Cities in Flight (51 page)

"Communications"

"Yes, sir!"

"Set up the return port for decontamination. Nobody gets back on board our town until he's been boiled alive- understand? I want the works."

There was a brief silence. Then: "Mr. Mayor, the city manager already has that in the works."

Amalfi grimaced wryly in the darkness. Anderson said, "Pardon me, sir, but-how did Mr. Hazleton guess?"

"Why, that's not too hard to see, at least after the fact, sergeant. This city we're on was desperately poor. And being poor under the new money system means being low on drugs. The end result, as Mr. Hazleton saw, and I should have seen, is-plague."

"The sons of bitches," the sergeant said bitterly. The epithet seemed intended to apply to every non-Okie in the universe.

At the same moment, a lurid scarlet glare splashed over his face and the front of his suit, and red lanes of light checkered the street. There was an almost-simultaneous flat crash, without weight in the thin air, but ugly-sounding.

"TDX!" Anderson shouted, involuntarily.

"Dulany? Dulany! Damn it all, I told the man to take it easy with that probe. Whoever survived on that squad, report!"

Underneath the ringing in Amalfi's ears, someone began to laugh. It was as ugly a sound as the TDX explosion had been. There was no other answer.

"All right, Anderson, surround this place. Communications, get the rest of the boarding squad and half the security police over here on the double."

The nasty laughter got louder.

"Whoever you are that's putting out that silly giggle, you're going to learn how to make another kind of noise when I get my hands on you," Amalfi added viciously. "Nobody uses TDX on my men, I don't care whether he's an Okie or a cop. Get me? Nobody!"

The laughter stopped. Then a cracked voice said, "You lousy damned vultures."

"Vultures, is it?" Amalfi snapped. "If you'd answered our calls in the first place, there'd have been no trouble. Why don't you come to your senses? Do you want to die of the pestilence?"

"Vultures," the voice repeated. It carried an overtone of sinister idiocy. "Eaters of carrion. The gods of all stars will boil your bones for soup." The cackling began again.

Amalfi felt a faint chill. He switched to tight-beam. "Anderson, keep your men at a respectable distance, and wait for the reinforcements. This place is obviously mined to the teeth, and I don't .know what other surprises our batty friend has for us."

"I could lob a gas grenade through that window—"

"Don't you suppose they're wearing suits, too? Just ring the place and sit tight."

"Check."

Amalfi squatted down upon his hams behind the aircab, sweating. There just'? might be enough power left in the accumulators here to put up a Bethe fender around the building, but that wasn't the main thing on his mind. This business of boarding another Okie city was easily the hardest operation he had ever had to direct. Every move went against the grain. The madman's accusation had hit him in his most vulnerable spot.

After what seemed like a whole week, his helmet ultra-phone said, "Proxy room. Mr. Mayor, the jungle beat off Lerner's first wave. I didn't think they could do it. They got in one good heavy lick at the beginning-blew two heavy cruisers right out of the sky-and the Acolytes act scared green. The admiral's launch has run out completely, and left Lerner holding the bag."

"Losses?"

"Four cities definitely wiped out. We haven't enough proxies out to estimate cities damaged with any accuracy, but Lerner had a group of about thirty towns enfiladed when the first cruiser got it."

"You haven't got the big drone out there, have you?" the mayor said in sudden alarm.

"No, sir; Communications ordered that one left berthed. I'm waiting now to see when the next Acolyte wave gets rolling; I'll call you as—"

The proxy pilot's voice snapped off, and the stars went out.

There was a shout of alarm from some technic in the party. Amalfi got up, cautiously and looked overhead. The single window in the big building which had shown a light was blacked out now, too.

"What the hell happened, Mr. Mayor?" Anderson's voice said quietly.

"A local spindizzy screen, at at least half-drive. Probably they've dropped their main screen entirely. Everybody keep to cover-there may be flares."

The laughter began again.

"Vultures," the voice said. "Little mangy vultures in a big tight cage."

Amalfi cut back in on the open radio band. "You're going to wreck your city," he said steadily. "And once you tear this section of it loose, your power will fail and your screen will go down again. You can't win, and you know it."

The street began to tremble. It was only a faint trembling now, but there was no telling how long the basic structure of the dead city could hold this one small area in place against the machine that was trying to fling it away into space. Hazleton, of course, would rush over a set of portable nutcrackers as soon as he had seen what had happened-but whether this part of the city would still be here when the nutcrackers arrived was an open question.

In the meantime, there was exactly nothing Amalfi could do about it. Even his contact with his own city was cut off.

"It isn't your city," the voice said, suddenly deceptively reasonable. "It's our city. You're hijacking us. But we won't let you."

"How were we supposed to know any of you were still alive?" Amalfi demanded angrily. "You didn't answer our calls. Is it our fault if you didn't hear them? We thought this town was open for salvage—"

His voice was abruptly obliterated by a new one, enormous yet familiar! which came slamming into his helmet as if it intended to drive him out of his suit entirely.

"EARTH POLICE AA EMERGENCY ACOLYTE CLUSTER CONDENSATION XIII ARM BETA," it thundered. "SYSTEM UNDER ATTACK BY MASS ARMY OF TRAMP CITIES. POLICE AID URGENTLY NEEDED. LERNER LIEUTENANT FORTY-FIFTH BORDER SECURITY GROUP ACTING COMMANDER CLUSTER DEFENSE FORCES. ACKNOWLEDGE."

Amalfi whistled soundlessly through his teeth. There was evidently a Dirac transceiver in operation somewhere inside the close-drawn spindizzy screen, or his helmet phones wouldn't have caught Lerner's yell for help; Diracs were too bulky for the usual proxy, let alone for a space suit. By the same token, everybody else in the galaxy possessing Dirac equipment had heard that yell-it had been the instantaneous propagation of Dirac pulses that had dealt the death blow to the West's hypercomplex relativity theories millennia ago.

And if a Dirac sender was open inside this bubble ...

"LERNER ACOLYTE DEFENSE FORCES YOUR MESSAGE IN. SQUADRON ASSIGNED YOUR CONDENSATION ON WAY. HANG ON. BETA ARM COMMAND EARTH."

. . . then Amalfi could use it. He flipped the chest switch and shouted, "Hazleton, are your nutcrackers rolling?"

"Rolling, boss," Hazleton shot back instantly. "Another ninety seconds and—"

"Too late, this sector will tear loose before then. Tune up our own screen to twenty-four per cent and hold—"

He realized suddenly that he was shouting into a dead mike. The Okies here had caught on belatedly to what was happening, and had cut the power to their Dirac. Had that last, crucial, incomplete sentence gotten through, even a fragment of it? Or ...

Deep down under Amalfi's feet an alarming sound began to rise. It was part screech, part monstrous rockslide, part prolonged and hollow groan. Amalfi's teeth began to itch in their sockets, and his bowels stirred slightly. He grinned.

The message had gotten through-or enough of it to enable Hazleton to guess the rest. The one spindizzy holding this field was going sour. Against the combined power of the nearby drivers of Amalfi's city, it could no longer maintain the clean space-lattice curvature it was set for.

"You're sunk," Amalfi told the invisible defenders quietly. "Give up now. and you'll not be hurt. I'll skip the TDX incident-Dulany was one of my best men, but maybe there was some reason on your side, too. Come on over with us, and you'll have a city to call your own again. This one isn't any good to you any more, that's obvious."

There was no answer.

Patterns began to race across the close-pressing black sky. The nutcrackers-portable generators designed to heterodyne a spindizzy field to the overload point-were being brought to bear. The single tortured spindizzy howled with anguish.

"Speak up, up there," Amalfi said. "I'm trying to be fair, but if you force me to drive you out—"

"Vultures," the cracked voice sobbed.

The window aloft lit up with a searing glare and burst outward. A long tongue of red flame winnowed out over the street. The spindizzy screen went down at once, and with it the awful noise from the city's power deck; but it was several minutes before Amalfi's dazzled eyes could see the stars again.

He stared up at the exploded scar on the side of the building, outlined in orange heat swiftly dimming. He felt a little sick.

"TDX again," he said softly. "Consistent to the last, the poor sick idiots."

"Mr. Mayor?"

"Here."

"This is the proxy room. There's a regular stampede going on in the jungle. The cities are streaming away from the red star as fast as they can tune up. No discernible order-just a mob, and a panicky mob, too. No signs of anything being done for the wounded cities; and it looks to me like they're just being left for Lerner to break up as soon as he gets up enough courage."

Amalfi nodded to himself. "All right, O'Brian, launch the big drone now. I want that drone to go with those cities and stick with them all the way. Pilot it personally; it's highly detectable, and there'll probably be several attempts to destroy it, so be ready to dodge."

"I will, sir. Mr. Hazleton just launched her a moment ago; I'm giving her the gun right now."

For some reason this did not improve Amalfi's temper in the least.

The Okies set to work rapidly, dismounting the dead city's spindizzies from their bases and shipping them into storage on board their own city. The one which had been overdriven in that last futile defense had to be left behind, of course; like the Twenty-third Street machine, it was hot and could not be approached, except by a graving dock.

The rest went over as whole units. Hazleton looked more and more puzzled as the big machines came aboard, but he seemed resolved to ask no questions.

Carrel, however, suffered under no such self-imposed restraints. "What are we going to do with all these dismounted drivers?" he said. All three men stood in a sally port at the perimeter of their city, watching the ungainly bulks being floated across.

"We're going to fly another planet," Hazleton said flatly.

"You bet we are," Amalfi agreed. "And pray to your star gods that we're in time, Mark."

Hazleton didn't answer..,

Carrel said, "In time for what?"

"That I won't say until I have it right under my nose on a screen. It's a hunch, and I think it's a good one. In the meantime, take my word for it that we're in a hurry, like we've never been in a hurry before. What's the word on that mass chromatography apparatus, Hazleton?"

"It's a reverse-English on the zone-melting process for refining germanium, boss. You take a big column of metal-which metal doesn't matter, as long as it's pure- and contaminate one end of it with the stuff you want to separate out. Then you run a disc-shaped electric field up the column from the contaminated end, and the contaminants are carried along by resistance heating and separate out at various points along the bar. To get pure fractions, you cut the bar apart with a power saw."

"But does it work?"

"Nah," Hazleton said. "It's just what we've seen a thousand times before. Looks good in theory, but not even the guys who owned this city could make it go."

"Another Lyran invisibility machine-or no-fuel drive," the mayor said, nodding. "Too bad; a process like that would be useful. Is the equipment massive?"

"Enormous. The area it occupies is twelve city blocks on a side."

"Leave it there," Amalfi decided at once. "Obviously this outfit was bragging from desperation when it offered the technique for the Acolyte woman's job. If she'd taken them up on it, they wouldn't have been able to deliver- and I don't care to lead us into any such temptation."

"In this case the knowledge is as good as the equipment," Hazleton said. "Their City Fathers will have all the information we could possibly worry out of the apparatus itself."

"Would somebody give me the pitch on this exodus of cities from the jungle,?" Carrel put in. "I wasn't along on your trip to the King's city, and I still think the whole idea of a March on Earth is crazy."

Amalfi remained silent. After a moment, Hazleton said, "It is and it isn't. The jungle doesn't dare stand up to a real Earth force and slug it out, and everybody knows now that there's an Earth force on its way here. The cities want to be somewhere else in a hurry. But they still have some hope of getting Earth protection from the Acolyte cops and similar local organizations if they can put their case before the authorities outside of a trouble area."

"That," Carrel said, "is just what I don't see. What hope do they have of getting a fair shuffle? And why don't they just contact Earth on the Dirac, as Lerner did, instead of making this long trip? It's sixty-three hundred or so light years from here to Earth, and they aren't organized well enough to make such a long haul without a lot of hardship."