CHAPTER ONE: Utopia

 

AS John Amalfi emerged onto the narrow, worn granite ledge with its gritty balustrade, his memory encountered one of those brief boggles over the meaning of a word which had once annoyed him constantly, like a bubble in an otherwise smoothly blown French horn solo. Such moments of confusion were very rare now, but they were still a nuisance.

This time he found himself unable to decide on a name for where he was going at the moment. Was it a belfry, or was it a bridge?

It was, of course, only a matter of simple semantics, depending, as the oldest saying goes, on the point of view. The ledge ran around the belfry of City Hall. The city, however, was a spaceship, much of which was sometimes operated from this spot, and from which Amalfi was accustomed to assess the star-seas that the city sailed. That made it a bridge. But the ship was a city, a city of jails and playgrounds, alleys and alley cats, and there was even one bell still in the belfry, though it no longer had a clapper. The city was still called New York, N.Y., too, but that, the old maps showed, was misleading; the city aloft was only Manhattan, or New York County.

Amalfi's step across the threshold struck the granite without perceptible interruption. The minute dilemma was familiar: he had been through others of its kind often in the years immediately after the city had taken to the skies. It was hard to decide the terms in which one thought about customary things and places after they had become utterly transformed by space flight. The difficulty was that, although the belfry of City Hall still looked much as it had in 1850, it was now the bridge of a spaceship, so that neither term could quite express what the composite had become.

Amalfi looked up. The skies, too, looked about as they must have in 1850 on a very clear night. The spindizzy screen which completely englobed the flying city was itself invisible, but it would pass only elliptically polarized light, so that it blurred the points which were stars seen from space, and took them down in brilliance about three magnitudes to boot. Except for the distant, residual hum of the spindizzies themselves-certainly a much softer noise than the composite traffic roar which had been the city's characteristic tone back in the days before cities could fly-there was no real indication that the city was whirling through the emptiness between stars, a migrant among migrants.

If he chose, Amalfi could remember those days, since he had been mayor of the city-although only for a short time-when the City Fathers had decided that it was time to go aloft. That had been in 3111, decades after every other major city had already left the Earth; Amalfi had been just 117 years old at the time. His first city manager had been a man named deFord, who for a while had shared Amalfi's amused puzzlement about what to call all the familiar things now that they had turned strange-but deFord had been shot by the City Fathers around 3300 for engineering an egregious violation of the city's contract with a planet called Epoch, which had put a black mark on the city's police record which the cops still had not forgotten.

The new city manager was a youngster less than 400 years old named Mark Hazleton, who was already as little loved by the City Fathers as deFord had been and for about the same reasons, but who had been born after the city had gone aloft and hence had no difficulty in finding the appropriate words for things. Amalfi was prepared to believe that he was the last living man on board the flying city who still had occasional bubbles blown into his stream of consciousness by old Earthbound habits of thinking.

In a way, Amalfi's clinging to City Hall as the center of operations for the city betrayed the mayor's ancient ties to Earth. City Hall was the oldest building on board, and so only a few of the other structures could be seen from it. It wasn't tall enough, and there were too many newer buildings around it. Amalfi didn't care. From the belfry-or bridge, if that was what he had to call it now-he never looked in any direction but straight up, his head tilted all the way back on his bull neck. He had no reason to look at the buildings around Battery Park, after all. He had already seen them.

Straight up, however, was a sun, surrounded by starry sable. It was close enough to show a perceptible disc, and becoming slowly larger. While Amalfi watched it, the microphone in his hand began to emit intermittent squawks.

"It looks good enough to me," Amalfi said, lowering his bald head grudgingly a centimeter or two toward the mike. "It's a type G star, or near to it, and Jake in Astronomy says two of the planets are Earthlike. And Records says that both of 'em are inhabited. Where there's people, there's work."

The phone quacked anxiously, each syllable evenly weighted, but without any over-all sense of conviction. Amalfi listened impatiently. Then he said, "Politics."

The way he said it made it sound fit only to be scrawled on sidewalks. The phone was silenced; Amalfi hung it on its hook on the railing and thudded back down the archaic stone steps which led from the belfry/bridge.

Hazleton was waiting for him in the mayor's office, drumming slim fingers upon the desk top. The current city manager was an excessively tall, slender, disjointed sort of man. Something in the way his limbs were distributed over Amalfi's chair made him also look lazy. If taking devious pains was a sign of laziness, Amalfi was quite willing to call Hazleton the laziest man in the city.

Whether he was lazier than anybody outside the city didn't matter. Nothing that went on outside the city was of real importance any more.

Hazleton said, "Well?"

"Well enough." Amalfi grunted. "It's a nice yellow dwarf star, with all the fixings."

"Sure," Hazleton said with a wry smile. "I don't see why you insist on taking a personal look at every star we go by. There are screens right here in the office, and the City Fathers have all the data. We knew even before we could see this sun what it was like."

"I like a personal look," said Amalfi. "I haven't been mayor here for five hundred years for nothing. I can't really tell about a sun until I see it with my own eyes. Then I know. Images don't mean a thing-no feel to "em."

"Nonsense," Hazleton said, without malice. "And what does your feelership say about this one?"

"It's a good sun; I like it. We'll land."

"All right, suppose I tell you what's going on out there?"

"I know, I know," Amalfi said. His heavy voice took on a finicky, nervous tone, his own exaggerated version of the mechanical speech of the City Fathers. " 'THE POLITICAL SITUATION IS VERY DISTURBING.' It's the food situation that I'm worried about."

"Oh? Is it so bad, then?"

"It's not bad yet. It will be, unless we land. There's been another mutation in the Chlorella tanks; must have started when we passed through that radiation field near Sigma Draconis. We're getting a yield of about twenty-two hundred kilograms per acre in terms of fats."

"That's not bad."

"Not bad, but it's dropping steadily, and the rate of decrease is accelerating. If it's not arrested, we won't have any algae crops at all in a year or so. And there's not enough crude-oil reserve to tide us over to the next nearest star. We'd hit there eating each other."

Hazleton shrugged. "That's a big if, boss," he said. "We've never had a mutation we couldn't get under control before. And it's very nasty on those two planets."

"So they're having a war. We've been through that kind of situation before. We don't have to take sides. We land on the planet best suited-—"

"If it were an ordinary interplanetary squabble, okay. But as it happens, one of those worlds-the third from the sun-is a sort of free-living polyp of the old Hruntan Empire, and the inner one is a survivor of the Hamiltonians. They've been fighting for a century, on and off, without any contact with Earth. Now-the Earth's found them."

"And?" Amalfi said.

"And it's cleaning them both out," Hazleton said grimly. "We've just received an official police warning to get the hell out of here."

Above the city the yellow sun was now very much smaller. The Okie metropolis, skulking out from the two warm warring worlds under one-quarter drive, crept steadily into hiding within the freezing blue-green shadow of one of the ruined giant planets of the system. Tiny moons, a quartet of them, circled in a gelid minuet against the chevrons of ammonia-storms that banded the gas giant.

Amalfi watched the vision screens tensely. This kind of close maneuvering, involving the balancing of the city against a whole series of conflicting gravitational fields, was very delicate, and not the kind of thing to which he was accustomed; the city generally gave gas giants a wide berth. His own preternatural "feel" for the spatial condition* in which he spent his life must here be abetted by every electronic resource at his command.

"Too heavy, Twenty-third Street," he said into the mike. "You've got close to a two-degree bulge on your arc of the screen. Trim it.”

"Trim, boss."

Amalfi watched the image of the giant planet and its chill hand-maidens. A needle tipped gently.

"Cut!"

The whole city throbbed once and went silent. The silence was a little frightening: the distant hum of the spindizzies was a part of the expected environment, and when it was damped, one felt a strange shortness of breath, as if the air had gone bad. Amalfi yawned involuntarily, his diaphragm sucking against an illusory shortage of oxygen.

Hazleton yawned, too, but his eyes were glittering. Amalfi knew that the city manager was enjoying himself now; the plan had been his, and so he no longer cared that the city might be in serious danger from here on out. He was taking lazy folks' pains.

Amalfi only hoped that Hazleton was not outsmarting himself and the city at the same time. They had had some narrow squeaks with Hazleton's plans before. There had been, for instance, that episode on Thor V. Of all the planets in the inhabited galaxy on which an Okie might choose to throw his weight around, Thor V was easily the worst. The first Okie city Thor V ever saw had been an outfit which had dropped its city name and taken to calling itself the Interstellar Master Traders. By the time it had left Thor V again, it had earned itself still another appellation: the Mad Dogs. On Thor V, hatred of Okies was downright hereditary, and for good reason ...

"Now we'll sit tight for a week," Hazleton Said, his spatulate fingers shooting the courser of his slide rule back and forth. "Our food will hold out that long. And that was a very convincing orbit Jake gave us. The cops will be sure we're well on our way out of this system by now- and there aren't enough of them to take care of the two warring planets and to comb space for us at the same time, anyhow."

"You hope."

"It stands to reason, doesn't it?" Hazleton said, his eyes gleaming. "Sooner or later, within a matter of weeks, they'll find out that one of those two planets is stronger than the other, and concentrate their forces on that one. When that happens, we'll hightail for the planet with the weaker police investiture. The cops'll be too busy to prevent our landing there, or to block our laying on supplies once we're grounded."

"That's fine as far as it goes. But it also involves us directly with the weaker planet. The cops won't need any better excuse for dispersing the city."

"Not necessarily," Hazleton insisted. "They can't break us up just for violating a Vacate order. They know that as well as we do. If necessary, we can call for a court ruling and show that the Vacate order was inhumane-and in the meantime, they can't enforce the order while we're under the aegis of an enemy of theirs. Which reminds me-we've got an 'I want off' from a man named Webster, a pile engineer. He's one of the city's original complement, and as good as they come; I hate to see him leave."

"If he wants off, he gets it," Amalfi said. "What does he opt?"

"Next port of call."

"Well, this looks like it. Well—"

The intercom on the flight board emitted a self-deprecatory burp. Amalfi pressed the stud.

"Mr. Mayor?"

"Yep."

"This is Sergeant Anderson at the Cathedral Parkway lookout. There's a whopping big ship just come into view around the bulge of the gas giant. We're trying to contact her now. A warship."

"Thanks," Amalfi said, shooting a glance at Hazleton. "Put her through to here when you do make contact." He dialed the 'visor until he could see the limb of the giant planet opposite the one into which the city was swinging. Sure enough, there was a tiny sliver of light there. The strange ship was still in direct sunlight, but even so, she must have been a whopper to be visible at all so far away. The mayor stepped up the magnification, and was rewarded with a look at a tube about the size of his thumb.

"Not making any attempt to hide," he murmured, "but then you couldn't very well hide a thing that size. She must be all of a thousand feet long. Looks like we didn't fool "em."

Hazleton leaned forward and studied the innocuous-looking cylinder intently. "I don't think that's a police craft," he said. "The police battleships on the clean-up squad are more or less pear-shaped, and have plenty of bumps. This, boat only has four turrets, and they're faired into the hull-what the ancients used to call 'streamlining.' See?"

Amalfi nodded, thrusting out his lower lip speculatively. "Local stuff, then. Designed for fast atmosphere transit. Archaic equipment-Muir engines, maybe."

The intercom burped again. "Ready with the visiting craft, sir," Sergeant Anderson said.

The view of the ship and the blue-green planet was wiped away, and a pleasant-faced young man looked out at them from the screen. "How do you do?" he said formally. The question didn't seem to mean anything, but his tone indicated that he didn't expect an answer to it anyhow. "I am speaking to the commanding officer of the . .. the flying fortress?"

"In effect" Amalfi said. "I'm the mayor here, and this gentleman is the city manager; we're responsible for different aspects of command. Who are you?"

"Captain Savage of the Federal Navy of Utopia," the young man said. He did not smile. "May we have permission to approach your fort or city or whatever it is? We'd like to land a representative.”

Amalfi snapped the audio switch and looked at Hazleton. "What do you think?" he said. The Utopian officer politely and pointedly did not watch the movements of his lips.

"It should be safe enough. Still, that's a big ship, even if it is a museum piece. They could as easily send their man in a life craft."

Amalfi opened the circuit again. "Under the circumstances, we'd just as soon you stayed where you are," he said. "You'll understand, I'm sure, Captain. However, you may send a gig if you like: your representative is welcome here. Or we will exchange hostages—"

Savage's hand moved across the screen as if brushing the suggestion away. "Quite unnecessary, sir. We heard the interstellar craft warn you away. Any enemy of theirs must be a friend of ours. We are hoping that you can shed some light on what is at best a confused situation."

"That's possible," Amalfi said. "If that is all for now

"Yes sir. End of transmission."

"Out."

Hazleton arose. "Suppose I meet this emissary. Your office?"

"Okay."

The city manager went out, and Amalfi, after a few moments, followed him, locking up the control tower. The city was in an orbit and would be stable until the time came to put it in flight again. On the street, Amalfi flagged a cab.

It was a fairly long haul from the control tower, which was on Thirty-fourth Street and The Avenue, down to Bowling Green, where City Hall was; and Amalfi lengthened it a bit more by giving the Tin Cabby a route that would have put folding money into the pocket of a live one of another, forgotten age. He settled back, bit the end off a hydroponic cigar, and tried to remember what he had heard about the Hamiltonians. Some sort of a republican sect, they'd been, back in the very earliest days of space travel. There'd been a public furor . . . recruiting . . . government disapproval and then suppression . . . hm-m-m. It was all very dim, and Amalfi was not at all sure that he hadn't mixed it up with some other event in Terrestrial history.

But there had been an exodus of some sort. Shiploads of Hamiltonians going out to colonize, to set up model planets. Come to think of it, one of the nations then current in the West on Earth had had a sort of Hamiltonianism of its own, something called a democracy. It had all died down after a while, but it had left traces. Nearly every major political wave after space flight had its vestige somewhere in the inhabited part of the galaxy.

Utopia must have been colonized very early. The Hruntan Imperials, had they arrived first, would have garrisoned both habitable planets as a matter of course.

It was a little easier to remember the Hruntan Empire, since it was of much more recent vintage than the Hamiltonians; but there was less to remember. The outer margins of exploration had spawned gimcrack empires by the dozen in the days when Earth seemed to be losing her grip. Alois Hrunta had merely been the most successful of the would-be emperors of space. His territory had expanded as far as the limits of communication would allow an absolute autocracy to spread, and then had been destroyed almost before he was assassinated, broken into duchies by his squabbling sons. Eventually the duchies fell in <heir turn to the nominal but irresistible authority of Earth, leaving, as the Hamiltonians had left, a legacy of a few remote colonies^-worlds where a dead dream was served with meaningless pomp.

The cab began to settle, and the facade of City Hall drifted past Amalfi's cab window. The once-golden motto-MOW YOUR LAWN, LADY?-looked greener than ever in the light of the giant planet. Amalfi sighed. These political squabbles were dull, and they were guaranteed to make a major project out of the simple matter of earning a square meal.

The first thing that Amalfi noticed upon entering his office Was that Hazleton looked uncomfortable. This was practically a millennial event. Nothing had ever disturbed Hazleton before; he was very nearly the perfect citizen of space: resilient, resourceful, and almost impossible to surprise-or bluff. There was nobody else in the office but a girl whom Amalfi did not recognize; probably one of the parliamentary secretaries who handled many of the intramural affairs of the city.

"What's the matter, Mark? Where's the Utopian contact man?"

"There," Hazleton said. He didn't exactly point, but there was no doubt about his meaning. Amalfi felt his eyebrows tobogganing over his broad skull. He turned and studied the girl.

She was quite pretty: black hair, with blue lights in it; gray eyes, very frank, and a little amused; a small body, well made, somewhat on the sturdy side. She was dressed in the most curious garment Amalfi had ever seen-she had a sort of sack over her head, with holes for her arms and neck, and the cloth was pulled in tightly above her waist. Her hips and her legs down to just below her knees were covered by a big tube of black fabric, belted at the top. Her legs were sheathed into token stockings of some sleazily woven, quite transparent stuff. Little flecks of color spotted the sack, and around her neck she had a sort of scarf-no, it wasn't a scarf, it was a ribbon-what was it, anyhow? Amalfi wondered if even deFord could have named it.

After a moment the girl began to seem impatient of his inspection, and he turned his head away and continued walking toward his desk. Behind him, her voice said gently, "I didn't mean to cause a sensation, sir. Evidently you didn't expect a woman . .. ?"

Her accent was as archaic as her clothes; it was almost Eliotian. Amalfi sat down and collected his scattered impressions. ,

"No, we didn't," he said. "However, we have women in positions of authority here. I suppose we were misled by

Earth custom, which doesn't allow women much hand in the affairs of the military. You're welcome, anyhow. What can we do for you?"

"May I sit down? Thank you. First of all, you can tell us where all these vicious fighting ships come from. Evidently they know you."

"Not personally," Amalfi said. "They know the Okie cities as a class, that's all. They're the Earth police."

The Utopian girl's piquant face dimmed subtly, as though she had expected the answer and had been fighting to believe it would not be given.

"That's what they told us," she said. "We . . . we couldn't accept it. Why are they attacking us then?"

"It was bound to happen sooner or later," Amalfi said as gently as possible. "Earth is incorporating the independent planets as a matter of policy. Your enemies the Hruntans will be taken in, too. I don't suppose we can explain why very convincingly. We aren't exactly in the confidence of Earth's government."

"Oh," the girl said. "Then perhaps you will help us? This immense fortress of yours-“

"I beg your pardon." Hazleton said, smiling ruefully. "The city is no fortress, I assure you. We are only lightly armed. However, we may be able to help you in other ways-frankly, we're anxious to make a deal."

Amalfi looked at him under his eyelids. It was incautious, and unlike Hazleton, to discuss the city's armament or lack of it with an officer who had just come on board from a strange battleship.

The girl said, "What do you want? If you can teach us how those-those police ships fly, and how you keep your city aloft—"

"You don't have the spindizzy?" Amalfi said. "But you must have had it once, otherwise you'd never have got way out here from Earth."

"The secret of interstellar flight has been lost for nearly a century. We still have the first ship our ancestors flew in our museum; but the motor is a mystery. It doesn't seem to do anything."

Amalfi found himself thinking: Nearly a century? Is that supposed to be a long time? Or do the Utopians lack the anti-agathic drugs, too? But ascomycin was supposed to have been discovered more than half a century before the Hamiltonian Exodus. Curiouser and curiouser.

Hazleton was smiling again. "We can show you What the spindizzy does," he said. "It is too simple to yield its secret lightly. As for us-we need supplies, raw materials. Oil, most of all. Have you that?"

The girl nodded. "Utopia is very, rich in oil, and we haven't needed it in quantity for nearly twenty-five years- ever since we rediscovered molar valence." Amalfi pricked up his ears again. The Utopians lacked the spindizzy and the anti-agathics-but they had something called molar valence. The term told its own story: anyone who could modify molecular bonding beyond the usual adhesion effects would have no need for mechanical lubricants like oil. And if the Utopians thought they had only rediscovered such a technique, so much the better.

"As for us, we can use anything you can give us," the girl went on. Abruptly she looked very weary in spite of her healthy youth. "All our lives we have been fighting these Hruntan barbarians and waiting for the day when help would arrive from Earth. Now Earth has come-and its hand is against both worlds! Things must have changed a great deal."

"The fault doesn't lie in change," Hazleton said quietly, "but in that you people have failed to change. Traveling away from Earth for us is very like traveling in time: different distances from the home planet have different year-dates. Stars remote from Earth, like yours, are historical backwaters. And the situation becomes complicated when the historical periods interpenetrate, as your Hamiltonian era and the Hruntan Empire have interpenetrated. The two cultures freeze each other the moment they come in conflict, and when history catches up with them-well, naturally it's a shock."

"On a more practical subject," Amalfi said, "we'd prefer to pick our own landing area. If we can send technicians to your planet in advance, they'll find a lie for us."

"A lie?"

"A mining site. That's to be permitted, I presume?"

"I don't know," the girl said uncertainly. "We're very short on metals, steel especially. We have to salvage all our scrap—"

"We use almost no iron or steel," Amalfi assured her. "We reclaim what we need, as you do-steel's nearly indestructible, after all. What we're after is germanium and some other rare-earth metals for instruments. You ought to have plenty of those to spare." Amalfi saw no point in adding that germanium was the base of the present universal coinage. What he had said was true as far as it went, and in dealing with these backward planets, there were always five or six facts best suppressed until after the city had left.

"May I use your phone?"

Amalfi moved away from the desk, then had to come back again as the girl dabbed helplessly at the 'visor controls. In a moment she was outlining the conversation to the Utopian captain. Amalfi wondered if the Hruntans understood English; not that he was worried about the present interchange being overheard-the giant planet would block that most effectively, since the Utopians used ordinary radio rather than ultraphones or Dirac communicators-but it was of the utmost importance, if Hazleton's scheme was to be made workable, that the Hruntans should have heard and understood the warning the Earth police had issued to the city. It was a point that would have to be checked as unobtrusively as possible.

It might also be just as well to restrict sharply the technical information the city passed out in this star system. If the Hamiltonians-or the Hruntans-suddenly blossomed out with Bethe blasters, field bombs, and the rest of the modern arsenal (or what had been modern the last time the city had been able to update its files, not quite a century ago), the police would be unhappy. They would also know whom to blame. It was comforting to know that nobody in the city knew how to build a Canceller, at least. Amalfi had a sudden disquieting mental picture of a mob of Hruntan barbarians swarming out of this system in spindizzy-powered ships, hijacking their way back to an anachronistic triumph, snuffing out stars like candle flames as they went.

"It is agreed," the girl said. "Captain Savage suggests that I take your technicians back with me in the gig to save time. And is there also someone who understands the interstellar drive—"

"I'll go along," Hazleton said. "I know spindizzies as well as the next man."

"Nothing doing, Mark. I need you here. We've plenty of grease monkeys for that purpose. We can send them your man Webster; here's his chance to get off the city before we even touch ground." Amalfi spoke rapidly into the vacated 'visor. "There. You'll find the proper people waiting at your gig, young lady. If Captain Savage will phone us exactly one week from today and tell us where on Utopia we're to land, we'll be out of occultation with this gas planet, and will get the message."

There was a long silence after the Utopian girl had left. At last Amalfi said slowly, "Mark, there is no shortage of women in the city."

Hazleton flushed. "I'm sorry, boss. I knew it was impossible directly the words were out of my mouth. Still, I think we may be able to do something- for them; the Hruntan Empire was a pretty nauseating sort of state, if I remember correctly."

"That's none of our business," Amalfi said sharply. He disliked having to turn the full force of his authority upon Hazleton; the city manager was for Amalfi the next best thing to that son his position had never permitted him to father-for the laws of all Okie cities include elaborate safeguards against the founding of any possible dynasty. Only Amalfi knew how many times this youngster's elusive, amoral intelligence had brought him close to being deposed and shot by the City Fathers; and a situation like this one was crucial to the survival of the city.

"Look, Mark. We can't afford to have sympathies. We're Okies. What are the Hamiltonians to us? What are they to themselves, for that matter? I was thinking a minute ago of what a disaster it'd be if the Hruntans got a Canceller or some such weapon and blackmailed their way back to a real empire again. But can you see a rebirth of Hamiltonianism any better-in this age? Superficially it would be easier to take, I'll admit, than another Hruntan tyranny-but historically, it'd be just as disastrous. These two planets have been fighting each other over two causes that played themselves out half a millennium ago. They aren't either of them relevant any more."

Amalfi stopped for a breath, taking the mangled cigar out of his mouth and eyeing it with mild surprise. "I knew that the girl was disturbing your judgment the moment I realized that I'd have to read you the riot act like this. Ordinarily you're the best cultural morphologist I've ever had, and every city manager has to be a good one. If you weren't in a sexual uproar, you'd see that these people are the victims of a pseudomorphosis-dead cultures both of 'em, going through the pangs of decay, even though they both do think it's rebirth."

"The cops don't see it that way," Hazleton said abstractedly.

"How could they? They haven't our point of view. I'm not talking to you as a cop. I'm trying to talk like an Okie. What good does it do you to be an Okie if you're going to mix in on some petty border feud? Mark, you might as well be dead-or back on Earth, it's the same thing in the end."

He stopped again. Eloquence was unnatural to him; it embarrassed him a little. He looked sharply at the city manager, and what he saw choked off the springs of his rare volubility. He felt, not for the first time, the essential loneliness that went with perspective.

Hazleton wasn't listening any more.

There was a battle in progress when the city made its run to Utopia. It was rather spectacular. The Hruntan planet, military in organization and spirit down to the smallest detail of daily living, had not waited for the Earth police to englobe it. The Hruntan ships, though they were nearly of the same vintage as those flown by the Utopians, were being fought to the limit, fought by experienced officers who were unencumbered by any sniveling notions about the intrinsic value of human life. There was not much doubt as to the outcome, but for the time being, the police were unhappy.

The battle was not directly visible from the city; the Hruntan planet was nearly forty degrees away from Utopia now. It was the steady widening of the distance between the two planets that had first given Hazleton his idea for a sneak landing. It had also been Hazleton who had dispatched the proxies-guided missiles less than five meters long-which hung invisibly upon the outskirts of the conflict and watched it with avid television eyes.

It was an instructive dogfight. The police craft, collectively, had not engaged in a major battle for decades; and individually, few of the Earthmen had ever been involved in anything more dangerous than a pushover. The Hruntans, vastly inferior in equipment, were rich in experience, and their tactics were masterly. They had forced the engagement in a heavily mined area, which was equivalent to picking a fight in the heart of a furnace-except that the Hruntans, having sown the mines, knew where the fire was hottest. Their losses, of course, were terrific-nearly five to one. But they had the numbers to waste, and it was obvious that officers who did not value their own lives would be unlikely to value those of their crews.

After a while, even Hazleton had to turn the screen off and order O'Brien to recall the proxies. The carnage was frightening, not just per se, but in the mental attitude behind it. Even a hardened killer, after a certain amount of watching men trying to snuff out a fire by leaping into it, might have felt his brains cracking.

The city settled toward Utopia. Outlying police scouts reported the fact-the reports were plainly audible in the city's Communications Room-and those reports would be exhumed later and acted upon. But now, in the midst of the battle, the cops had no time to care about what the city did. When they began to care again, the city hoped to be gone-or invulnerable.

The question of how Utopia had resisted the Hruntan onslaught for nearly a century remained a riddle. It became more of a riddle after the city landed on Utopia. The planet was a death trap of radioactivity. There were no cities; there were seething white-hot pools that would never cool within the lifetime of humanity to show where cities once had stood. One of the continental land masses was not habitable at all. The very air disturbed counters slightly. In the daytime, the radioactivity was just below the dangerous limit; at night, when the drop in temperature released the normal microscopic increase in the radon content-a phenomenon common to the atmospheres of all Earthlike planets-the air was unbreathable.

Utopia had been bombarded with fission bombs and dust canisters at every opposition with the Hruntan planet for the past seventy Utopian years. The favorable oppositions occurred only once every twelve years-otherwise even the underground life of Utopia would have been impossible.

"How have you kept them off?" Amalfi asked. "Those boys are soldiers. If they can put up this much of a battle against the police, they should be able to wipe up the floor with you folks."

Captain Savage, perched uncomfortably in the belfry, blinking at the sun, managed a thin smile. "We know all their tricks. They are very fine strategists-I will grant you that. But in some respects they are unimaginative.

Necessarily, I suppose; initiative is not encouraged among them." He stirred uneasily. "Are you going to leave your city out here in plain sight? And at night, too?"

"Yes. I doubt that the Hruntans will attack us; they're busy, and besides, they probably know that the police don't love us, and will be too puzzled to call us an enemy of theirs right off the bat. As for the air-we're maintaining a point naught two per cent spindizzy field. Not enough to be noticeable, but it changes the moment of inertia of our own atmosphere enough to prevent much of your air from getting in."

"I don't think I understand that," Savage said. "But doubtless you know your own resources. I confess, Mayor Amalfi, that your city is a complete mystery to us. What does it do? Why are the police against you? Are you exiled?"

"No," Amalfi said. "And the police aren't against us exactly. We're just rather low in the social scale; we're migratory workers, interstellar hobos, Okies. The police are as obligated to protect us as they are to protect any other citizen-but our mobility makes us possible criminals by their figuring, so we have to be watched."

Savage's summary of his reaction to this was the woeful sentence Amalfi had come to think of as the motto of Utopia. "Things have changed so much," the officer said.

"You should set that to music. I can't say that I understand yet how you've held out so long, either. Haven't you ever been invaded?"

"Frequently," Savage said. His voice was half gloomy and half charged with pride. "But you have seen how we live. At best, we have beaten them off; at worst, we cannot be found. And the Hruntans themselves have made this planet a difficult place to live. Many of their landing parties succumbed to the results of their own bombing."

"Still—"

"Mob psychology," Savage said, "is something of a science with us-as it is with them, but we have developed it in a different direction. Combined with the subsidiary art of camouflage, it is a powerful weapon. By dummy installations, faked weather conditions, false high-radioactivity areas, we have thus far been able to make the Hruntans erect their invasion camps exactly on the spots we have previously chosen for them. It is a form of chess: one persuades, or lures, the enemy into entering an area where one can dispose of him in perfect safety and with a minimum of effort."

He blinked up at the sun, nibbling at his lower lip. After a while he added, "There is another important factor. It is freedom. We have it. The Hruntans do not. They are defending a system which is ascetic in character-that is, it offers few rewards to the individual, even once it has triumphed. We on Utopia are fighting for a system which has personal rewards for us-the rewards of freedom. It makes a difference. The incentive is greater."

"Oh, freedom," Amalfi said. "Yes, that's a great thing, I suppose. Still, it's the old problem. Nobody is ever free. Our city is vaguely republican, it might even be Hamiltonian in one sense. But we aren't free of the requirements of our situation, and never can be. As for efficiency hi warfare being increased by freedom-I question that. Your people are not free now. A wartime political economy has to tend toward dictatorship; that's what killed off the West back on Earth. Your people are fighting for steak tomorrow, not steak today. Well-so are the Hruntans. The difference between you exists as a potential, but-a difference which makes no difference is no difference."

"You are subtle," Savage said, standing up. "I think I can see why you would not understand that part of our history. You have no ties, no faith. You will have to excuse us ours. We cannot afford to be logic-choppers."

He went down the stairs, his shoulders thrown back unnaturally. Amalfi watched him go with a rueful grin. The young man was a character; talking with him was like being brought face to face with a person from a historical play. Except, of course, that a character in a play is ordinarily understandable even at his queerest; Savage had the misfortune to be real, not the product of an artificer with an ax to grind.

Amalfi was reminded abruptly of Hazleton. Where was Hazleton, anyhow? He had gone off hours ago with that girl upon some patently trumped-up errand. If he didn't hurry, he'd be trapped underground overnight. Amalfi did not mind working alone, but there were managerial jobs hi the city which the mayor simply could not handle efficiently-and besides, Hazleton might be committing the city to something inconvenient. Amalfi went down to his office and called the Communications Room.

Hazleton had not reported in. Grumbling, Amalfi went about the business of organizing the work of the city-the work for which it had gone aloft, but which it found so seldom. It disturbed him that there was no official work contract between the city and Utopia; it was not customary, and if Utopia should turn out, as so many ideals-ridden planets had turned out, to be willing to cheat on an astronomical scale for the sake of its obsession, there would be no recourse under the Earth laws. People with Ends in view were quick to justify all kinds of Means, and the city, which was nothing but Means made concrete and visible, had learned to beware of short cuts.

Hazleton, it appeared, was off somewhere on a short cut. Amalfi could only hope that he-and the city-would survive it.

The Earth police did not wait for Hazleton, either. Amalfi was mildly appalled to see how rapidly the Earth forces reformed and were reinforced. Their logistics had been much improved since the city had last seen them in action. The sky sparkled with ships driving in on the Hruntan planet.

That was bad. Amalfi had expected to have several months at least to build up a food reserve on Utopia before making the run to the Hruntan planet that Hazleton's strategy called for. Evidently, however, the Hruntan world would be completely blockaded by that time.

The mayor sent out an emergency warning at once. The thin resistance which the spindizzy field had offered to Utopia's atmosphere became a solid, hard-driven wall. The spindizzies screamed into the highest level of activity they could maintain without snapping the gravitational thread between the city and Utopia. Around the perimeter of that once-invisible field, a flicker of polarization thickened to translucence. Drive-fields were building, and only a few light rays, most of them those to which the human eye was least sensitive, got through the fields and out again. To Utopian onlookers the city went dark blood-color and became frighteningly indistinct.

Calls began to come in at once. Amalfi ignored them; his flight board, a compressed analog of the banks in the control tower, was alive with alarm signals, and all the speakers were chattering at once.

"Mr. Mayor, we've just made a strike in that old till; it's lousy with oil-bearing shale—"

"Stow what you have and make it tight."

"Amalfi! How can we get any thorium out of—"

"More where we're going. Damp your stock on the double."

"Com Room. Still no word from Mr. Hazleton-—"

"Keep trying."

"Calling the flying city! Is there something wrong? Calling the flying—"

Amalfi cut them all off with a brutal swipe at the toggles. "Did you think we'd stay here forever? Stand by!"

The spindizzies screamed. The sparkling of the ships coming to invest the Hruntan planet became brighter by the minute. It would be a near thing.

"Whoop it up there on Forty-second Street! What d'you think you're doing, warming up tea? You've got ninety seconds to get that machine to take-off pitch!"

"Take-off? Mr. Mayor, it'll take at least four minutes—"

"You're kidding me. I can tell. Dead men don't kid. Move!"

"Calling the flying city—"

The sparks spread over the sky like a Catherine wheel whirling into life. The watery quivering of the single point of light that was the Hruntan planet dimmed among them, shivered, blended into the general glitter. From Astronomy, Jake added his voice to the general complaint.

"Thirty seconds," Amalfi said.

From the speaker which had been broadcasting the puzzled, fearful inquiries of the Utopians, Hazleton's voice said calmly, "Amalfi, are you out of your mind?"

"No," Amalfi said. "It's your plan, Mark. I'm just following through. Twenty-five seconds."

"I'm not pleading for myself. I like it here, I think. I've found something here that the city doesn't have. The city needs it—"

"Do you want off, too?"

"No, hell no," Hazleton said. "I'm not asking for it. But if I had to take it anyhow, I'd take it here—"

A brief constriction made Amalfi's big frame knot up tightly. Nothing emotional:-no, nothing to do with Hazleton; probably some spindizzy operator was hurrying things. He staggered to his feet and threw up in the little washstand. Hazleton went on talking, but Amalfi could hardly hear him. The clock grinned and rushed on.

"Ten seconds," Amalfi gasped, a little late.

"Amalfi, listen to me!"

"Mark," Amalfi said, choking, "Mark, I haven't time. You made your choice. I ... five seconds ... I can't do anything about that. If you like it there, go ahead and stay. I wish you, I wish you everything, Mark, believe me. But I have to think of—"

The clock brought its thin palms together piously.

". . . the city—"

"Amalfi—"

"Spin!"

The city vaulted skyward. The sparks whirled in around it