Cities in Flight

twenty-four—and we won’t take it at all. Understand?”

“Very well,” the woman said with concentrated viciousness. “You’ll hear from me again, Okie.”

The King was looking at Amalfi with an unreadable, but certainly unfriendly, expression. If Amalfi’s guess was right, the King thought Amalfi was somewhat overdoing Okie solidarity. It might also be occurring to him that the expression of so much independence might be a bid for power within the jungle itself. Yes, Amalfi was sure that that, at least, had occurred to the King.

The hiring of the class B cities was now all that remained, but nevertheless it took quite a while to get started. The woman, it emerged, was more than a trader; she was an entrepreneur of some importance. She wanted the cities, twenty of them, each for the same identical piece of dirty work: working low- grade carnotite lies on a small planet too near a hot star. Twenty mining cities working upon such a planet would reduce it to as small and sculptured a lump of trash as a meteorite before very many months. The method, obviously, was to get the work done fast without paying more than a pittance for it.

Then, startlingly, while the woman was still making up her mind, the voice came through. It was weak and. indistinct, and without any face to go with it.

“We’ll take the job. Take us.”

There was a murmuring from the screens, and across some of the faces there the same shadow seemed to run. Amalfi checked the tank, but it told him little. The signal had been too weak. All that could be made certain was that the voice belonged to some city far out on the periphery of the jungle—a city desperate for energy.

The Acolyte woman seemed momentarily nonplussed. Even in a jungle, Amalfi thought grimly, some crude rules had to be observed; evidently the woman realized that to take on the volunteer before interviewing the others might be—resented.

“Keep out of this,” the voice of the King said, so much more slowly and heavily than before that its weight was almost tangible upon the air. “Let the lady do her own picking. She’s got no use for a class C outfit.”

“We’ll take the job. We’re a mining town from way back, and we can refine the stuff, too, by gaseous diffusion, mass spectrography, mass chromatography, whatever’s asked. We can handle it. And we’ve got to have it.”

“So do the rest,” the King said, coldly unimpressed. “Take your turn.”

“We’re dying out here! Hunger, cold, thirst, disease!”

“Others are in the same state. Do you think any of us like it here? Wait your turn!”

“All right,” the woman said suddenly. “I’m sick of being told who I do and who I don’t want. Anything to get this over with. File your coordinates, whoever that is out there, and—”

“File your coordinates and we’ll have a Dirac torpedo there before you’ve stopped talking!” the King roared “Acolyte, what are you paying for this rock-heaving? Nobody here works for less than sixty-that’s flat.”

“We’ll go for fifty-five.”

The woman smiled an unpleasant smile. “Apparently somebody in this pest area is glad of a chance to do some honest work for a change. Who’s next?”

“Hell, you don’t need to take a class C city,” one of the rejected class A’s blurted. “We’ll go for fifty-five. What can we lose?”

“Then we’ll take fifty,” the outsider whispered immediately.

“You’ll take a bolt in the teeth! As for you—you’re Coquilhatville-Congo, eh?—you’re going to be sorry you ever had a tongue to flap.”

There was already a stir among the green dots in the tank. Some of the larger cities were leaving their orbits. The woman began to look vaguely alarmed.

“Hazleton!” Amalfi murmured quickly. “This is going to get worse before it gets better. Set us up, as fast as you can, to move into one of the vacated orbits close to the red star the moment I give the word.”

“We won’t be able to put on any speed—”

“I wouldn’t want us to if we could. It’ll have to be done slowly enough so that it won’t be apparent in any tank that we’re moving counter to the general tendency. Also, get me a fix on that outfit on the outside that broke ranks if you possibly can. If you can’t do it without attracting attention, drop the project at once.”

“Right.”

“By Hadjjii’s nightshirt, you’ve got a lesson coming!” the woman was exclaiming. “The whole deal is off for today. No jobs, not for anybody. I’ll come back in a week. Maybe by then you’ll have some common sense back. Lieutenant, let’s get the hell out of here.”

That, however, proved to be a difficult assignment. There was a sort of wave front of heavy-duty cities between the Acolyte ships and open space, expanding outward into the darkness where the weaklings shivered. In that second frigid shell most of the class C cities were panicking; and, still farther out, the brilliant green sparks of the cities whose promised jobs had just been written off were plunging angrily back toward the main cloud.

The reception hall was a bedlam of voices, mostly those of mayors trying to establish that they had not been responsible for the break in the wage line. Somewhere several cities were still attempting to shout new bids to the Acolyte woman under cover of the confusion. Through it all the voice of the King whirled like a bull-roarer.

“Clear the sky!” Lerner shouted. “Clear it up out there, by—”

As if in response, the tank suddenly crackled with hair-thin sapphire tracers. The static of the scattered mesotron rifle fire rattled audio speakers, cross-hatched the desperate, shouting faces on the screens. Terror, the terror of a man who finds suddenly that the situation he is in has always been deadly, turned Lieutenant Lerner’s features rigid. Amalfi saw him reach for something.

“All right, Hazleton, spin!”

The defective spindizzy sobbed, and the city moved painfully. Lerner’s elbow jerked back toward his midriff, and from his ship came the pale guide light of a Bethe blaster.

Seconds later, something went up in the white agony of a fusion explosion—something so far off from the center of the riot that Amalfi first thought, with a shock of fury, that Lerner had undertaken to destroy Okie cities unselectively, simply to terrorize. Then the look on Lerner’s face told him that the shot had been fired at random. Lerner was as taken aback as Amalfi, and seemingly for much the same reasons, at the death of the unknown bystander.

The depth of the response surprised Amalfi anew. Perhaps there was hope for Lerner yet.

Some incredible fool of an Okie was firing on the cop now, but the shots fell short; mesotron rifles were not primarily military instruments, and the Acolytes had almost worked free of the jungle. For a moment Amalfi was afraid that Lerner would fling a few vindictive Bethe blasts back into the pack, but evidently the cop was recovering the residues of his good sense; at least, no more shots came from the command cruiser. It was possible that he had realized that any further exchange of fire would turn the incident from a minor brawl to a mob uprising which would make it necessary to call in the Acolyte navy.

Not even the Acolytes could want that, for it would end in cutting off their supply of skilled labor.

The city’s spindizzies cut out. Lurid, smoky scarlet light leaked down the stone stairwell which led out of the reception hall to the belfry.

“We’re parked near the stinking little star, boss. We’re less than a million miles out from the orbit of the King’s own city.”

“Good work, Mark. Break out a gig. We’re going calling.”

“All right. Anything special in the way of equipment?”

“Equipment?” Amalfi said, slowly. “Well—no. But you’d best bring Sergeant Anderson along. And Mark—”

“Yes?”

“Bring Dee, too.”

The center of government of the King’s city was enormously impressive: ancient, stately, marmoreal. It was surrounded on a lower level by a number of lesser structures of equally heavy-handed beauty. One of these was a heavy, archaic cantilever bridge for which Amalfi could postulate no use at all; it spanned an enormously broad avenue which divided the city in two, an avenue which was virtually untraveled; the bridge, too, carried only foot traffic now, and not much of that.

He decided finally that the bridge had been retained only out of respect to history. There seemed to be no other sentiment which fitted it, since the normal mode of transportation in the King’s city, as in every other Okie city, was by aircab. Like the City Hall, the bridge was beautiful; possibly that had spoken for its retention, too.