Cities in Flight (38 page)

Then suddenly they went silent.

The City Fathers had been turned off, and Amalfi was ready to move a world.

The fact that the City Fathers could not be consulted- for the first time since the Epoch affair five centuries ago, when the whole city had been without power for a while- made the job more difficult than it needed to be, barring their conservatism. Tipping the planet, the crux of the job, was simple enough in essence; the city's spindizzies could handle it. But the side effects of the medicine might easily prove to be worse than the disease.

The problem was seismological. Rapidly whirling objects have a way of being stubborn about changing their positions in space. If that energy were overcome, it would have to appear somewhere else-the most likely place being multiple earthquakes.

Too, very little could be anticipated about the gravities of the task. The planet's revolution produced, as usual, a sizable magnetic field. Amalfi did not know how well that field would take to being tipped in the space-lattice which it distorted, nor just what would happen to He when the city's spindizzies polarized the whole gravity field. During "moving day" the planet would be, in effect, without magnetic moment of its own, and since computation was a function of the City Fathers, there was no way of finding out where the energy would reappear, in what form, or at what intensity.

He broached the latter question to Hazleton. "If we were dealing with an ordinary problem, I'd say the energy would show up as velocity," he pointed out. "In which case we'd be in for an involuntary junket. But this is no ordinary case. The mass involved is ... well, it's planetary, that's all. What do you think, Mark?"

"I don't know what to think," Hazleton admitted. "The equations only give us general solutions, and only quanticised solutions at that-and this whole problem is a classical field problem. When we move the city, we change the magnetic moment of its component electrons; but the city itself is a low-mass body with no spin of its own, and doesn't have a gross magnetic moment."

"That's what stuck me. I can't cross over from probability into tensors any more than poor old Einstein could. As far as I know, nobody's ever really faced up to the discontinuity between what the spindizzy does to the electron and what happens to a body of classical mass in a spindizzy field."

"Still-we could control velocity, or even ignore it out here. Suppose the energy reappears as heat, instead? There'd be nothing left of He but a cloud of gas."

Amalfi shook his head. "I think that's a bogey. The gyroscopic resistance may show up as heat, sure, but not the magnetogravitic. I think we'd be safest to assume that it'll appear as velocity, just as in ordinary flight. Use the standard transformation and see what you get."

Hazleton bent over his slide rule, the sweat standing out along his forehead and above his mustache in great heavy droplets. Amalfi could understand the eagerness of the Hevians to get rid of the jungle and its eternal humidity. His own clothing, sparse though it was, had been sopping ever since the city had landed here.

"Well," the city manager said finally, "unless I've made a mistake somewhere, the whole kit and kaboodle, the planet itself, will go shooting away from here at about twice the speed of light. That's not too bad-just about coasting speed for us. We could always loop around and bring the planet back to its orbit."

"Ah, but could we? Remember, we don't control it! The vector appears automatically when we turn on the spindizzies. We don't even know in which direction that arrow is going to point. The planet could throw itself into the sun within the first second as far as we know. We can't predict the direction."

"Yes, we can," Hazleton objected. "Along the axis of spin, of course."

"Cant? And torque?"

"No problem-no, yes, there is. I keep forgetting that we're dealing with a planet instead of electrons." He applied the slipstick again. "No soap. Too many substitutions. Can't be answered in time without the City Fathers- and torque might hype the end-velocity substantially. But if we can figure a way to control the flight, it won't matter in the end. Of course there'll be perturbations of the other planets when this one goes massless, whether it actually moves or not-but nobody lives on them anyhow."

"All right, Mark, go figure a control system. I'll see what can be done on the geology end—"

The door slid back suddenly, and Amalfi looked back over his shoulder. It was Sergeant Anderson. The perimeter sergeant was usually blase in the face of all possible wonders, unless they threatened the city. "What's the matter?" Amalfi said, alarmed.

"Mr. Mayor, we've gotten an ultracast from some outfit claiming to be refugees from another Okie city-they claim they hit a bindlestiff and got broken up. They've crash-landed on this planet up north, and they're being mobbed by one of the local bandit towns. They were holding 'em off and yelling for help, and then they stopped transmitting. I thought you ought to know."

Amalfi heaved himself to his feet almost instantly. "Did you get a bearing on that call?" he demanded.

"Yes sir."

"Give me the figures. Come on, Mark. That's our life craft from the city with the no-fuel drive. We need those boys."

Amalfi and Hazleton grabbed a cab to the edge of the city, and went the rest of the way to the Hevian town on foot, across the supersonics-cleared strip of bare turf which surrounded the walls. The turf felt rubbery. Amalfi suspected that some rudimentary form of friction-field was keeping the mud in a state of stiff gel. He had visions of foot soldiers sinking suddenly into slowly-folding ooze as the fields were turned off, and quickened his pace.

Inside the gates, the Hevian guards summoned a queer, malodorous vehicle which seemed to be powered by the combustion of hydrocarbons, and the Okies were roared through the streets toward Miramon. Throughout the journey, Amalfi clung to a cloth strap in an access of nervousness. Traveling right on a surface at any good speed was a rare experience for him, and the way things zipped past the windows made him jumpy.

"Is this bird out to smash us up?" Hazleton demanded petulantly. "He must be doing all of four hundred kilos an hour."

"I'm glad you feel the same way," Amalfi said, relaxing a little. "Actually, I'll bet he's doing less than two hundred. It's just the way the—"

The driver, who had been holding his car down to a conservative fifty out of deference to the strangers from the Great Age, wrenched the machine around a corner and halted it neatly before Miramon's door. Amalfi got out, his knees wobbly. Hazleton's face was a delicate puce.

"I'm going to figure out a way to make our cabs operate outside the city," he muttered. "Every time we make a new planetfall, we have to ride on ox carts, the backs of bull kangaroos, in hot air balloons, steam-driven air-screws, things that drag you feet first and face down through tunnels, or whatever else the natives think is classy transportation. My stomach won't stand much more."

Amalfi grinned and raised his hand to Miramon, whose expression suggested laughter smothered with great difficulty.

'"What brings you here?" the Hevian said. "Come in. I have no chairs, but-—"

"No time," Amalfi said. "Listen closely, Miramon, because this is going to be complex to explain, and I'm going to have to give it to you fast. You already know that our city isn't the only one of its type. Well, the fact is that we aren't even the first Okie city to enter the Rift; there were two others ahead of us. One of them, a criminal city that we call a bindlestiff, attacked and destroyed the other; we were too far away to prevent it. Do you follow me?"

"I think so," Miramon said. "This bindlestiff is like our bandit cities—"

"Yes, precisely. And as far as we know, it's still in the Rift, somewhere. Now the city that the 'stiff destroyed had something that we want very badly, and that we must have before the 'stiffs get it. We know that the dead city put off some life craft, and that one of those craft has just landed on your world and has fallen afoul of one of your own bandit cities. We've got to rescue them. They're the sole survivors of the dead city as far as we know, and it's vital for us to question them. We need to know what they know about the thing we want-the no-fuel drive-and what they know about where the bindlestiff is now."

"I see," Miramon said thoughtfully. "Will this-this bindlestiff follow them to He?"

"We think it will. And it's powerful-it packs all the stuff we have and more besides. We have to pick up these survivors first, and work out some way to defend ourselves and you people against the 'stiff when it gets here. And above all, we must prevent the 'stiff from getting the secret of that fuelless drive!"

"What would you like me to do?" Miramon said gravely.

"Can you locate the Hevian town that's holding these people prisoner? We have a fix on it, but only a blurred one. If you can, we'll be able to get them out of there ourselves."

Miramon went back into his house-actually, like all the other living quarters in the town, it was a dormitory housing twenty-five men of the same trade or profession- and returned with a map. The map-making conventions of He were anything but self-explanatory, but after a while

Hazleton was able to figure out the symbolism involved. "There's your city, and here's ours," he said to Miramon, pointing. "Right? And this peeled-orange thing is a butterfly grid. I've always claimed that it was a lot more faithful to spherical territory than our Geographic projection, boss."

"Easier still to express what you want to remember as a topological relationship," Amalfi said impatiently. "Nobody ever confuses a table of symbols with the territory. Show Miramon where the signals came from."

"Up here, on this wing of the butterfly."

Miramon frowned. "There is only one city there-Fabr-Suithe. A very bad place to approach, even in the military sense. But if you insist on trying, we will help you. Do you know what the end result will be?"

"We'll rescue our friends, I hope. What else?"

"The bandit cities will come out in force to hinder the Great Work. They oppose it; the jungle is their life."

"Then why haven't they impeded us before now?" Hazleton said. "Are they scared?"

"No. They fear nothing-we think they take drugs-but they have seen no way to attack you without huge losses, and their reasons for attacking you have not been sufficiently compelling to make them take the risk up to now. But if you attack one of them, that will give them reason enough. They learn hatred very quickly."

"I think we can handle them," Hazleton said coldly.

"I am sure you can," Miramon said. "But you should be warned that Fabr-Suithe is the leader of all the bandit cities. If Fabr-Suithe attacks you, so will they all."

Amalfi shrugged. "We'll chance it. We'll have to: we must have those men. Maybe we can make it quick enough to crush resistance before it starts. We can pick our own town up and go calling on Fabr-Suithe; if they don't want to deliver up these Okies—"

"Boss-—"

"Eh?"

"How are you going to get us off the ground?"

Amalfi could feel his ears turning red, and swore. "I forgot that Twenty-third Street machine. Miramon, we'll have to have a task force of your own rockets. Hazleton, how are we going to work this? We can't fit anything really powerful into a Hevian rocket plane-a pile would go into one easily enough, but a frictionator or a naval-size mesotron rifle wouldn't, and there'd be no point in taking popguns. Do you suppose we could gas Fabr-Suithe?"

"You couldn't carry enough gas in a Hevian rocket either. Or carry enough men to make a raid in force."

"Excuse me," Miramon said, "but it is not even certain that the priests will authorize the use of our planes against Fabr-Suithe. We had best drive directly over to the temple and ask them for permission."

"Belsen and bebop!" Amalfi said. It was the oldest oath in his repertoire.

Talk, even with electronic aids, was impossible inside the little rocket. The whole machine roared like a gigantic tam-tam to the vibration of the Venturis. Morosely Amalfi watched Hazleton connecting the mechanism in the nose of the plane with the power-leads from the pile-no mean balancing feat, considering the way the craft pitched in its passage through the tortured Hevian crosswinds. The pile itself, of course, was .simple enough to handle; it consisted only of a tank about the size of a glass brick, filled with a fine white froth: heavy water containing uranium235 hexafluoride in solution, damped by bubbles of cadmium vapor. Most of its weight was shielding and the peripheral capillary network of the heat-exchanger.

There had been no difficulty with the priests about the little rocket task force itself; the priests had been delighted at the proposal that the emissaries from the Great Age should teach an apostate Hevian city the error of its ways. Amalfi suspected that the straight-faced Miramon had invented the need for priestly permission just to get the two Okies back into the smelly ground car again and watch their faces during the drive to the temple. Still the discomforts of that ride had been small compared to this one.

The pilot shifted his feet on the treadles, and the deck pitched. A metal trap rushed back under Amalfi's nose, and he found himself looking through misty air at a crazily canted jungle. Something long, thin, and angry flashed over it and was gone. At the same time there was a piercing, inhuman shriek, sharp enough to dwarf for a long instant the song of the rocket.