Cities in Flight Retelling: Earthman Come Home Part 8 - Coming Home
New York has left the Milky Way behind. The spindizzies are failing one by one. And on a planet in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, Mayor Amalfi is about to go head-to-head with the most notorious criminal city in Okie history. This is the finale.
Chapter 8: IMT
New York lands on a planet in the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Not for a job. Not for a contract. This time, it’s forever. The city is dying. Two of its spindizzy units are already junked. There will be no more flying between the stars. Amalfi stands on the balcony of City Hall, looking at the dense star field, and he knows it. The city is grounded.
But there’s a problem. This planet already has people on it.
Amalfi and Hazleton go for a walk across the blasted heath where the city landed. On the edge of the cultivated land, they find a man named Karst, plowing a field with a bone plow. His wife is strapped to the harness, pulling it. Like an animal.
And here’s the thing. Karst speaks English. Not the Interlingua that the ruling class uses. English. The old Earth tongue, preserved as a language for holidays and feast days. Karst is a serf. His masters are called the Proctors.
Amalfi tells Karst the truth. “You are an Earthman.” And the Proctors? They are not. They are the descendants of a rogue Okie city, one that committed the worst atrocity in space history. The massacre of Thor Five. The city known as the Mad Dogs. That city was called IMT. And it never left this planet. It just planted itself here, enslaved the local population, and ruled for centuries.
This is the moment Blish has been building toward for the entire novel. IMT is the original sin of the Okie era. The reason Earth cops hunt Okies so hard. The reason anti-Okie laws exist. And now Amalfi’s city has landed right next to it.
Amalfi brings Karst into the city. He puts him and dozens of other serfs through the learning machines, the same hypnopaedic system the City Fathers use. In hours, these people who have never been taught to read are absorbing physics and cultural history. And more importantly, they’re learning freedom. Starting with freedom to hate.
Meanwhile, a Proctor named Heldon shows up with a proposal. He wants Amalfi to fix IMT’s ancient spindizzies so the city can fly again. His cover story is that he wants an escape route if New York’s people start a revolution. Sounds reasonable. But Amalfi and Hazleton both smell a trap.
Karst confirms it. Heldon is not trying to escape. He’s trying to use IMT’s old trick. Pick the city up and drop it on top of New York. Just like the old folk song says: “IMT made the sky Fall.”
Amalfi goes to inspect the spindizzies anyway. He takes Karst as his “slave” to carry equipment. The machines are ancient, built with vacuum tubes bigger than a fist. Primitive. Dangerous. But functional. Amalfi can’t find the master controls in the underground chamber. The control cable runs straight up through the roof. The controls are somewhere on top of the Temple.
Heldon lets Amalfi inspect for hours. He’s patient. Too patient. Because Heldon has been running out the clock. When Amalfi finishes his work, Heldon delivers the punch line. The contract between the two cities has expired. It’s been over an hour past the deadline. New York is now on IMT’s soil illegally.
“Mayor Amalfi, you may consider yourself a prisoner of war.”
Ten armed men appear with mesotron rifles. Old weapons. But they work.
And now comes one of the best scenes in the whole series. Amalfi puts his hands up. In each hand, he holds a small black egg.
He explains, calmly, that the eggs contain a mutated strain of rickettsialpox, airborne, custom-developed in the city’s biological warfare lab. Drop them and everyone in the room dies within hours unless they crawl back to the Okie city for the antibiotic. The Proctors, being a feudal society, are terrified of plague. Rifles waver. The standoff holds.
Amalfi bargains for safe passage out of the building. But before he leaves, he drops the real bomb. He tells Heldon he knows what IMT stands for. “Interstellar Master Traders.” He tells him to remember Thor Five when he dies.
Heldon turns white.
Here’s where Amalfi’s genius pays off. While he was inspecting the machines, he had Karst memorize the location of the master power switch. He also secretly whispered instructions into the inspection port using ventriloquism. Now, as Amalfi heads up the spiral stairs to Star Chamber at the top of the Temple, Karst sneaks back down to the generator room and cuts the power.
Amalfi busts through the ornate doors of Star Chamber. No controls there. But he finds a hidden hatch above, reached with a hooked pole. The tiny cabin at the very top has glass windows on all four sides and a single green light on one of the dusty control panels. While he watches, the light goes out. Karst did his job.
Amalfi sets the controls, locks them, and commits selective sabotage. Then he dusts every panel with his shirt so nobody can tell which switches he touched. He slides back down, fights past the Proctors, drops a black egg on the threshold as a farewell gift, and runs.
The ground begins to shake. Buildings crack. IMT is lifting. Serfs throw themselves off the edges. Amalfi scrambles across the trench where IMT’s old foundations were buried and makes it to the Barrens.
And then IMT rises. One mile. Two miles. Five. Seven. It doesn’t stop. It can’t stop. Amalfi sabotaged the controls so they can’t be turned off. The Proctors forgot too much about space flight to figure out what he did.
Karst crawls out of a gully. “Can it come back?”
“No,” Amalfi says.
And then a third sun blooms in the sky. Three or four seconds of blinding light. The Earth cops were watching for an escaping Okie city. They found one. They blew it up. Wrong city from their perspective, but they don’t know that. They’ll go home satisfied.
IMT is gone. The Mad Dogs are finally dead.
Chapter 9: Home
Around Amalfi and Karst, hushed voices are murmuring. Serfs are crawling out from the wreckage. Something old and new is stirring on this planet. Something that barely has a name here, because IMT stamped it out centuries ago. Freedom.
Karst asks, “What do you mean, Earth? This is not Earth.”
And Amalfi gives him the answer that explains the whole novel’s title.
“It is now. We’re all Earthmen, Karst. Earth is more than just one little planet, buried in another galaxy than this. Earth is much more important than that. Earth isn’t a place. It’s an idea.”
Across the Barrens, the Okie city glitters. A cloud of stars is rising behind it.
Final Thoughts on Earthman, Come Home
This is the heart of the entire Cities in Flight series. And I think it’s the best novel of the four.
“They Shall Have Stars” set up the technology and the politics. “A Life for the Stars” gave us a coming-of-age tour of the Okie world. But “Earthman, Come Home” is where Blish takes the idea of flying cities and pushes it as far as it will go. Amalfi is a thousand years old, and he’s still learning. He’s a politician, a trickster, a leader, and by the end, something close to a philosopher.
The IMT chapters are the most action-packed in the series. A city-vs-city battle decided not by firepower but by sabotage, folk songs, and two black eggs that may or may not contain plague. Blish writes tension like a man who studied thriller structure, then wrapped it in hard science fiction.
But the real punch is at the end. After all the wandering, the contracts, the battles, the politics. After the March on Earth and the anti-Okie laws and a thousand years of being homeless. After crossing into another galaxy with a dying city. The answer to the title is simple. Earthman, come home. And home is wherever you decide it is.
Blish wrote this in the 1950s, and it still hits. Maybe it hits harder now. A lot of us know what it’s like to leave your country, learn a new language, build a life somewhere else, and wonder what “home” even means. Amalfi’s answer is honest. Home isn’t coordinates on a star map. It’s people, and what they do with freedom.
Next up is the final book in the series, “The Triumph of Time.” The end of everything. Literally.
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