Cities in Flight

—fight back, fight back! Don’t let those cabinetheads lick you! Stick them out. They’re only probing, and the minute we find out what they want, we can bear down on it. I’ll help wherever I can— I hate those things. But first, we have to find out what they want. Have you got the guts, Chris?”

“I don’t know. I’ll try. But I don’t know.”

“Nobody knows, yet. They don’t know themselves—that’s your only hope. They want to know what you can do. You have to show them. As soon as they find out, you will be a citizen—but until then, it’s going to be rough, and there will be nothing that anybody can do to help you. It will be up to you, and you alone.”

It was heartening to have another ally, but Chris would have found Dr. Braziller’s whole case more convincing had he been able to see the faintest sign of a talent—any talent at all—emerging under the ungentle ministrations of the machines. True, lately they had been bearing down heavily on his interest in history—but what good was that aboard an Okie city? The City Fathers themselves were the city’s historians, just as they were its library, its accounting department, its schools and much of its government. No live person was needed to teach the subject or to write about it, and at best, as far as Chris could see, it could never be more than a hobby for an Okie citizen.

Even in the present instance, Chris was not being called upon to do anything with history but pass almost incredibly hard tests in it—tests which consisted largely of showing that he had retained all of the vast mass of facts that the City Fathers were determinedly shoving into him. And this was no longer just history from the Okie point of view. Whole systems of world and interstellar history—Machiavelli, Plutarch, Thucydides, Gibbon, Marx, Pareto, Spengler, Sarton, Toynbee, Durant and a score of others—came marching through the grey gas into his head, without mercy and with apparent indifference to the fact that they all contradicted each other fatally at crucial points.

There was no punishment for failures, since the City Fathers’ pedagogy made failure of memory impossible, and it was only his memory that they seemed to be exploiting here. Instead, punishment was continuous: It lay in the certainty that though today’s dose had been fiendish, tomorrow’s would be worse.

“Now there you’re wrong,” Dr. Braziller told him. “Dead though they are, the machines aren’t ignorant of human psychology—far from it. They know very well that some students respond better to reward than to punishment, and that others have to be driven by fear. The second kind is usually the less intelligent, and they know that too; how could they not know it after so many generations of experience? You’re lucky that they’ve put you in the first category.”

“You mean they’re rewarding me?” Chris squeaked indignantly.

“Certainly.”

“But how?”

“By letting you go on studying even when they’re not satisfied with your progress. That’s quite a concession, Chris.”

“Maybe so,” Chris said glumly. “But I’d get the point faster if they handed out lollipops instead.”

Dr. Braziller had never heard of lollipops; she was an Okie. She only responded, a little primly: “You’d get it fast enough if they decided on a punishment system for you instead. They’re rigidly just, but know nothing about mercy; and leniency with children is utterly foreign to them—which is one reason why I’m here.”

The city hummed onward, and so did the days—and the months. Only Chris seemed to be making no progress in any visible direction.

No, that wasn’t quite true. Piggy was going nowhere, either, as far as Chris could see. But there the situation was even more puzzling and full of complications. To begin with, ever since Chris had first met him, Piggy had been denying that he cared about what happened to him when he turned eighteen; so it was odd—though not entirely surprising—to discover that he did care, after all. In fact, though his situation appeared to be now quite hopeless, Piggy was full of loud self-confidence, belied in the next breath by dark hints of mysterious plans to cinch what was supposed to be cinched already, and even darker hints of awful things to come if it didn’t turn out to be cinched. It was all more than Chris could manage to sort out, especially considering his inability to see more than half a minute into his own future. Some days he felt as though Piggy’s old accusation—“Boy, you are dumb!”—were written on his forehead in letters of fire.

Although Piggy said almost nothing about it, Chris gathered that he had already approached his father on the subject of biasing the City Fathers in his favor on the Citizenship Tests, and had been rebuffed with a loud roar, only slightly tempered by the intervention of his mother. There was of course no way to study for the Tests, since they measured nothing but potentials, not achievements; which meant, in turn, that there was no such thing as a pony or a crib for them.

Now, it was obvious, Piggy was thinking back to Chris’s adventure on Heaven. Judging by the questions he asked about it, Chris deduced that Piggy was searching for something heroic to do, in order to do it much better than Chris had. Chris was human enough to doubt that Piggy could make a much better showing, but in any event the city was still in space, so no opportunity offered itself.

Occasionally, too, he would disappear after class for several days running. On his return, his story was that he had been prowling around the city eavesdropping on the adult passengers. They were, Piggy said, up to something—just possibly, the building of a secret Dirac transmitter with which to call the Lost City. Chris did not believe a word of this, nor did he think Piggy did either.

The simple, granite-keel facts were that time was running out for both of them, and that desperation was setting in: for Piggy because he had never tried, and for Chris because nothing he tried seemed to get him anywhere. All around them their younger schoolmates seemed to be opening into talents with the violence and unpredictability of popcorn, turning everything the memory cells fed them into salt and savor no matter how high the heat was turned up. In comparison, Chris felt as retarded as a dinosaur, and just as clumsy and gigantic.

It was in this atmosphere of pervasive, incipient failure that Sgt. Anderson one evening said calmly:

“Chris, the Mayor wants to talk to you.”

From anyone else, Chris would have taken such an announcement as a practical joke, too absurd to be even upsetting. From Sgt. Anderson he did not know how to take it; he simply stared.

“Relax—it isn’t going to be an ordeal, and besides I didn’t say he wanted to see you. Sit back down and I’ll explain.”

Numbly, Chris did so.

“What’s happened is this: We’re approaching another job of work. From the first contacts we had with these people, it sounded simple and straightforward, but of course nothing ever is. (Amalfi says the biggest lie it’s possible to tell in the English language is, ‘It was as simple as that.’) Supposedly we were going to be hired on to do a straightforward piece of local geology and mining—nothing so tricky as changing the whole setup of a planet; just a standard piece of work. You’ve seen the motto on City Hall?”

Chris had. It read: Mow YOUR LAWN, LADY? It had never seemed very dignified to him, but he was beginning to understand what it implied. He nodded.

“Well, that’s the way it’s always supposed to be: We come in, we do a job, we go out again. Local feuds don’t count; we take no part in them.

“But as we got closer to signing a contract with this place—it’s called Argus Three—we began to get hints that we were second comers. Apparently there’d already been one city on Argus, hired to do the job, but hadn’t done it well.

“We tried to find out more about this, naturally, to be sure the Argidae were telling a straight story; we didn’t want to be poaching on any other city’s contract. But the colonists were very vague about the whole thing. Finally, though, they let it slip that the other city was still sitting on their planet, and still claimed to be working on the job, even though the contract deadline had passed. Tell me—what would you do in a case like that, if you were Amalfi?”

Chris frowned. “I don’t know any other answer but the one in the books. If the planet has an overstayed city, it’s supposed to call the cops. All other cities should stay clear, otherwise they might get involved in the shooting, if there is any.”

“Right; and this appears to be a classic case. The colonists can’t be too explicit because they know that every word they broadcast to us is going to be overheard; but the City Fathers have analyzed what Argus Three has sent us, and the chances are a hundred to one that that other city has settled on Argus Three for good … in short, that it means to take over the planet. The Argidae don’t want to call the cops, for reasons we don’t know. Instead, they seem to be trying to hire us to take on this tramp city and clear him out. If