Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  Corsi got up and walked lightly to the window, where he stood with his back to the room, as though trying to look through the light-tight blind down on to the deserted street

  To Wagoner’s fire-dazed eyes, he was scarcely more than a shadow himself. The senator found himself thinking, for perhaps the twentieth time in the past six months, that Corsi might even be glad to be out of it all, branded unreliable though he was. Then, again for at least the twentieth time, Wagoner remembered the repeated clearance hearings, the oceans of dubious testimony and gossip from witnesses with no faces or names, the clamor in the press when Corsi was found to have roomed in college with a man suspected of being an ex-YPSL member, the denunciation on the senate floor by one of MacHinery’s captive solons, more hearings, the endless barrage of vilification and hatred, the letters beginning “Dear Doctor Corsets, You bum,” and signed “True American.” To get out of it that way was worse than enduring it, no matter how stoutly most of your fellow scholars stood by you afterwards.

  “I shan’t be the first to say so to you,” the physicist said, turning at last. “I don’t think we’ll ever reach the stars either, Bliss. And I am not very conservative, as physicists go. We just don’t live long enough for us to become a star-traveling race. A mortal man limited to speeds below that of light is as unsuited to interstellar travel as a moth would be to crossing the Atlantic. I’m sorry to believe that, certainly; but I do believe it.”

  Wagoner nodded and filed the speech away. On that subject he had expected even less than Corsi had given him.

  “But,” Corsi said, lifting his snifter from the table, “it isn’t impossible that interplanetary flight could be bettered. I agree with you that it’s rotting away now. I’d suspected that it might be, and your showing tonight is conclusive.”

  “Then why is it happening?” Wagoner demanded.

  “Because scientific method doesn’t work any more.”

  “What! Excuse me, Seppi, but that’s sort of like hearing an archbishop say that Christianity doesn’t work any more. What do you mean?”

  Corsi smiled sourly. “Perhaps I was overdramatic. But it’s true that, under present conditions, scientific method is a blind alley. It depends on freedom of information, and we deliberately killed that. In my bureau, when it was mine, we seldom knew who was working on what project at any given time; we seldom knew whether or not somebody else in the bureau was duplicating it; we never knew whether or not some other department might be duplicating it. All we could be sure of was that many men, working in similar fields, were stamping their results Secret because that was the easy way— not only to keep the work out of Russian hands, but to keep the workers in the clear if their own government should investigate them. How can you apply scientific method to a problem when you’re forbidden to see the data?

  “Then there’s the caliber of scientist we have working for the government now. The few first-rate men we have are so harassed by the security set-up—and by the constant suspicion that’s focused on them because they are top men in their fields, and hence anything they might leak would be particularly valuable—that it takes them years to solve what used to be very simple problems. As for the rest—well, our staff at Standards consisted almost entirely of third-raters: some of them were very dogged and patient men indeed, but low on courage and even lower on imagination. They spent all their time operating mechanically by the cook-book—the routine of scientific method—and had less to show for it every year.”

  “Everything you’ve said could be applied to the space flight research that’s going on now, without changing a comma,” Wagoner said. “But, Seppi, if scientific method used to be sound, it should still be sound. It ought to work for anybody, even third-raters. Why has it suddenly turned sour now—after centuries of unbroken successes?”

  “The time lapse,” Corsi said somberly, “is of the first importance. Remember, Bliss, that scientific method is not a natural law. It doesn’t exist in nature, but only in our heads; in short, it’s a way of thinking about things—a way of sifting evidence. It was bound to become obsolescent sooner or later, just as sorites and paradigms and syllogisms became obsolete before it. Scientific method works fine while there are thousands of obvious facts lying about for the taking—facts as obvious and measurable as how fast a stone falls, or what the order of the colors is in a rainbow. But the more subtle the facts to be discovered become—the more they retreat into the realms of the invisible, the intangible, the unweighable, the sub-microscopic, the abstract—the more expensive and time-consuming it is to investigate them by scientific method.

  “And when you reach a stage where the only research worth doing costs millions of dollars per experiment, then those experiments can be paid for only by government. Governments can make the best use only of third-rate men, men who can’t leaven the instructions in the cook-book with the flashes of insight you need to make basic discoveries. The result is what you see: sterility, stasis, dry rot.”

  “Then what’s left?” Wagoner said. “What are we going to do now? I know you well enough to suspect that you’re not going to give up all hope.”

  “No,” Corsi said, “I haven’t given up, but I’m quite helpless to change the situation you’re complaining about. After all, I’m on the outside. Which is probably good for me.” He paused, and then said suddenly: “There’s no hope of getting the government to drop the security system completely?”

  “Completely?”

  “Nothing else would do.”

  “No,” Wagoner said. “Not even partially, I’m afraid. Not any longer.”

  Corsi sat down and leaned forward, his elbows on his knobby knees, staring into the dying coals. “Then I have two pieces of advice to give you, Bliss. Actually they’re two sides of the same coin. First of all, begin by abandoning these multi-million-dollar, Manhattan-District approaches. We don’t need a newer, still finer measurement of electron resonance one-tenth so badly as we need new pathways, new categories of knowledge. The colossal research project is defunct; what we need now is pure skullwork.”

  “From my staff?”

  “From wherever you can get it. That’s the other half of my recommendation. If I were you, I would go to the crackpots.”

  Wagoner waited. Corsi said these things for effect; he liked drama in small doses. He would explain in a moment.

  “Of course I don’t mean total crackpots,” Corsi said. “But you’ll have to draw the line yourself. You need marginal contributors, scientists of good reputation generally whose obsessions don’t strike fire with other members of their profession. Like the Crehore atom, or old Ehrenhaft’s theory of magnetic currents, or the Milne cosmology—you’ll have to find the fruitful one yourself. Look for discards, and then find out whether or not the idea deserved to be totally discarded. And—don’t accept the first ‘expert’ opinion that you get.”

  “Winnow chaff, in other words.”

  “What else is there to winnow?” Corsi said. “Of course it’s a long chance, but you can’t turn to scientists of real stature now; it’s too late for that. Now you’ll have to use sports, freaks, near-misses.”

  “Starting where?”

  “Oh,” said Corsi, “how about gravity? I don’t know any other subject that’s attracted a greater quota of idiot speculations. Yet the acceptable theories of what gravity is are of no practical use to us. They can’t be put to work to help lift a spaceship. We can’t manipulate gravity as a field; we don’t even have a set of equations for it that we can agree upon. No more will we find such a set by spending fortunes and decades on the project. The law of diminishing returns has washed that approach out.”

  Wagoner got up. “You don’t leave me much,” he said glumly.

  “No,” Corsi agreed. “I leave you only what you started with. That’s more than most of us are left with, Bliss.”

  Wagoner grinned tightly at him and the two men shook hands. As Wagoner left, he saw Corsi silhouetted against the fire, his back to the door, his should
ers bent. While he stood there, a shot blatted not far away, and the echoes bounded back from the face of the embassy across the street. It was not a common sound in Washington, but neither was it unusual: it was almost surely one of the city’s thousands of anonymous snoopers firing at a counter-agent, a cop, or a shadow.

  Corsi made no responding movement. The senator closed the door quietly.

  He was shadowed all the way back to his own apartment, but this time he hardly noticed. He was thinking about an immortal man who flew from star to star faster than light.

  CHAPTER ONE: New York

  In the newer media of communication … the popularization of science is confounded by rituals of mass entertainment. One standard routine dramatizes science through the biography of a hero scientist: at the denouement, he is discovered in a lonely laboratory crying ‘Eureka’ at a murky test tube held up to a bare light bulb.

  —GERARD PIEL

  THE PARADE of celebrities, notorieties, and just plain brass that passed through the reception room of Jno. Pfitzner & Sons was marvelous to behold. During the hour and a half that Colonel Paige Russell had been cooling his heels, he had identified the following publicity-saints: Senator Bliss Wagoner (Dem., Alaska), chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Space Flight; Dr. Guiseppi Corsi, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a former Director of the World Health Organization; and Francis Xavier MacHinery, hereditary head of the FBI.

  He had seen also a number of other notables, of lesser caliber, but whose business at a firm which made biologicals was an equally improper subject for guessing games. He fidgeted.

  At the present moment, the girl at the desk was talking softly with a seven-star general, which was a rank nearly as high as a man could rise in the army. The general was so preoccupied that he had failed completely to recognize Paige’s salute. He was passed through swiftly. One of the two swinging doors with the glass ports let into them moved outward behind the desk, and Paige caught a glimpse of a stocky, dark-haired, pleasant-faced man in a conservative grosse-pointilliste suit

  “Gen. Horsefield, glad to see you. Come in.”

  The door closed, leaving Paige once more with nothing to look at but the motto written over the entrance in German black-letter:

  Since he did not know the language, he had already translated this by the If-only-it-were-English system, which made it come out, “The fatter toad is waxing on the kine’s cole-slaw.” This did not seem to fit what little he knew about the eating habits of either animal, and it was certainly no fit admonition for workers.

  Of course, Paige could always look at the receptionist—but after an hour and a half he had about plumbed the uttermost depths of that ecstasy. The girl was pretty in a way, but hardly striking, even to a recently returned spaceman. Perhaps if someone would yank those blackrimmed pixie glasses away from her and undo that bun at the back of her head, she might pass, at least in the light of a whale-oil lamp in an igloo during a record blizzard.

  This too was odd now that he thought about it. A firm as large as Pfitzner could have its pick of the glossiest of office girls, especially these days. Then again, the whole of Pfitzner might well be pretty small potatoes to the parent organization, A. O. LeFevre et Cie. Certainly at least LeFevre’s Consolidated Warfare Service operation was bigger than the Pfitzner division, and Peacock Camera and Chemicals probably was too; Pfitzner, which was the pharmaceuticals side of the cartel, was a recent acquisition, bought after some truly remarkable broken-field running around the diversification amendments to the anti-trust laws.

  All in all, Paige was thoroughly well past mere mild annoyance with being stalled. He was, after all, here at these people’s specific request, doing them a small favor which they had asked of him—and soaking up good leave-time in the process. Abruptly he got up and strode to the desk.

  “Excuse me, miss,” he said, “but I think you’re being goddamned impolite. As a matter of fact, I’m beginning to think you people are making a fool of me. Do you want these, or don’t you?”

  He unbuttoned his right breast pocket and pulled out three little pliofilm packets, heat-sealed to plastic mailing tags. Each packet contained a small spoonful of dirt. The tags were addressed to Jno. Pfìtzner & Sons, div. Α. Ο. LeFevre et Cie, the Bronx 153, WPO 249920, Earth; and each card carried a $25 rocket-mail stamp for which Pfitzner had paid, still uncancelled.

  “Colonel Russell, I agree with you,” the girl said, looking up at him seriously. She looked even less glamorous than she had at a distance, but she did have a pert and interesting nose, and the current royal-purple lip-shade suited her better than it did most of the starlets to be seen on 3-V these days. “It’s just that you’ve caught us on a very bad day. We do want the samples, of course. They’re very important to us, otherwise we wouldn’t have put you to the trouble of collecting them for us.”

  “Then why can’t I give them to someone?”

  “You could give them to me,” the girl suggested gently. “I’ll pass them along faithfully, I promise you.”

  Paige shook his head. “Not after this run-around. I did just what your firm asked me to do, and I’m here to see the results. I picked up soils from every one of my ports of call, even when it was a nuisance to do it. I mailed in a lot of them; these are only the last of a series. Do you know where these bits of dirt came from?”

  “I’m sorry, it’s slipped my mind. It’s been a very busy day.”

  “Two of them are from Ganymede; and the other one is from Jupiter V, right in the shadow of the Bridge gang’s shack. The normal temperature on both satellites is about two hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Ever try to swing a pick against ground frozen that solid—working inside a spacesuit? But I got the dirt for you. Now I want to see why Pfitzner wants dirt.”

  The girl shrugged. “I’m sure you were told why before you even left Earth.”

  “Supposing I was? I know that you people get drugs out of dirt. But aren’t the guys who bring in the samples entitled to see how the process works? What if Pfitzner gets some new wonder-drug out of one of my samples—couldn’t I have a sentence or two of explanation to pass on to my kids?”

  The swinging doors bobbed open, and the affable face of the stocky man was thrust into the room.

  “Dr. Abbott not here yet, Anne?” he said.

  “Not yet, Mr. Gunn. I’ll call you the minute he arrives.”

  “But you’ll keep me sitting at least another ninety minutes,” Paige said flatly. Gunn looked him over, staring at the colonel’s eagle on his collar and stopping at the winged crescent pinned over his pocket.

  “Apologies, Colonel, but we’re having ourselves a small crisis today,” he said, smiling tentatively. “I gather you’ve brought us some samples from space. If you could possibly come back tomorrow, I’d be happy to give you all the time in the world. But right now—”

  Gunn ducked his head in apology and pulled it in, as though he had just cuckooed 2400 and had to go somewhere and lie down until 0100. Just before the door came to rest behind him, a faint but unmistakable sound slipped through it.

  Somewhere in the laboratories of Jno. Pfitzner & Sons a baby was crying.

  Paige listened, blinking, until the sound was damped off. When he looked back down at the desk again, the expression of the girl behind it seemed distinctly warier.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m not asking a great favor of you. I don’t want to know anything I shouldn’t know. All I want to know is how you plan to process my packets of soil. It’s just simple curiosity—backed up by a trip that covered a few hundred millions of miles. Am I entitled to know for my trouble, or not?”

  “You are and you aren’t,” the girl said steadily. “We want your samples, and we’ll agree that they’re unusually interesting to us because they came from the Jovian system—the first such we’ve ever gotten. But that’s no guarantee that we’ll find anything useful in them.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No.
Colonel Russell, you’re not the first man to come here with soil samples, believe me. Granted that you’re the first man to bring anything back from outside the orbit of Mars; in fact, you’re only the sixth man to deliver samples from any place farther away than the Moon. But evidently you have no idea of the volume of samples we get here, routinely. We’ve asked virtually every space pilot, every Believer missionary, every commercial traveler, every explorer, every foreign correspondent to scoop up soil samples for us, where-ever they may go. Before we discovered ascomycin, we had to screen one hundred thousand soil samples, including several hundred from Mars and nearly five thousand from the Moon. And do you know where we found the organism that produces ascomycin? On an over-ripe peach one of our detail men picked up from a peddler’s stall in Baltimore!”

  “I see the point,” Paige said reluctantly. “What’s ascomycin, by the way?”

  The girl looked down at her desk and moved a piece of paper from here to there. “It’s a new antibiotic,” she said. “We’ll be marketing it soon. But I could tell you the same kind of story about other such drugs.”

  “I see.” Paige was not quite sure he did see, however, after all. He had heard the name Pfitzner fall from some very unlikely lips during his many months in space. As far as he had been able to determine after he had become sensitized to the sound, about every third person on the planets was either collecting samples for the firm or knew somebody who was. The grapevine, which among spacemen was the only trusted medium of communication, had it that the company was doing important government work. That, of course, was nothing unusual in the Age of Defense, but Paige had heard enough to suspect that Pfitzner was something special—something so big, perhaps, as the historic Manhattan District and at least twice as secret.