Cities in Flight Retelling: Earthman Come Home Part 3 - The Mystery of He
This is the big one. Chapter 4 of Earthman, Come Home is called “He,” and it’s the longest chapter in the entire novel. “He” is a planet, not a person. And what happens on that planet is one of the most ambitious things Amalfi and New York City have ever attempted. They move a whole world.
Landing on a Lost Planet
New York City has crossed into the Rift, that vast empty gap between galactic arms where stars are rare and work is nonexistent. And in the middle of this desert, they find a planet called He. It orbits a lone star that’s speeding through the Rift at high velocity. This world got cut off from the rest of civilization thousands of years ago.
The people on He, the Hevians, once had a great advanced culture. But two disasters hit at the same time. First, a natural axial shift changed their climate to permanent tropical heat. Second, their sun carried them into the Rift, away from all the other stars. Their civilization collapsed. What remains is a mix of city-states that still remember fragments of their old technology, and bandit cities that prey on the civilized ones.
Amalfi’s main contact is Miramon, a Hevian technician with a sharp mind and a giant feather stuck in his topknot. Miramon doesn’t believe in his planet’s gods. But he follows the religious rituals anyway, because the priesthood is the only thing holding society together. Without it, everyone would just give up and slide back into the mud.
Here’s the thing about the Hevians. Their religion says women are the source of sin. Women are kept in cages, treated as subhuman reminders of damnation. The bandit cities threw out the religion entirely, which is why people keep deserting to them. Amalfi accepts custody of the caged women from the priests without argument, a smooth political move that the Hevians interpret as a sacred act.
The Deal
Amalfi needs to get paid. He’s an Okie, after all. And He turns out to be sitting on two things of enormous value: germanium, which is the metal that serves as currency in Okie civilization, and anti-agathic drugs growing wild in the jungle. Anti-agathics are the drugs that stop aging. They’re incredibly rare in the wider galaxy, and here they’re just weeds.
But there’s a catch. The Okies can’t just mine the planet without permission. If they showed up rich without a contract, Earth’s cops would assume they got their wealth through crime. So Amalfi needs a written deal with the Hevians.
Miramon tells him what the priests will demand in return. First, the secret of the anti-aging drugs for themselves. Second, and this is the hard part, they want the jungle wiped out. The endless tropical jungle that covers everything.
Amalfi asks the City Fathers, the giant computers that run the city’s operations, how to kill a jungle permanently. Their answer surprises him. You can’t, not in a tropical climate. Unless the planet has a natural axial wobble. In that case, you could theoretically tip the planet’s axis to change the climate. Nobody has ever done it. A bill to do it to Earth once lost by only three votes.
Amalfi sees the answer immediately. He also sees that the City Fathers will never approve it. So he does something he’s almost never done in nine hundred years. He orders Hazleton to shut down the City Fathers. Just turn them off. Before they can stop him.
The machines go silent. And Amalfi is ready to move a world.
Rescue Under Fire
Before Moving Day, there’s another problem. Survivors from the destroyed agronomist city have crash-landed on He and been captured by a bandit town called Fabr-Suithe. These are the people who might know about Doctor Beetle’s no-fuel drive. Amalfi needs them alive.
What follows is one of the most vivid action sequences Blish ever wrote. Amalfi and Hazleton ride in a Hevian rocket to attack Fabr-Suithe, and neither of them has ever experienced atmospheric combat before. The Okies are used to space. Now they’re inside a shaking metal tube while bullets punch holes through the hull around them and explosions go off in every direction.
Amalfi can’t even identify what the sounds are. He’s never heard gunfire before. The whooping, screaming weapons of Hevian warfare are completely alien to a man who has spent centuries in space. Blish does something clever here. He makes the reader feel Amalfi’s confusion by refusing to name the weapons. You just hear noise and see holes appearing in the metal.
The plan works, barely. Hazleton uses the rocket’s power pile to create a massive flash of visible light. A photon explosion. Everyone looking at the sky goes blind, temporarily for most, permanently for the unlucky ones. Amalfi’s team pulls the prisoners out.
But the rescue is grim. Of the captured Okies, one was strangled by his own friends as a mercy. Another begs to be killed. Two are insane. The one rational survivor, who had already taught himself to speak without a tongue after the “questioning,” gets killed by a stray bullet during takeoff. A brass-nosed slug goes through the rocket hull and takes the top of his skull off.
The information they get from the survivors is thin. Doctor Beetle probably didn’t make it off the dead city. The bindlestiff might have him. Nobody knows for sure.
The Bindlestiff Was Here All Along
Amalfi’s work crews start drilling into He’s crust, preparing for Moving Day. The plan is to reinforce the planet’s structure with iron from its own core, stitching the crust together with natural steel so it can survive being tipped on its axis. At two hundred points across the surface, teams are sinking interlocking shafts toward the molten center.
Then the work camps start getting destroyed. Twenty percent of Amalfi’s crews die in the first month. And the weapons used are too advanced for the Hevians. Flat-plane explosives. Military-grade poison gas called Hawkesite that makes you vomit, sneeze, and blister all at once.
Amalfi puts it together. The bindlestiff, the criminal city they’ve been worried about, was already on He when New York arrived. It landed quietly, hid itself under a lake of boiling mud, and allied with the bandit towns. It has been directing the attacks all along.
This is classic Blish. The enemy doesn’t attack head-on. It pilots the local culture, manipulating events from behind the scenes, turning native conflicts to its advantage. Amalfi describes it perfectly: a shrewd Okie never overwhelms a civilization by direct assault. It steers history sideways at the crucial moment.
Moving Day
Amalfi advances the deadline. He spreads the rumor that Moving Day is coming a thousand hours early. The goal is to force the bindlestiff out of hiding. Meanwhile, Hazleton executes a wild plan. He takes the Hevian women, now cleaned up and clothed, and plants them in a clearing where a bindlestiff outpost can see them. The tramps can’t resist. They fight their own allies for the women, even nuking a Hevian town in the process. That act unites every Hevian faction against them.
The police have arrived too, circling above the planet but unable to land because the bindlestiff has thrown up a shell of orbital mines. Everyone is stuck. The bindlestiff is surrounded but hidden under its umbrella of explosives.
Then the bindlestiff starts to rise from the mud lake, ready to flee through a gap in its own mine field. And Amalfi presses the button.
Six pillars of white fire, each forty miles across, burst through the planet’s surface. One of them vaporizes Fabr-Suithe instantly. The pillars shoot hundreds of miles into space and explode, sending steel meteors screaming across the sky. The spindizzy field goes live around the entire planet. The orbital mines scatter into the void, cut off from the world they were circling.
The planet of He begins to move. Under spindizzy drive, this whole world is now the biggest Okie “city” that has ever flown. It crosses the Rift at twice the speed of light, blasts past its own sun, punches through the far wall of stars, and keeps going. Right out of the galaxy.
Amalfi and Hazleton have no way to stop it. The planet is too massive. They can only watch as stars flash past like fireflies and the entire galaxy begins shrinking behind them.
Aftermath
They abandon He. They have no choice. The city lifts off from the fleeing planet and begins the long trip back toward their own galaxy. Behind them, He vanishes into intergalactic space, carrying Miramon and his people toward the Andromeda galaxy.
But the contract is fulfilled. Amalfi is sure of it. The Hevians won’t be hurt. The spindizzy screen protects them from losing heat and atmosphere. Their volcanoes will keep them warm. And without enough light to sustain it, the jungle will die. That was the deal. The jungle would be destroyed. It just happened by sending the whole planet out of range of its sun.
And the bindlestiff? It blew up. The tramps had captured Doctor Beetle after all, tortured the no-fuel drive out of him, and tried to use it immediately. But the drive was unfinished, a half-baked invention that needed another culture’s expertise to perfect. When the bindlestiff activated it inside the most powerful spindizzy field in history, the incompatible technologies reacted. The criminal city was gone in an instant.
“It doesn’t pay to be lazy, Mark,” Amalfi says.
The chapter ends with Amalfi turning the City Fathers back on. The machines wake up alarmed. “MAYOR AMALFI, HAVE YOU TIPPED THIS PLANET?” No, he tells them. He sent it on its way as it was. The City Fathers accept this, run their calculations, and tell the crew to stand by for a course determination.
Dee Hazleton appears in the doorway. “Where are we going?” she asks. And Amalfi, nine hundred years old, has no real answer. Where does an Okie go? They’re going, that’s all. If there’s a destination, no one can know what it is.
Why This Chapter Matters
“He” is where Blish shows what the Okie concept can really do. Moving a city is impressive. Moving a planet is something else entirely. Amalfi doesn’t just solve a problem here. He reshapes the fate of an entire civilization, sends them on a journey that will take thousands of years, and treats it as a fulfilled contract.
But there’s a sadness underneath it all. The Hevians didn’t ask to become interstellar pioneers. Amalfi decided for them. The women were used as bait. The rational survivor died before he could tell them what they needed to know. And at the end, New York City is poorer than when it arrived. No germanium, no drugs, burning fuel to get back to their own galaxy.
The only profit is survival. And maybe that’s enough.
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