Cities in Flight

“Cut!”

The whole city throbbed once and went silent. The silence was a little frightening: the distant hum of the spindizzies was a part of the expected environment, and when it was damped, one felt a strange shortness of breath, as if the air had gone bad. Amalfi yawned involuntarily, his diaphragm sucking against an illusory shortage of oxygen.

Hazleton yawned, too, but his eyes were glittering. Amalfi knew that the city manager was enjoying himself now; the plan had been his, and so he no longer cared that the city might be in serious danger from here on out. He was taking lazy folks’ pains.

Amalfi only hoped that Hazleton was not outsmarting himself and the city at the same time. They had had some narrow squeaks with Hazleton’s plans before. There had been, for instance, that episode on Thor V. Of all the planets in the inhabited galaxy on which an Okie might choose to throw his weight around, Thor V was easily the worst. The first Okie city Thor V ever saw had been an outfit which had dropped its city name and taken to calling itself the Interstellar Master Traders. By the time it had left Thor V again, it had earned itself still another appellation: the Mad Dogs. On Thor V, hatred of Okies was downright hereditary, and for good reason …

“Now we’ll sit tight for a week,” Hazleton said, his spatulate fingers shooting the courser of his slide rule back and forth. “Our food will hold out that long. And that was a very convincing orbit Jake gave us. The cops will be sure we’re well on our way out of this system by now—and there aren’t enough of them to take care of the two warring planets and to comb space for us at the same time, anyhow.”

“You hope.”

“It stands to reason, doesn’t it?” Hazleton said, his eyes gleaming. “Sooner or later, within a matter of weeks, they’ll find out that one of those two planets is stronger than the other, and concentrate their forces on that one. When that happens, we’ll hightail for the planet with the weaker police investiture. The cops’ll be too busy to prevent our landing there, or to block our laying on supplies once we’re grounded.”

“That’s fine as far as it goes. But it also involves us directly with the weaker planet. The cops won’t need any better excuse for dispersing the city.”

“Not necessarily,” Hazleton insisted. “They can’t break us up just for violating a Vacate order. They know that as well as we do. If necessary, we can call for a court ruling and show that the Vacate order was inhumane—and in the meantime, they can’t enforce the order while we’re under the aegis of an enemy of theirs. Which reminds me —we’ve got an ‘I want off from a man named Webster, a pile engineer. He’s one of the city’s original complement, and as good as they come; I hate to see him leave.”

“If he wants off, he gets it,” Amalfi said. “What does he opt?”

“Next port of call.”

“Well, this looks like it. Well—”

The intercom on the flight board emitted a self-deprecatory burp. Amalfi pressed the stud.

“Mr. Mayor?”

“Yep.”

“This is Sergeant Anderson at the Cathedral Parkway lookout. There’s a whopping big ship just come into view around the bulge of the gas giant. We’re trying to contact her now. A warship.”

“Thanks,” Amalfi said, shooting a glance at Hazleton. “Put her through to here when you do make contact.” He dialed the ’visor until he could see the limb of the giant planet opposite the one into which the city was swinging. Sure enough, there was a tiny sliver of light there. The strange ship was still in direct sunlight, but even so, she must have been a whopper to be visible at all so far away. The mayor stepped up the magnification, and was rewarded with a look at a tube about the size of his thumb.

“Not making any attempt to hide,” he murmured, “but then you couldn’t very well hide a thing that size. She must be all of a thousand feet long. Looks like we didn’t fool ’em.”

Hazleton leaned forward and studied the innocuous-looking cylinder intently. “I don’t think that’s a police craft,” he said. “The police battleships on the clean-up squad are more or less pear-shaped, and have plenty of bumps. This boat only has four turrets, and they’re faired into the hull—what the ancients used to call ‘streamlining.’ See?”

Amalfi nodded, thrusting out his lower lip speculatively. “Local stuff, then. Designed for fast atmosphere transit. Archaic equipment—Muir engines, maybe.”

The intercom burped again. “Ready with the visiting craft, sir,” Sergeant Anderson said.

The view of the ship and the blue-green planet was wiped away, and a pleasant-faced young man looked out at them from the screen. “How do you do?” he said formally. The question didn’t seem to mean anything, but his tone indicated that he didn’t expect an answer to it anyhow. “I am speaking to the commanding officer of the … the flying fortress?”

“In effect,” Amalfi said. “I’m the mayor here, and this gentleman is the city manager; we’re responsible for different aspects of command. Who are you?”

“Captain Savage of the Federal Navy of Utopia,” the young man said. He did not smile. “May we have permission to approach your fort or city or whatever it is? We’d like to land a representative.”

Amalfi snapped the audio switch and looked at Hazleton. “What do you think?” he said. The Utopian officer politely and pointedly did not watch the movements of his lips.

“It should be safe enough. Still, that’s a big ship, even if it is a museum piece. They could as easily send their man in a life craft.”

Amalfi opened the circuit again. “Under the circumstances, we’d just as soon you stayed where you are,” he said. “You’ll understand, I’m sure, Captain. However, you may send a gig if you like; your representative is welcome here. Or we will exchange hostages—”

Savage’s hand moved across the screen as if brushing the suggestion away. “Quite unnecessary, sir. We heard the interstellar craft warn you away. Any enemy of theirs must be a friend of ours. We are hoping that you can shed some light on what is at best a confused situation.”

“That’s possible,” Amalfi said. “If that is all for now—”

“Yes sir. End of transmission.”

“Out.”

Hazleton arose. “Suppose I meet this emissary. Your office?”

“Okay.”

The city manager went out, and Amalfi, after a few moments, followed him, locking up the control tower. The city was in an orbit and would be stable until the time came to put it in flight again. On the street, Amalfi flagged a cab.

It was a fairly long haul from the control tower, which was on Thirty-fourth Street and The Avenue, down to Bowling Green, where City Hall was; and Amalfi lengthened it a bit more by giving the Tin Cabby a route that would have put folding money into the pocket of a live one of another, forgotten age. He settled back, bit the end off a hydroponic cigar, and tried to remember what he had heard about the Hamiltonians. Some sort of a republican sect, they’d been, back in the very earliest days of space travel. There’d been a public furor … recruiting … government disapproval and then suppression … hm-m-m. It was all very dim, and Amalfi was not at all sure that he hadn’t mixed it up with some other event in Terrestrial history.

But there had been an exodus of some sort. Shiploads of Hamiltonians going out to colonize, to set up model planets. Come to think of it, one of the nations then current in the West on Earth had had a sort of Hamiltonianism of its own, something called a timocracy. It had all died down after a while, but it had left traces. Nearly every major political wave after space flight had its vestige somewhere in the inhabited part of the galaxy.

Utopia must have been colonized very early. The Hruntan Imperials, had they arrived first, would have garrisoned both habitable planets as a matter of course.

It was a little easier to remember the Hruntan Empire, since it was of much more recent vintage than the Hamiltonians; but there was less to remember. The outer margins of exploration had spawned gimcrack empires by the dozen in the days when Earth seemed to be losing her grip. Alois Hrunta had merely been the most successful of the would-be emperors of space. His territory had expanded as far as the limits of communication would allow an absolute autocracy to spread, and then had been destroyed almost before he was assassinated, broken into duchies by his squabbling sons. Eventually the duchies fell in their turn to the nominal but irresistible authority of Earth, leaving, as the Hamiltonians had left, a legacy of a few remote colonies—worlds where a dead dream was served