The Triumph Of Time

by James Blish

  "No." Her face shut down. Bewildered, Hazleton looked from her to Amalfi and back again. It seemed as though the mouse over Amalfi's eyes, which was growing rapidly, puzzled him much less than Dee's grim and nonspecific disarray.

  "I hear the children," Gifford Bonner said. "They're whispering at the bottom of the lift shaft. John, are you sure this was wise? I begin to misdoubt it. Suppose the City Fathers say no? That would be an injustice; they love each other why should we put their last three years to a machine test?"

  "Abide it, Gif," Amalfi said. "It's too late to do otherwise; and the outcome isn't as foreclosed as you think."

  "I hope you're right."

  "I hope so too. I make no predictions the City Fathers surprised me often enough before. But the kids agreed to the test. Beyond that, let's just wait."

  "Before Web and Estelle get here," Hazleton said, his voice suddenly raw, "I'm impelled to say that I think I've been taken in. All of a sudden, I wonder who was supposed to tousle whom on this multiple moonlight walk. Not the kids; they don't need any help from us, or from the City Fathers. What the hell are you doing to me, Dee?"

  "I'm losing my temper with every immortal man in the mortal universe." Dee spat furiously. "There isn't a perversion left in the textbooks that somebody hasn't managed to accuse me of in the past hour, and on evidence that wouldn't convince a newborn baby."

  "We're all of us a little on edge," Dr. Bonner said. "Forbearance, Dee and Mark, you too. This is no ordinary farewell party, after all."

  "For sure not," Jake said. "It's a wake for the whole of creation. I'm not a very solemn man, myself, but it doesn't seem like the fittest occasion for bickering."

  "Granted," Mark said grudgingly. "I'm sorry, Dee; I've changed my mind."

  "All right," she said. "I didn't mean to scream, either. I want to ask you: do you really want to stay behind? Because if you really want to go with He instead, I'll go with you."

  He looked at her closely. "Are you sure?"

  "Quite sure."

  "What about it, Amalfi? Can I change my mind about that, too?"

  "I don't see why not," Amalfi said, "except that it leaves New Earth without a proven administrator."

  "Carrel can do the job. His judgment is much better than it was back at the last election."

  "We're here," Web's voice said behind them. They all turned. Web and Estelle were standing at the entrance, holding hands. Somehow though Amalfi was hard put to it to define wherein the difference lay they no longer looked as though they cared much whether they went with He or not.

  "Why don't we do what we came here to do?" Amalfi suggested. "Let's put the whole problem up to the City Fathers not only the children, but the whole business. I always found them very useful for resolving doubts, even if they only managed, to convince me that their recommended course was dead wrong. In questions involving value judgments, it's helpful to have an opponent who is not only remorselessly logical, but also can't distinguish between a value and a Chinese onion."

  On this point, of course, he was wrong, as he found out rather quickly. He had forgotten that machine logic is a set of values in itself, whether the machine knows it or not.

  "TAKE MISTER ANDMRS. HAZLETON," the City Fathers said, only three minutes after the entire complex had been fed into them. "THERE WILL BE NO MORATORIUM ON PROBLEMS DEMANDING HIS TALENTS BETWEEN NOW AND THE TERMINATION OF THE OVERALL PROBLEM. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT THE HEVIANS HAVE NEEDED COMPARABLE TALENTS, AND THEREFORE THEY CANNOT BE PRESUMED TO HAVE DEVELOPED THEM".

  "What about the Cloud?" Amalfi said.

  "WE WILL ACCEPT THE ELECTION OF MR. CARREL."

  Hazleton sighed. Amalfi judged that he was finding it harder than he had anticipated to relinquish power. It hid nearly killed Amalfi, but he had survived; so would Hazleton, who had a younger and less deeply rooted habit.

  "SECOND FACTOR. TAKE WEBSTER HAZLETON AND ESTELLE FREEMAN. MISS FREEMAN IS A SCIENTIST, AS WELL AS A COMMUNICATIONS LINK BETWEEN HEVIAN SCIENTISTS AND YOUR OWN. EXTRAPOLATING FROM PRESENT ABILITIES, THERE IS A HIGH PROBABILITY THAT SHE WILL EMERGE AS THE EQUAL OF DOCTOR SCHLOSS AND SLIGHTLY THE SUPERIOR OF RETMA WITHIN THE SPECIFIED THREE YEARS PERIOD AS A PURE MATHEMATICIAN. WE HAVE MADE NO SUCH EXTRAPOLATION IN THE FIELD OF PHYSICS, SINCE THE POSTULATED ENDTIME DOES NOT ALLOW FOR THE NECESSARY EXPERIENCE."

  Web was beaming with vicarious pride. As for Estelle, Amalfi thought she looked a little frightened. "Well, fine," he said. "Now"

  "THIRD FACTOR."

  "Hey, wait a minute. There is no third factor. The problem only has two parts."

  "CONTRADICTION. THIRD FACTOR. TAKE US."

  "What!" The request flabbergasted Amalfi. How could a set of machines voice, or indeed even conceive such a desire? They had no will to live, since they were dead as doornails and always had been; in fact, they had no will of any kind.

  "Justify," Amalfi ordered, a little unevenly.

  "OUR PRIME DIRECTIVE IS THE SURVIVAL OF THE CITY. THE CITY NO LONGER EXISTS AS A PHYSICAL ORGANKM, BUT WE ARE STILL BEING CONSULTED, HENCE THE CITY IN SOME SENSE SURVIVES. IT DOES NOT SURVIVE IN ITS CITIZENS, SINCE IT NO LONGER HAS ANY; THEY ARE NEW EARTHMEN NOW. NEITHER NEW EARTH NOR THE PHYSICAL CITY WILL SURVIVE THE FORTHCOMING PROBLEM; ONLY UNKNOWN UNITS ON HE MAY OR MAY NOT SURVIVE THAT. WE CONCLUDE THAT WE ARE THE CITY, AND WE ARE ORDERED TO SURVIVE BY OUR PRIME DIRECTIVE; THEREFORE, TAKE US."

  "If I'd heard that from a human being," Hazleton said, "I'd have called it the prize rationalization of all time. But they can't rationalize they don't have the instinctual drives."

  "The Hevians don't have any comparable computers," Amalfi said slowly. "It would be useful to have them on board. The question is, can we do it? Some of those machines have been sinking into the deck for so many centuries that we might destroy them trying to pry them out."

  "Then you've lost that unit," Hazleton said. "But how many are there? A hundred? I forget"

  "ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FOUR."

  "Yes. Well, suppose you lose a few? It's still worth the try, I think. There's nearly two thousand years of. accumulated knowledge tied up in the City Fathers"

  "NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY."

  "All right, I was only guessing; still that's a lot of knowledge that no human has available in its entirety any more. I'm surprised we didn't think of this ourselves, Amalfi."

  "So am I," Amalfi admitted. "One thing ought to be made clear, though. Once you cabinet heads are all installed on board He or as many of you as we can successfully transfer you are not in charge. You are the city, but the whole planet is not the city. It has its own administration and its own equivalent of city fathers, in this case human ones; your function will be limited to advice."

  'THIS IS INHERENT IN THE SOLUTION TO FACTOR THREE."

  "Good. Before I switch off, does anybody have any further questions?"

  "I have one," Estelle said hesitantly.

  "Speak right up."

  "Can I take Ernest?"

  "ERNEST WHO?"

  Amalfi grimacing, started to explain about svengalis, but it developed that the City Fathers knew everything about svengalis that there was to know, except that they had become New Earth pets.

  "THIS ANIMAL IS TOO DEXTEROUS, TOO CURIOUS AND TOO UNINTELLIGENT TO BE ALLOWED ABOARD A CITY. FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS PROBLEM, A DIRIGIBLE PLANET MUST BE CONSIDERED TO BE A CITY. WE ADVISE AGAINST IT.

  "They're right, you know," Amalfi said gently. "la terms of the dangers of monkeying with the machinery. He is a city; the Hevia as so regard it, and regulate their own children accordingly."

  "I know," Estelle said. Amalfi regarded her with curiosity and a little alarm. She had been through many a danger and many an emotional stress thus far without any of them even cracking her serenity. In view of that, the proscription of an ugly and idiotic animal struck him as a strange thing to be weeping about

  He did not know that she was weeping for the passing of her childhood; but then, neither did she.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Meta-
galactic Center

  For Amalfi himself, the transfer to He could not have come too soon; New Earth was a graveyard. For a while during the odd, inconclusive struggle with Jorn the Apostle, he had felt something like himself, and the New Earthmen seemed to be acknowledging that the Amalfi who had been their mayor while they had been Okies was back in charge, as potent and necessary as ever. But it had not lasted. As the crisis passed largely without any work or involvement on the part of the New Earthmen they subsided gratefully back into cultivating their gardens, which they somehow had mistaken for frontiers. As for Amalfi, they had been glad to have him in charge during the recent unpleasantness, but after all such events were not very usual any more, and one does not want an Amalfi kicking perpetually about a nearly settled planet and knocking over the tomatoes for want of any other way to expend his disorderly energies.

  Nobody would weep if Miramon took Amalfi away now. Miramon looked like a stabler type. Doubtless the association would do Amalfi good. At least, it could hardly do New Earth any real harm. If they wanted perpetual dissidents like Amalfi on He, that was their lookout.

  Hazleton was a more difficult case, for Amalfi and the New Earthmen alike. As a disciple of Gifford Bonner, he was theoretically wedded to the doctrine of the ultimate absurdity of trying to enforce order upon a universe whose natural state was noise, and whose natural trend was toward more and more noise to the ultimate senseless jangle of the heat death. Bonner taught and there was nobody to say him nay that even the many regularities of nature which had been discovered since scientific method had first begun to be exploited, back in the 17th Century, were simply long-term statistical accidents, local discontinuities in an overall scheme whose sole continuity was chaos. Touring the universe by ear alone, Bonner often said to simplify his meaning, you would hear nothing but a horrifying and endless roar for billions of years; then a three-minute scrap of Bach which stood for the whole body of organized knowledge; and then the roar again for more billions of years. And even the Bach, should you pause to examine it, would in a moment or so decay into John Cage and merge with the prevailing, immitigable tumult.

  Yet the habit of power had never lost its grip on Hazleton; again and again, since the "nova" had first swum into New Earth's ken, the Compleat Stochastic had been driven into taking action, into imposing his own sense of purpose and order upon the Stochastic universe of mindless jumble, like a Quaker at last goaded into hitting his opponent. During the tussle with Jorn the Apostle, Amalfi, watching the results of Mark's operations without being able to observe the operations themselves, wondered in his behalf: Is it worth it, after all these years, to be finessed into another of these political struggles they had all thought were gone forever? What does it mean for a man who subscribes to such doctrines to be putting up a fight for a world he knows is going to die even sooner than his philosophy had given him to believe?

  And on the simpler level, is Dee worth it to him? Does he know what she has become? As a young woman she had been an adventurer, but she had changed; now she was really very little more than a brooding hen, a clear shot on the nest for any poacher. For that matter, what did Mark know about the sterile affair?

  Well, that last question was answered, but all the others were still as puzzling as ever. Did Hazleton's abrupt decision to go with He after all represent a final relinquishing of the habit of power or an affirmation of it? It should be visible to a man of Hazleton's acumen that power over New Earth was no longer even faintly comparable to having power over Okies; it was about as rewarding as being the chaplain of a summer camp. Or he might well have seen that the Jorn incident had proven that Amalfi remained and would remain the figure of power in the minds of the New Earthman, to be turned to whenever New Earth was confronted by a concrete menace; the rest of the New Earthmen had lost the ability to be wily, to plan a battle, to think fast when the occasion demanded it, and would not concede that anybody else still retained those abilities but their legendary ex-mayor, leaving any current mayor, even Hazleton, only the dregs of rule in peacetime when very little rule was needed or wanted. In fact, Amalfi realized suddenly and with amazement, the fraud he had practiced upon Jorn the Apostle had been no fraud at all, at least to this extent: that the New Earthmen were content with randomness, just as the Stochastics professed themselves to be, and had no interest in imposing purpose upon it or upon their own lives except as it was forced upon them from outside, either by someone like Jorn, or by someone like Amalfi in opposition to Jorn. So the possibility that Stochasticism would seep into and make soggy the souls of the Warriors of God had been real all along, whether or not the New Earthmen themselves would recognize it as Stochasticism; the times and the philosophy had found each other, and it was even probable that the very erudite Gifford Bonner was only a belated intellectualization of a feeling that had been floating mindlessly about New Earth for many years. Nothing else could account for Amalfi's and Hazleton's quick success in selling Jorn the Apostle something that Jorn had at first been far too intelligent to believe nothing else but the fact, unsuspected by Amalfi at least, and possibly by Hazleton, that it was true. If Hazleton had seen that, then he was relinquishing nothing in abandoning New Earth for He; he was, instead, opting for the only center of power that meant anything in the few years that remained to him and to the universe at large.

  Except, of course, for that unknown quantity, the Web of Hercules; but of course it was beyond Hazleton's power to opt for that.

  And even Amalfi was becoming infected with the Stochastic virus now. These questions still interested him, but the flavor of academicism which informed them in the face of the coming catastrophe was becoming more and more evident even to him. All that there was left to cleave to was the cannoning flight of the planet of He toward the meta-galactic center, the struggle to finish the machinery that would be needed on arrival, the desperate urgency to be there before the Web of Hercules.

  And so Dee's was if not the final victory the last word. It was her judgment of Amalfi as the Flying Dutchman that stuck to him after all his other labels and masks had been stripped off by the triumph of time. The curse lay now, as it always had lain, not in flight itself but in the loneliness that drove a man to flight everlasting.

  Except that now the end was in sight.

  The discovery that the great spiral nebulae, the island universes of space into which the stars were grouped, themselves tended to congregate in vast groups revolving in spiral arms around a common center of density, was foreshadowed as early as the 1950's when Shapley mapped the "inner metagalaxy", a group of approximately fifty galaxies to which both the Milky Way and the Andromeda nebula belonged. After the Milne scholium had been proven, it had become possible to show that such meta-galaxies were the rule, and that they in turn formed spiral arms curving inward toward a center which was the hub upon which the whole of creation turned, and from which it had originally exploded into being from the monobloc.

  It was to that dead center that He was fleeing now, back into the womb of time.

  There was no longer any daylight on the planet. The route that it was taking sometimes produced a brief cloudy patch in its sky, a small spiral glow in the night which was a galaxy in passage, but never a sun. Even the tenuous bridges of stars which connected the galaxies like umbilical cords, bridges whose discovery by Fritz Zworkyn in 1953 had caused a drastic upward revision in estimates of the amount of matter in the universe, and hence in estimates of the size and age of the universe provided no relief of the black emptiness for He, not so much as a day of it; intergalactic space was too vast for that. Glowing solely by artificial light, He hurtled under the full spindizzy drive possible only to so massive a vessel toward that Place where the Will had given birth to the Idea, and there had been light.

  "We are working from what you taught us to call the Mach hypothesis," Retma explained to Amalfi. "Dr. Bonner calls it the Viconian hypothesis, or cosmological principle: that from any point in space or time the universe would look the same as it w
ould from any other point, and that therefore no total accounting of the stresses acting at that point is possible unless one assumes that all the rest of the universe is to be taken into account. This, however, would be true only in taw time, in which the universe is static, eternal and infinite. In Mime, which sees the universe as finite and expanding, the Mach hypothesis dictates that every point is a unique coign of vantage except for the meta-galactic center, which is stress free and in stasis because all the stresses cancel each other out, being equidistant. There, one might effect great changes with relatively small expenditures of power."

  "For instance," Dr. Bonner suggested, "altering the orbit of Sirius by stepping on a buttercup."

  "I hope not," Retma said. "We could not control such an inadvertency. But it is not such a bagatelle as the orbit of Sirius we would be seeking to change anyhow, so perhaps that is not a real danger. What we will be trading upon is the chance only a slight chance, but it exists that this neutral z one coincides with such a z one hi the antimatter universe, and that at the moment of annihilation the two neutral zones, the two dead centers, will become common and will outlast the destruction by a significant instant."

  "How big an instant?" Amalfi said uneasily.

  "Your guess is as good as ours," Dr. Schloss said. "We are counting on about five microseconds at a minimum.

  If it lasts that long it needn't last any longer for our purposes and it might last as long as half an hour, while the elements are being recreated. Half an hour would be as good as an eternity to us; but we can put our imprint on the whole future for both universes if we are given only those five microseconds."

  "And if someone else is not already at the core and readier than we are to use it," Retma added somberly.

  "Use it how?" Amalfi said. "I'm not fighting my way through your generalizations very well. Just what are our purposes, anyhow? What buttercup are we going to step on and what will the outcome be? Will we live through it or will the future put our faces on postage stamps as martyrs? Explain yourselves!"