CHAPTER THREE: "Like a Barrel of Scrap"

Even a city which has sloughed off its slums to go space flying has hidey holes, and Chris had lost no time in finding one of his own. He had located it with the simple instinct of a hunted animal going to ground.

Not that anybody was hunting for him-not yet. But something told him that it would be only a matter of time. Dr. Boyle Warner, the city's astronomer, had been more than kind to him, but he had asked hard questions all the same; and these had revealed quickly enough that

Chris's knowledge of astronomy, while extraordinary in a youngster with no formal education worth mentioning, was too meager to be of any help to Dr. Warner or of any use to the city.

Dr. Warner signed him on as an apprentice anyhow, and so reported to the city manager's office, but not without carefully veiled misgivings, and an open warning:

"I can think of very little for you to do around the observatory that would be useful, Crispin, I'm sorry to say. If I so much as set you to work sweeping the place, one of Frank Lutz's henchmen would find out about it sooner or later; and Frank would point out quite legitimately that I don't need so big a fellow as you for so light a task as that. While you're with me, you'll have to appear to be studying all the time."

"I will be studying," Chris said. "That's just what I'd like."

"I appreciate that," Dr. Warner said sadly. "And I sympathize. But Crispin, it can't last forever. Neither I nor anyone else in Scranton can give you in two years the ten years of study that you've missed, let alone any part of what it took me thirty more years to absorb. I'll do my best, but that best can only be a pretense-and sooner or later they'll catch us at it."

After that, Chris already knew, would come the slag heaps-hence the hidey hole. He wondered if they would send Dr. Warner to the slag heaps too. It didn't seem very likely, for the frail, pot-bellied little astrophysicist could hardly last long at the wrong end of a shovel, and besides he was the only navigator the city had. Chris mentioned this guardedly to Frad Haskins.

"Don't you believe it," Frad said grimly. "The fact is that we've got no navigator at all. Expecting an astronomer to navigate is about like asking a chicken to fry an egg. Doc Warner ought to be a navigator's assistant himself, not a navigator-in-chief, and Frank Lutz knows it. If we ever run across another city with a spare real navigator to trade, Frank could send Boyle Warner to the slag heaps without blinking an eye. I don't say that he would, but he might."

It could hardly be argued that Haskins knew his boss, and after only one look of his own at Lutz, Chris was more than ready to agree. Officially, Chris continued to occupy the single tiny room at the university dormitory to which he had been assigned as Dr. Warner's apprentice, but he kept nothing there but the books that Dr. Warner lent him, the mathematical instruments from the same source, and the papers and charts that he was supposed to be working on; plus about a quarter of the rough clothing and the even rougher food which the city had issued him as soon as he had been given an official status. The other three-quarters of both went into the hole, for Chris had no intention of letting himself be caught at an official address when the henchmen of Frank Lutz finally came looking for him.

He studied as hard in the hole as he did in the dormitory and at the observatory, all the same. He was firmly determined that Dr. Warner should not suffer for his dangerous kindness if there was anything that Chris could possibly do to avoid it. Frad Haskins, though his visits were rare-he had no real business at the university-detected this almost at once; but he said only:

"I knew you were a fighter."

For almost a year Chris was quite certain that he was making progress. Thanks to his father, for example, he found it relatively easy to understand the economy of the city-probably better than most of its citizens did, and almost certainly better than either Frad Haskins or Dr. Warner. Once aloft, Scranton had adopted the standard economy of all tribes of highly isolated nomad herdsmen, to whom the only real form Of wealth is grass: a commune, within which everyone helped himself to what be needed, subject only to the rules which established the status of his job in the community. If Frad Haskins needed to ride in a, cab, for instance, he boarded it, and gave the Tin Cabby his social security number-but if, at the end of the fiscal year, his account showed more cab charges than was reasonable for his job, he would hear about it. And if he or anyone else took to hoarding physical goods-no matter whether they were loaves of bread or. lock washers, they could not by definition be in anything but short supply on board an Okie city-he would do more than hear about it: The penalties for hoarding of any kind were immediate and drastic.

There was money aboard the city, but no ordinary citizen ever saw it or needed it. It was there to be used exclusively for foreign trade-that is, to bargain for grazing rights, or other privileges and, supplies which the city did not and could not carry within the little universe bounded by its spindizzy field. The ancient herdsmen had accumulated gold and jewels for the same reason. Aboard Scranton, the equivalent metal was germanium, but there was actually very little of it in the city's vaults; since germanium had been the universal metal base for money throughout this part of the galaxy ever since space flight had become practical most of the city's currency was paper-the same "Oc dollar" everyone used in trading with the colonies.

All this was new to Chris in the specific situation in which he now found himself, but it was far from new to him in principle. As yet, however, he was too lowly an object in Scranton to be able to make use of his understanding; and remembering the penury into which his father had been driven, back on Earth, he was far from sure that he would ever have a use for it.

As the year passed, so also did the stars. The city manager, according to Haskins, had decided not to cruise anywhere inside "the local group"-an arbitrary sphere fifty light-years in diameter, with Sol at its center. The planetary systems of the local group had been heavily settled during the great colonial Exodus of 2375-2400, mostly by people from Earth's fallen Western culture who were fleeing the then worldwide Bureaucratic State. It was Lutz's guess-quickly confirmed by challenges received by Scranton's radio station-that the density of older Okie cities would be too high to let a newcomer into competition.

During this passage, Chris busied himself with trying to identify the stars involved by their spectra. This was the only possible way to do it under the circumstances, for of course their positions among the constellations changed rapidly as the city overtook them. So did the constellations themselves, although far more slowly.

It was hard work, and Chris was often far from sure his identifications were correct. All the same, it was impressive to know that those moving points of light all around him were the almost legendary stars of colonial times, and even more impressive to find that he had one of those storied suns in the small telescope. Their very names echoed with past adventure: Alpha Centauri, Wolf 359, RD-4°4048', Altair, 61 Cygni, Sirius, Kruger 60, Procyon, 40 Eridani. Only a very few of these, of course, lay anywhere near the city's direct line of flight-indeed, many of them were scattered "astern" (that is, under the keel of the city), in the imaginary hemisphere on the other side of his home Sun. But most of them were at least visible from here, and the rest could be photographed. The city, whatever Chris thought of it as a home, had to be given credit for being a first-class observatory platform.

How he saw the stars was another matter, and one that was a complete mystery to him. He knew that Scranton was now traveling at a velocity many times that of light, and it seemed to him that under these circumstances there should have been no stars at all still visible in the city's wake, and those to the side and even straight ahead should be suffering considerable distortion. Yet in fact he could see no essential change in the aspect of the skies. To understand how this could be so would require at least some notion of how the spindizzies worked, and on this theory Dr. Warner's explanations were even more unclear than usual ... so much so that Chris suspected him of not understanding it any too well himself.

Lacking the theory, Chris's only clue was that the stars from Scranton-in-flight looked to him much as they always had from a field in the Pennsylvania backwoods, where the surrounding Appalachians had screened him from the sky glare of Scranton-on-the-ground. From this he deducted that the spindizzy screen, though itself invisible, cut down the apparent brightness of the stars by about three magnitudes, as had the atmosphere of the Earth in the region where Chris had lived. Again he didn't know the reason why, but he could see that the effect had some advantages. For instance, it blanked out many of the fainter stars completely to the naked eye, thus greatly reducing the confusing multitudes of stars which would otherwise have been visible in space. Was that really an unavoidable effect of the spindizzy field-or was it instead something imposed deliberately, as an aid to navigation?

"I'm going to ask Lutz that question myself," Dr. Warner said, when Chris proposed it. "It's no help to me; in fact, it takes all the fun out of being an astronomer in free space. And there's no time like the present. Come along, Crispin-I can't very well leave you in charge, and the only other logical place for Lutz to see an apprentice of mine is with me."

It seemed to Chris that nobody aboard Scranton ever said anything officially to him but "Come along," but he went. He did not relish the prospect of seeing the city manager again, but it was probably true that he would be safer under the astronomer's wing than he would be anyplace else; in fact, he was both surprised by, and a little admiring of, Dr. Warner's boldness.

But if Boyle Warner ever asked the question, Chris never heard the answer.

Frank Lutz did not believe in making people who came to see him on official business wait in ante-chambers: It wasted his time as well as theirs, and he at least had none to waste-and they had better not have. Nor were there many details of his administration that he thought he needed to keep secret, not now that those who might oppose him no longer had any place to run to. To remind his people who was boss, he occasionally kept the mayor waiting out of earshot, but everyone else came and went quite freely when he held court.

Dr. Warner and Chris sat in the rearmost benches-for Lutz's "court" was actually held in what once had been a courtroom-and waited patiently to work their way forward to the foot of the city manager's desk. In the process, the astronomer fell into a light doze; Frank Lutz's other business was nothing to him, and in addition his hearing was no better than usual for a man his age. Both Chris's curiosity and his senses, on the other hand, shared the acuity of his youth, and the latter had been sharpened by almost a lifetime of listening and watching for the rustle of small animals in the brush; and the feeling of personal danger with which Frank Lutz had filled him on their first encounter was back again, putting a razor edge upon hearing and curiosity alike.

"We're in no position to temporize," the city manager was saying. "This outfit is big-the biggest there is-and it's offering us a fair deal, The next time we meet it, it may not be so polite, especially if we give it any sass this time around. I'm going to talk turkey with them."

"But what do they want?" Someone said. Chris craned his neck, but he did not know the man who had spoken. Most of Lutz's advisers were nonentities, in any event, except for those like Huggins, who were outright thugs.

"They want us to veer off. They've analyzed our course and say we're headed for a region of space that they'd had staked out long before we showed up. Now this, let me point out, is actually all to the good. They have a preliminary survey of the area, and we don't—"everything ahead of us is all alike, until we've had some experience of it. Furthermore, one of the things they offer in. payment is a new course which they say will take us into an iron-bearing star cluster, very recently settled, where there's-likely to be plenty of work for us."

"So they say."

"And I believe them," Lutz said sharply. "Everything they've said to me, they've also said on the open air, by Dirac transmitter. The cops have heard every word, not only locally, but wherever in the whole universe that there's a Dirac transceiver. Big as they are, they're not going to attempt to phony an open contract. The only question in my mind is, what ought to be the price?"

He looked down at the top of his desk. Nobody seemed to have any suggestions. Finally he looked up again and smiled coldly.

"I've thought of several, but the one I like best is this: They can help us run up our supplies. We haven't got the food to reach the cluster that they've designated-I'd hoped we'd make a planetfall long before we had to go that far-but that's something that they can't know, and that I'm not going to tell them."

"They'll know when you ask for the food, Frank—"

"I'm not such an idiot. Do you think any Okie city would ever sell food at any price? You might as well try to buy oxygen, or money. I'm going to ask them to throw in some minor piece of machinery or other, it doesn't matter what, and two or three technicians to man and service it; and as an evidence of good faith, I'll offer back for these oh-so-valuable technicians a big batch of our people-people that are of no use to us. There won't be so many of them that a town that size would have any difficulty in absorbing them-but to us, they'll represent just the number of extra mouths to feed that would prevent us from reaching the iron-bearing cluster that Amalfi's offered to guide us to. Food will never be mentioned. It'll be just a standard swap of personnel, under the usual Okie 'rule of discretion.'"

There was, a long minute of respectful silence. Even Chris was forced to admire the ingenuity of the scheme, insofar as he understood it. Frank Lutz smiled again and added:

"And this way we get rid of every single one of those useless bums and red-necks we had to take aboard under the impressment laws. The cops will never know it; and neither will Amalfi; he has to carry enough food and, ah, medicines to maintain a crew of well over a million. He'll swallow another three hundred yokels without as much effort as you'd swallow an aspirin, and probably think it a fair trade for two techies and a machine that are useless to him. The most beautiful part of it all is, it might even be a fair trade-which brings me to my next point—"

But Chris did not stay to hear the next point. After a last, quick, regretful glance at the drowsing astronomer who had befriended him, he stole out of the court as silently as any poacher, and went to ground.

The hole was structurally an accident. Located in a warehouse at the edge of the city nearest the university, it was in the midst of an immense stack of heavy crates which evidently had shifted during the first few moments of take-off, thus forming a huge and unpredictable three-dimensional maze which no map of the city would ever show. By worrying a hole in the side of one crate with a pocketknife, Chris had found that it contained mining machinery (and, evidently, so did all the others, since they all bore the same stenciled code number). The chances were good, he thought, that the crates would not be unstacked until Scranton made its first planetfall; the city in flight would have nothing to dig into.

Nor did Chris have any reason to leave the hole, at least for now. The warehouse itself had a toilet he could visit, and seemed to be unfrequented; and of course it didn't need a watchman-Who would bother to steal heavy machinery, and where would they run with it? If he was careful not to set any fires with his candles-for the hole, although fairly well ventilated through the labyrinth, was always pitch dark-he would probably be safe until Irk food ran out After that, he would have to take his chances . . . but he had been a poacher before.

But nothing in his plans had allowed for a visitor.

He heard the sounds of the approach from some distance and blew out his candle at once. Maybe it was only a casual prowler; maybe even only a strayed child-maybe, at the worst, another refugee from Lutz's flesh-trading deal, looking for a hole. There were plenty of holes amid the piled-up crates, and the way to this one was so complex that two of them could live in the heap for weeks without encountering each other.

But his heart sank as he realized how quietly the footsteps were approaching. The newcomer was negotiating the maze with scarcely a false turn, let alone a noisy blunder.

Someone knew where he was-or at least knew where his hole was.

The footsteps became louder, slowed, and stopped. Now he could distinctly hear someone breathing.

Then the beam of a hand torch caught him full in the face.

"Hell, Chris. Make a light, huh?"

The voice was that of Frad Haskins. Anger and relief flooded through Chris at the same time. The big man had been his first friend, and almost his name-brother-for after all, Fradley O. Haskins is not much more ridiculous a name than Crispin deFord-but that blow of light in the face had been like a betrayal.

"I've only got candles. If you'd set the flashlight on end, it'd be just as good-maybe better."

"Okay." Haskins sat down on the floor, placing the torch on the small crate Chris used for a table, so that it made a round spot of light on the boards overhead. "Now tell me something. Just what do you think you're doing?"

"Hiding," Chris said, a little sullenly.

"I can see that. I knew what this place was from the day I saw you toting books into it. I have to keep in practice on this press-gang dodge; I'll need it some day on some other planet. But in your case, what's the sense? Don't you want to be transferred to a bigger city?"

"No, I don't. Oh, I can't say that Scranton's been like home to me. I hate it. I wish I could really go home. But Frad, at least I'm getting to know the place. I already knew part of it, back while it was on the ground. I don't want to be kidnapped twice, and go through it all again aboard some city where I don't know even as much about the streets as I knew about Scranton-and maybe find out that I hate it even worse. And I don't like being swapped, like-like a barrel of scrap."

"Well, maybe I can't blame you for that-though it's standard Okie procedure, not anything that Lutz thought up in his own head. Do you know where the 'rule of discretion' came from?"

"From the trading of players between baseball teams. It's that old-more than a thousand years. The contract law that sanctions it is supposed to be a whale of a lot older, even."

"All right," Chris said. "It could even be Roman, I suppose. But Frad, I'm not a barrel of scrap and I still don't want to be swapped."

"Now that part of it," the big man said patiently, "is just plain silly. You've got no future in Scranton, and you ought to know it by now. On a really big town you could probably find something to do-and the least you'll get is some schooling. All our schools are closed, for good and forever. And another thing: We've only been aloft a year, and it's a cinch we've got some hard times ahead of us. An older town would be a darn sight safer-not absolutely safe, no Okie ever is; but safer."

"Are you going, too?"

Haskins laughed. "Not a chance. Amalfi must have ten thousand of the likes of me. Besides, Lutz needs me. He doesn't know it, but he does."

"Well .. . then.. . I'd rather stay with you."

Haskins smote one fist into the other palm in exasperation. "Look, Red.. . Cripes, what do you say to this kid? Thanks, Chris; I-I'll remember that. But if I'm lucky, I'll have a boy of my own some day. This isn't the day. If you don't face facts right now, you aren't going to get a second chance. Listen, I'm the only guy who knows where you are, yet, but how long can that last? Do you know what Frank will do when he roots you out of a hole full of cached food? Think, please, will you?"

Chris's stomach felt as though he had just been thrown out of a window.

"I guess I never thought of that."

"You need practice.. I don't blame you for that. But I'll tell you what Frank will do: He'll have you shot. And nobody else in town'll even raise an eyebrow. In the Okie lawbook, hoarding food comes under the head of endangering the survival of the city. Any such crime is a capital crime-and not only in Scranton, either."

There was a long silence. At last, Chris said quietly:

"All right. Maybe it is better this way. I'll go."

"That's using your head," Haskins said gruffly. "Come on, then. We'll tell Frank you were sick. You look sick, right enough. But we'll have to hustle-the gigs leave in two hours."

"Can I take my books?"

"They're not yours, they're Boyle Warner's," Fred said impatiently. "I'll get 'em back to him later. Pick up the torch and let's go-you'll find plenty of books where you're going." He stopped suddenly and glared at Chris through the dim light. "Not that you care where you're going! You haven't even asked the name of the town."

This was true; he had not asked, and now that he came to think about it, he didn't care. But his curiosity came forward even through the gloom of the maze, and even through his despair. He said, "So I haven't. What is it?"

"New York."