Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  The door opened and emitted Gunn for the second time hand-running, this time all the way.

  “Not yet?” he said to the girl. “Evidently he isn’t going to make it. Unfortunate. But I’ve some spare time now, Colonel—”

  “Russell, Paige Russell, Army Space Corps.”

  “Thank you. If you’ll accept my apologies for our preoccupation, Colonel Russell, I’ll be glad to show you around our little establishment. My name, by the way, is Harold Gunn, vice-president in charge of exports for the Pfitzner division.”

  “I’m importing at the moment,” Paige said, holding out the soil samples. Gunn took them reverently and dropped them in a pocket of his jacket. “But I’d enjoy seeing the labs.”

  He nodded to the girl and the doors closed between them. He was inside.

  The place was at least as fascinating as he had expected it to be. Gunn showed him, first, the rooms where the incoming samples were classified and then distributed to the laboratories proper. In the first of these, a measured fraction of a sample was dropped into a one-litre flask of sterile distilled water, swirled to distribute it evenly, and then passed through a series of dilutions. The final suspensions were then used to inoculate test-tube slants and petri plates, containing a wide variety of nutrient media, which went into the incubator.

  “In the next lab here—Dr. Aquino isn’t in at the moment, so we mustn’t touch anything, but you can see through the glass quite clearly—we transfer from the plates and agar slants to a new set of media,” Gunn explained. “But here each organism found in the sample has a set of cultures of its own, so that if it secretes anything into one of the media, that something won’t be contaminated.”

  “If it does, the amount must be very tiny,” Paige said. “How do you detect it?”

  “Directly, by its action. Do you see the rows of plates with the white paper discs in their centers, and the four furrows in the agar radiating from the discs? Well, each one of those furrows is impregnated with culture medium from one of the pure cultures. If all four streaks grow thriving bacterial colonies, then the medium on the paper disc contains no antibiotic against those four germs. If one or more of the streaks fails to grow, or is retarded compared to the others, then we have hope.”

  In the succeeding laboratory, antibiotics which had been found by the disc method were pitted against a whole spectrum of dangerous organisms. About 90 per cent of the discoveries were eliminated here, Gunn explained, either because they were insufficiently active or because they duplicated the antibiotic spectra of already known drugs. “What we call ‘insufficiently active’ varies with the circumstances, however,” he added. “An antibiotic which shows any activity against tuberculosis or against Hansen’s disease—leprosy—is always of interest to us, even if it attacks no other germ at all.”

  A few antibiotics which passed their spectrum tests went on to a miniature pilot plant, where the organisms that produced them were set to work in a deep-aerated fermentation tank. From this bubbling liquor, comparatively large amounts of the crude drug were extracted, purified, and sent to the pharmacology lab for tests on animals.

  “We lose a lot of otherwise promising antibiotics here, too,” Gunn said. “Most of them turn out to be too toxic to be used in—or even on —the human body. We’ve had Hansen’s bacillus knocked out a thousand times in the test-tube only to find here that the antibiotic is much more quickly fatal in vivo than is leprosy itself. But once we’re sure that the drug isn’t toxic, or that its toxicity is outweighed by its therapeutic efficacy, it goes out of our shop entirely, to hospitals and to individual doctors for clinical trial. We also have a virology lab in Vermont where we test our new drugs against virus diseases like the ’flu and the common cold—it isn’t safe to operate such a lab in a heavily populated area like the Bronx.”

  “It’s much more elaborate than I would have imagined,” Paige said. “But I can see that it’s well worth the trouble. Did you work out this sample-screening technique here?”

  “Oh, my, no,” Gunn said, smiling indulgently. “Waksman, the discoverer of streptomycin, laid down the essential procedure decades ago. We aren’t even the first firm to use it on a large scale; one of our competitors did that and found a broad-spectrum antibiotic called chloramphenicol with it, scarcely a year after they’d begun. That was what convinced the rest of us that we’d better adopt the technique before we got shut out of the market entirely. A good thing, too; otherwise none of us would have discovered tetracycline, which turned out to be the most versatile antibiotic ever tested.”

  Farther down the corridor a door opened. The squall of a baby came out of it, much louder than before. It was not the sustained crying of a child who had had a year or so to practice, but the short-breathed “ah-la, ah-la, ah-la,” of a newborn infant.

  Paige raised his eyebrows. “Is that one of your experimental animals?”

  “Ha, ha,” Gunn said. “We’re enthusiasts in this business, Colonel, but we must draw the line somewhere. No, one of our technicians has a baby-sitting problem, and so we’ve given her permission to bring the child to work with her, until she’s worked out a better solution.”

  Paige had to admit that Gunn thought fast on his feet. That story had come reeling out of him like so much ticker tape without the slightest sign of a preliminary double-take. It was not Gunn’s fault that Paige, who had been through a marriage which had lasted five years before he had taken to space, could distinguish the cry of a baby old enough to be out of a hospital nursery from that of one only days old.

  “Isn’t this,” Paige said, “a rather dangerous place to park an infant —with so many disease germs, poisonous disinfectants, and such things all around?”

  “Oh, we take all proper precautions. I daresay our staff has a lower yearly sickness rate than you’ll find in industrial plants of comparable size, simply because we’re more aware of the problem. Now if we go through this door, Colonel Russell, we’ll see the final step, the main plant where we turn out drugs in quantity after they’ve proved themselves.”

  “Yes, I’d like that. Do you have ascomycin in production now?”

  This time, Gunn looked at him sharply and without any attempt to disguise his interest. “No,” he said, “that’s still out on clinical trial. May I ask you, Colonel Russell, just how you happened to—”

  The question, which Paige realized belatedly would have been rather sticky to answer, never did get all the way asked. Over Harold Gunn’s head, a squawk-box said, “Mr. Gunn, Dr. Abbott has just arrived.”

  Gunn turned away from the door that, he had said, led out to the main plant, with just the proper modicum of polite regret. “There’s my man,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut this tour short, Colonel Russell. You may have seen what a collection of important people we have in the plant today; we’ve been waiting only for Dr. Abbott to begin a very important meeting. If you’ll oblige me—”

  Paige could say nothing but “Certainly.” After what seemed only a few seconds, Gunn deposited him smoothly in the reception room from which he had started.

  “Did you see what you wanted to see?” the receptionist said.

  “I think so,” Paige said thoughtfully. “Except that what I wanted to see sort of changed in mid-flight. Miss Anne, I have a petition to put before you. Would you be kind enough to have dinner with me this evening?”

  “No,” the girl said. “I’ve seen quite a few spacemen, Colonel Russell, and I’m no longer impressed. Furthermore, I shan’t tell you anything you haven’t heard from Mr. Gunn, so there’s no need for you to spend your money or your leave-time on me. Good-by.”

  “Not so fast,” Paige said. “I mean business—or, if you like, I mean to make trouble. If you’ve met spacemen before, you know that they like to be independent—not much like the conformists who never leave the ground. I’m not after your maidenly laughter, either. I’m after information.”

  “Not interested,” the girl said. “Save your breath.”
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br />   “MacHinery is here,” Paige said quietly. “So is Senator Wagoner, and some other people who have influence. Suppose I should collar any one of those people and accuse Pfitzner of conducting human vivisection?”

  That told: Paige could see the girl’s knuckles whitening. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “That’s my complaint. And I take it seriously. There were some things Mr. Gunn wasn’t able to conceal from me, though he tried very hard. Now, I am going to put my suspicions through channels —and get Pfitzner investigated—or would you rather be sociable over a fine flounder broiled in paprika butter?”

  The look she gave him back was one of almost pure hatred. She seemed able to muster no other answer. The expression did not at all suit her; as a matter of fact, she looked less like someone he would want to date than any other girl he could remember. Why should he spend his money or his leave-time on her? There were, after all, about five million surplus women in the United States by the Census of 2010, and at least 4,999,950 of them must be prettier and less recalcitrant than this one.

  “All right,” she said abruptly. “Your natural charm has swept me off my feet, Colonel. For the record, there’s no other reason for my acceptance. It would be even funnier to call your bluff and see how far you’d get with that vivisection tale, but I don’t care to tie my company up in a personal joke.”

  “Good enough,” Paige said, uncomfortably aware that his bluff in fact had been called. “Suppose I pick you up—”

  He broke off, suddenly noticing that voices were rising behind the double doors. An instant later, General Horsefield bulled into the reception room, closely followed by Gunn.

  “I want it clearly understood, once and for all,” Horsefield was rumbling, “that this entire project is going to wind up under military control unless we can show results before it’s time to ask for a new appropriation. There’s still a lot going on here that the Pentagon will regard as piddling inefficiency and highbrow theorizing. And if that’s what the Pentagon reports, you know what the Treasury will do—or Congress will do it for them. We’re going to have to cut back, Gunn. Understand? Cut right back to basics!”

  “General, we’re as far back to basics as we possibly can get,” Harold Gunn said, placatingly enough, but with considerable firmness as well. “We’re not going to put a gram of that drug into production until we’re satisfied with it on all counts. Any other course would be suicide.”

  “You know I’m on your side,” Horsefield said, his voice becoming somewhat less threatening. “So is General Alsos, for that matter. But this is a war we’re fighting, whether the public understands it or not And on as sensitive a matter as these death-dopes, we can’t afford—”

  Gunn, who had spotted Paige belatedly at the conclusion of his own speech, had been signaling Horsefield ever since with his eyebrows, and suddenly it took. The general swung around and glared at Paige, who, since he was uncovered now, was relieved of the necessity for saluting. Despite the sudden freezing silence, it was evident that Gunn was trying to retain in his manner toward Paige some shreds of professional cordiality—a courtesy which Paige was not too sure he merited, considering the course his conversation with the girl had taken.

  As for Horsefield, he relegated Paige to the ghetto of “unauthorized persons” with a single look. Paige had no intention of remaining in that classification for a second longer than it would take him to get out of it, preferably without having been asked his name; it was deadly dangerous. With a mumbled “—at eight, then,” to the girl, Paige sidled ingloriously out of the Pfitzner reception room and beat it

  He was, he reflected later in the afternoon before his shaving mirror, subjecting himself to an extraordinary series of small humiliations, to get close to a matter which was none of his business. Worse: it was obviously Top Secret, which made it potentially lethal even for everyone authorized to know about it, let alone for rank snoopers. In the Age of Defense, to know was to be suspect, in the West as in the USSR; the two great nation-complexes had been becoming more and more alike in their treatment of “security” for the past fifty years. It had even been a mistake to mention the Bridge on Jupiter to the girl—for despite the fact that everyone knew that the Bridge existed, anyone who spoke of it with familiarity could quickly earn the label of being dangerously flap-jawed. Especially if tie speaker, like Paige, had actually been stationed in the Jovian system for a while, whether he had had access to information about the Bridge or not.

  And especially if the talker, like Paige, had actually spoken to the Bridge gang, worked with them on marginal projects, was known to have talked to Charity Dillon, the Bridge foreman. More especially if he held military rank, making it possible for him to sell security files to Congressmen, the traditional way of advancing a military career ahead of normal promotion schedules.

  And most especially if the man was discovered nosing about a new and different classified project, one to which he hadn’t even been assigned.

  Why, after all, was he taking the risk? He didn’t even know the substance of the matter; he was no biologist. To all outside eyes the Pfitzner project was simply another piece of research in antibiotics, and a rather routine research project at that. Why should a spaceman like Paige find himself flying so close to the candle already?

  He wiped the depilatory cream off his face into a paper towel and saw his own eyes looking back at him from the concave mirror, as magnified as an owl’s. The image, however, was only his own, despite the distortion. It gave him back no answer.

  CHAPTER TWO: Jupiter V

  … it is the plunge through the forbidden zones that catches the heart with its sheer audacity. In the history of life there have been few such episodes. It is that which makes us lonely. We have entered a new corridor, the cultural corridor. There has been nothing here before us. In it we are utterly alone. In it we are appallingly unique. We look at each other and say, “It can never be done again.”

  —LOOREN C. ELSELEY

  ASCREECHING tornado was rocking the Bridge when the alarm sounded; the whole structure shuddered and swayed. This was normal, and Robert Helmuth on Jupiter V barely noticed it. There was always a tornado shaking the Bridge. The whole planet was enswathed in tornadoes and worse.

  The scanner on the foreman’s board was given 114 as the sector where the trouble was. That was at the northwestern end of the Bridge, where it broke off, leaving nothing but the raging clouds of ammonia crystals and methane, and a sheer drop thirty miles down to the invisible surface. There were no ultra-phone “eyes” at that end to show a general view of the area—in so far as any general view was possible—because both ends of the Bridge were incomplete.

  With a sigh, Helmuth put the beetle into motion. The little car, as flat-bottomed and thin through as a bedbug, got slowly under way on its ball-bearing races, guided and held firmly to the surface of the Bridge by ten close-set flanged rails. Even so, the hydrogen gales made a terrific siren-like shrieking between the edge of the vehicle and the deck, and the impact of the falling drops of ammonia upon the curved roof was as heavy and deafening as a rain of cannon balls. In fact, the drops weighed almost as much as cannon balls there under Jupiter’s two-and-a-half-fold gravity, although they were not much bigger than ordinary raindrops. Every so often, too, there was a blast, accompanied by a dull orange glare, which made the car, the deck, and the Bridge itself buck savagely; even a small shock wave traveled through the incredibly dense atmosphere of the planet like the armor-plate of a bursting battleship.

  These blasts were below, however, on the surface. While they shook the structure of the Bridge heavily, they almost never interfered with its functioning. And they could not, in the very nature of things, do Helmuth any harm.

  Helmuth, after all, was not on Jupiter—though that was becoming harder and harder for him to bear in mind. Nobody was on Jupiter; had any real damage ever been done to the Bridge, it probably would never have been repaired. There was nobody on Jupiter
to repair it; only the machines which were themselves part of the Bridge.

  The Bridge was building itself. Massive, alone, and lifeless, it grew in the black deeps of Jupiter.

  It had been well planned. From Helmuth’s point of view—that of the scanners on the beetle—almost nothing could be seen of it, for the beetle tracks ran down the center of the deck, and in the darkness and perpetual storm even ultrawave-assisted vision could not penetrate more than a few hundred yards at the most. The width of the Bridge, which no one would ever see, was eleven miles; its height, as incomprehensible to the Bridge gang as a skyscraper to an ant, thirty miles; its length, deliberately unspecified in the plans, fifty-four miles at the moment and still increasing—a squat, colossal structure, built with engineering principles, methods, materials and tools never touched before now ….

  For the very good reason that they would have been impossible anywhere else. Most of the Bridge, for instance, was made of ice: a marvelous structural material under a pressure of a million atmospheres, at a temperature of 94° below zero Fahrenheit. Under such conditions, the best structural steel is a friable, talc-like powder, and aluminum becomes a peculiar transparent substance that splits at a tap; water, on the other hand, becomes Ice IV, a dense, opaque white medium which will deform to a heavy stress, but will break only under impacts huge enough to lay whole Earthly cities waste. Never mind that it took millions of megawatts of power to keep the Bridge up and growing every hour of the day; the winds on Jupiter blow at velocities up to twenty-five thousand miles per hour, and will never stop blowing, as they may have been blowing for more than four billion years; there is power enough.

  Back home, Helmuth remembered, there had been talk of starting another Bridge on Saturn, and perhaps later still on Uranus too. But that had been politicians’ talk. The Bridge was almost five thousand miles below the visible surface of Jupiter’s atmosphere—luckily in a way, for at the top of that atmosphere the temperature was 76º Fahrenheit colder than it was down by the Bridge, but even with that differential the Bridge’s mechanisms were just barely manageable. The bottom of Saturn’s atmosphere, if the radiosonde readings could be trusted, was just 16,878 miles below the top of the Saturnian clouds one could see through the telescope, and the temperature down there was below —238° F. Under those conditions, even pressure-ice would be immovable, and could not be worked with anything softer than itself.