Cities in Flight

“Violence between employer and employee is as old as man, Chris, but the work has to be done all the same. The colonists as a corporate entity disown the kidnapper and claim the right to deal with him according to their own system of justice, which we’re bound to respect. Damage to real property, on the other hand, has to be paid for— and the city can’t disown Irish and me because we’re officers and agents of the city.”

“But what about the scheme to ground the city and take it over?”

“We know nothing about that except what you overheard. That would have no status in a colonial court, and probably wouldn’t even if you were a citizen—in this case, if you were of legal age.”

And there it was again. “Well, there’s something else I’ve been wondering about,” Chris said. “Why is the age to start the drugs fixed at eighteen? Wouldn’t they work at any age? Suppose we took aboard a man forty years old who also happened to be a red-hot expert at something we needed. Couldn’t you start him on the drugs anyhow?”

“We could and we would,” Anderson assured him. “Eighteen is only the optimum age, the earliest age at which we can be sure the specimen is physically mature. You see the drugs can’t set the clock back. They just arrest aging from the moment when they’re first given. Tell me, have you ever heard of the legend of Tithonus?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“I don’t know it very well myself; ask the City Fathers. But briefly, he got himself in the good books of the goddess of dawn, Eos, and asked for the gift of immortality. She gave it to him, but he was pretty old at the time. When he realized that he was just going to stay that way forever, he asked Eos to take the gift back. So she changed him into a grasshopper, and you know how long they live.”

“Hmm. A man who was going to be a permanent seventy-five wouldn’t be much good to himself, I guess. Or to the city either.”

“That’s the theory,” the perimeter sergeant agreed. “But of course we have to take ’em as we find ’em. Amalfi went on the drugs at fifty—which, for him, happened to be his prime.”

Thus his education went on, much as before, except that he stayed scrupulously away from the docks. Since the new contract was limited to three months, there probably wouldn’t have been much to see down there anyhow—or so he told himself, not without a suspicion that there were a few holes in his logic. In addition, he got some sympathy and support from a wholly unexpected source: Piggy Kingston-Throop.

“It just goes to show you how much truth there is in all this jabber about citizenship,” he said fiercely, at their usual after-class meeting. “Here you go and do them a big fat favor, and all they can think of to do is lecture you for getting in their way. They even go right on doing business with these guys who were going to grab the city if they could.”

“Well, we do have to eat.”

“Yeah, but it’s dirty money all the same. Come to think of it, though, if I’d have been in your shoes I’d have handled it differently.”

“I know,” Chris said, “that’s what they all keep telling me. I should never have gotten into the boat in the first place.”

“Pooh, that part’s all right,” Piggy said scornfully. “If you hadn’t gotten into the boat they’d never have known about the plot to take the city—that’s the favor you did them, and don’t you forget it. They’re on their guard now. No, I mean what happened after you locked the guys up in the back cabin. You said that the boat had bumped into the dock and was trying to climb it, right?”

“Yes.”

“And a lot of cops came running?”

“I don’t know about a lot,” Chris said cautiously. “There were three or four, I think.”

“Okay. Now if it had been me, I would have just stopped the boat right there, and gotten out, and told the cops what I’d heard. Let them drag it out of the guys you’d locked up. You know how the City Fathers cram all that junk into our heads in class—well, they can take stuff out the same way. Dad says it’s darned unpleasant for the victim, but they get it.”

Chris could only shrug helplessly. “You’re right. That would have been the sensible thing to do. And it seems obvious the way you tell it. But all I can say is, it didn’t occur to me.” He thought a moment, and then added: “But in a way I’m not too sorry, Piggy. That way, I never would have gotten to Castle Wolfwhip at all—sure, it would have been better if I hadn’t—but it sure was exciting while I was there.”

“Boy, I’ll bet it was! I wish I’d been there!” Piggy began to shadowbox awkwardly. “I wouldn’t have hidden in any cell, believe you me. I’d have showed ’em!”

Chris did his best not to laugh. “Going by what I heard, if you’d gone along with the sergeants—if they’d let you—you’d have been killed by your own friends. Those weren’t just rotten eggs they were throwing around.”

“All the same, I’ll bet-Hullo, we’re lifting.”

The city had not lifted yet, but Chris knew what Piggy meant; he too could hear the deepening hum of the spindizzies. “So we are. That three months sure went by in a hurry.”

“Three months isn’t much in space. We’ll be eighteen before we know it.”

“That,” Chris said gloomily, “is exactly what I’m afraid of.”

“Well, I don’t give a darn. This whole deal about your running off with the boat proves that they don’t mean what they say about earning citizenship. Like I say, the whole thing’s just a scheme to keep kids in line, so they won’t have to be watched so much. The minute you actually do something for the survival of the city, bingo! the roof falls on you. Never mind that, it was a good thing to do and shows you’ve got guts—you’ve caused them trouble, and that’s what the system’s supposed to prevent.”

There was, Chris saw, something to be said for the theory, no matter how exaggerated Piggy’s way of putting it was. In Chris’s present state of discouragement, it would be a dangerously easy point of view to adopt.

“Well, Piggy, what I want to know is, what are you going to do if you’re wrong? I mean, supposing the City Fathers decide not to make you a citizen, and it turns out that they can’t be fixed? Then you’ll be stuck with being a passenger for the rest of your life—and it’d only be a normal lifetime, too.”

“Passengers aren’t as helpless as they think,” Piggy said darkly. “Some one of these days the Lost City is going to come back, and when that happens, all of a sudden the passengers are going to be top dog.”

“The Lost City? I never heard of it.”

“Of course you haven’t. And the City Fathers won’t ever tell you about it, either. But word gets around.”

“Okay, don’t be mysterious,” Chris said. “What’s it all about?”

Piggy’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “Do you swear not to tell anybody else, except another passenger?”

“Sure.”

Piggy looked elaborately over both shoulders before going on. As usual, they were the only youngsters on the street, and none of the adults were paying the slightest attention to them.

“Well,” he said in the same tone of voice, “it’s like this. One of the first cities ever to take off was a big one. Nobody knows its name, but I think it was Los Angeles. Anyhow, it got lost, and ran out of drugs, and then out of food, way off in some part of space that was never colonized, so it couldn’t find any work either. But then they made a planetfall on a new world, something nobody had ever seen before. It was like Earth —bigger, but the same gravity, and a little more oxygen in the air, and a perfect climate—like spring all year round, even at the poles. If you planted seeds there, you had to jump back in a hurry or the plant would hit you under the chin, they grew so fast.

“But that wasn’t the half of it.”

“It sounds like plenty,” Chris said.

“That was all good, but they found something else even better. There was a kind of grain growing wild there, and when they analyzed it to see whether or not it was good to eat, they found it contained an antideath drug—not any of ours, but better than all of ours rolled into one. They didn’t even have to extract it—all they had to do was make bread out of the plant.”

“Wow. Piggy, is this just a story?”

“Well, I can’t give you an affidavit,” Piggy said, offended. “Do you want to hear the rest or don’t you?”

“Go ahead,” Chris said hastily.

“So then the question was, what were they going to do with their city? They didn’t need it. Everything they needed came right up out of the ground while their backs were turned. So they decided to stock it up and send it