by James Blish
His definition of “home” had changed. He had won long life; but with it, new ties and new obligations; not an eternal childhood on Earth, but a life for the stars.
He wrenched his attention back to the control room. “What about Piggy?” he said curiously. “I talked to him on the way back. He seems to have learned a lot.”
“Too late,” Amalfi said, his voice inflexibly stern. “He wrote his own ticket. It’s a passenger ticket. He’s got boldness and initiative, all right—all of it of the wrong kind, totally untempered by judgment or imagination. The same kind of pitfall will always lie ahead of you, Chris; that, too, is an aspect of the job. It’d be wise not to forget it.”
Chris nodded again, but the warning could not dampen his spirits now; for this was for some reason the highest moment of them all—the moment when Frad Huskins, the new city manager of Scranton, shook his hand and said huskily:
“Colleague, let’s talk business.”
EARTHMAN, COME HOME
PROLOGUE
SPACE FLIGHT got its start as a war weapon amid the collapse of the great Western culture of Earth. The invention of Muir’s tape-mass engine carried early explorers out as far as Jupiter; and gravity was discovered—though it had been postulated centuries before—by the 2018 Jovian expedition, the last space flight with Muir engines which was completed on behalf of the West before that culture’s final extinction. The building, by remote control, of the Bridge on the face of Jupiter itself, easily the most enormous (and in most other respects the most useless) engineering project ever undertaken by man, had made possible direct, close measurements of Jupiter’s magnetic field. The measurements provided final confirmation of the Blackett-Dirac equations, which as early as 1948 had proposed a direct relationship between magnetism, gravitation, and the rate of spin of any mass.
Up to that time, nothing had been done with the Blackett-Dirac hypothesis, which remained a toy of pure mathematicians. Then, abruptly, the hypothesis and the mathematicians had their first innings. From the many pages of symbols and the mumbled discussions of the possible field-strength of a single electronic pole in rotation, the Dillon-Wagoner gravitron polarity generator—almost immediately dubbed the “spindizzy” in honor of what it did to electron rotation—sprang as if full-born. The overdrive, the meteor screen, and antigravity had all arrived in one compact package labeled “G = 2(PC/BU) 2 .”
Every culture has its characteristic mathematic, in which its toriographers can see its inevitable social form. This expression, couched in the algebra of the Magian culture, pointing toward the matrix mechanics of the new Nomad Era, remained essentially a Western discovery. At first its major significance seemed to lie in the fact that it was rooted in a variation of the value of C, the velocity of light, as a limit. The West used the spindizzy to scatter the nearby stars with colonists during the last fifty years of its existence; but even then, it did not realize the power of the weapon that it held in its faltering hands. Essentially, the West never found out that the spindizzy could lift anything, as well as protect it and drive it faster than light.
In the succeeding centuries, the whole concept of space flight was almost forgotten. The new culture on Earth, that narrow planar despotism called by historiographers the Bureaucratic State, did not think that way. Space flight had been a natural, if late, outcome of Western thought patterns, which had always been ambitious for the infinite. The Soviets, however, were opposed so bitterly to the very idea that they would not even allow their fiction writers to mention it. Where the West had soared from the rock of Earth like a sequoia, the Soviets spread like lichens over the planet, tightening their grip, satisfied to be at the bases of the pillars of sunlight the West had sought to ascend.
This was the way the Bureaucratic State had been born and had triumphed, and it was the way it meant to maintain its holdings. There had never been any direct military conquest of the West by the Soviets. Indeed, by 2105, the date usually assigned to the fall of the West, any such battle would have depopulated the Earth almost overnight. Instead, the West helped conquer itself, a long and painful process which many people foresaw but no one was able to halt. In its anxiety to prevent infiltration by the enemy, the West developed thought controls of its own, which grew ever tighter. In the end, the two opposing cultures could no longer be told apart—and since the Soviets had had far more practice at running this kind of monolithic government than had the West, Soviet leadership became a bloodless fact.
The ban on thinking about space flight extended even to the speculations of physicists. The omnipresent thought police were instructed in the formulae of ballistics and other disciplines of astronautics, and could detect such work—Unearthly Activities, it was called—long before it might have reached the proving-stand stage.
The thought police, however, could not ban atomic research because the new state’s power rested upon it. It had been from study of the magnetic moment of the electron that the Blackett equation had emerged. The new state had suppressed the spindizzy—it was too good an escape route—and the thought police had never been told that the original equation was one of those in the “sensitive area.” The Soviets did not dare let even that much be known about it.
Thus, despite all of the minority groups purged or “reeducated” by the Bureaucratic State, the pure mathematicians went unsuspected about the destruction of that state, innocent even in their own minds of revolutionary motives. The spindizzy was rediscovered, quite inadvertently, in the nuclear physics laboratories of the Thorium Trust.
The discovery spelled the doom of the flat culture, as the leveling menace of the nuclear reactor and the Solar Phoenix had cut down the soaring West. Space flight returned. For a while, cautiously, the spindizzy was installed only in new spaceships, and there was another period—comically brief—of interplanetary exploration. The tottering edifice fought to retain its traditional balance. But the center of gravity had shifted. The waste inherent in using the spindizzy only in a ship could not be disguised. There was no longer any reason why a man-carrying vehicle to cross space needed to be small, cramped, organized fore-and-aft, penurious of weight. Once anti-gravity was an engineering reality, it was no longer necessary to design ships specially for space travel, for neither mass nor aerodynamic lines meant anything any more. The most massive and awkward object could be lifted and hurled off the Earth, and carried almost any distance. Whole cities, if necessary, could be moved.
Many were. The factories went first; they toured Earth, from one valuable mineral lie to another, and then went farther aloft. The exodus began. Nothing could be done to prevent it, for by that time the whole trend was obviously in the best interests of the State. The mobile factories changed Mars into the Pittsburgh of the solar system; the spindizzy had lifted the mining equipment and the refining plants bodily to bring life back to that lichen-scabbed ball of rust. The blank where Pittsburgh itself had been was a valley of slag and ashes. The great plants of the Steel Trust gulped meteors and chewed into the vitals of satellites. The Aluminum Trust, the Germanium Trust, and the Thorium Trust put their plants aloft to mine the planets.
But the Thorium Trust’s Plant No. 8 never came back. The revolution against the planar culture began with that simple fact. The first of the Okie cities soared away from the solar system, looking for work among the colonists left stranded by the ebb tide of Western civilization. The new culture began among these nomad cities; and when it was all over, the Bureaucratic State, against its own will, had done what it had long promised to do “when the people were ready”—it had withered away. The Earth that it once had owned, right down to the last grain of sand, was almost deserted. Earth’s nomad cities—migratory workers, hobos, Okies—had become her inheritors.
Primarily the spindizzy had made this possible; but it could not have maintained it without heavy contributions from two other social factors. One of these was longevity. The conquest of so-called “natural” death had been virtually complete by the time the technicians on the
Jovian Bridge had confirmed the spindizzy principle, and the two went together like hand in spacemitt. Despite the fact that the spindizzy would drive a ship—or a city—at speeds enormously faster than that of light, interstellar flight still consumed finite time. The vastness of the galaxy was sufficient to make long flights consume lifetimes, even at top spindizzy speed.
But when death yielded to the anti-agathic drugs, there was no longer any such thing as a “lifetime” in the old sense.
The other factor was economic: The rise of the metal germanium as the jinn of solid-state physics. Long before flight into deep space became a fact, the metal had assumed a fantastic value on Earth. The opening of the interstellar frontier drove its price down to a manageable level, and gradually it emerged as the basic, stable monetary standard of space trade. Nothing else could have kept the nomads in business.
And so the Bureaucratic State had fallen; but the social structure did not collapse entirely. Earth laws, though much changed, survived, and not entirely to the disadvantage of the Okies. The migrant cities found worlds that refused them landing permits. Others allowed them to land, but exploited them mercilessly. The cities fought back, but they were not efficient fighting machines. Steam shovels, by and large, had been more characteristic of the West than tanks, but in a fight between the two, the outcome was predictable; that situation never changed. It was, of course, a waste to bottle a spindizzy in so small an object as a spaceship, but a war vessel is meant to waste power—the more, the more deadly. The Earth police put the rebel cities down; and then, in self-protection, because the cities were needed, Earth passed laws protecting the cities.
Thus the Earth police held their jurisdiction, but the hegemony of Earth was weak, for the most part. There were many corners of the galaxy which knew Earth only as a legend, a green myth floating unknown thousands of parsecs away in space, known and ineluctable thousands of years away in history. Some of them remembered much more vividly the now-broken tyranny of Vega, and did not know—some of them never had known—even the name of the little planet that had broken that tyranny.
Earth itself became a garden planet, bearing only one city worth noticing, the sleepy capital of a galaxy. Pittsburgh valley bloomed, and rich honeymooners went there to frolic. Old bureaucrats went to Earth to die.
Nobody else went there at all.
— ACREFF-MONALES: The Milky Way: Five Cultural Portraits
CHAPTER ONE: Utopia
As John Amalfi emerged onto the narrow, worn granite ledge with its gritty balustrade, his memory encountered one of those brief boggles over the meaning of a word which had once annoyed him constantly, like a bubble in an otherwise smoothly blown French horn solo. Such moments of confusion were very rare now, but they were still a nuisance.
This time he found himself unable to decide on a name for where he was going at the moment. Was it a belfry, or was it a bridge?
It was, of course, only a matter of simple semantics, depending, as the oldest saying goes, on the point of view. The ledge ran around the belfry of City Hall. The city, however, was a spaceship, much of which was sometimes operated from this spot, and from which Amalfi was accustomed to assess the star-seas that the city sailed. That made it a bridge. But the ship was a city, a city of jails and playgrounds, alleys and alley cats, and there was even one bell still in the belfry, though it no longer had a clapper. The city was still called New York, N.Y., too, but that, the old maps showed, was misleading; the city aloft was only Manhattan, or New York County.
Amalfi’s step across the threshold struck the granite without perceptible interruption. The minute dilemma was familiar: he had been through others of its kind often in the years immediately after the city had taken to the skies. It was hard to decide the terms in which one thought about customary things and places after they had become utterly transformed by space flight. The difficulty was that, although the belfry of City Hall still looked much as it had in 1850, it was now the bridge of a spaceship, so that neither term could quite express what the composite had become.
Amalfi looked up. The skies, too, looked about as they must have in 1850 on a very clear night. The spindizzy screen which completely englobed the flying city was itself invisible, but it would pass only elliptically polarized light, so that it blurred the points which were stars seen from space, and took them down in brilliance about three magnitudes to boot. Except for the distant, residual hum of the spindizzies themselves—certainly a much softer noise than the composite traffic roar which had been the city’s characteristic tone back in the days before cities could fly—there was no real indication that the city was whirling through the emptiness between stars, a migrant among migrants.
If he chose, Amalfi could remember those days, since he had been mayor of the city—although only for a short time—when the City Fathers had decided that it was time to go aloft. That had been in 3111, decades after every other major city had already left the Earth; Amalfi had been just 117 years old at the time. His first city manager had been a man named deFord, who for a while had shared Amalfi’s amused puzzlement about what to call all the familiar things now that they had turned strange—but deFord had been shot by the City Fathers around 3300 for engineering an egregious violation of the city’s contract with a planet called Epoch, which had put a black mark on the city’s police record which the cops still had not forgotten.
The new city manager was a youngster less than 400 years old named Mark Hazleton, who was already as little loved by the City Fathers as deFord had been and for about the same reasons, but who had been born after the city had gone aloft and hence had no difficulty in finding the appropriate words for things. Amalfi was prepared to believe that he was the last living man on board the flying city who still had occasional bubbles blown into his stream of consciousness by old Earthbound habits of thinking.
In a way, Amalfi’s clinging to City Hall as the center of operations for the city betrayed the mayor’s ancient ties to Earth. City Hall was the oldest building on board, and so only a few of the other structures could be seen from it. It wasn’t tall enough, and there were too many newer buildings around it. Amalfi didn’t care. From the belfry—or bridge, if that was what he had to call it now—he never looked in any direction but straight up, his head tilted all the way back on his bull neck. He had no reason to look at the buildings around Battery Park, after all. He had already seen them.
Straight up, however, was a sun, surrounded by starry sable. It was close enough to show a perceptible disc, and becoming slowly larger. While Amalfi watched it, the microphone in his hand began to emit intermittent squawks.
“It looks good enough to me,” Amalfi said, lowering his bald head grudgingly a centimeter or two toward the mike. “It’s a type G star, or near to it, and Jake in Astronomy says two of the planets are Earthlike. And Records says that both of ’em are inhabited. Where there’s people, there’s work.”
The phone quacked anxiously, each syllable evenly weighted, but without any over-all sense of conviction. Amalfi listened impatiently. Then he said, “Politics.”
The way he said it made it sound fit only to be scrawled on sidewalks. The phone was silenced; Amalfi hung it on its hook on the railing and thudded back down the archaic stone steps which led from the belfry/bridge.
Hazleton was waiting for him in the mayor’s office, drumming slim fingers upon the desk top. The current city manager was an excessively tall, slender, disjointed sort of man. Something in the way his limbs were distributed over Amalfi’s chair made him also look lazy. If taking devious pains was a sign of laziness, Amalfi was quite willing to call Hazleton the laziest man in the city.
Whether he was lazier than anybody outside the city didn’t matter. Nothing that went on outside the city was of real importance any more.
Hazleton said, “Well?”
“Well enough.” Amalfi grunted. “It’s a nice yellow dwarf star, with all the fixings.”
“Sure,” Hazleton said with a wry smile. “I don’t
see why you insist on taking a personal look at every star we go by. There are screens right here in the office, and the City Fathers have all the data. We knew even before we could see this sun what it was like.”
“I like a personal look,” said Amalfi. “I haven’t been mayor here for five hundred years for nothing. I can’t really tell about a sun until I see it with my own eyes. Then I know. Images don’t mean a thing—no feel to ’em.”
“Nonsense,” Hazleton said, without malice. “And what does your feelership say about this one?”
“It’s a good sun; I like it. We’ll land.”
“All right, suppose I tell you what’s going on out there?”
“I know, I know,” Amalfi said. His heavy voice took on a finicky, nervous tone, his own exaggerated version of the mechanical speech of the City Fathers. “ ‘THE POLITICAL SIT-UATION IS VER-Y DISTURBING.’ It’s the food situation that I’m worried about.”
“Oh? Is it so bad, then?”
“It’s not bad yet. It will be, unless we land. There’s been another mutation in the Chlorella tanks; must have started when we passed through that radiation field near Sigma Draconis. We’re getting a yield of about twenty-two hundred kilograms per acre in terms of fats.”
“That’s not bad.”
“Not bad, but it’s dropping steadily, and the rate of decrease is accelerating. If it’s not arrested, we won’t have any algae crops at all in a year or so. And there’s not enough crude-oil reserve to tide us over to the next nearest star. We’d hit there eating each other.”
Hazleton shrugged. “That’s a big if, boss,” he said. “We’ve never had a mutation we couldn’t get under control before. And it’s very nasty on those two planets.”