Cities in Flight (36 page)

Amalfi took a cautious breath. His jacket, which, like Nandor's, had ballooned away from his chest, creaked a little, but the fabric was elastic enough to stretch. Nandor saw the movement and made a frantic snatch for the pistol. His left forearm was glued to its position above the chair and could not be moved at all. The gun retreated from his free hand, then followed it back obediently as Nandor pulled back for another try.

The second try was an even greater fiasco. Nandor's arm brushed one of the arms of the chair, and then it, too, was held firmly, an inch away from the wood. Amalfi chuckled.

"I would advise you not to move any more than you can help," he said. "If you should bring your head too close to some other object, for instance, you would have to spend the rest of your time looking at the ceiling."

"What ... have you done?" Nandor said, choking. "When I get free—"

"You can't, not as long as your friends have their friction-field in operation," Amalfi said. "The plans we gave you were accurate enough, except in one respect: your generator can be operated only in reverse. Instead of allowing molecular valence full play, it freezes molecular relationships as they stand, and creates adherence between all surfaces. If you had been able to put full power into that generator, you would have stopped molecular movement in place, and frozen all of us to death in a split second-but your power sources are rather puny."

He realized suddenly that his feet were aching violently; the plastic membranes of his shoes were trying to stand away from his flesh, and pressing heavily against his skin. His jaw muscles were aching, too; only the fact that the field traveled over surfaces had protected him from having his teeth jammed away from each other, and even at that it was an effort to part his lips to talk against the pressure.

He inhaled slowly. The jacket creaked again. His ribs ground against his sternum. Then, suddenly, the fabric gave way, and the silver belt which had been stitched into it snapped into a tense hoop around his body. His soles hit the straining carpet heavily, and the air puffed out of his shoes.

He swung his arms experimentally, brushing his hands past his thighs. They moved freely. Only the silver belt maintained its implausible position, girdling the keg of his chest like a stave, soaking up the field.

"Good-by," he said. "Remember not to move. The cops will let you go in a little while."

Nandor was not listening. He was watching with bulging eyes the slow amputation of six of his fingers by the rings he was wearing.

There was now, Amalfi knew, no longer than fifteen minutes before the overdriven friction-field would begin to have more serious effects. Normal molecular cohesion could not be disturbed; homogeneous objects-stones, girders, planks-would remain as they were, but things which were made up of fitted parts would soon begin to yield to the pressure driving them away from each other. After that, structures joined by binders of smaller coherence than the coherence of their parts would begin to give way; older buildings, such as City Hall, would become taller and of greater volume as the ancient bricks pulled away from each other-and would collapse the moment the influence of the friction-field was removed. More modern constructions and machines would last only a little longer. By the time the cops inherited Gort, the planet would be a mass of rubble.

And eventually the human body, assembled of a thousand tubes, tunnels, caverns, and pockets, would strain, and swell, and burst-and only a few city men had the silver belt; there had not been time.

Puffing, Amalfi threw himself down the stairs, dodging among the paralyzed, floating guards. The bumblebee sound was very hard on the nerves. At the seventieth floor he found an unexpected problem; the lights x>n the elevator board told him that the car had been sealed in' the shaft, probably by the action of the safety mechanisms when it had been derailed by the friction-field.

Going down by the stairs was out of the question. Even under normal conditions he could never have traveled seventy flights of stairs, and in the influence of the field, his feet moved as if in thick mud, for the belt could not entirely protect his extremities. Tentatively he touched the wall. The same nauseous sucking sensation enfolded his hand, and he pulled it away.

Gravity ... the quickest way down ...

He entered the nearest office, threading his way among the four suspended, moaning figures who belonged there, and kicked the window out. It was impossible to open it against the field, which had sprung it an inch from its lands; only the amazing lateral strength of glass had preserved the pane, but against a cross-sectional blow, it shattered at once. He climbed out.

It was twenty stories down to the next setback. He planted his feet against the metal, and then his hands. As an afterthought, he also laid his forehead against the wall. He began to slide.

The air whispered in his ears, and windows blinked past him. His palms were beginning to feel warm; they were not actually touching the metal, but the reluctant binding energies were exacting a toll. It was the penalty he had to pay for the heightened pull of friction.

As the setback rushed up to him, he flattened his whole body against the side of the building. The impact of the deck was heavy, but it did not seem to break any bones. He staggered to the parapet and climbed over, without allowing a split second for second thoughts. The long, whistling slide began again.

For a moment after he fell against the concrete of the sidewalk, he was ready to get up and throw himself over Still another cliff. His hands and his forehead were as seared as if they had been dipped in boiling oil, and inside his teflon shoes his feet seemed to be bubbling like lumps of fat in a rendering vat. On the solid ground, a belated vertigo knotted him helplessly for long, valuable minutes.

The building whose flank he had traversed began to groan.

All along the street, men stood in contorted attitudes. It was like the lowest circle of hell. Amalfi got up, retching, and lurched toward the control tower. The bumblebee sound filled the universe.

"Amalfi! Gods of all stars, what happened to you—"

Someone took Amalfi's arm. Serum from the enormous blister which was his forehead flooded his eyes.

"Mark—"

"Yes, yes. What's the matter-how did you—"

"Get aloft. Get—"

Pain wrenched him into a ringing darkness.

After a while he felt his head and his hands being laved with something cool. The touch was very delicate and soothing. He swallowed and tried to breathe.

"Easy, John. Easy."

John. No one called him that. A woman's voice. A woman's hands.

"Easy."

He managed a croaking sound, and then a word or two. The hands stroked the coolness across his forehead, gently, monotonously. "Easy, John. It's all right."

"Aloft?"

"Yes."

"Who's ... that? Mark—“

"No," said the voice. It laughed, surprisingly, a musical sound. "This is Dee, John. Hazleton's girl."

"The Hamiltonian girl." He allowed himself to be silent for a while, savoring the coolness. But there were too many things that needed to be done. "The cops. They should have the planet."

"They have it. They almost had us. They don't keep their bargains very well. They charged us with aiding Utopia; that was treason, they said."

"What happened?"

"Doctor Schloss made the invisibility machine work Mark says the machine must have been damaged in transit, so the Lyrans didn't cheat you after all. He hid Doctor Schloss in it—that was your idea, wasn't it?—and Schloss got bored and amused himself trying to figure out what the machine was for; nobody had told him. He found out. He made the whole city invisible for nearly half an hour before his patchwork connections burned out."

"Invisible? Not just opaque?" Amalfi tried to think about it. And he had nearly had Schloss killed! "If we can use that—"

"We did. We sailed right through the police ring, and they looked right through us. We're on our way to the next star system."

"Not far enough," Amalfi said, stirring uneasily. "Not if we're charged with technical treason. Cops will detect us, follow us. Tell Mark to head for the Rift."

"What is the Rift, John?"

At the word, the bottom seemed to fall out of things, and Amalfi was again sinking into that same pit in which he had been floundering in dream the night that Hazleton had come back to the city. How do you tell a planetbound colonial girl what the Rift is? How do you teach her, in just a few words, that there is a place in the universe so empty and lightless that even an Okie dreams about it? Let it go.

"The Rift is a hole. It's a place where there aren't any stars. I can't explain it any better. Tell Mark we have to go there, Dee."

There was a long silence. She was frightened, that much was plain. But at last she said, "The Rift. I'll tell him."

"He'll argue. Say it's an order."

"Yes, John. The Rift; it's an order."

And then she was silent. Somehow she had accepted it. Amalfi was surprised; but the steady, uneventful passage of the cool hands was putting him to sleep. Yet there was Still something more ...

"Dee?"

"Yes, John."

"You said-we're on our way."

"Yes, John."

"You, too? Even to the Rift?"

The girl made her fingertips trace a smile upon his forehead. "Me, too," she said. "Even to the Rift. The Hamiltonian girl."

"No," Amalfi said. He sighed. "Not any more, Dee. Now you're an Okie."

There was no answer, but the movement of the cool fingers did not hesitate. Under Amalfi the city soared outward, humming like a bee, into the raw night.

EVEN to the men of the flying city, the Rift was awesome beyond all human experience. Loneliness was natural between the stars, and starmen of all kinds were used to it-the star-density of the average cluster was more than enough to give a veteran Okie claustrophobia. But the enormous empty loneliness of the Rift was unique.

To the best of Amalfi's knowledge, no human being, let alone a city, had ever crossed the Rift before. The City Fathers, who knew everything, agreed. Amalfi was none too sure that it was wise, for once, to be a pioneer.

Ahead and behind, the walls of the Rift shimmered, a haze of stars too far away to resolve into individual points of light. The walls curved gently toward a starry floor, so many parsecs "beneath" the granite keel of the city that it seemed to be hidden in a rising haze of star dust.

"Above" there was nothing; a nothing as final as the slamming of a door. It was the empty ocean of space that washes between galaxies.

The Rift was, in effect, a valley cut in the face of the galaxy. A few stars swam in it, light millennia apart-stars which the tide of human colonization could never have reached. Only on the far side was there likely to be any inhabited planet, and, consequently, work for the city.

On the near side there was still the police. It was not, of course, the same contingent which had consolidated Utopia and the Duchy of Gort; such persistence by a single squadron of cops, over a trail which had spanned nearly three centuries, would have been incredible for so small a series of offenses on the city's part. Nevertheless, there was a violation of a Vacate order still on the books, and a little matter of a trick . . . and the word had been passed. To turn back was out of the question for the city.

Whether or not the police would follow the city even as far as the Rift, Amalfi did not know. It was, however, a good gamble. Crossing a desert of this size would probably be impossible for so small an object as a ship, out of a sheer inability to carry enough supplies; only a city which could grow its own had much chance of surviving such a crossing.

Soberly Amalfi contemplated the oppressive chasm which the screens showed him. The picture came in from a string of proxies, the leader of which was already parsecs out across the gap. And still the far wall was featureless, just beginning to show a faintly granular texture which gave promise of resolution into individual stars at top magnification.

"I hope the food holds out," he muttered. "If we make this one, it'll make the most colossal story any Okie ever had to tell. They'll be calling us the Rifters from one end of the galaxy to the other."

Beside him, Hazleton drummed delicately upon the arm of his chair. "And if we don't," he said, "they'll be calling us the biggest damned fools that ever got off the ground- but we won't be in a position to care. Still, we do seem to be in good shape for it, boss. The oil tanks are almost full, and the Chlorella crops are flourishing. Both breeders are running, so there'll be no fuel problem. And I doubt that we'll have any mutation trouble in the crops out here- isn't free-field incidence supposed to vary directly with star-density?"

"Sure," Amalfi said, irritated. "We won't starve if everything goes right." He paused; there had been a stir behind him, and he turned around. Then he smiled.

There was something about Dee Hazleton that relaxed him. She had not yet seen enough actual space cruising to acquire the characteristic deep Okie star-burn, nor yet to lose the wonder of being now, by Utopian standards, virtually immortal, and so she seemed still very pink and young and unharried.

Someday, perhaps, the constant strain of wandering from star to star, from crisis to crisis, would tell on her, as it did upon all Okies. She would not lose the wanderlust, but the wanderlust would take its toll.

Or perhaps her resiliency was too great even for that. Amalfi hoped so.

"Go ahead," she said. "I'm only kibitzing."

The word, like a great part of Dee's vocabulary, was a mystery to Amalfi. He grinned and turned back to Hazleton. "If we hadn't been sound enough to risk crossing," he went on, "I'd have let us be captured; we could have paid the fine on the Vacate violation, just barely, and with luck we could have gotten a show-cause injunction against breaking us up slapped on the cops for that 'treason' charge. But just look at that damned canyon, Mark. We've never been as long as fifty years without a planet-fall before, and this crossing is going to take all of the hundred and four the Fathers predicted. The slightest accident, and we'll be beyond help-well be out where no ship could reach us."

"There'll be no accident," Hazleton said confidently.

"There's fuel decomposition-we've never had a flash fire before, but there's always a first time. And if that Twenty-third Street spindizzy conks out again, it'll damn near double the time of the crossing—"

He stopped abruptly. Through the corner of his eye, a minute pinprick of brightness poked insistently into his brain. When he looked directly at the screen, it was still there, though somewhat dimmed as its image moved off the fovea centralis of his retina. He pointed.

"Look-is that a cluster? No, it's too small and sharp. If that's a single free-floating star, it's close."

He snatched up a phone. "Give me Astronomy. Hello, Jake. Can you figure me the distance of a star from the source of an ultraphone videocast?"

"Why, yes," the voice on the phone said. "Wait, and I'll pick up your image. Ah-I see what you're after: something at ten o'clock, can't tell what yet. Dinwiddlie pickups on your proxies? Intensity will tell the tale." The astronomer chuckled like a parrot on the rim of a cracker barrel. "Now if you'll just tell me how many proxies you have ahead, and how far they—"

"Five. Full interval."

"Hm-m. A big correction, then." There was a long, itching silence. Amalfi knew that there would be no hurrying Jake. He was not the city's original astronomer; that man had fallen victim to a native of a planet called St. Rita's after he had insisted once too often to said native that St. Rita's was not the center of the universe. Jake had been swapped from another city for an atomic-pile engineer and two minor protosynthetics technicians under the traditional "rule of discretion," and he had turned out to be interested only in the behavior of the more remote galaxies. Persuading him to think about the immediate astronomical situation of the city was usually a hopeless struggle; he seemed to feel that problems of so local a nature were nearly beneath notice.

The "rule of discretion" was an Okie tradition which Amalfi had never before invoked, and never since, for it seemed to him to smell suspiciously of peonage. It had evolved, the City Fathers said, from the trading of baseball players, a term which meant nothing to Amalfi. The results of his one violation of his own attitude toward the rule sometimes seemed to him to smack of divine retribution.

"Amalfi?"

"Yeah."

"About ten parsecs, give or take four-tenths. That's from the proxies, not from us. I'd say you've found a floater, my boy."

"Thanks." Amalfi put the phone back and drew a deep breath. "Just a few years' travel. What a relief."

"You won't find any colonists on a star that isolated," Hazleton reminded him.

"I don't care. It's a landing point, possibly a fuel or even a food source. Most stars have planets; a freak like this might not, or it might have dozens. Just cross your fingers."

He stared at the tiny sun, his eyes aching from sympathetic strain. A star in the middle of the Rift-almost certainly a wild star, moving at four hundred or five hundred kilometers per second, but not, as such stars usually were, a white dwarf; by eye alone, Amalfi estimated it to be an F star like Canopus. It occurred to him that a people living on a planet of that star might remember the moment when it burst through the near wall of the Rift and embarked upon its journey into the emptiness.

"There might be people there," he said. "The Rift was swept clean of stars once, somehow. Jake claims that this is an overdramatic way of putting it, that the mean motions of the stars probably opened the gap naturally. But either way, that sun must be a recent arrival, going at quite a clip, since it's moving counter to the general tendency. It could have been colonized while it was still passing through a populated area. Runaway stars tend to collect hunted criminals as they go by, Mark."

"Possibly," Hazleton admitted. "Though I'll bet that if that star ever was among the others, it was way back before space flight. By the way, that image is coming in from your lead proxy, out across the valley. Don't you have any outriggers? I ordered them sent."

"Sure. But I don't use them except for routine. Cruising the Rift lengthwise would really be suicide."

"I know. But where there's one isolated star, there may be another. Maybe a nearer one."

Amalfi shrugged. "We'll take a look if you like."

He touched the board. On the screen, the far wall of the Rift was wiped away. Nothing was left but what looked like a thin haze; down at that end, the Rift turned and eventually faded out into a rill of emptiness, soaking into the sands of the stars.

"Nothing on that side. Lots of nothing."

Amalfi moved the switch again.

On the screen, apparently almost within hallooing distance, a city was burning.

It was all over in a few minutes. The city bucked and toppled in a maelstrom of lightning. Feeble flickers of resistance spat around its edges-and then it no longer had any edges. Sections of it broke off and melted like wraiths. From its ardent center, a few hopeless life craft shot out into the gap; whatever was causing the destruction let them go. No conceivable life ship could live long enough to get out of the Rift.

Dee cried out. Amalfi cut in the audio circuit, filling the control room with a howl of static. Far behind the wild blasts of sound, a tiny voice was shouting desperately, "Rebroadcast if anyone hears us. Repeat: We have the fuelless drive. We're destroying our model and evacuating our passenger. Pick him up if you can. We're being blown up by a bindlestiff. Rebroadcast if—"

Then there was nothing left but the skeleton of the city, glowing whitely, evaporating in the blackness. The pale, innocent light of the guide beam for a Bethe blaster played over it, but it was still impossible to see who was wielding the weapon. The Dinwiddie circuits in the proxies were compensating for the glare, so that nothing was coming through to the screen that did not shine with its own light.

The terrible fire died slowly, and the stars brightened. As the last spark flared and went out, a shadow loomed against the distant star-wall. Hazleton drew his breath in sharply.

"Another city! So some outfits really do go bindlestiff! And we thought we were the first ones out here!"

"Mark," Dee said in a small voice. "Mark, what is a bindlestiff?"

"A tramp," Hazleton said, his eyes still on the screen. "The kind of outfit that gives all Okies a bad name. Most Okies are true hobos, Dee; they work for their living wherever they can find work. The bindlestiff lives by robbery-and murder."

His voice was bitter. Amalfi himself felt a little sick. That one city should destroy another was bad enough; but it was even more of a wrench to realize that the whole scene was virtually ancient history. Ultrawave transmission was somewhat faster than light, but only by about 25 per cent; unlike the Dirac transmitter, the ultraphone was by no means an instantaneous communicator. The dark city had destroyed its counterpart years ago, and must now be beyond pursuit. It was even beyond identification, for no orders could be sent now to the lead proxy which would result in any action until still more years had passed.

"Some outfits go bindlestiff, all right," he said. "And I think the number must have been increasing lately. Why that should be, I don't know, but evidently it's happening. We've been losing a lot of legitimate, honest cities lately- getting no answer to Dirac casts, missing them at rendezvous, and so on. Maybe now we know why."

"I've noticed," Hazleton said. "But I don't see how there could be enough piracy to account for all the losses. For all we know, the Vegan orbital fort may be out here, picking off anybody who's venturesome enough to leave the usual commerce lanes."

"I didn't know the Vegans flew cities," Dee said.

"They don't," Amalfi said abstractedly. He considered describing the legendary fort, then rejected the idea. "But they dominated the galaxy once, before Earth took to space flight. At their peak they owned more planets than Earth does right now, but they were knocked out a hell of a long time ago. . . . I'm still worried about that bindlestiff, Mark. You'd think that some heavy thinker on Earth would have figured out a way to make Diracs compact enough to be mounted in a proxy. They haven't got anything better to do back there."

Hazleton had no difficulty in penetrating to the real core of Amalfi's grumbling. He said, "Maybe we can still smoke 'em out, boss."

"Not a chance. We can't afford a side jaunt."

"Well, I'll send out a general warning on the Dirac," Hazleton said. "It's barely possible that the cops will be able to invest this part of the Rift before the 'stiff gets out of it."

"That'll trap us neatly, won't it? Besides, that bindlestiff isn't going to leave the Rift, at least not until it's picked up those life craft."

"Eh? How do you know?"

"Did you hear what the SOS said about a fuelless drive?"

"Sure," Hazleton said uneasily, "but the man who knows how to build it must be dead by now, even if he escaped when his city was blasted."

"We can't be sure of that-and that's the one thing that the 'stiff has to make sure of. If the ‘stiffs get a hold of that drive, there'll be all hell to pay. After that, 'stiffs won't be a rarity any more. If there isn't widespread piracy in the galaxy now, there will be-if we let the 'stiffs get that no-fuel drive."