Cities in Flight

In the past, his most usual strategy had been to outsit the enemy. If that failed, he tried to outperform them. As a last resort, he tried to bring them into conflict with themselves. There were no pure cases of any of these policies on record—every example was a mixture, and a complicated one—but these three flavorings were the strongest, and usually one was far more powerful than the other two. When Amalfi salted his dish, you could hardly taste the pepper or the mustard.

Not everyone could eat it thereafter, either; there were, Chris suspected, more subtle schools of Okie cookery. But that was how Almalfi did it, and he was the only chef the city had. Thus far, the city had survived him, which was the only test that counted with the citizens and the City Fathers.

On Argus III, it seemed, Amalfi’s hope was to starve Scranton out by outperforming it. The city had the contract; Scranton had lost it. The city could do the job; Scranton had made a mess of it, and left behind a huge yellow scar around its planetfall which might not heal for a century. And while New York worked and Scranton starved—here was where a faint pinch of outsittery was added to the broth—Scranton couldn’t carry through on its desperate hope of seizing Argus III as a new home planet; though the Argidae could not yell for the cops at the first sign—or the last—of such a piracy, New York could and would. Okie solidarity was strong, and included a firm hatred of the cops … but it did not extend to encouraging another incident like Thor V, or bucking the cops against another city like IMT. Even the outlaw must protect himself against the criminally insane, especially if they seem to be on his side.

Okay; if that was what Amalfi planned, so be it. There was nothing that Chris could say about it, anyhow. Amalfi was the mayor, and he had the citizens and the City Fathers behind him. Chris was only a youngster and a passenger.

But he knew one thing about the plan that neither Amalfi nor any other New Yorker could know, except himself:

It was not going to work.

He knew Scranton; the city didn’t. If this was how Amalfi planned to proceed against Frank Lutz, it would fail.

But was he reading Amalfi’s mind aright? That was probably the first question. After several days of worrying—which worsened his school record drastically—he took the question to the only person he knew who had ever seen Amalfi: his guardian.

“I can’t tell you what Amalfi’s set us up to do, you aren’t authorized to know,” the perimeter sergeant said gently. “But you’ve done a lot of good guessing. As far as you’ve guessed, Chris, you’re pretty close.”

Carla banged a coffee cup angrily into a saucer. “Pretty close? Joel, all this male expertise is a pain in the neck. Chris is right and you know it. Give him a break and tell him so.”

“I’m not authorized,” Anderson said doggedly, but from him that was tantamount to an admission. “Besides, Chris is wrong on one point. We can’t sit there forever, just to prevent this tramp from taking over Argus Three. Sooner or later we’ll have to be on our own way, and we can’t overstay our contract, either—we’ve got Violations of our own on our docket that we care about, whether Scranton cares about Violations or not. We have a closing date that we mean to observe—and that makes the problem much stiffer.”

“I see it does,” Chris said diffidently. “But at least I understood part of it. And it seems to me that there are two big holes in it—and I just hope I’m wrong about those.”

“Holes?” the perimeter sergeant said. “Where? What are they?”

“Well, first of all, they’re probably pretty desperate over there, or if they aren’t now, they soon will be. The fact that they’re in this part of space at all, instead of wherever it was the Mayor directed them, back when I came on board here, shows that something went wrong with their first job, too.”

Anderson snapped a switch on his chair. “Probability?” he said to the surrounding air.

“S EVENTY-TWO PER CENT,” the air said back, making Chris start. He still had not gotten used to the idea that the City Fathers overheard everything one said, everywhere and all the time; among many other things, the city was their laboratory in human psychology, which in turn enabled them to answer such questions as Anderson had just asked.

“Well, score another for you,” the sergeant said in a troubled voice.

“But I hadn’t quite gotten to my point yet, sir. The thing is, now this job has gone sour on them too, so they must be awfully low on supplies. No matter how good our strategy is, it has to assume that the other side is going to react logically. But desperate men almost never behave logically; look at German strategy in the last year of World War Two, for instance.”

“Never heard of it,” Anderson admitted. “But it seems to make sense. What’s the other hole?”