Cities in Flight (52 page)

"And they'll do all their talking with Earth over the Dirac even after they get there," Amalfi added. "Partly, of course, this march is sheer theatricalism. The King hopes that such a big display of cities will make an impression on the people he'll be talking to. Don't forget that Earth is a quiet, rather idyllic world these days-a skyful of ragged cities will create a lot of alarm there.

"As for getting a square shuffle: the King is relying on a tradition of at least moderately fair dealing that goes back many centuries. Don't forget, Carrel, that for the last thousand years the Okie cities have been the major unifying force in our entire galactic culture."

"That's news to me," Carrel said, a little dubiously.

"But it's quite true. Do you know what a bee is? Well, it's a little Earth insect that sucks nectar from flowers. While it's about it, it picks up pollen and carries it about; it's a prime factor in cross-fertilization of plants. Most habitable planets have similar insects. The bee doesn't know that he's essential to the ecology of his world-all he's out to do is collect as much honey as he can-but that doesn't make him any less essential.

"The cities have been like the bee for a long time. The governments of the advanced planets, Earth in particular, know it, even if the cities generally don't. The planets distrust the cities, but they also know that they're vital and must be protected. The planets are tough on bindlestiffs for the same reason. The bindlestiffs are diseased bees; the taint that they carry gets fastened upon innocent cities, cities that are needed to keep new techniques and other essential information on the move from planet to planet. Obviously, cities and planets alike have to protect themselves from criminal outfits, but there's the culture as a whole to be considered, as well as the safety of an individual unit; and to maintain that culture, the free passage of legitimate Okies throughout the galaxy has to be maintained."

"The King knows this?" Carrel said. "Of course he does. He's eight hundred years old; how could he help but know it? He wouldn't put it like this, but all the same, it's the essence of what he's depending upon to carry through his March on Earth."

"It still sounds risky to me," Carrel said dubiously. "We've all been conditioned almost from birth to distrust Earth, and Earth cops especially—"

"Only because the cops distrust us. That means that the cops are conditioned to be strict with cities about the smallest violations; so, since small violations of local laws are inevitable in a nomadic life, it's smart for an Okie to steer clear of cops. But for all the real hatred that exists between Okies and cops, we're both on the same side. We always have been."

On the underside of the city, just within the cone of vision of the three men, the big doors to the main hold swung slowly shut.

"That's the last one," Hazleton said. "Now I suppose we go back to where we left the all-purpose city we stole from Murphy, and relieve it of its drivers, too."

"Yes, we do," Amalfi said. "And after that, Mark, we go on to Hern Six. Carrel, ready a couple of small fission bombs for the Acolyte garrison there-it can't be large enough to make us much trouble, but we've no time left to play patty-cake."

"Is Hern Six the planet we're going to fly?" Carrel said.

"It has to be," Amalfi said, with a trace of impatience.

"It's the only one available. Furthermore, this time we're going to have to control the flight, not just let the planet scoot off anywhere its natural converted rotation wants it to go. Being carried clean out of the galaxy once is once too often for me."

"Then I'd better put a crack team to work op the control problem with the City Fathers," Hazleton said. "Since we didn't have them to consult with on He, we'll have to screen every scrap of pertinent information they have in stock. No wonder you've been so hot on this project for corralling knowledge from other cities. I only wish we could have gotten started on integrating it sooner."

"I haven't had this in mind quite that long," Amalfi said. "But,, believe me, I'm not sorry now that it turned out this way."

Carrel said, "Where are we going?"

Amalfi turned away toward the airlock. He had heard the question before, from Dee, but this was the first time that he had had an answer.

"Home," he said.

MOUNTING Hern VI—as desolate and damned a slab of rock as Amalfi had ever set down upon—for guided spindizzy flight was incredibly tedious work. Drivers had to be spotted accurately at every major compass point, and locked solidly to the center of gravity of the planetoid; and then each and every machine had to be tuned and put into balance with every other. And there were not enough spindizzies to set up a drive for the planet as a whole which would be fully dirigible when the day of flight came. The flight of Hern VI, when all the work was finally done, promised to be giddy and erratic.

But at least it would go approximately where the master space stick directed it to go. That much responsiveness, Amalfi thought, was all that was really necessary- or all that he hoped would be necessary.

Periodically, O'Brian, the proxy pilot, reported on the progress of the March on Earth. The mob had lost quite a few stragglers along the way as it passed attractive-looking systems where work might be found, but the main body was still streaming doggedly toward the mother planet. Though the outsize drone was as obvious a body as a minor moon, so far not a single Okie had taken a pot shot at it. O'Brian had kept it darting through and about the marchers in a double-sine curve in three dimensions, at its top speed and with progressive modulations of the orbit. If the partial traces which it made on any individual city's radar screen were not mistaken for meteor tracks, predicting its course closely enough to lay a gun on it would keep any ordinary computer occupied full time.

It was a superb job of piloting. Amalfi made a mental note to see to it that the task of piloting the city itself was split off from the city manager's job when Hazleton stepped down. Carrel was not a born pilot, and O'Brian was obviously the man Carrel would need.

At the beginning of the Hern VI conversion, the City Fathers had placed E-Day-the day of arrival of the marchers within optical telescope distance of Earth-at one hundred fifty-five years, four months, twenty days. Each report which came in from the big drone's pilot cut this co-ordinate-set back toward the flying present as the migrating jungle lost its laggards and became more and more compact, more and more able to put on speed as a unit. Amalfi consumed cigars faster and drove his men and machines harder every time the new computation was delivered to his desk.

But a full year had gone by since installation had started on Hern VI before O'Brian sent up the report he had been dreading and yet counting upon to arrive sooner or later.

"The march has lost two more cities to greener pastures, Mr. Amalfi," the proxy pilot said. "But that's routine. We've gained a city, too."

"Gained one?" Amalfi said tensely. "Where'd it come from?"

"I don't know. The course I've got the drone on doesn't allow me to look in any one direction more than about twenty-five seconds at a time. I have to take a census every time I pass her through the pack. The last time I went around, there was this outfit on the screen, just as if it had been there all the time. But that isn't all. It's the damnedest looking city I've ever seen, and I can't find anything like it in the files, either."

"Describe it."

"For one thing, it's enormous. I'm not going to have to worry about anybody spotting my drone for a while. This outfit must have every detector in the jungle screaming blue bloody murder. Besides, it's closed up."

"What do you mean b£ that?"

"It's got a smooth hull all around, Mr. Mayor. It isn't the usual platform with buildings on it and a spindizzy screen around both. It's more like a proper spaceship, except for its size."

"Any communication between it and the pack?"

"About what you'd expect. Wants to join the march; the King gave it the okay. I think he was pleased; it's the very first answer he's had to his call for a general mobilization of Okies, and this one really looks like a top-notch city. It calls itself Lincoln-Nevada."

"It would," Amalfi said grimly. He mopped his face. "Give me a look at it, O'Brian."

The screen lit up. Amalfi mopped his face again.

"All right. Back your drone off a good distance from the march and keep that thing in sight from now on. Get 'Lincoln-Nevada' between you and the pack. It won't shoot at your drone; it doesn't know it doesn't belong there."

Without waiting for O'Brian's acknowledgment, Amalfi switched over to the City Fathers. "How much longer is this job going to take?" he demanded.

"ANOTHER SIX YEARS, MR. MAYOR."

"Cut it to four at a minimum. And give me a course from here to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, one that crosses Earth's orbit."

"MR. MAYOR, THE LESSER MAGELLANIC CLOUD IS TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY THOUSAND LIGHT YEARS AWAY FROM THE ACOLYTE CLUSTER!"

"Thank you," Amalfi said sardonically. "I have no intention of going there, I assure you. All I want is a course with those three points on it."

"VERY WELL. COMPUTED."

"When would we have to spin, to cross Earth's orbit on E-Day?"

"FROM FIVE SECONDS TO FIFTEEN DAYS FROM TODAY, FIGURING FROM THE CENTER OF THE CLOUD TO EITHER EDGE."

"No good. We cant start within those limits. Give me a perfectly flat trajectory from here to there."

"THAT ARC INVOLVES NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-EIGHT DIRECT COLLISIONS AND FOUR HUNDRED ELEVEN THOUSAND AND TWO GRAZES AND NEAR-MISSES."

"Use it."

The City Fathers were silent. Amalfi wondered if it were possible for machinery to be stunned. He knew that the City Fathers would never use the crow-flight arc, since it conflicted with their most ineluctable basic directive: Preserve the city first. This was all right with the mayor, He had given that instruction with an eye to the tempo of building on Hern VI; he had a strong hunch that it would go considerably faster after that stunner.

And as a matter of fact, it was just fourteen months later when Amalfi's hand closed on the master space stick for Hern VI, and he said:

"Spin!"

The career of Hern VI from its native Acolyte cluster across the center of the galaxy made history-particularly in the field of instrumentation. Hern VI was a tiny world, considerably smaller than Mercury, but nevertheless it was the most monstrous mass ever kicked past the speed of light within the limits of the inhabited galaxy. Except for the planet of He, which had left the galaxy from its periphery and was now well on its way toward Messier 31 in Andromeda, no such body had ever before been flown under spindizzy or any other drive. Its passage left permanent scars in the recording banks of every detecting instrument within range, and the memories of it graven into the brains of sentient observers were no less drastic.

Theoretically, Hern VI was following the long arc laid out for it by Amalfi's City Fathers, an arc leading from the fringe of the Acolyte cluster all the way across the face of the galaxy to the center of the Lesser Megallanic Cloud. (Its mass center, of course; both clouds had emerged too recently from the galaxy as a whole to have developed the definite orbital dead centers characteristic of "spiral" nebulae.) The mean motion of the flying planet followed that arc scrupulously.

But at the speed at which Hern VI was traveling-a velocity which could not be expressed comfortably even in multiples of C, the old arbitrary velocity of light-the slightest variation from that orbit became a careening side jaunt of horrifying proportions before even the microsecond reactions of the City Fathers could effect the proper corrections.

Like other starmen, Amalfi was accustomed enough to traveling at transphotic speeds-in space, a medium ordinarily without enough landmarks to make real velocity very apparent. And, like all Okies, he had traveled on planets in creeping ground vehicles which seemed to be making dangerous speed simply because there were so many nearby reference points to make that speed seem great. Now he was finding out what it was like to move among the stars at a comparable velocity.

For at the velocity of Hern VI, the stars became almost as closely spaced as the girders beside a subway track- with the added hazard that the track frequently swerved enough to place two or three girders in a row between the rails. More than once Amalfi stood frozen on the balcony in the belfry of City Hall, watching a star that had been invisible half a second before cannoning directly at his head, swelling to fill the whole sky with glare
—

Blackness.

Amalfi felt irrationally that there should have been an audible whoosh as Hern VI passed that star. His face still tingled with the single blast of its radiation which had bathed him, despite the planet's hard-driven and nearly cross-polarized spindizzy screen, at that momentary perihelion.

There was nothing the matter, of course, with the orbit corrections of the City Fathers. The difficulty was simply that Hern VI was not a responsive enough space craft to benefit by really quick orbital corrections. It took long seconds for the City Fathers' orders to be translated into enough vector thrust to affect the flight of the dead planet over parsecs of its shambling, paretic stride. And there was another, major reason: when all of Hern VI's axial rotation had been converted to orbital motion, .all of a considerable axial libration had also been converted, and there was nothing that could be done about the kinks this put in the planet's course.

Possibly, had Amalfi spotted his own city's spindizzies over the surface of the planet, as he had those of the all-purpose city and the plague city, Hern VI might have been more sensitive to the space stick; at the very least, the libration could have been left as real libration, for it wouldn't have mattered had the planet heeled a little this way and that as long as it kept a straight course. But Amalfi had left the city's drivers undisturbed for the most cogent of all reasons: for the survival of the city. Only one of the machines was participating at all in the flight of Hern VI, that being the big pivot spindizzy at Sixtieth Street. The others, including the decrepit but now almost cool Twenty-third Street machine, rested.

".. . calling the free planet, calling the free planet ... is there anybody alive on that thing? . . . EPSILON CRUCIS, HAVE YOU SUCCEEDED IN RAISING THE BODY THAT JUST PASSED YOU? . . . CALLING THE FREE PLANET! YOU'RE ON COLLISION COURSE WITH US-HELL AND DAMNATION! . . . CALLING ETA PALINURI, THE FREE PLANET JUST GAVE US A HAIRCUT AND IT'S HEADING for you. It's either dead or out of control . . . Calling the free planet, calling the free pla—"

There was no time to answer such frantic calls, which poured into the city from outside like a chain of spring freshets as inhabited systems were by-passed, skirted, overshot, fringed, or actually penetrated. The calls could have been acknowledged but acknowledgment would demand that some explanation be offered, and Hern VI would be out of ultraphone range of the questioner before more than a few sentences could be exchanged. The most panicky inquiries might have been answered by Dirac, but that had two drawbacks: the minor one, that there were too many inquiries for the city to handle, and no real reason to handle them; the major one, that Earth and one other important party would be able to hear the answer.

Amalfi did not care too much about what the Earth heard-Earth was already hearing plenty about the flight of Hern VI; if Dirac transmission could be spoken of as jammed, even in metaphor (and it could, for an infinite number of possible electron orbits in no way presupposes a Dirac transmitter tuned to each one), then Earth Dirac boards were jampacked with the squalls of alarmed planets along Hern VI's arc.

But about the other party, Amalfi cared a great deal.

O'Brian kept that other party steadily in the center of his drone's field of vision, and a small screen mounted on the railing of the belfry showed Amalfi the shining, innocuous-looking globe whenever he cared to look at it. The newcomer to the Okie jungle-and to the March on Earth-had made no untoward or even interesting motion since it had arrived in the Okies' ken. Occasionally it exchanged chitchat with the King of the jungle; less often, it talked with other cities. Boredom had descended on the jungle, so there was now a fair amount of intercity touring; but the newcomer was not visited as far as O'Brian or Amalfi could tell, nor did any gigs leave it. This, of course, was natural: Okies are solitary by preference, and a refusal to fraternize, providing that it was not actively hostile in tone, would always be understood in any situation. The newcomer, in short, was giving a very good imitation of being just another member of the hegira-just one more Birnam tree on the way to Dunsinane. ...

And if anyone in the jungle had recognized it for what it was, Amalfi could see no signs of it.

A fat star rocketed blue-white over the city and Dopplered away into the black, shrinking as it faded out. Amalfi spoke briefly to the City Fathers. The jungle would be within sight of Earth within days-and the uproar on the Dirac was now devoted more and more to the approach of the jungle, less and less to Hern VI. Amalfi had considerable faith in the City Fathers, but the terrifying flight of stars past his head could not fail to make him worry about overshooting E-Day, or undershooting it, however accurate the calculations seemed to be.

But the City Fathers insisted doggedly that Hern VI would cross the solar system of Earth on E-Day, and Amalfi had to be as content as he could manage with the answer. On this kind of problem, the City Fathers had never been known to be wrong. He shrugged uneasily and phoned down to Astronomy.

"Jake, this is the mayor. Ever heard of something called 'trepidation'?"

"Ask me a hard one," the astronomer said testily.

"All right. How do I go about introducing some trepidation into this orbit we're following?"

The astronomer sounded his irritating chuckle. "You don't," he said. "It's a condition of space around suns, and you haven't the mass. The bottom limit, as I recall, is one and five-tenths times ten to the thirtieth power kilograms, but ask the City Fathers to be sure. My figure is of the right order of magnitude, anyhow."

"Damn," Amalfi said. He hung up and took time out to light a cigar, a task complicated by the hurtling stars in the corner of his eye; somehow the cigar seemed to flinch every time one went by. He lit the nervous cheroot and called Hazleton next.