Cities in Flight

resistance spat around its edges—and then it no longer had any edges. Sections of it broke off and melted like wraiths. From its ardent center, a few hopeless life craft shot out into the gap; whatever was causing the destruction let them go. No conceivable life ship could live long enough to get out of the Rift.

Dee cried out. Amalfi cut in the audio circuit, filling the control room with a howl of static. Far behind the wild blasts of sound, a tiny voice was shouting desperately, “Rebroadcast if anyone hears us. Repeat: We have the fuelless drive. We’re destroying our model and evacuating our passenger. Pick him up if you can. We’re being blown up by a bindlestiff. Rebroadcast if—”

Then there was nothing left but the skeleton of the city, glowing whitely, evaporating in the blackness. The pale, innocent light of the guide beam for a Bethe blaster played over it, but it was still impossible to see who was wielding the weapon. The Dinwiddie circuits in the proxies were compensating for the glare, so that nothing was coming through to the screen that did not shine with its own light.

The terrible fire died slowly, and the stars brightened. As the last spark flared and went out, a shadow loomed against the distant star-wall. Hazleton drew his breath in sharply.

“Another city! So some outfits really do go bindlestiff! And we thought we were the first ones out here!”

“Mark,” Dee said in a small voice. “Mark, what is a bindlestiff?”

“A tramp,” Hazleton said, his eyes still on the screen. “The kind of outfit that gives all Okies a bad name. Most Okies are true hobos, Dee; they work for their living wherever they can find work. The bindlestiff lives by robbery— and murder.”

His voice was bitter. Amalfi himself felt a little sick. That one city should destroy another was bad enough; but it was even more of a wrench to realize that the whole scene was virtually ancient history. Ultrawave transmission was somewhat faster than light, but only by about 25 per cent; unlike the Dirac transmitter, the ultraphone was by no means an instantaneous communicator. The dark city had destroyed its counterpart years ago, and must now be beyond pursuit. It was even beyond identification, for no orders could be sent now to the lead proxy which would result in any action until still more years had passed.

“Some outfits go bindlestiff, all right,” he said. “And I think the number must have been increasing lately. Why that should be, I don’t know, but evidently it’s happening. We’ve been losing a lot of legitimate, honest cities lately—getting no answer to Dirac casts, missing them at rendezvous, and so on. Maybe now we know why.”

“I’ve noticed,” Hazleton said. “But I don’t see how there could be enough piracy to account for all the losses. For all we know, the Vegan orbital fort may be out here, picking off anybody who’s venturesome enough to leave the usual commerce lanes.”

“I didn’t know the Vegans flew cities,” Dee said.

“They don’t,” Amalfi said abstractedly. He considered describing the legendary fort, then rejected the idea. “But they dominated the galaxy once, before Earth took to space flight. At their peak they owned more planets than Earth does right now, but they were knocked out a hell of a long time ago …. I’m still worried about that bindlestiff, Mark. You’d think that some heavy thinker on Earth would have figured out a way to make Diracs compact enough to be mounted in a proxy. They haven’t got anything better to do back there.”

Hazleton had no difficulty in penetrating to the real core of Amalfi’s grumbling. He said, “Maybe we can still smoke ’em out, boss.”

“Not a chance. We can’t afford a side jaunt.”

“Well, I’ll send out a general warning on the Dirac,” Hazleton said. “It’s barely possible that the cops will be able to invest this part of the Rift before the ’stiff gets out of it.”

“That’ll trap us neatly, won’t it? Besides, that bindlestiff isn’t going to leave the Rift, at least not until it’s picked up those life craft.”

“Eh? How do you know?”

“Did you hear what the SOS said about a fuelless drive?”

“Sure,” Hazleton said uneasily, “but the man who knows how to build it must be dead by now, even if he escaped when his city was blasted.”

“We can’t be sure of that—and that’s the one thing that the ’stiff has to make sure of. If the ’stiffs get ahold of that drive, there’ll be all hell to pay. After that, ’stiffs won’t be a rarity any more. If there isn’t widespread piracy in the galaxy now, there will be—if we let the ’stiffs get that no-fuel drive.”

“Why?” Dee said.

“ I wish you knew more history, Dee. I don’t suppose there were ever any pirates on Utopia, but Earth once had plenty of them. They eventually died out, thousands of years ago, when sailing ships were replaced by fueled ships. The fueled ships were faster than sailing vessels—but they couldn’t themselves become pirates because they had to touch civilized ports regularly to coal up. They could always get food off some uninhabited island, but for coal they had to visit a real port. The Okie cities are in the same position now; they’re fueled ships. But if that bindlestiff can actually get its hands on a no-fuel drive—so he can sail space without having to touch civilized planets for power metals—well, we just can’t allow it to happen, that’s all. We’ve got to get that drive away from them.”

Hazleton stood up, kneading his hands nervously. “That’s perfectly true—and that’s why the ’stiff will knock itself out to recapture those life ships. You’re right, Amalfi. Well, there’s only one place in the Rift where a life ship could go, and that’s to the wild star. So the ’stiff is probably there, too, by now—or on the way there.” He looked thoughtfully at the screen, once more glittering only with anonymous stars. “That changes things. Shall I send out the Dirac warning, or not?”

“Yes, send it out. It’s the law. But I think it’s up to us to deal with the ’stiff; we’re familiar with ways of manipulating strange cultures, and we know how Okies think—even ’stiffs. Whereas the cops would just smash things up if they did manage to get here in time.”

“Check. Our course as before, then.”

“Necessarily.”

Still the city manager did not go. “Boss,” he said at last, “the outfit is heavily armed. They could muscle in on us with no trouble.”

“Mark, I’d call you yellow if I didn’t know you were just lazy,” Amalfi growled. He stopped suddenly and peered up the length of Hazleton’s figure to his sardonic, horselike face. “Or are you leading up to something?”

Hazleton grinned like a small boy caught stealing jam. “Well, I did have something in mind. I don’t like ’stiffs, especially killers. Are you willing to entertain a small scheme?”

“Ah,” Amalfi said, relaxing. “That’s better. Let’s hear it.”

“It centers on women. Women are the best possible bindlestiff bait.”

“I grant you that,” Amalfi said. “But what women would you use? Ours? Nix.”

“No, no,” Hazleton said. “This is predicated on there being an inhabited planet going around that star. Are you still with me?”

“I think,” Amalfi said slowly, “that I may even be a meter or so ahead of you.”

The wild star, hurling itself through the Rift on a course that would not bring it to the far wall for another ten thousand Earth years, carried with it six planets, of which only one was even remotely Earthlike. That planet shone deep chlorophyll green on the screens long before it had grown enough to assume a recognizable disc shape. The proxies, called in now, arrived one by one, circling the new world like a swarm of five-meter footballs, eyeing it avidly.

It was everywhere the same: savagely tropical, in the throes of a geological period roughly comparable to Earth’s Carboniferous Era. Plainly, the only habitable planet would be nothing but a way station; there would be no work for pay there.

Then the proxies began to pick up weak radio signals.

Nothing, of course, could be made of the language; Amalfi turned that problem over to the City Fathers at once. Nevertheless, he continued to listen to the strange gabble while he warped the city into an orbit. The voices sounded ritualistic, somehow.

The City Fathers said:

“THIS LANGUAGE IS A VARIANT OF HUMANOID PATTERN G, BUT THE SITUATION IS AMBIGUOUS. GENERALLY WE WOULD SAY THAT THE RACE WHICH SPEAKS IT IS INDIGENOUS TO THE PLANET, A RARE OCCURRENCE, BUT BY NO MEANS UNHEARD OF. THERE ARE TRACES OF FORMS WHICH MIGHT BE DEGENERATES OF ENGLISH, HOWEVER, AS WELL AS STRONG EVIDENCES OF DIALECT MIXTURES SUGGESTING