Cities in Flight

“The other one is really only a guess,” Chris said. “It’s based on what I know about Frank Lutz, and I only saw him twice, and heard one of his aides talk about him. But I don’t think he’d ever allow anybody to outbluff him; he’d always fight first. He has to prove he’s the toughest guy in any situation, or his goose is cooked—somebody else’ll take over. It’s always like that in a thug society—look at the history of the Kingdom of Naples, or Machiavelli’s Florence.”

“I’m beginning to suspect you’re just inventing these examples,” Anderson said, frowning blackly. “But again, it does make a certain amount of sense—and nobody but you knows even a little about this man Lutz. Supposing you’re right; what could we do about it that we’re not doing now?”

“You could use the desperation,” Chris said eagerly. “If Lutz and his gang are desperate, then the ordinary citizen must be on the edge of smashing things up. And I’m sure they don’t have any ‘citizens’ in our sense of the word, because the aide I mentioned before let slip that they were short on the drugs. I think he meant me to overhear him, but it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. The man on the street must hate the gang even in good times. We could use them to turn Lutz out.”

“How?” Anderson said, with the air of a man posing a question he knows to be unanswerable.

“I don’t know exactly. It’d have to be done more or less by feel. But I used to have at least two friends over there, one of them with constant access to Lutz. If he’s still around and I could sneak over there and get in touch with him—”

Anderson held up a hand and sighed. “I was kind of afraid you were going to trot out something like that. Chris, when are we going to cure you of this urge to go junketing? You know what Amalfi said about that.”

“Circumstances alter cases,” Carla put in.

“Yes, but-oh, all right, all right, I’ll go one step farther, at least.” Once more he snapped the switch, and said to the air: “Comments?”

“W E ADVISE AGAINST SUCH A VENTURE, SERGEANT A NDERSON. THE CHANCE THAT MISTER DE F ORD WOULD BE RECOGNIZED IS PROHIBITIVELY HIGH. ”

“There, you see?” Anderson said. “Amalfi would ask them the same question. He ignores their advice more often than not, but in this case what they say is just what he’s already decided himself.”

“Okay,” Chris said, not very much surprised. “It’s a pretty fuzzy sort of idea, I’ll admit. But it was the only one I had.”

“There’s a lot to it. I’ll tell the Mayor your two points, and suggest that we try to do something to stir up the animals over there. Maybe hell think of another way of tackling that. Cheer up, Chris; it’s a darned good thing you told me all this, so you shouldn’t feel bad if a small part of what you said gets rejected. You can’t win them all, you know.”

“I know,” Chris said. “But you can try.”

If Amalfi thought of any better idea for “stirring up the animals” in Scranton, Chris did not hear of it; and if he tried it, obviously it had no significant effect. While the city worked, Scranton sat sullenly where it was, ominously silent, while New York’s contract termination date drew closer and closer. Poor and starving though it must have been, Scranton had no intention of being outsat at the game of playing for so rich a planet as Argus III; if Amalfi wanted Scranton off the planet, he was going to have to throw it off—or call for the cops. Frank Lutz was behaving pretty much as Chris had predicted, at least so far.

Then, in the last week of the contract, the roof fell in.

Chris got the news, as usual, from his guardian. “It’s your friend Piggy,” he said wrathfully. “He had the notion that he could pretend to turn his coat, worm his way into Scranton’s government, and then pull off some sort of coup. Of course Lutz didn’t believe him, and now we’re all in the soup.”

Chris was torn between shock and laughter. “But how’d he get there?”

“That’s one of the worst parts of it. Somehow he sold two women on the idea of being deadly female spies, concubine type, as if a thug government ever had any shortage of women, especially in a famine! One of them is a sixteen-year-old girl whose family is spitting flames, for every good reason. The other is a thirty-year-old passenger who’s the sister of a citizen, and he’s one of Irish Dulany’s fighter pilots. The sister, the City Fathers tell us now, is a borderline psychotic, which is why she never made citizenship herself; but they authorized the brother to teach her to fly because it seemed to help her clinically. She stole the boarding-squad plane for the purpose, and by the time we got the whole story from the machines, it was all over.”

“You mean that the City Fathers heard Piggy and the others planning all this?”

“Sure they did. They hear everything—you know that.”

“But why didn’t they tell somebody?” Chris demanded.