Earthman, Come Home by James Blish

Author:James Blish [Blish, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780099086901
Goodreads: 1930281
Publisher: Arrow
Published: 1955-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

·He seemed to have calmed down a little, Amalfi said. "What's wrong with germanium?"

"Nothing," the dockman said, looking at Amalfi over his incredible nose with a mixture of compassion and vindictiveness, "It's a good, useful metal. But it just isn't money any more, Okie. I don't see how you could have missed finding that out. Germanium is trash now—well, no, it's still worth something, but only what it's actually worth, if you get me. You have to buy it; you can't buy other things with it.

"It's no good here as money. It's no good anywhere else, either. Anywhere else. The whole galaxy is broke. Dead broke.

"And so are you."

He wiped his eyes again. Overhead a siren groaned, softly but urgently.

Hazleton was ready, and had sighted the incoming cops.

Amalfi found it impossible to understand what happened when he closed the "spin" key. He did not hope to understand it at any time in the future, either; and it would do no good to ask the City Fathers, who would simply refuse to tell him—for the very good reason that they did not know. Whatever they had had in reserve for Standard Situation N—that ultimate situation which every Okie city must expect to face eventually, the situation wherein what is necessary to prevent total destruction is only and simply to get away fast—it was drastic and unprecedented. Or it had become so when the City Fathers had been given the chance to pool their knowledge with that of the City Fathers of the all-purpose city.

The city snapped from its graving dock on Murphy to a featureless coordinate-set space. The movement took no

time and involved no detectable display of energy. One moment the city was on Murphy; Amalfi closed the key, and Murphy had vanished, and Jake was demanding to know where in space the city was. He was told to find out.

The cops had come up on Murphy in fair order, but they had not been given the chance to fire a single shot. When Jake had managed to find Murphy again, O'Brian sent a proxy out to watch the cops, who by that time were shooting back and forth across the planet's sky like belated actors looking for a crucial collar button.

An hour later, without the slightest preliminary activity, the all-purpose city snapped out of existence on Murphy. By the time the garagemen had recovered enough to sound another alarm, the cops were scattered in all directions, still hunting something that they had had no prior idea could turn up missing: Amalfi's own town. By the time they managed to reform their ranks sufficiently to trace the all-purpose city, it had stopped operating, and thus had become undetectable?.

It was floating now in an orbit half a million miles away from Amalfi's city. Its screens were down again. If there had been any garagemen on it when it took off, they were dead now; the city was airless.

And the City Fathers honestly did not know how all this had been accomplished; or, rather, they no longer knew.

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