Cities in Flight

exclusively on his feet, he would have detected the fact that only one other pair of feet was with him as soon as Hazleton had begun to catfoot it away.

“He’ll be back—I hope,” Amalfi said. “Look, friend, what we need is repair work. We’ve got a bad spindizzy in a hot hold. Can you haul it out and give us a replacement, preferably the newest model you’ve got?”

The garageman considered it. The problem seemed to appeal to him; his whole expression changed, so thoroughly that he looked almost friendly in his intimate ugliness.

“I’ve got a Six-R-Six in storage that might do, if you’ve got the reflux-laminated pediments to mount it on,” he said slowly. “If you haven’t, I’ve also a reconditioned B-C-Seven-Seven-Y that hums as sweetly as new. But I’ve never done any hot hauling before—didn’t know spindizzies ever hotted up enough to notice. Anybody on board your burg that can give me a hand on decontamination?”

“Yes, it’s all set up and ready to ride. Check the color of our money, and let’s get on it.”

“It’ll take a little time to get a crew together,” the garageman said. “By the way, don’t let your men wander around. The cops don’t like it.”

“I’ll do my best.”

The garageman scampered away, dodging in and out among the idle, rust-tinted machines. Amalfi watched him go, marveling anew at how quickly the born technician can be gulled into forgetting who he’s working for, let alone how his work is going to be used. First you mention money—since technies are usually underpaid; you then cap that with a tough and inherently interesting problem—and you have your man. Amalfi was always happy when he met a pragmatist in the enemy’s camp.

“Boss——”

Amalfi spun. “Where the hell have you been? Didn’t you hear me say that this planet is probably taboo to tourists? If you’d been on hand when you were needed, you’d have heard the ‘probably’ knocked out of that statement—to say nothing of speeding matters considerably!”

“I’m aware of that,” Hazleton said evenly. “I took a calculated risk—something you seem to have forgotten how to do, Amalfi. And it paid off. I’ve been over to that other city, and found out something that we needed to know. Incidentally, the graving docks around here are a mess. This one, and the one the other city is in, must be the only ones in operation for hundreds of miles. All the rest are nearly full of sand and rust and flaked concrete.”

“And the other city?” Amalfi said very quietly.

“It’s been garnisheed; there’s no doubt about it. It’s shabby and deserted. Half of it is being held up by buttressing, and it’s got huts pitched in the streets. It’s nearly a hulk. There’s a crew over there putting it in some sort of operating order, but they’re in no hurry, and they aren’t doing a damn thing to make the city habitable—all they want it to do is run. It’s not the city’s own complement, obviously. Where they are, I’m afraid to think.”

“There’s considerable thinking you haven’t done,” Amalfi said. “The original crew is obviously in debtor’s prison. The garage is putting the city in order for some kind of dirty job that they don’t expect it to outlast—and that no city still free could be hired to do at any price.”

“And what would that be?”

“Setting up a planethead on a gas giant,” said Amalfi. “They want to work some low-density, ammonia- methane world with an ice core, a Jupiter-type planet, that they can’t conquer any other way. It’s my guess that they hope to use such a planethead as an inexhaustible source of poison gas.”

“That’s not your only guess,” Hazleton said, his lips thinned. “I expect to be disciplined for wandering off, Amalfi, but I’m a big boy, and won’t have rationalizations palmed off on me just to keep the myth of your omniscience going.”

“I’m not omniscient,” Amalfi said mildly. “I looked at the other city on the way in. And I looked at the instruments. You didn’t. The instruments alone told me that almost nothing was going on in that city that was normal to Okie operation. They also told me that its spindizzies were being tuned to produce a field which would burn them out within a year, and they told me what that field was supposed to do—what kind of conditions it was supposed to resist.

“Spindizzy fields will bounce any fast-moving large aggregate of molecules. They won’t much impede the passage of gases by osmosis. If you so drive a field as to exclude the smallest possible molecular exchange, even under a pressure of more than a million atmospheres, you destroy the machine. That set of conditions occurs only in one kind of situation, a situation no Okie would ever commit himself to for an instant: setting down on a gas giant. Obviously then, since the city was being readied for that kind of job, it had been garnisheed—it was now state property, and nobody cares about wasting state property.”

“Once again,” Hazleton said, “you might have told me that in time to prevent my taking my side jaunt. However, this time it’s just as well you didn’t, because I still haven’t come to the main thing I discovered. Do you know the identity of that city?”

“No.”

“Good for you for admitting it. I do. It’s the city we heard about when it was in the building three centuries ago; the so-called all-purpose city. Even under all the junk and decay, the lines are there. These Acolytes are letting it rot where it makes a real difference, just to hot-rod it for one job only. We could take it away from them if we tried. I studied the plans when they were first published, and—”

He stopped. Amalfi turned toward where Hazleton was looking. The garageman was coming back at a dead run. He had a meson pistol in one hand.

“I’m convinced,” Amalfi said swiftly. “Can you get over there again without being observed? This looks to me like trouble.”

“Yes, I can. There’s a—”

“ ‘Yes’ is enough for now. Tune our City Fathers to theirs, and set up Standard Situation N in both. Cue it to our ‘spin’ key—straight yes-no signal.”

“Situation N? Boss, that’s a—”

“I know what it is. I think we need it now. Our bum spindizzy prevents us from making any possible getaway without the combined knowledge of the two sets of City Fathers; we just aren’t fast enough. Git, before it’s too late.”

The garageman was almost upon them, emitting screams of fury each time he hit the ground at the end of a leap, as if the sounds were jolted out of him by the impact. In the thin atmosphere of Murphy, the yells sounded like toots on a toy whistle.

Hazleton hesitated a moment more, then sprinted up the stairway. The garageman ducked around a trunnion and fired. The meson pistol howled at the sky and flew backwards out of his hand. Evidently he had never fired one before.

“Mayor Amalfi, shall I—”

“Not yet, sergeant. Cover him, that’s all. Hey, you! Walk over here. Nice and slow, with your hands locked behind your head. That’s it …. Now then: what were you firing at my city manager for?”

The dark-complected face was livid now. “You can’t get away,” he said thickly. “There’s a dozen police squads on the way. They’ll break you up for fair. It’ll be fun to watch.”

“Why?” Amalfi asked, in a reasonable tone. “You shot at us first. We’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Nothing but pass a bum check! Around here that’s a crime worse than murder, brother. I checked you with Lerner, and he’s frothing at the mouth. You’d damn well better pray that some other squad gets to you before his does!”

“A bum check?” Amalfi said. “You’re blowing. Our money’s better than anything you’re using around here, by the looks of you. It’s germanium—solid germanium.”

“Germanium?” the dockman repeated incredulously.

“That’s what I said. It’d pay you to clean your ears more often.”

The garageman’s eyebrows continued to go higher and higher, and the corners of his mouth began to quiver. Two fat, oily tears ran down his cheeks. Since he still had his hands locked behind his head, he looked remarkably like a man about to throw a fit.

Then his whole face split open.

“Germanium!” He howled. “Ho, haw, haw, haw! Germanium! What hole in the plenum have you been living in, Okie? Germanium—haw, haw!” He emitted a weak gasp and took his hands down to wipe his eyes. “Haven’t you any silver, or gold, or platinum, or tin, or iron? Or