Cities of Flight by James Blish

Author:James Blish [Blish, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SciFi-Masterwork
Amazon: B00UDU198Y
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2000-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE: Murphy

A SPINDIZZY going sour makes the galaxy's most unnerving noise. The top range of the sound is inaudible, but it feels like a multiple toothache. Just below that, there is a screech like metal tearing, which blends smoothly into a composite cataract of plate glass, slate, and boulders; this is the middle register. After that, there is a painful gap in the sound's spectrum, and the rest of the noise comes into one's ears again with a hollow round dinosaurian sob and plummets on down into the subsonics, ending in frequencies which induce diarrhea and an almost unconquerable urge to bite one's thumbs.

The noise was coming, of course, from the Twenty-third Street spindizzy, but it permeated the whole city. It was tolerable only so long as the hold which contained the moribund driver was kept sealed. Amalfi knew better than to open that hold. He surveyed the souring machine via instruments, and kept the audio tap prudently closed. The sound fraction which was thrumming through the city's walls was bad enough, even as far up as the control chamber.

Hazleton's hand came over his left shoulder, stabbing a long finger at the recording thermocouple.

"She's beginning to smoke now. Damned if I know how she's lasted this long. The model was two hundred years old when we took it aboard-and the repair job I did on He was only an emergency rig."

"What can we do?" Amalfi said. He did not bother to look around; the city manager's moods were his own second nature. They had lived together a long time-long enough to learn what learning is, long enough to know that, just as habit is second nature, so nature-the seven steps from chance to meaning-is first habit. The hand which rested upon Amalfi's right shoulder told him all he needed to know about Hazleton at this moment. "We can't shut her down."

"If we don't, she'll blow for good and all. That hold's hot already."

"Hot and howling. .. . Let me think a minute."

Hazleton waited. After another moment, Amalfi said, "We'll keep her shoving. If the City Fathers can push this much juice through her, maybe they can push just a little more. Maybe enough to get us down to a reasonable cruising speed. Besides-we couldn't jury-rig that spindizzy again. It's radiating all up and down the line. The City Fathers could shut her down if we ordered it, but it'd take human beings to repair her and re-tune the setup stages. And it's too late for that."

"It'll be a year before anything alive can go into that hold," Hazleton agreed gloomily. "All right. How's our velocity now?"

"Negligible, with reference to the galaxy as a whole. But as far as the Acolyte stars proper are concerned- we'd shoot through the whole cluster at about eight times the city's top speed if we stopped decelerating now. It's going to be damned tight, that's for sure, Mark."

"Excuse me," Dee's voice said behind them. She was hesitating just beyond the threshold of the lift shaft.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.