CHAPTER EIGHT: The Ghosts of Space

The "riot act" was every bit as unpleasant as he had foreseen it would be, but somehow he managed to live through it-mostly by bearing in mind as firmly as possible that he had it coming. He was never likely to become a real Okie by stealing the property of people who had hired the city on to do a job, no matter how good be thought his reasons were.

And in this first disastrous instance he had simply been in the way. The city would have known soon enough in any event of the fact that Anderson and Dulany were being held prisoner, since the colonists of Heaven could not have used them effectively as hostages without notifying Amalfi of the fact; and there was no doubt in Chris's mind that the two cops could have gotten out of Castle Wolfwhip without his intervention, and perhaps a good deal faster, too. Above all, they might have been gotten out by Amalfi without violence, and thus saved the contract intact. The appearance of Chris as a third prisoner had been, totally unwelcomed to both sides, and had turned what had been merely a tense situation into an explosion.

In the end, they gave him full marks for imagination and boldness, as well as for coolness under fire, but by that time Chris had learned enough about the situation to feel that his chances of ever becoming a citizen were not worth an Oc dollar. The new contract was considerably more limited than the old, and called for reparations for the damage the two sergeants had done to Castle Wolfwhip; under it, the city stood to gain considerably less than before.

Chris was astonished that there was any new contract at all, and said so, rather hesitantly. Anderson explained:

"Violence between employer and employee is as old as' man, Chris, but the work has to be done all the same. The colonists as a corporate entity disown the kidnapper and claim the right to deal with him according to their own system of justice, which we're bound to respect. Damage to real property, on the other hand, has to be paid for-and the city can't disown Irish and me because we're officers and agents of the city."

"But what about the scheme to ground the city and take it over?"

"We know nothing about that except what you overheard. That would have no status in a colonial court, and' probably wouldn't even if you were a citizen-in this case, if you were of legal age."

And there it was again. "Well, there's something else I've been wondering about," Chris said. "Why is the age to start the drugs 'fixed at eighteen? Wouldn't they work at any age? Suppose we took aboard a man forty years old who also happened to be a red-hot expert at something we needed. Couldn't you start him on the drugs anyhow?"

"We could and we would," Anderson assured him. "Eighteen is only the optimum age, the earliest age at which we can be sure the specimen is physically mature. You see the drugs can't set the clock back. They just arrest aging from the moment when they're first given. Tell me, have you ever heard of the legend of Tithonus?"

"No, I'm afraid not."

"I don't know it very well myself; ask the City Fathers. But briefly, he got himself in the good books of the goddess of dawn, Eos, and asked for the gift of immortality. She gave it to him, but he was pretty old at the time. When he realized that he was just going to stay ,that way forever, he asked Eos to take the gift back. So she changed him into a grasshopper, and you know how long they live."

"Hmm. A man who was going to be a permanent seventy-five wouldn't be much good to himself, I guess. Or to the city either."

"That's the theory," the perimeter sergeant agreed. "But of course we have to take 'em as we find 'em. Amalfi went on the drugs at fifty-which, for him, happened to be his prime."

Thus his education went on, much as before, except that he stayed scrupulously away from the docks. Since the new contract was limited to three months, there probably. wouldn't have been much to see down there anyhow-or so he told himself, not without a suspicion that there were a few holes in his logic. In addition, he got some sympathy and support from a wholly unexpected source: Piggy Kingston-Throop.

"It just goes to show you how much truth there is in all this jabber about citizenship," he said fiercely, at their usual after-class meeting. "Here you go and do them a big fat favor, and all they can think of to do is lecture you for getting in their way. They even go right on doing business with these guys who were going to grab the city if they could."

"Well, we do have to eat."

"Yeah, but it's dirty money all the same. Come to think of it, though, if I'd have been in your shoes I'd have handled it differently."

"I know," Chris said, "that's what they all keep telling me. I should never have gotten into the boat in the first place."

"Pooh, that part's all right," Piggy said scornfully. "If you hadn't gotten into the boat they'd never have known about the plot to take the city-that's the favor you did them, and don't you forget it. They're on their guard now. No, I mean what happened after you locked the guys up in the back cabin. You said that the boat had bumped into the dock and was trying to climb it, right?"

"Yes."

"And a lot of cops came running?"

"I don't know about a lot," Chris said cautiously. "There were three or four, I think."

"Okay. Now if it had been me, I would have just stopped the boat right there, and gotten out, and told the cops what I'd heard. Let them drag it out of the guys you'd locked up. You know how the City Fathers cram all that junk into our heads in class-well, they can take stuff out the same way. Dad says it's darned unpleasant for the victim, but they get it."

Chris could only shrug helplessly. "You're right. That would have been' the sensible thing to do. And it seems obvious the way you tell it. But all I can say is it didn't occur to me." He thought a moment, and then added: "But in a way I'm not too sorry, Piggy. That way, I never would have gotten to Castle Wolfwhip at all-sure, it would have been better if I hadn't-but it sure was exciting while I was there."

"Boy, I'll bet it wash I wish I'd been there!" Piggy began to shadowbox awkwardly. "I wouldn't have hidden in any cell, believe you me. I'd have showed 'em!"

Chris did his best, not to laugh. "Going by what I heard, if you'd gone along with the sergeants-if they'd let you-you'd have been killed by your own friends. Those weren't' just rotten eggs they were throwing around."

"All the same, I'll bet-Hullo, we're lifting."

The city had not lifted yet, but Chris knew what Piggy meant; he too could hear the deepening hum of the spindizzies. "So we are. That three months sure went by in a hurry."

"Three months isn't much in space. We'll be eighteen before we know it."

"That," Chris said gloomily, "is exactly what I'm afraid of."

"Well, I don't give a darn. This whole deal about your running off with the boat proves' that they don't mean what they say' about earning citizenship. Like I say, the whole thing's just a scheme to keep kids in line, so they won't have to, be watched so much. The minute you actually do something for the survival of the city, bingo! the roof falls on you. Never mind that, it was a good thing to do and shows you've got guts-you've caused them trouble, and that's what the system's supposed to prevent."

There was, Chris saw, something to be said for the theory, no matter how exaggerated Piggy's way of putting it was. In Chris's present state of discouragement, it would be a dangerously easy point of view to adopt.

"Well, Piggy, what I want to know is, what are you going to do if you're wrong? I mean, supposing the City Fathers decide not to make you a citizen; and it turns out that they can't be fixed? Then you'll be stuck with being a passenger for the rest of your life-and it'd only be a normal lifetime, too."

"Passengers aren't as helpless as they think," Piggy said darkly. "Some 'one of 'these days the Lost City is going to come back, and when that happens, all of a sudden the passengers are going to be top dog."

"The Lost City? I never heard of it."

"Of course you haven't. And the City Fathers won't ever tell you about it, either. But word gets around."

"Okay, don't be mysterious," Chris said. "What's it all about?"

Piggy's voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. "Do you swear not to tell anybody else, except another passenger?"

"Sure."

Piggy looked elaborately over both shoulders before going on. As usual, they were the only youngsters on the street, and none of the adults were paying the slightest attention to them.

"Well," he said in the same tone of voice, "it's like this. One of the first cities ever to take off was a big one. Nobody knows its name, but I think it was Los Angeles. Anyhow, it got lost, and ran out of drugs, and then out of food, way off in some part of space that was never colonized, so it couldn't find any work either. But then they made a planetfall on a new world, something nobody had ever seen before. It was like Earth-bigger, but the same gravity, and a little more oxygen in the air, and a perfect climate-like spring all year round, even at the poles. If you planted seeds there, you had to jump back in a hurry or the plant would hit you under the chin, they grew so fast.

"But that wasn't the half of it."

"It sounds like plenty," Chris said.

"That was all good, but they found something else even better. There was a kind of grain growing wild there, and when they analyzed it to see whether or not it was good to eat, they found it contained an antideath drug-not any of ours, but better than all of ours rolled into one. They didn't even have to extract it-all they had to do was make bread out of the plant."

"Wow. Piggy, is this just a story?'

"Well, I can't give you an affidavit," Piggy said, offended. "Do you want to hear the rest or don't you?"

"Go ahead," Chris said hastily.

"So then the question was, what were they going to do with their city ? They didn't need it. Everything they needed came right up out of the ground while their backs were turned. So they decided to stock it up and send it out into space again, to look for other cities. Whenever they make contact with a new Okie town, they take all the passengers off-nobody else-and take them back to this planet where everybody can have the drugs, because there's never any shortage."

"Suppose the other city doesn't want to give up its passengers?"

"Why wouldn't it want to? If it had any use for them, they'd be citizens, wouldn't they?"

"Yes, but just suppose."

"They'd give them up anyhow. Like I said, the Lost City is big."

Unfortunately for the half-million other questions Chris wanted to ask, at that point the city moaned softly to the sound of the take-cover siren. The boys parted hurriedly; but Chris, after a moment's thought, did not go home. Instead, he holed up in a public information booth, where he fed his car into the slot and asked for the Librarian.

He had promised not to mention the Lost City to anyone but another passenger, which ruled out questioning his guardian, or the City Fathers directly; but he had thought of a way to ask an indirect question. The Librarian was that one of the 134 machines comprising the City Fathers which had prime charge of the memory banks, and was additionally charged with teaching; it did not collect information, but only catalogued and dispensed it. Interpretation was not one of its functions.

"CARD ACCEPTED. PROCEED."

"Question: Do any antiagathics grow naturally-I mean, do they occur in plants that could be raised as crops?"

A brief pause. "A PRECURSOR OF THE ANTISLEEP DRUG IS A STEROID SUBSTANCE OCCURRING NATURALLY IN A NUMBER OF YAMLIKE PLANTS FOUND ON EARTH, LARGELY IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA. THIS SAPOGENIN IS NOT, HOWEVER, IN ITSELF AN ANTIAGATHIC, AND MUST BE CONVERTED; HUNDREDS OF DIFFERENT STEROIDS ARE PRODUCED FROM THE SAME STARTING MATERIAL.

"ASCOMYCIN IS PRODUCED BY DEEP-TANK FERMENTATION OF A MICROORGANISM AND HARVESTED FROM THE BEER. THE PROCEDURE MIGHT BROADLY BE DEFINED AS CROPRAISING.

"ALL OTHER KNOWN ANTIAGATHICS ARE WHOLLY SYNTHETIC DRUGS."

Chris sat back, scratching his head in exasperation. He had hoped for a clear-cut, yes-or-no answer, but what he had gotten stood squarely in the middle. No antiagathics were harvested from real crops; but if a crop plant could produce something at least enough like an antiagathic to be converted into one, then that part of Piggy's astounding story was at least possible. Unhappily, he could think of no further questions sufficiently indirect to keep his main point of interest hidden.

Then he noticed that the booth had not returned his card to him. This was quite usual; it meant only that the Librarian, which spent its whole mechanical life substituting free association for thinking, had a related subject it would talk about if he liked. Usually it wasn't worth while exploring these, for the Librarian could go on forever if so encouraged; all he needed to do now was to say "Return," and he could take his card and go. But the take-cover alert wasn't over yet; so, instead, he said, "Proceed."

"SUBJECT, ANTIAGATHICS AS BY-PRODUCTS OF AGRICULTURE. SUB-SUBJECT, LEGENDARY IDYLLIC PLANETS." Chris sat bolt upright. "ANTIAGATHICS AS BY-PRODUCTS OF AGRICULTURE, USUALLY IN THE DAILY BREAD, IS ONE OF THE COMMON FEATURES OR DIAGNOSTIC SIGNS OF THE LEGENDARY PLANETS OF NOMAD-CITY MYTHOLOGY. OTHERS INCLUDE: EARTHLIKE GRAVITY BUT GREATER LAND AREA, EARTHLIKE ATMOSPHERE BUT MORE ABUNDANT OXYGEN, EARTHLIKE WEATHER BUT WITH UNIFORM CLIMATE, AND COMPLETE ISOLATION FROM EXISTING TRADE LANES. NO PLANET MATCHING THIS DESCRIPTION IN ANY PARTICULAR HAS YET BEEN FOUND. NAMES OFTEN GIVEN TO SUCH WORLDS INCLUDE: ARCADY, BRADBURY, CELEPHAIS . . ."

Chris was so stunned that the Librarian had worked its way all the way through "ZIMIAMVIA" and had begun another alphabetical catalogue before he thought to ask for his card back. His question had not been very crafty, after all.

By the time he emerged from the booth, the storms of Heaven had vanished and the city was once more soaring amid the stars. Furthermore, he was late for dinner.

So, after all, there had been no secret to keep. Chris told the Andersons the story of his failure to outwit the Librarian; it made the best possible excuse for his lateness, since it was true, and it reduced Carla to tears of helpless laughter. The perimeter sergeant was amused, too, but there was an undercurrent of' seriousness beneath his amusement.

"You're learning, Chris. It's easy to think that because the City Fathers are dead, they're also stupid; but you see that that isn't the case. Otherwise they would never have been given the power that they wield-and in some departments their power is absolute."

"Even over the Mayor?"

"Yes and no. They can't forbid the Mayor anything. But if he goes against their judgment more often than they're set. to tolerate, they can revoke his office. That's never happened here, but if it does, we'll have to sit still for it. If we don't, they'll stop the machinery."

"Wow. Isn't it dangerous to give machines so much power? Suppose they had a breakdown?"

"If there were only a few of them, that would be a real danger; but there are more than a hundred, and they monitor and repair each other, so in fact it will never 'happen. Sanity and logic is their stock in trade-which is why they can accept or reject the results of any election we may run. The popular will is sometimes an idiot, but no human being can be given the power to overrule it; not safely. But the machines can.

"Of course, there are stories about towns whose City Fathers ran amok with them. They're just stories, like Piggy's 'Lost City'-but they're important even when they're not true. Whenever a new way of living appears in the universe, the people who adopt it see quickly enough that it isn't perfect. They try to make it better, sure; but there are always some things about it that can't be changed. And the hopes and fears that are centered on those points 'get turned into stories.

"Piggy's myth, for instance. We live long lives in the cities, but not everybody can have the gift. It's impossible that everyone should have it-the whole universe isn't hi1 enough to contain the sheer mass of flesh that would accumulate if we all lived and bred as long as we each wanted to. Piggy's myth says it is possible, which is untrue; but what is true about it is that it points to one of the real dissatisfactions with our way of living, real be. cause nothing can be done about it.

"The story of the runaway City Fathers is another. No such thing has ever happened as far as I know, and ii doesn't seem to be possible, but no live man likes to take orders from a bunch of machines, or to think that he may lose his life if they say so-but he might. because the City Fathers are the jury aboard most cities. So he invents a cautionary tale about City Fathers running amok, though actually he's talking not about the machines at all-he's warning that he may run amok if he's pushed too far..

"The universe of the cities is full of these ghosts. Sooner or later somebody is going to tell you that some cities go bindlestiff."

"Somebody has," Chris admitted. "But I didn't know what he meant."

"It's an old Earth term. A hobo was an honest migratory worker, who lived that way because he liked it, A tramp was the same kind of fellow, except that he wouldn't work-he lived by stealing or begging from settled people. In hobo society both kinds were more or less respectable. But the bindlestiff was a migrant who stole from other migrants-he robbed their bindles, the bags they carried their few belongings in. That man was an outcast from both worlds.

"It's common talk that some cities in trouble have gone bindlestiff-taken to preying on other cities. Again, there are no specific instances. IMT is the town that's most often mentioned, but the last we heard of IMT, she wasn't a bindlestiff-she'd been outlawed for a horrible crime on a colony planet, but technically that makes her only a tramp. A mean one, but still only a tramp.".

"I see," Chris said slowly. "It's like the story about City Fathers going crazy. Cities do starve, I know that; and the bindlestiff story says, 'How will we behave when the pinch comes?'"

Anderson looked gratified. "Look at that," he said to Carla. "Maybe I should have been a teacher!"

"Nothing to do with you," Carla said composedly. "Chris is doing all the thinking. Besides, I like you better as a cop.."

The perimeter sergeant sighed, a little ruefully. "Oh, well, all right. Then I'll give you only one more story. You've heard of the Vegan orbital fort?"

"Oh, sure. That was in the history, way back."

"Good. Well, for once, that's a real thing. There 'was a Vegan orbital fort, and it did get away, and nobody knows where it is now. The City Fathers say that it probably died when it ran out of supplies, but it was a pretty big job and might well have survived under circumstances no ordinary city could live through. If you ask the City Fathers for the probabilities, they tell you that they can't give you any figures-which is a bad sign in itself.

"Now, that's as far as the facts go. But there's a legend to go with them. The legend says that the fort is foraging through the trade lanes, devouring cities-just the way a dragonfly catches mosquitoes, on the wing. Nobody has actually seen the fort since the scorching of Vega, but the legend persists; every time a city disappears, the word goes around, first, that a bindlestiff got it, and next, that the fort got it.

"What's it all about, Chris? Tell me."

Chris thought for a long time. At last he said:

"I'm kind of confused. It ought to be the same kind of story as the others-something people are afraid of. Like meeting up some day with a planet, like the Vegan system, where the people have more on the ball than we do and will gobble us up the way we did Vega—"

Anderson's big fist' crashed down on the dinner table, making all the plates jump. "Precisely!" he crowed. "Look there, Carla—"

Carla's own hands reached out and covered the sergeant's fist gently. "Dear, Chris isn't through yet. You didn't give him a chance to finish."

"I didn't? But-sorry, Chris. Go ahead."

"I don't know whether I'm through or not," Chris said, embarrassed and floundering. "This one story just confuses me. It's not as simple as the others; I think I'm sure of that."

"Go ahead."

"Well, it's sensible to be afraid of meeting somebody stronger than yourself. It might well happen. And there is a real Vegan orbital fort, or at least there was one. The other stories don't have that much going for them that's real-except the things people are actually afraid of, the things the stories actually are about. Does this make sense?"

"Yes. The things the stories symbolize."

"That's the word. To be afraid of the fort is to be afraid of a real thing. But what does the story symbolize? It's got to be the same kind of thing in the end-the fear people have of themselves. The story says, 'I'm tired of working to be a citizen, and obeying the Earth cops, and protecting the city, and living a thousand years with machines bossing me, and taking sass from colonists, and don't know what all else. If I had a great big city that could run all by myself, I'd spend the next thousand years smashing things up!'"

There was a long, long silence, during which Chris became more and more convinced that he had again talked out of turn, and far too much. Carla did not seem to be upset, but her husband looked stunned and wrathful.

"There is something wrong with the 'apprenticeship sys. tern," he growled at last, though he did not appear to be speaking to either of them. "First the Kingston-Throop kid-and now this: Carla! You're the brains in the family. Did it ever occur to you that that fort legend had anything to do with education?"

"Yes, dear. Long ago."

"Why didn't you say so?"

"I would have said so as soon as we had a child; until then, it wasn't any of my business. Now Chris has said ii for me"

The perimeter sergeant turned a lowering face on Chris. "You," he said, "are a holy terror. I set out to teach you, as I was charged to do, and you wind up teaching me. Not even Amalfi knows this side of the foil story, I'll swear to that-and when he hears it, there's going to be a real upheaval in the schools."

"I'm sorry," Chris said miserably. He did not know what else to say.

"Don't be sorry!" Anderson roared, surging to his feet.

"Stick to your guns! Let the other guy be afraid of ghosts-you know the one thing about ghosts that you need to know, no matter what kind of ghosts they are: They have nothing to do with the dead. It's always themselves that people are afraid of."

He looked about distractedly. "I've got to go topside. Here's my hurry-where's my hat?" He roared out, banging one hand against the side of the door, leaving Chris frozen with alarm.

Then Carla began to laugh all over again.