by James Blish
Cities in Flight
James Blish
James Blish's galaxy-spanning masterwork, originally published in four volumes, explores a future in which two crucial discoveries ― antigravity devices which enable whole cities to be lifted from the Earth to become giant spaceships, and longevity drugs which enable their inhabitants to live for thousands of years ― lead to the establishment of a unique Galactic empire.
James Blish
Cities in Flight
INTRODUCTION
Betty Ballantine
SOME STORIES are written to provide entertainment: some to teach: some as a form of self expression: some because the writer could not do otherwise: and some combine all these forms—and more—thereby creating in the reader another level of interest altogether: the need to know more about the author. James Blish was such a writer.
When I first met Jim he was well known to the burgeoning field of science fiction. He was extremely active in the science fiction world, in teaching, in sponsoring workshops, in research of specialized works, and in several areas beyond the actual writing of science fiction. He had already published many outstanding short stories and at least one of the novels that would eventually become the tetralogy titled Cities in Flight.
In the early 1950s I had started editing science fiction for Ballantine Books and used the science fiction magazine media as a fertile source for authors who might be interested in doing novels for our list. It was a bonanza. Every author in the field wanted to see his work in book form. Arthur Clarke, Fred Pohl, Ted Sturgeon, Henry Kuttner, Lester Del Rey, Cyril Kornbloth, and James Blish were just a few of the notables who flowed into Ballantine’s original science fiction list—all nurtured, so to speak, in the bosom of John Campbell and his ilk. Yet at that time, science fiction was still a closed world. Fans and professionals blended in a way unique to the genre. Of necessity, we talked to each other, attended our own conventions, admired one another, were confidently aware that it required a certain degree of intelligence to enjoy science fiction, and meanwhile appreciated the quality of our exclusivity while waiting for the rest of the literary world to catch up.
Jim was a graduate of pulp fiction, as were most of his contemporary writers. He believed profoundly in the power of intellect and, indeed, was in danger of being positively erudite. Fortunately the sense of drive and adventure that characterized the pulps never left him and are very evident in Cities in Flight. It is equally clear that part of his mission was to teach, an objective he shared with Heinlein. But what is truly astonishing is that his hardcore physics and engineering ideas were so meticulously researched that the “spindizzy” drive which carried mankind to the stars seems convincingly possible—the very essence of hardcore science fiction. Yet Jim, the really deep thinker, could never be satisfied with the surface adventure or even the hardware that made the adventure possible. He thought through the conflicting philosophic concepts that were necessarily provoked by the giant leap, and he used that conflict in the persons of his chief characters to maintain tension, to keep his readers turning the pages as rapidly as possible. In other words, it is the human element, the emotional confrontations, that keep the stories moving.
One would never have suspected, on meeting this quiet man, the vaulting imagination or the intellectual daring that lurked beneath the gentle exterior, much less his urgent need to express his deep concern for humanity. Yet this is all there, embodied in the four novels of Cities in Flight. And, of course, in his many other writings, notably in the Hugo Award-winning A Case of Conscience, in which he tackled the inconsistencies of religion, the first time a science fiction writer had done so.
Science fiction was the perfect medium for a mind like Jim’s—a writing form that permitted, indeed, demanded, no limit to anything that man could imagine. He was the very apotheosis of a science fiction writer for he insisted on justifying whatever extravagant notion he imagined, in whatever field, on whatever subject. Whether it was the lifting of entire cities, the complexities involved in anti-gravity, the self-destructive paradox of matter versus anti-matter, the mind-boggling problems raised by virtual immortality, or the end of time itself, no aspect of the human condition was too daring, no concept too vast for logic to rationalize—provided one had the courage to use it. Again and again one is astounded by the magnitude of his thinking. What is so remarkable about Jim Blish is that he really believed, and thought, in logical terms. He would happily have argued that he actually had very little imagination, his most outrageous confrontations being merely the result of logical thinking. He thus completed the circle, making it absolutely necessary for him to think through the wildest leaps of his very fertile mind. Later on, when Spock appeared on the scene, it seemed to me that he and Jim had much in common. Perhaps that’s why Jim enjoyed novelizing so many Star Trek scripts and of course produced his own contributions to that world.
James Blish was quiet, and complex, and a man of high moral principle. But most of all he enjoyed using that powerful mind. So whatever the challenge he created for himself, whatever the impossible condition to which he had given birth, he had the intellect, and the daring, and, indeed, the need to meet it head-on and come as close as any man could to making the impossible highly probable. I hope the results were satisfying for Jim. (I doubt it—he was rarely satisfied with his own work. For Jim, there was always something beyond….)
But one thing is sure: His oeuvre is a permanent feast for his readers, of whom there are now something like three generations extant.
And if you, gentle reader, are encountering Cities in Flight for the first time, I envy you.
Bearsville, 1999
Cities in Flight
To Frederik Pohl
To L. Sprague DeCamp
To John W. Campbell, Jr.
THEY SHALL HAVE STARS
And death shall have no dominion
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot …
DYLAN THOMAS
“… While Vegan civilization was undergoing this peculiar decline in influence, while at the height of its political and military power, the culture which was eventually to replace it was beginning to unfold. The reader should bear in mind that at that time nobody had ever heard of the Earth, and the planet’s sun, Sol, was known only as an undistinguished type Go star in the Draco sector. It is possible—although highly unlikely—that Vega knew that the Earth had developed space flight some time before the events we have just reviewed here. It was, however, only local interplanetary flight; up to this period, Earth had taken no part in Galactic history. It was inevitable, however, that Earth should make the two crucial discoveries which would bring it on to that starry stage. We may be very sure that Vega, had she known that Earth was to be her successor, would have exerted all of her enormous might to prevent it. That Vega failed to do so is evidence enough that she had no real idea of what was happening on Earth at this time ….”
— ACREFF-MONALES: The Milky Way: Five Cultural Portraits
BOOK ONE
PRELUDE:
WASHINGTON
We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.
—J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
THE SHADOWS flickered on the walls to his left and right, just inside the edges of his vision, like shapes stepping quickly back into invisible doorways. Despite his bone-deep weariness, they made him nervous, almost m
ade him wish that Dr. Corsi would put out the fire. Nevertheless, he remained staring into the leaping orange light, feeling the heat tightening his cheeks and the skin around his eyes, and soaking into his chest
Corsi stirred a little beside him, but Senator Wagoner’s own weight on the sofa seemed to have been increasing ever since he had first sat down. He felt drained, lethargic, as old and heavy as a stone despite his forty-eight years; it had been a bad day in a long succession of bad days. Good days in Washington were the ones you slept through.
Next to him Corsi, for all that he was twenty years older, formerly Director of the Bureau of Standards, formerly Director of the World Health Organization, and presently head man of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (usually referred to in Washington as “the left-wing Triple A-S”), felt as light and restless and quick as a chameleon.
“I suppose you know what a chance you’re taking, coming to see me,” Corsi said in his dry, whispery voice. “I wouldn’t be in Washington at all if I didn’t think the interests of the AAAS required it. Not after the drubbing I’ve taken at MacHinery’s hands. Even outside the government, it’s like living in an aquarium—in a tank labelled ‘Pirhana.’ But you know about all that.”
“I know,” the senator agreed. The shadows jumped forward and retreated. “I was followed here myself. MacHinery’s gumshoes have been trying to get something on me for a long time. But I had to talk to you, Seppi. I’ve done my best to understand everything I’ve found in the committee’s files since I was made chairman—but a nonscientist has inherent limitations. And I didn’t want to ask revealing questions of any of the boys on my staff. That would be a sure way to a leak—probably straight to MacHinery.”
“That’s the definition of a government expert these days,” Corsi said, even more dryly. “A man of whom you don’t dare ask an important question.”
“Or who’ll give you the only the answer he thinks you want to hear,” Wagoner said heavily. “I’ve hit that too. Working for the government isn’t a pink tea for a senator, either. Don’t think I haven’t wanted to be back in Alaska more than once; I’ve got a cabin on Kodiak where I can enjoy an open fire, without wondering if the shadows it throws carry notebooks. But that’s enough self-pity. I ran for the office, and I mean to be good at it, as good as I can be, anyhow.”
“Which is good enough,” Corsi said unexpectedly, taking the brandy snifter out of Wagoner’s lax hand and replenishing the little amber lake at the bottom of it. The vapors came welling up over his cupped hand, heavy and rich. “Bliss, when I first heard that the Joint Congressional Committee on Space Flight was going to fall into the hands of a freshman senator, one who’d been nothing but a press agent before his election—”
“Please,” Wagoner said, wincing with mock tenderness. “A public relations counsel.”
“As you like. Still and all, I turned the air blue. I knew it wouldn’t have happened if any senator with seniority had wanted the committee, and the fact that none of them did seemed to me to be the worst indictment of the present Congress anyone could ask for. Every word I said was taken down, of course, and will be used against you, sooner or later. It’s already been used against me, and thank God that’s over. But I was wrong about you. You’ve done a whale of a good job; you’ve learned like magic. So if you want to cut your political throat by asking me for advice, then by God I’ll give it to you.”
Corsi thrust the snifter back into Wagoner’s hand with something more than mock fury. “That goes for you, and for nobody else,” he added. “I wouldn’t tell anybody else in government the best way to pound sand—not unless the AAAS asked me to.”
“I know you wouldn’t, Seppi. That’s part of our trouble. Thanks, anyhow.” He swirled the brandy reflectively. “All right, then, tell me this: what’s the matter with space flight?”
“The army,” Corsi said promptly.
“Yes, but that’s not all. Not by a long shot. Sure, the Army Space Service is graft-ridden, shot through with jealousy and gone rigid in the brains. But it was far worse back in the days when a half-dozen branches of government were working on space flight at the same time—the weather bureau, the navy, your bureau, the air force and so on. I’ve seen some documents dating back that far. The Earth Satellite Program was announced in 1944 by Stuart Symington; we didn’t actually get a manned vehicle up there until 1962, after NASA was given full jurisdiction. They couldn’t even get the damned thing off the drawing boards; every rear admiral insisted that the plans include a parking place for his pet launch. At least now we have space flight.
“But there’s something far more radically wrong now. If space flight were still a live proposition, by now some of it would have been taken away from the army again. There’d be some merchant shipping maybe; or even small passenger lines for a luxury trade, for the kind of people who’ll go in uncomfortable ways to unliveable places just because it’s horribly expensive.” He chuckled heavily. “Like fox-hunting in England a hundred years ago; wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who called it ‘the pursuit of the inedible by the unspeakable’?”
“Isn’t it still a little early for that?” Corsi said.
“In 2013? I don’t think so. But if I’m rushing us on that one point, I can mention others. Why have there been no major exploratory expeditions for the past fifteen years? I should have thought that as soon as the tenth planet, Proserpine, was discovered some university or foundation would have wanted to go there. It has a big fat moon that would make a fine base—no weather exists at those temperatures—there’s no sun in the sky out there to louse up photographic plates—it’s only another zero-magnitude star—and so on. That kind of thing used to be meat and drink to private explorers. Given a millionaire with a thirst for science, like old Hale, and a sturdy organizer with a little grandstand in him—a Byrd-type—and we should have had a Proserpine Two station long ago. Yet space has been dead since Titan Station was set up in 1981. Why?”
He watched the flames for a moment.
“Then,” he said, “there’s the whole question of invention in the field. It’s stopped, Seppi. Stopped cold.”
Corsi said: “I seem to remember a paper from the boys on Titan not so long ago—”
“On xenobacteriology. Sure. That’s not space flight, Seppi; space flight only made it possible; their results don’t update space flight itself, don’t improve it, make it more attractive. Those guys aren’t even interested in it. Nobody is any more. That’s why it’s stopped changing.
“For instance: we’re still using ion-rockets, driven by an atomic pile. It works, and there are a thousand minor variations on the principle; but the principle itself was described by Coupling in 1954! Think of it, Seppi—not one single new, basic engine design in fifty years! And what about hull design? That’s still based on von Braun’s work—older even than Coupling’s. Is it really possible that there’s nothing better than those frameworks of hitched onions? Or those powered gliders that act as ferries for them? Yet I can’t find anything in the committee’s files that looks any better.”
“Are you sure you’d know a minor change from a major one?”
“You be the judge,” Wagoner said grimly. “The hottest thing in current spaceship design is a new elliptically wound spring for acceleration couches. It drags like a leaf-spring with gravity, and pushes like a coil-spring against it. The design wastes energy in one direction, stores it in the other. At last reports, couches made with it feel like sacks stuffed with green tomatoes, but we think we’ll have the bugs out of it soon. Tomato bugs, I suppose. Top Secret.”
“There’s one more Top Secret I’m not supposed to know,” Corsi said. “Luckily it’ll be no trouble to forget.”
“All right, try this one. We have a new water-bottle for ships’ stores. It’s made of aluminum foil, to be collapsed from the bottom like a toothpaste tube to feed the water into the man’s mouth.”
“But a plastic membrane collapsed by air pressure is handier, weighs less—”
“Sure it does. And this foil tube is already standard for paste rations. All that’s new about this thing is the proposal that we use it for water too. The proposal came to us from a lobbyist for CanAm Metals, with strong endorsements by a couple of senators from the Pacific Northwest. You can guess what we did with it.”
“I am beginning to see your drift.”
“Then I’ll wind it up as fast as I can,” Wagoner said. “What it all comes to is that the whole structure of space flight as it stands now is creaking, obsolescent, over-elaborate, decaying. The field is static; no, worse than that, it’s losing ground. By this time, our ships ought to be sleeker and faster, and able to carry bigger payloads. We ought to have done away with this dichotomy between ships that can land on a planet, and ships that can fly from one planet to another.
“The whole question of using the planets for something—something, that is, besides research—ought to be within sight of settlement. Instead, nobody even discusses it any more. And our chances to settle it grow worse every year. Our appropriations are dwindling, as it gets harder and harder to convince the Congress that space flight is really good for anything. You can’t sell the Congress on the long-range rewards of basic research, anyhow; representatives have to stand for election every two years, senators every six years; that’s just about as far ahead as most of them are prepared to look. And suppose we tried to explain to them the basic research we’re doing? We couldn’t; it’s classified!
“And above all, Seppi—this may be only my personal ignorance speaking, but if so, I’m stuck with it—above all, I think that by now we ought to have some slight clue toward an inter stellar drive. We ought even to have a model, no matter how crude—as crude as a Fourth of July rocket compared to a Coupling engine, but with the principle visible. But we don’t. As a matter of fact, we’ve written off the stars. Nobody I can talk to thinks we’ll ever reach them.”