavy door was thrown back with a thunderous crash.

The crash neatly drowned out the only yell the guard outside managed to get off. In this thunder-ridden fortress, nobody would think anything of such a noise. Then there was a jangle of keys, and two loud clicks as the unfortunate man was manacled with his own handcuffs. The Okies rolled him into the cell.

“What’ll I do if he comes to?” Chris whispered hoarsely.

“Won’t for hours,” Dulany’s voice said. “Shut the door. We’ll be back.”

From the boarding-squad sergeant, nine words all in one speech had the reassuring force of an oration. Chris grinned and shut the door.

Nothing seemed to happen thereafter for hours, except that the thunder got louder. That was certainly no novelty on Heaven. But was it possible for even the heaviest thunderclap to shake a pile of stone as squat and massive as Castle Wolfwhip? Surely it couldn’t last long if that were the case—and yet it was obviously at least a century old, probably more.

The fourth such blast answered his question. It was an explosion, and it was inside the building. In response, all the lights came on; and Chris saw that the door had been jarred open.

When he went over to close it again, he found himself looking down a small precipice. The corridor floor had collapsed. Several stunned figures were sitting amid the rubble it had made on the story below it. Considering the size of the blocks of which it had been made, they were lucky that it hadn’t killed them.

Still another explosion, and this time the lights went back out. Quite evidently, the suits Chris had seen in the audience hall had indeed been Anderson’s and Dulany’s battle dress. Well, this ought to cure the baron of Castle Wolfwhip of the habit of exhibiting his scalps. It ought to cure him of the habit of kidnapping Okies, too. It occurred to Chris that the whole plan of using Anderson and Dulany as hostages, even in their underwear, was about as safe an operation as trying to imprison two demons in a corncrib.

Then they were back. Seeing them hovering in the collapsed corridor, their helmet lamps making a shifting, confusing pattern of shadows, Chris realized, too, what kind of vehicle the city would have sent out after him if he had managed to get word back.

“You all right?” Anderson’s PA speaker demanded. “Good. Didn’t occur to me that the floor might go.”

They came into the cell. The guard, who had just recovered his senses, took one look and crawled into the corner farthest from the two steel figures.

“Now we’ve got a problem. We’ve got a safe-conduct out of the castle, but we can’t carry you through that storm, and we don’t dare risk putting you in one of their suits.”

“Boat,” Dulany said, pointing at Chris.

That’s right, I forgot, he knows how to drive one. Okay, boy, stick your elbows out and well fly you out to where there’s a floor you can walk on. Irish, let’s go.”

“One minute.” Dulany unhooked a bunch of keys from his waist and tossed them into the corner where the guard was cowering. “Right.”

Only Anderson joined him in the swan boat, still in his armor; Dulany stayed airborne, in radio communication with Anderson, in case the colonials should have the notion of making the boat turn around and return home on autopilot. After he saw the holes the two cops had torn through the great walls of Castle Wolfwhip, Chris doubted that they’d even entertain such a notion, but obviously it was sensible not to take chances where it wasn’t necessary.

The moment the boat was crawling across the bottom of the lake, Anderson took his helmet off and turned promptly to studying the control board. Finally he nodded and snapped three switches.

“That should do it.”

“Do what?”

“Prevent them from putting this tub under remote control. In fact from this point on they won’t even be able to locate her. Now Irish can shoot on ahead of us and get the word to the Mayor.” He put the helmet back on and spoke briefly, then doffed it.

“Now, Chris,” he said grimly, “comes the riot act.”

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Ghosts of Space

THE “riot act” was every bit as unpleasant as he had foreseen it would be, but somehow he managed to live through it—mostly by bearing in mind as firmly as possible that he had it coming. He was never likely to become a real Okie by stealing the property of people who had hired the city on to do a job, no matter how good he thought his reasons were.

And in this first disastrous instance he had simply been in the way. The city would have known soon enough in any event of the fact that Anderson and Dulany were being held prisoner, since the colonists of Heaven could not have used them effectively as hostages without notifying Amalfi of the fact; and there was no doubt in Chris’s mind that the two cops could have gotten out of Castle Wolf-whip without his intervention, and perhaps a good deal faster, too. Above all, they might have been gotten out by Amalfi without violence, and thus saved the contract intact. The appearance of Chris as a third prisoner had been totally unwelcomed to both sides, and had turned what had been merely a tense situation into an explosion.

In the end, they gave him full marks for imagination and boldness, as well as for coolness under fire, but by that time Chris had learned enough about the situation to feel that his chances of ever becoming a citizen were not worth an Oc dollar. The new contract was considerably more limited than the old, and called for reparations for the damage the two sergeants had done to Castle Wolf-whip; under it, the city stood to gain considerably less than before.

Chris was astonished that there was any new contract at all, and said so, rather hesitantly. Anderson explained: