Cities in Flight

time, like any other time—one that had implicit in it the inevitable timeword: Now.

Amalfi picked up the phone which hung from the belfry railing.

“Hazleton?”

“Here, boss. What’s the verdict?”

“None yet,” Amalfi said. “Supposedly we snitched the city next door for some purpose; now we need to know what the chances are of abandoning ship at this point and getting out of here with it. Get some men in suits over there and check on it.”

Hazleton did not answer for a moment. In that moment, Amalfi knew that the question was peripheral, and that the verdict was already in. A line by the Earth poet Theodore Roethke crept across the floor of his brain like a salamander: The edge cannot eat the center.

“Right,” Hazleton’s voice said.

Half an eternal hour later, it added: “Boss, that city is worse off than we are, I’m afraid. It’s got good drivers still, but of course they’re all tuned wrong. Besides, the whole place seems to be structurally unsound on a close look; the garagemen really did a thorough job of burrowing around in it. Among other things, the keel’s cracked— the Acolytes must have landed it, not the original crew.”

It would, of course, be impossible to claim foreknowledge of any of this, with Hazleton’s present state of mind teetering upon the edge of some rebellion Amalfi hoped he did not yet understand. It was possible that Hazleton, despite all the mayor’s precautions, had divined the load of emotional guilt which had been accumulating steadily upon Amalfi—or perhaps that suspicion was only the guilt itself speaking. In any event, Amalfi had allowed himself to be stampeded into stealing the other city by Hazleton, even in the face of the foreknowledge, to keep peace in the family. He said instead, “What’s your recommendation, Mark?”

“I’d cast loose from it, boss. I’m only sorry I advocated snitching it in the first place. We have the only thing it had to give us that we could make our own: our City Fathers now know everything their City Fathers knew. We couldn’t take anything else but a new spin-dizzy, and that’s a job for a graving dock.”

“All right. Give it a point thirty-four per cent screen to clinch its present orbit, and come on back. Make sure you don’t give it more than that, or those overtuned spindizzies will advertise its position to anyone coming within two parsecs of it, and interfere with our own operation to boot.”

“Right.”

And now there were the local cops to be considered. They had chalked up against Amalfi’s city, not only the issuing of a bad check, but the theft of state property, and the deaths of Acolyte technicians on board the other city.

Only the jungle was safe, and even the jungle was safe only temporarily. In the jungle, at least for the time being, one city could lose itself among three hundred others—many of which would be better armed than Amalfi’s city had ever been.

There might even be a chance, in such a salmon-pack of cities, that Amalfi would see at last with his own eyes the mythical Vegan orbital fort—the sole non-human construction ever to go Okie, and now the center of an enormous saga of exploits woven about it by the starmen. Amalfi was as fascinated by the legend as any other Okie, though he knew the meager facts well: the fort had circled Vega until the smashing of the Confederacy’s home planet, and then—unexpectedly, since the Vegans had never been given to flying anything bigger than a battleship—had taken off for parts unknown, smashing its way through the englobement of police cruisers almost instantly. Nothing had ever been heard of it since, although the legend grew and grew.

The Vegans themselves had been anything but an attractive people, and it was difficult to say why the story of the orbital fort was so beloved with the Okies. Of course, Okies generally disliked the cops and said that they had no love for Earth, but this hardly explained why the legend of the fort was so popular among them. The fort was now said to be invulnerable and unlimited; it had done miracles in every limb of the galaxy; it was everywhere and nowhere; it was the Okies’ Beowulf, their Cid, their Sigurd, Gawaine, Roland, Cuchulainn, Prometheus, Lemminkainen …

Amalfi felt a sudden chill. The thought that had just come to him was so outrageous that he had almost stopped thinking it in the middle, out of sheer instinct. The fort—probably it had been destroyed centuries ago. But if it did still exist, certain conclusions emerged implacably, and certain actions could be taken on them ….

Yes, it was possible. It was possible. And definitely worth trying ….

But if it actually worked …

Having made the decision, Amalfi put the idea resolutely aside. In the meantime, one thing was sure: as long as the Acolytes continued to use the jungle as a labor pool, their cops would not risk smashing things up indiscriminately only in order to search out one single “criminal” city. To the Acolyte’s way of thinking, all Okies were lawbreakers, by definition.

Which, Amalfi thought, was quite correct as far as his own city was concerned. The city was not only a bum now, but a bindlestiff to boot—by definition.

The end of the line.

“Boss? I’m coming in. What’s the dodge? We’ll need to pull it soon, or—”

Amalfi looked up steadily at the red dwarf star above the balcony.

“There is no dodge,” he said. “We’re licked, Mark. We’re going to the jungle.”

CHAPTER SIX: The Jungle

THE cities drifted along their sterile orbits around the little red sun. Here and there, a few showed up on the screen by their riding lights, but most of them could not spare even enough power to keep riding lights going. The lights were vital in such close-packed quarters, but power to maintain spindizzy screens was more important still.

Only one city glowed—not with its riding lights, which were all out, but by street lighting. That city had power to waste, and it wanted the fact known. And it wanted it known, too, that it preferred to waste the power in sheer bragging to the maintenance of such elementary legalities as riding lights.

Amalfi looked soberly at the image of the bright city. It was not a very clear image, since the bright city was in a preferred position close to the red dwarf, where that sun’s natural and unboundable gravitational field strained the structure of space markedly. The saturation of the intervening area with the smaller screens of the other Okies made the seeing still worse, since Amalfi’s own city had been unable to press through the pack beyond eighteen AU’s from the sun, a distance about equivalent to that from Sol to Uranus. For Amalfi, consequently, the red dwarf was visually only a star of the tenth magnitude—the Go star four light years away seemed much closer.

But obviously, three hundred-odd Okie cities could not all huddle close enough to a red dwarf to derive any warmth from it. Somebody had to be on the outside. It was equally obvious, and expectable, that the city with the most power available to it should be the one drawn up the most cosily to the dull stellar fire, while those who most needed to conserve every erg shivered in the outer blackness.

What was surprising was that the bright city should be advertising its defiance of local law and common sense alike—while police-escorted Acolyte ships were shoving their way into the heart of the jungle.

Amalfi looked up at the screen banks. For the second time within the year, he was in a chamber of City Hall which was almost never used. This one was the ancient reception hall, which had been fitted with a screen system of considerable complexity about five hundred and eighty years ago, just after the city had first taken to space. It was called into service only when the city was approaching a heavily developed, highly civilized star system, in order to carry on the multiple negotiations with various diplomatic, legal, and economic officials which had to be gone through before an Okie could hope to deal with such a system. Certainly Amalfi had never expected to have any use for the reception hall in a jungle.

There was a lot, he thought grimly, that he didn’t know about living in an Okie jungle.

One of the screens came alight. It showed the full-length figure of a woman in sober clothing of an old style, utilitarian in cut, but obviously made of perishable materials. The woman inside the clothes was hard-eyed, but not hard of muscle; an Acolyte trader, evidently.

???The assignment,” the trader said in a cold voice, “is a temporary development project on Hern Six, as