Cities in Flight

THE CITY was still administered, with due regard for tradition, from City Hall, but its control room was in the mast of the Empire State Building. It was here that Amalfi received them all—Chris, Frad, and Sgts. Anderson and Dulany—for he had been occupying it around the clock while the alert had been on, as officially it still was. It was a marvelous place, jammed to the ceilings with screens, lights, meters, automatic charts, and scores of devices Chris could not even put a name to; but Chris was more interested in the Mayor.

Since he was at the moment talking to Frad, Chris had plenty of opportunity to study him.

The fabulous Amalfi had turned out to be a complete surprise. Chris could not say any more just what kind of man he had pictured in his mind. Something more stalwart, lean and conventionally heroic, perhaps—but certainly not a short barrel-shaped man with a bull neck, a totally bald head and hands so huge that they looked as though they could crush rocks. The oddest touch of all was the cigar, held in the powerful fingers with almost feminine delicacy, and drawn on with invariable relish. Nobody else in the city smoked— nobody else—because there was no place in it to grow tobacco. The cigar, then, was more than a badge of office; it was a symbol of the wealth of the city, like the snow imported from the mountains by the Roman emperors, and Amalfi treated it like a treasure, not a habit. When he was thinking, he had an odd way of holding it up and looking at it, as though everything that was going on in his head was concentrated in its glowing coal.

He was saying to Frad: “The arrangements with the machinery are cumbersome, but not difficult in principle. We can lend you our Brood assembly until she replicates herself; then you reset the daughter machine, feed her scrap, and out come City Fathers to the number that you’ll need—probably about a third as many as we carry, and it’ll take maybe ten years. You can use the time feeding them data, because in the beginning they’ll be idiots except for the computation function.

“In the meantime we’ll refigure your job problem on our own machines. Since we’ll trust the answer, and since Chris says you’re a man of your word, that means that of course we’ll underwrite your contract with the Argidae.”

“Many thanks,” Frad said.

“Not necessary,” Amalfi rumbled. “For value received. In fact we got more than we’re paying for—we learned something from you. Which brings us to our drastic friend Mr. deFord.” He swung on Chris, who tried unsuccessfully to swallow his heart. “I suppose you’re aware, Chris, that this is D-day for you: your eighteenth birthday.”

“Yes, sir. I sure am.”

“Well, I’ve got a job for you if you want it. I’ve been studying it ever since it was first mentioned to me, and all I can say is, it serves you right.”

Chris swallowed again. The Mayor studied the cigar judiciously.

“It calls for a very odd combination of skills and character traits. Taking the latter first, it needs initiative, boldness, imagination, a willingness to improvise and take short-cuts, and an ability to see the whole of a complex situation at a glance. But at the same time, it needs conservative instincts, so that even the boldest ideas and acts tend to be those that save men, materials, time, money. What class of jobs does that make you think of so far?”

“M ILITARY GENERAL OFFICERS,” the City Fathers promptly announced.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Amalfi growled. He was plainly irritated, but it seemed to Chris an old irritation, almost a routine one. “Chris?”

“Well, sir, they’re right, of course. I might even have thought of it myself, though I can’t swear to it. At least all the great generals follow that pattern.”

“Okay. As for the skills, a lot of them are required, but only one is cardinal. The man has got to be a first-class cultural morphologist.”

Chris recognized the term, from his force-feeding in Spengler. It denoted a scholar who could look at any culture at any stage in its development, relate it to all other cultures at similar stages, and come up with specific predictions of how these people would react to a given proposal or event. It surely wouldn’t be a skill a general would ever be likely to have a use for, even if he had the time to develop it.

“You’ve got the character traits, that’s plain to see—including the predisposition toward the skill. Most Okies have that, but in nowhere near the degree you seem to. The skill itself, of course, can only emerge with time and practice … but you’ll have lots of time. The City Fathers say five years’ probation.

“As for the city, we never had such a job on the roster before, but a study of Scranton and some more successful towns convinces us that we need it. Will you take it?”

Chris’s head was whirling with a wild, humming mixture of pride and bafflement. “Excuse me, Mr. Mayor—but just what is it?”

“City manager.”

Chris stared at Sgt. Anderson, but his guardian looked as stunned as Chris felt. After a moment, however, he winked solemnly. Chris could not speak; but at last he managed to nod his head. It was all the management he was capable of, right now.

“Good. The City Fathers predicted you would, so you were started on the drugs in your first meal of today. Welcome to citizenship, Mr. deFord.”

Even at this moment, however, a part of Chris’s mind seemed curiously detached. He was thinking of the original reason he had wanted long life: in the hope that some day, somehow, he might yet get back home. It had never occurred to him that by the time that happened, there would be nothing left back there that he could call his own. Even now, Earth was unthinkably remote, not only in space, but in his heart.

His definition of “home” had changed. He had won long life; but with it, new ties and new obligations; not an eternal childhood on Earth, but a life for the stars.

He wrenched his attention back to the control room. “What about Piggy?” he said curiously. “I talked to him on the way back. He seems to have learned a lot.”

“Too late,” Amalfi said, his voice inflexibly stern. “He wrote his own ticket. It’s a passenger ticket. He’s got boldness and initiative, all right—all of it of the wrong kind, totally untempered by judgment or imagination. The same kind of pitfall will always lie ahead of you, Chris; that, too, is an aspect of the job. It’d be wise not to forget it.”

Chris nodded again, but the warning could not dampen his spirits now; for this was for some reason the highest moment of them all—the moment when Frad Huskins, the new city manager of Scranton, shook his hand and said huskily:

“Colleague, let’s talk business.”

EARTHMAN, COME HOME

PROLOGUE

SPACE FLIGHT got its start as a war weapon amid the collapse of the great Western culture of Earth. The invention of Muir’s tape-mass engine carried early explorers out as far as Jupiter; and gravity was discovered— though it had been postulated centuries before—by the 2018 Jovian expedition, the last space flight with Muir engines which was completed on behalf of the West before that culture’s final extinction. The building, by remote control, of the Bridge on the face of Jupiter itself, easily the most enormous (and in most other respects the most useless) engineering project ever undertaken by man, had made possible direct, close measurements of Jupiter’s magnetic field. The measurements provided final confirmation of the Blackett-Dirac equations, which as early as 1948 had proposed a direct relationship between magnetism, gravitation, and the rate of spin of any mass.

Up to that time, nothing had been done with the Blackett-Dirac hypothesis, which remained a toy of pure mathematicians. Then, abruptly, the hypothesis and the mathematicians had their first innings. From the many pages of symbols and the mumbled discussions of the possible field-strength of a single electronic pole in rotation, the Dillon-Wagoner gravitron polarity generator—almost immediately dubbed the “spindizzy” in honor of what it did