A Life For The Stars Page 2

  "Ah, shaddup, will you?" the other voice said surlily. "Anyhow we got the dog"

  "You loudmouthed, look out!"

  Two men grabbed Chris, one from each side, as he surged to his feet. He struggled fiercely, but all the fight left in him was in his soul, not any in his muscles.

  "What a bunch of flap jaws. No wonder you can't hold your own with a kid. Huggins, put your hat on. Red, don't you listen to that slob, he's been all mouth all his life. Your dog ran away, that's all."

  The lie was kindly meant, no matter how clumsy it was, but it was useless. Chris could see Kelly, not far away. Kelly had done the best he could; he would never have another chance.

  The youngster the pressgang dragged stumbling toward Scranton had a heart made of stone.

  CHAPTER TWO: A Line of Boiling Dust

  The city inside the perimeter of raw earth was wavery and unreal. It did not hum any more, but it gave a puzzling impression of being slightly in shadow, though the July sun was still blazing over it. Even in his grief and anger, Chris was curious enough to wonder at the effect, and finally he thought he saw what caused it: The heat waves climbing the air around the town seemed to be detouring it, as though the city itself were inside a dome. No, not a dome, but a bubble, only a part of which was underground; it met the earth precisely at the cleared perimeter.

  The spindizzy field was up. It was invisible in itself, but it was no longer admitting the air of the Earth.

  Scranton was ready.

  Thanks to the scrapping, the patrol was far behind schedule; the leader drove them all through the scabrous, deserted suburbs without any mercy for his own torn leg. Chris grimly enjoyed watching him wince at every other step, but the man did not allow the wound to hold him up, nor did he let any of the lesser bruises and black eyes in the party serve as excuses for foot dragging.

  There was no way to tell, by the normal human senses, when the party passed through the spindizzy screen. Midway across the perimeter, which was a good five hundred feet wide, the leader unshipped from his belt a device about as big as an avocado, turned it in his hands until it whined urgently, and then directed the group on ahead of him in single file, along a line which he traced in the dry red ground with the toe of his boot.

  As his two guards left his side, Chris crouched instinctively. He was not afraid of them, and the leader apparently was going to stay behind. But the big man saw the slight motion.

  "Red, I wouldn't if I were you," he said quietly. "If you try to run back this way after I turn off this gadget or if you try to go around me, you'll go straight up in the air. Look back and see the dust rising. You're a lot heavier than a dust speck, and you'll go up a lot farther. Better relax. Take it from me."

  Chris looked again at the dubious boundary line he had just crossed. Sure enough, there was a hair thin ruling there, curving away to both sides as far as he could see, where the inert friable earth seemed to be turning over restlessly. It was as though he were standing inside a huge circle of boiling dust.

  "That's right, that's what I meant. Now look here." The pressgang leader bent and picked up a stone just about as big as his fist which was extraordinarily big and shied it back the way they had come. As the rock started to cross the line above the seething dust, it leaped skyward with an audible screech, like a bullet ricocheting. In less than a second, Chris had lost sight of it.

  "Fast, huh? And it'd throw you much farther, Red. In a few minutes, it'll be lifting a whole city. So don't go by how things look. Right where you stand, you're not even on the Earth any more."

  Chris looked at the mountains for a moment, and then back' at the line of boiling dust. Then he turned away and resumed marching toward Scranton.

  And yet they were now on a street Chris had traveled a score of times before, carrying fifty cents for the Sunday paper's Help Wanted ads, or rolling, a wheelbarrow not quite full of rusty scrap, or bringing back a flat package of low-grade ground horsemeat. The difference lay only in the fact that just beyond the familiar corner the city stopped, giving place to the new desert of the perimeterand all in the overarching shadow which was not a, shadow at all.

  The patrol leader stopped and looked back. "We'll never make it from here," he said finally. "Take cover. Barney, watch that redneck. I'll take the kid with me; he looks sensible."

  Barney started to answer, but his reply was drowned out by a prolonged fifty decibel honking which made the very walls howl back. The noise was horrifying; Chris had never before heard anything even a fraction so loud, and it seemed to go on forever. The pressgang boss herded him into a doorway.

  "There's the alert. Duck, you guys. Stand still, Red. There's probably no danger, we just don't know. But something might just shake down and fall so keep your head in."

  The honking stopped; but in its place Chris could again hear the humming, now so pervasive that it made his teeth itch in their sockets. The shadow deepened, and out in the bare belt of earth the seething dust began to leap into the air in feathery plumes almost as tall as ferns.

  Then the doorway lurched and went askew. Chris grabbed for the frame; and just in time, for a second later, the door jerked the other way; and then, back again. Gradually, the quakes became periodic, spacing themselves farther apart in time, and slowly weakening in violence.

  After the first quake, however, Chris's alarm began to dwindle into amazement, for the movements of the ground were puny compared to what was going on before his eyes. The whole city seemed to be rocking heavily, like a ship in a storm. At one instant, the street ended in nothing but sky; at the next, Chris was staring at a wall of sheared earth, its rim looming clifflike, fifty feet or more above the new margin of the city; and then the blank sky was back again

  These huge pitching movements should have brought the whole city down in a roaring avalanche of steel and stone. Instead, only these vague twitchings and shudderings of the ground came through, and even those seemed to be fading away. Now the city was level again, amidst an immense cloud of dust, through which Chris could see the landscape begin to move solemnly past him. The city had stopped rocking, and was now turning slowly. There was no longer even the slightest sensation of movement; the illusion that it was the valley that was revolving around the city was irresistible and more than a little dizzying.

  I can see where 'the spindizzy got its name, Chris thought. Wonder if we go around like a top all the time we're in space? How'll we see where we're going, then?

  But now the high rim of the valley was sinking. In a breath, the distant roadbed of the railroad embankment was level with the end of the street; then the lip of the street was at the brow of the mountain; then with the treetops ... and then there was nothing but blue sky, becoming rapidly darker.

  The big pressgang leader released an explosive sigh. "By thunder," he said, "we got her up." He seemed, a little dazed. "I guess I never really believed it till now."

  "Not so sure I believe it yet," the man called Barney said. "But I don't see any cornices falling we don't have to hang around here 'any longer. The boss'll have our necks for being even this late."

  "Yeah, let's move. Red, use your head and don't give us any more trouble, huh? You can see for yourself, there's no place to run to now."

  There was no doubt about that. The sky at the end of the street, and overhead too, was now totally black; and even as Chris looked up, the stars became visible at first only a few of the brightest, but the others came out steadily in their glorious hundreds. From their familiar fixity Chris could also deduce that the city was no longer rotating on its axis, which was vaguely reassuring, somehow. Even the humming had faded away again; if it was still present, it was now inaudible in the general noise of the city.

  Oddly, the sunlight was still as intense as ever. From now on, "day" and "night" would be wholly arbitrary terms aboard the city; Scranton had emerged into the realm of Eternal Daylight-Saving Time.

  The party walked two blocks and then stopped while the big man located a cab post and pulled t
he phone from it. Barney objected at once.

  "It'll take a fleet of cabs to get us all to the Hall," he complained. "And we can't get enough guys into a hack to handle a prisoner, if he gets rough."

  "The kid won't get rough. Go ahead and march your man over. I'm not going to walk another foot on this leg."

  Barney hesitated, but obviously the big man's marked limp was an unanswerable argument. Finally he shrugged and herded the rest of his party around the corner. His boss grinned at Chris; but the boy looked away.

  The cab came floating down out of the sky at the intersection and maneuvered itself to rest at the curb next to them with a finicky precision. There was, of course, nobody in it; like everything else in the world requiring an I.Q. of less than 150, it was computer controlled. The worldwide dominance of such machines, Chris's father had often said, had been one of the chief contributors to the present and apparently permanent depression: the coming of semi-intelligent machines into business and technology had created a second Industrial Revolution, in which only the most highly creative human beings, and those most gifted at administration, found themselves with any skills to sell which were worth the world's money to buy.

  Chris studied the cab with the liveliest interest, for though he had often seen them before from a distance, he had of course never ridden in one. But there was very little to see. The cab was an eggshaped bubble of light metals and plastics, painted with large red-and-white checkers, with a row of windows running all around it. Inside, there were two seats for four people, a speaker grille, and that was all; no controls, and no instruments. There was not even any visible, place for the passenger to deposit his fare.

  The big pressgang leader gestured Chris into the front seat, and himself climbed into the back. The doors slid shut simultaneously from the ceiling and floor, rather like a mouth closing, and the cab lifted gently until it hovered about six feet above street level.

  "Destination?" the Tin Cabby said cheerily, making Chris jump.

  "City Hall."

  "Social Security number?"

  "One five six one one dash zero nine seven five dash zero six nine eight two one seven."

  "Thank you."

  "Shaddup."

  "You're welcome, sir."

  The cab lifted vertically, and the gang captain settled back into his seat. He seemed content for the moment to allow Chris to sightsee out the windows at the passing stubby towers of the flying city; he looked relaxed and, a little indulgent, but a little wary, too. Finally he said:

  "I need to Dutch uncle you a little, Red. I didn't call a cab because of the leg I've walked farther on worse. Feel up to listening?"

  Chris felt himself freezing. Distracted though he was by all this enormous budget of new experience and the vast reaches of the unknown which stretched before him, the pressgang leader's remark reminded him instantly of Kelly, and as instantly made him ashamed that he had forgotten. In the same rush of anger he remembered that he had been kidnapped, and that now there was no one left to take care of his father and the little kids but Bob. That had been hard enough to do when there had been two of them. It was bad enough that he would never see Annie and Kate and Bob and his father again, but far worse that they should be deprived of his hands and his back and his love; and worst of all, they would never know what had happened.

  The little girls would only think that he .and Kelly had run away, and won4er why, and mourn a little until they forgot about it. But Bob and his father might well think that he'd deserted them ... most likely of all that he had gone off with Scranton on his own hook, leaving them all to scrounge for themselves.

  There was a well-known ugly term for that among the peasantry of the Earth, expressing all the contempt it felt for any man who abandoned his land, no matter how unrewarding it was, to tread the alien streets and star lanes of a nomad city: it was called, "going Okie."

  Chris had gone Okie. He had not done, it 0. his own free will, but his father and Bob and the little girls would never know that. For that matter, it would never have happened had it not been for his own useless curiosity; and neither would the death of poor Kelly, who, Chris now remembered too, had been Bob's dog.

  The big man in the hard hat saw his expression ,close down, and made an impatient gesture. "Listen, Red, I know what you're thinking. What good would it do now if

  I said I was sorry? What's done is done; you're on board, and you're going to stay on board. We didn't put the snatch on you either. If you didn't know about the impressment laws, you've got your own ignorance to blame."

  "You killed my brother's dog."

  "No, I didn't. I've got a bad rip or two under that rag to prove I had reasons to kill him; but I wasn't the guy who did it, and I couldn't have done it, either. But that's done too, and can't be undone. Right now I'm trying to help you, and I've got about three minutes left to do it in, so if you don't shut up and listen it'll be too late. You need help, Red; can't you understand that?"

  "Why do you bother?" Chris said bitterly.

  "Because you're a bright kid and a fighter, and I like that. But that's not going to be enough aboard an Okie city, believe me. You're in a situation now that's totally new to you, and if you've got any skills you can make a career on here, I'll be darned surprised, I can tell you that. And Scranton isn't going to start educating you this far along in your life. Are you smart enough to take some advice, or aren't you? If you aren't, there's no sense in my bothering. You've got about a minute left to think it over."

  What the big man said made a bitter dose to have to swallow, but it did seem to make sense. And it did seem likely, too, that the man's intentions were good otherwise, why would he be taking the trouble? Nevertheless Chris's emotions were in too much of a turmoil for him to trust himself to speak; instead, he merely nodded mutely.

  "Good for you. First of all, I'm taking you to see the boss not the mayor, he doesn't count for much, but Frank Lutz, the city manager. One of the things he'll ask you is what you do, or what you know about. Between now and when we get there, you ought to be thinking up an answer. I don't care what you tell him, but tell him something. And it had better be the thing you know the most about, because he'll ask you questions."

  "I don't know anything except gardening, and hunting," Chris said grimly.

  "No, no, that's not what I mean! Don't you have any book subjects? Something that might be useful in space? If you don't, he'll put you to work pitching slag and you won't have much of a lifetime as an Okie."

  The cab slowed, and then began to settle.

  "And if he doesn't seem interested in what you tell him, don't try to satisfy him by switching to something else. No true specialist really knows more than one subject, especially at your age. Stick to the one you picked and try to make it sound useful, Understand?"

  "Yes, but"

  "No time left for 'hi4.' One other thing: If you ever get into a jam on board this burg, you'll need to know somebody to turn to, and it'd better not be Frank Lutz. My name is Frad Haskins, not Fred but Frad, FRAD."

  The cab hovered for a moment, and then its hull grated against the cobblestones and the doors slid open. Chris was thinking so hard and in so many directions that for a long. moment he did not understand what the pressgang chief was trying to convey by introducing himself. Then the realization hit home, and Chris was struggling unsuccessfully to blurt out his than3s and give his own name at the same time.

  "Destination, gentlemen," the Tin Cabby said primly.

  "Shaddup. Come along, Red."

  Frank Lutz, the city manager of Scranton inflight, reminded Chris instantly of a skunk but by this Chris meant not at all what a city boy would have meant by a skunk. Lutz was small, sleek, handsome, and plump, and even sitting behind his desk, he gave an appearance of slight clumsiness. A he listened to Haskins' account of the two impressments, even his expression had something of the nearsighted amiability of the woods pussy; but as Haskins finished, the city manager looked up suddenly and Chris knew, if he had ever
been in any doubt about it before, that this animal was also dangerous . . . and never more so than, when it seemed to be turning its back.

  "That impressment law was a nuisance. But I suppose we'll have to make a show of maintaining our pickups until we get to some part of space where the police aren't so thick."

  "We've got no drug for them, that's for sure," Haskins agreed obscurely.

  "That's not a public subject," Lutz said, with such deadly coldness that Chris was instantly convinced that the slip, whatever its meaning, had been intended by Haskins for his own ears. The big man was a lot more devious than his size or his bluffness suggested. That much was becoming clearer every minute. "As for these samples, I don't suppose they can do anything. They never can."

  The deceptively mild hazel eyes, watery and inoffensive, swung suddenly to bear on the redneck. "What's your name?"

  "Who wants to know? That's what I want to know. You got no right"

  "Don't buck me, bum, I haven't got the time. So you've got no name. Have you a trade?"

  "I'm no bum, 'm a puddler," the redneck said indignantly. "A steel puddler."

  "Same thing. Anything else?"

  "I been a puddler twenty years. 'M a Master Puddler, fair an' square. I got seniority, see? I don' need to be anything else, see? I got a trade. Nobody knows it like I do."

  "Been working lately?" the city manager said quietly. "No. But I got seniority. And a card. I'm no bum, in a craftsman, see?"

  "If you were a Genius Puddler I couldn't use you, buddy. . . not even if, as and when we ever see any steel again. This is a Bessemer process town, and it was one even back when you were an apprentice. You didn't notice? Tough. Barney, Huggins, this one's fer the slag heaps."