Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  Had those crewmen been heroes? They had been enlisted men and officers of the Army Space Service, acting under orders. While doing what they had been ordered to do, they had been killed. Wagoner could not remember whether or not the survivors of that operation had also been called heroes. Oh, they had certainly been decorated—the Army liked its men to wear as much fruit salad on their chests as it could possibly spoon out to them, because it was good public relations—but they were not mentioned in the report.

  This much was certain: the dead men had died because of Wagoner. He had known, generally at least, that many of them would die, but he had gone ahead anyhow. He knew that there might be worse to come. Nevertheless, he would proceed, because he thought that—in the long run—it would be worth it. He knew well enough that the end cannot justify the means; but if there are no other means, and the end is necessary ….

  But from time to time he thought of Dostoevski and the Grand Inquisitor. Would the Millennium be worth having, if it could be ushered in only by the torturing to death of a single child? What Wagoner foresaw and planned for was by no means the Millennium; and while the children at Jno. Pfitzner & Sons were certainly not being tortured or even harmed, their experiences there were at least not normal for children. And there were two hundred and thirty-one men frozen solid somewhere in the bottomless hell of Jupiter, men who had had to obey their orders even more helplessly than children.

  Wagoner had not been cut out to be a general.

  The report praised the lost men’s heroism. Wagoner lifted the heavy pages one after another, looking for a word from the investigating senators about the cause those deaths had served. There was nothing but the conventional phrases, “for their country,” “for the cause of peace,” “for the future.” High-order abstractions—blabs. The senators had no notion of what the Bridge was for. They had looked, but they hadn’t seen. Even with a total of four years to think back on the experience, they hadn’t seen. The very size of the Bridge evidently had convinced them that it was a form of weapons research —so much “for the cause of peace”—and that it would be better for them not to know the nature of the weapon until an official announcement was circulated to them.

  They were right. The Bridge was assuredly a weapon. But in neglecting to wonder what kind of a weapon it might be, the senators had also neglected to wonder at whom it was pointed. Wagoner was glad that they had.

  The report did not even touch upon those two years of exploration, of search for some project which might be worth attacking, which had preceded even the notion of the Bridge. Wagoner had had a special staff of four devoted men at work during every minute of those two years, checking patents that had been granted but not sequestered, published scientific papers containing suggestions other scientists had decided not to explore, articles in the lay press about incipient miracles which hadn’t come off, science-fiction stories by practicing scientists, anything and everything that might lead somewhere. The four men had worked under orders to avoid telling anybody what they were looking for, and to stay strictly away from the main currents of modern scientific thought on the subject; but no secret is ever truly safe; no fact in nature is ever truly a secret.

  Somewhere, for instance, in the files of the FBI, was a tape recording of the conversation he had had with the chief of the four-man team, in his office, the day the break came. The man had said, not only to Wagoner, but to the attentive FBI microphones no senator dared to seek out and muffle: “This looks like a real line, Bliss. On Subject G.” (Something on gravity, chief.)

  “Keep it to the point.” (A reminder: Keep it too technical to interest a casual eavesdropper—if you have to talk about it here, with all these bugs to pick it up. )

  “Sure. It’s a thing called the Blackett equation. Deals with a possible relationship between electron-spin and magnetic moment. I understand Dirac did some work on that, too. There’s a G in the equation, and with one simple algebraic manipulation you can isolate the G on one side of the equals-sign, and all the other elements on the other.” (Not a crackpot notion this time. Real scientists have been interested in it. There’s math to go with it. )

  “Status?” (Why was it never followed, then?)

  “The original equation is about status seven, but there’s no way anybody knows that it could be subjected to an operational test. The manipulated equation is called the Locke Derivation, and our boys say that a little dimensional analysis will show that it’s wrong; but they’re not entirely sure. However, it is subject to an operational test if we want to pay for it, where the original Blackett formula isn’t.” ( Nobody’s sure what it means yet. It may mean nothing. It would cost a hell of a lot to find out. )

  “Do we have the facilities?” (Just how much?)

  “Only the beginnings.” (About four billion dollars, Bliss.)

  “Conservatively?” (Why so much?)

  “Yes. Field strength again.”

  (That was shorthand for the only problem that mattered, in the long run, if you wanted to work with gravity. Whether you thought of it, like Newton, as a force, or like Faraday as a field, or like Einstein as a condition in space, gravity was incredibly weak. It was so weak that, although theoretically it was a property of every bit of matter in the universe no matter how small, it could not be worked with in the laboratory. Two magnetized needles will rush toward each other over a distance as great as an inch; so will two balls of pith as small as peas if they bear opposite electrical charges. Two ceramet magnets no bigger than doughnuts can be so strongly charged that it is impossible to push them together by hand when their like poles are opposed, and impossible for a strong man to hold them apart when their unlike poles approach each other. Two spheres of metal of any size, if they bear opposite electrical charges, will mate in a fat spark across the insulating air, if there is no other way that they can neutralize each other.

  (But gravity—theoretically one in kind with electricity and magnetism—cannot be charged on to any object. It produces no sparks. There is no such thing as an insulation against it—a di-gravitic. It remains beyond detection as a force, between bodies as small as peas or doughnuts. Two objects as huge as skyscrapers and as massive as lead will take centuries to crawl into the same bed over a foot of distance, if nothing but their mutual gravitational attraction is drawing them together; even love is faster than that. Even a ball of rock eight thousand miles in diameter—the Earth—has a gravitational field too weak to prevent one single man from pole-vaulting away from it to more than four times his own height, driven by no opposing force but that of his spasming muscles.)

  “Well, give me a report when you can. If necessary, we can expand.” (Is it worth it?)

  “I’ll give you the report this week.” (Yes!)

  And that was how the Bridge had been born, though nobody had known it then, not even Wagoner. The senators who had investigated the Bridge still didn’t know it. MaoHinery’s staff at the FBI evidently had been unable to penetrate the jargon on their recording of that conversation far enough to connect the conversation with the Bridge; otherwise MacHinery would have given the transcript to the investigators. MacHinery did not exactly love Wagoner; he had been unable thus far to find any handle by which he might grasp and use the Alaskan senator.

  All well and good.

  And yet the investigators had come perilously close, just once. They had subpoenaed Guiseppi Corsi for the preliminary questioning.

  Committee Counsel: Now then, Dr. Corsi, according to our records, your last interview with Senator Wagoner was in the winter of 2013. Did you discuss the Jupiter Project with him at that time?

  Corsi: How could I have? It didn’t exist then.

  Counsel: But was it mentioned to you in any way? Did Senator Wagoner say anything about plans to start such a project? Corsi: No.

  Counsel: You didn’t yourself suggest it to Senator Wagoner?

  Corsi: Certainly not. It was a total surprise to me, when it was announced afterwards.

  Counsel: But I
suppose you know what it is.

  Corsi: I know only what the general public has been told. We’re building a Bridge on Jupiter. It’s very costly and ambitious. What it’s for is a secret. That’s all.

  Counsel: You’re sure you don’t know what it’s for?

  Corsi: For research.

  Counsel: Yes, but research for what? Surely you have some clues. Corsi: I don’t have any clues, and Senator Wagoner didn’t give me any. The only facts I have are those I read in the press. Naturally I have some conjectures. But all I know is what is indicated, or hinted at, in the official announcements. Those seem to convey the impression that the Bridge is for weapons research.

  Counsel: But you think that maybe it isn’t?

  Corsi: I—I’m not in a position to discuss government projects about which I know nothing.

  Counsel: You could give us your opinion.

  Corsi: If you want my opinion as an expert, I’ll have my office go into the subject and let you know later what such an opinion would cost.

  Senator Billings: Dr. Corsi, do we understand that you refuse to answer the question? It seems to me that in view of your past record you might be better advised—

  Corsi: I haven’t refused an answer, Senator. I make part of my living by consultation. If the government wishes to use me in that capacity, it’s my right to ask to be paid. You have no right to deprive me of my livelihood, or any part of it.

  Senator Croft: The government made up its mind about employing you some time back, Dr. Corsi. And rightly, in my opinion.

  Corsi: That is the government’s privilege.

  Senator Croft: —but you are being questioned now by the Senate of the United States. If you refuse to answer, you may be held in contempt.

  Corsi: For refusing to state an opinion?

  Counsel: If you will pardon me, Senator Croft, the witness may refuse to offer an opinion—or withhold such an opinion, pending payment. He can be held in contempt only for declining to state the facts as he knows them.

  Senator Croft: All right, let’s get some facts, and stop the pussyfooting.

  Counsel: Dr. Corsi, was anything said during your last meeting with Senator Wagoner which might have had any bearing on the Jupiter Project?

  Corsi: Well, yes. But only negatively. I did counsel him against any such project. Rather emphatically, as I recall.

  Counsel: I thought you said that the Bridge hadn’t been mentioned.

  Corsi: It hadn’t. Senator Wagoner and I were discussing research methods in general. I told him that I thought research projects of the Bridge’s order of magnitude were no longer fruitful.

  Senator Billings: Did you charge Senator Wagoner for that opinion, Dr. Corsi?

  Corsi: No, Senator. Sometimes I don’t.

  Senator Billings: Perhaps you should have. Wagoner didn’t follow your free advice.

  Senator Croft: It looks like he considered the source.

  Corsi: There’s nothing compulsory about advice. I gave him my best opinion at the time. What he did with it was up to him.

  Counsel: Would you tell us if that is your best opinion now? That

  research projects the size of the Bridge are—I believe your phrase was, “no longer fruitful”?

  Corsi: That is still my opinion.

  Senator Billings: Which you will give us free of charge …?

  Corsi: It is the opinion of every scientist I know. You could get it free from those who work for you. I have better sense than to charge fees for common knowledge.

  It had been a near thing. Perhaps, Wagoner thought, Corsi had after all remembered the really crucial part of that interview and had decided not to reveal it to the sub-committee. It was more likely, however, that those few words that Corsi had thrown off while standing at the blinded windows of his apartment would not have stuck in his memory as they had stuck in Wagoner’s.

  Yet surely Corsi knew, at least in part, what the Bridge was for. He must have remembered the part of that conversation which dealt with gravity. By now he would have reasoned his way from those words all the difficult way to the Bridge—after all, the Bridge was not a difficult object for an understanding like Corsi’s.

  But he had said nothing about it. That had been a crucial silence.

  Wagoner wondered if it would ever be possible for him to show his gratitude to the ageing physicist. Not now. Possibly never. The pain and the puzzlement in Corsi’s mind stood forth in what he had said, even through the coldness of the official transcript. Wagoner badly wanted to assuage both. But he couldn’t. He could only hope that Corsi would see it whole, and understand it whole, when the time came.

  The page turned on Corsi. Now there was another question which had to be answered. Was there a single hint, anywhere in the sixteen hundred mimeographed pages of the report, that the Bridge was incomplete without what was going on at Jno. Pfitzner & Sons? …

  No, there was not. Wagoner let the report fall, with a sigh of relief of which he was hardly conscious. That was that.

  He filed the report, and reached into his “In” basket for the dossier on Paige Russell, Colonel, Army Space Corps, which had come in from the Pfitzner plant only a week ago. He was tired, and he did not want to perform an act of judgment on another man for the rest of his life—but he had asked for the job, and now he had to work at it.

  Bliss Wagoner had not been cut out to be a general. As a god he was even more inept.

  CHAPTER FIVE: New York

  The original phenomena which the soul-hypothesis attempted to explain still remain. Homo sapiens does have some differences from other animal species. But when his biological distinctions and their consequences are clearly described, man’s ‘morality,’ his ‘soul,’ and his ‘immortality’ all become accessible to a purely naturalistic formulation and understanding, … Man’s ‘immortality’ (in so far as it differs from the immortality of the germ plasm of any other animal species) consists in his time-transcending inter-individually shared values, symbol-systems, languages, and cultures—and in nothing else.

  —WESTON LA BARRE

  IT TOOK Paige no more than Anne’s mandatory ten seconds, during breakfast of the next day in his snuggery at the Spaceman’s Haven, to decide that he was going back to the Pfitzner plant and apologize. He didn’t quite understand why the date had ended as catastrophically as it had, but of one thing he was nearly certain: the fiasco had had something to do with his space-rusty manners, and if it were to be mended, he had to be the one to tool up for it.

  And now that he came to think of it over his cold egg, it seemed obvious in essence. By his last line of questioning, Paige had broken the delicate shell of the evening and spilled the contents all over the restaurant table. He had left the more or less safe womb of technicalities, and had begun, by implication at least, to call Anne’s ethics into question—first by making clear his first reaction to the business about the experimental infants, and then by pressing home her irregular marriage to her firm.

  In this world called Earth of disintegrating faiths, one didn’t call personal ethical codes into question without getting into trouble. Such codes, where they could be found at all, obviously had cost their adherents too much pain to be open for any new probing. Faith had once been self-evident; now it was desperate. Those who still had it—or had made it, chunk by fragment by shard—wanted nothing but to be allowed to hold it.

  As for why he wanted to set matters right with Anne Abbott, Paige was less clear. His leave was passing him by rapidly, and thus far he had done little more than stroll while it passed—especially if he measured it against the desperate meter-stick established by his last two leaves, the two after his marriage had shattered and he had been alone again. After the present leave was over, there was a good chance that he would be assigned to the Proserpine station, which was now about finished and which had no competitors for the title of the most forsaken outpost of the solar system. None, at least, until somebody should discover an 11th planet.

  Nevertheless, he was
going to go out to the Pfitzner plant again, out to the scenic Bronx, to revel among research scientists, business executives, government brass, and a frozen-voiced girl with a figure like an ironing-board, to kick up his heels on a reception-room rug in the sight of gay steel engravings of the founders, cheered on by a motto which might or might not be Dionysiac, if he could only read it. Great. Just great. If he played his cards right, he could go on duty at the Proserpine station with fine memories: perhaps the vice-president in charge of export would let Paige call him “Hal,” or maybe even “Bubbles.”

  Maybe it was a matter of religion, after all. Like everyone else in the world, Paige thought, he was still looking for something bigger than himself, bigger than family, army, marriage, fatherhood, space itself, or the pub-crawls and tyrannically meaningless sexual spasms of a spaceman’s leave. Quite obviously the project at Pfitzner, with its air of mystery and selflessness, had touched that very vulnerable nerve in him once more. Anne Abbott’s own dedication was merely the touchstone, the key …. No, he hadn’t the right word for it yet, but her attitude somehow fitted into an empty, jagged-edge blemish in his own soul like—like … yes, that was it: like a jigsaw-puzzle piece.

  And besides, he wanted to see that sunburst smile again.

  Because of the way her desk was placed, she was the first thing he saw as he came into Pfitzner’s reception room. Her expression was even stranger than he had expected, and she seemed to be making some kind of covert gesture, as though she were flicking dust off the top of her desk toward him with the tips of all her fingers. He took several slower and slower steps into the room and stopped, finally baffled.