Cities in Flight Retelling: Earthman Come Home Part 4 - Murphy's Law in Space

The chapter is called “Murphy,” and if you know Murphy’s Law, you already know how this is going to go. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong. And then it gets worse.

A Spindizzy Screaming to Death

The chapter opens with one of the best descriptions of mechanical failure I’ve read in science fiction. The Twenty-third Street spindizzy is dying, and it’s doing it loudly. Blish describes the sound as a combination of toothache, tearing metal, plate glass, slate, boulders, dinosaur sobs, and frequencies that literally make you sick. The whole city can hear it. The hold where the machine sits is sealed shut because the noise inside would be unbearable. And the machine is getting hot. Radioactively hot.

Amalfi and Hazleton, his city manager, have a problem. They can’t shut the spindizzy down because they need it to slow the city’s approach to the Acolyte star cluster. They can’t repair it because the hold is too radioactive for anyone to enter. They can’t jury-rig it again because it’s falling apart. Their only option is to push it harder and hope it holds long enough to get them to a place where they can buy a replacement.

Here’s the thing. New York has the money, or thinks it does. They mined a good amount of germanium on their last job. And germanium is money. Has been for centuries. So the plan is simple: fly to the nearest garage planet, buy a new spindizzy, and move on.

Dee, Hazleton’s wife, asks the obvious question: why not just replace the machine? The men exchange looks. It’s expensive, but maybe not impossible this time. The City Fathers, New York’s governing computers, will probably approve it after being forced to run the dying machine at maximum overdrive.

Cops in Fancy Uniforms

But Hazleton has another worry. Cops. New York has been accumulating unpaid fines and violations for a long time. If they ever get caught and forced to pay up, they’re bankrupt. And bankruptcy for an Okie city means dispersal. The city gets broken up, the people scattered. It’s meant to be a humane law, to stop desperate mayors from dragging bankrupt cities on endless job hunts where half the crew dies. But it’s still a death sentence for the city as a living thing.

Amalfi talks him down. The local cops can’t possibly know about their record. The galaxy is too big for every police force to track every petty offender. Relax, he says. We’re just another law-abiding Okie city.

And right at that exact moment, the screen flashes red and a police whistle screams through the control room.

The timing is perfect, and it’s classic Blish humor. The cops swagger aboard in flashy black uniforms with silver braid and shiny boots. They look like something out of a bad historical movie. But they’re carrying meson pistols, which are serious demolition weapons, modern enough to be dangerous. Amalfi notices the pistols and starts doing math in his head. These weapons mean the Acolyte cluster has had frequent contact with other Okie cities. That means there’s a garage planet nearby. Good news. But the pistols are demolition tools, not people weapons. That part is less reassuring.

The police lieutenant is rude, aggressive, and not very bright. He calls Amalfi “Fatty” and demands to know their business. Amalfi says petroleum geology, which is technically true but sounds like a joke. The lieutenant threatens a vagrancy charge. Amalfi calmly explains that vagrancy laws are forbidden by the Constitution. The cop laughs and says they don’t follow Earth’s Constitution out here.

So Amalfi bribes him. He offers to buy a medal ribbon off the lieutenant’s uniform for five hundred Oc dollars. It’s a worthless good-conduct ribbon, the kind Earth cops handed out centuries ago by the tens of thousands. But the lieutenant takes the money and leaves happy.

After the cops are gone, Hazleton points out that the bribe was probably unnecessary. The lieutenant never even asked to see their violations record. Something is off. Why does this backwater cluster maintain an alert border patrol, but staff it with cops who don’t care about actual law enforcement?

Three Hundred Cities in a Jungle

Then they see it on the screen. A green smudge near a red dwarf star at the edge of the cluster. Not one city. Hundreds of them. More than three hundred Okie cities huddled around a dim star like homeless people around a trash fire.

It’s a jungle. An Okie jungle.

This is the moment the chapter turns dark. Three hundred cities don’t park themselves in the middle of nowhere for fun. Okies are nomads. They go where the work is. If they’re all sitting in one place, it means there’s nowhere else to go.

Amalfi figures it out fast. The Acolyte cluster is exploiting the situation. They lure Okies here because the economy has collapsed somewhere in this part of the galaxy. Then they hire the few cities they need on a competitive basis. Lowest possible wages. The rest just sit there, waiting, slowly going broke.

Murphy the Garage Planet

New York lands on Murphy, the local garage world. It’s named right. The planet is a graveyard of cranes, hoists, pipelines, and rusty machines. Most of the graving docks are empty or filled with sand and flaked concrete. Business is dead.

But there’s one other city on Murphy, already grounded with its screens down. Hazleton sneaks over to investigate while Amalfi deals with the local garageman, a short, curly-haired guy with clogged pores and an attitude problem. The garageman’s first instinct is to tell them to go away. “No charity here. Go back to your jungle.” But when Amalfi mentions money, the guy’s whole personality changes. He’s a technician at heart, and the combination of cash and an interesting technical problem wins him over.

Then everything falls apart. Again.

The Check Bounces

The garageman checks their money with Lieutenant Lerner. Comes back running with a meson pistol. Because germanium isn’t money anymore. Not here, not anywhere in the galaxy.

The whole galactic economy has shifted to a drug standard. Currencies are now backed by pharmaceuticals, not metals. Germanium is still useful as a material, but its value as treasure is gone. New York’s actual metal is worth an eighth of what it was. Their paper money, Oc dollars backed by government germanium reserves on Earth, is completely worthless.

If the city had come away from their last job with the anti-agathic drugs they’d hoped to harvest, they’d be rich beyond imagination. Instead, they have a hold full of metal that nobody wants as currency.

The garageman literally cries laughing. “Germanium! What hole in the plenum have you been living in, Okie?”

And the cops are coming.

Standard Situation N

What happens next is the most extreme thing Amalfi has ever done. Earlier, Hazleton snuck over to the other grounded city and found it had been seized by the Acolyte government. Its crew was in debtor’s prison. The garagemen were hot-rodding it for a suicide mission on a gas giant. But its City Fathers still worked. Hazleton linked them to New York’s City Fathers.

Now, with cops closing in, Amalfi activates something called Standard Situation N. It’s the ultimate emergency escape, a sealed one-time circuit that every Okie city carries for the absolute worst case. It can never be used twice. Nobody knows exactly how it works, not even the City Fathers, because the circuit self-destructs after firing.

Both cities vanish from Murphy instantly. No energy signature, no detectable movement. One moment they’re there, the next they’re floating in empty space eight parsecs away, with confused cops buzzing around Murphy like lost bees.

Amalfi knows he wasted it. The situation was bad, but it wasn’t truly the end of the world. He burned both cities’ ultimate escape on a problem that was serious but not final. That circuit is gone forever.

The Jungle Is the Only Option

Standing alone on the belfry of City Hall, Amalfi thinks through everything. The other city is a wreck. Cracked keel, wrong-tuned drives, structurally unsound. They take the knowledge from its City Fathers and cut it loose. Then Amalfi does the math on their own situation.

They’re poor. They can sell their germanium for a fraction of its old value. Their paper money is trash. The drugs they have on board can’t be traded because the city needs them to survive. Anti-agathic drugs, the ones that keep everyone immortal, are now the most expensive thing in the galaxy. And every person on board will face a terrible choice: use your drug credits as money to survive now, or stay poor but keep living.

There’s no work in the Acolyte cluster that pays enough to matter. They can’t leave without a new spindizzy they can’t afford. There’s nowhere else to go.

Amalfi has one thought. Something about the Vegan orbital fort, a legendary alien construction that went Okie centuries ago and vanished. The fort is the great myth of the Okies, their Beowulf, their Prometheus. And Amalfi has an idea about it so outrageous he almost stops thinking it mid-thought.

But he puts that aside. For now, there’s only one option.

Hazleton calls in. “What’s the dodge? We’ll need to pull it soon.”

Amalfi looks up at the red dwarf star.

“There is no dodge,” he says. “We’re licked, Mark. We’re going to the jungle.”

What Blish Is Doing Here

This chapter is about the moment when all the clever plans and smooth moves stop working. Amalfi has always had an angle, a trick, a way out. He bribed the cop, he stole a city, he used the emergency escape circuit. And none of it mattered because the real problem isn’t cops or broken machines. It’s that the entire economic system changed while New York was in transit, and nobody told them.

Blish is writing about systemic failure. Not one thing going wrong, but the ground shifting under your feet. New York did everything right by the old rules. Mined germanium, saved money, maintained their equipment as best they could. And it all became worthless because the rules changed.

The word “jungle” keeps coming back. Blish uses it deliberately. These aren’t explorers or pioneers sitting around that red dwarf star. They’re unemployed. They’re stuck. And now New York is joining them.

For a book written in the 1950s, it feels uncomfortably modern.

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