Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  “An odd situation,” Schloss agreed. “It means that in any thermodynamic situation we have better information about the future than we do about the past. In the anti-matter universe it has to be the other way around—but only from our point of view; a hypothetical observer living under their laws and composed of their energies, I assume, couldn’t tell the difference.”

  “Can we write a convergent retrodictive equation?” Jake’s voice said. “One which describes what their situation is as we would see it, if we could? If we can’t, I don’t see how we can design instruments to detect any difference.”

  “It can be done,” Retma said. “For instance.” He turned to the blackboard and the symbols flowed squeakily:

  “Ah-ha,” Schloss said. “Thus giving us an imaginary constant in place of a real one. But your second equation isn’t a mirror of your first; parity is not conserved. Your first equation is an equalization process, but this one is oscillatory. Surely the gradient on the other side doesn’t pulsate!”

  “Parity is not conserved anyhow in these weak reactions,” Jake said. “But I think the objection may be well taken all the same. If Equation Two describes anything at all, it can’t be the other side. It has to be both sides—the whole vast system, providing that it is cyclical, which we don’t know yet. Nor do I see any way to test it, it’s as ultimately and finally unprovable as the Mach Hypothesis—”

  The door opened quietly and a young Hevian beckoned silently to Amalfi. He got up without too much reluctance; the boys were giving him a hard time today, and he found that he missed Estelle. It had been her function to remind the group of possible pitfalls in Retma’s notation: here, for instance, Retma was using the d which in Amalfi’s experience was an increment in calculus, as simply an expression for a constant; he was using the G which to Amalfi was the gravitational constant, to express a term in thermodynamics Amalfi was accustomed to seeing written with the greek capital letter Ψ; and could Schloss be sure that Retma’s i was equivalent to the square root of minus one, as it was in New Earth math? Doubtless Schloss had good reason to feel that agreement on that very simple symbol had been established between the New Earthmen and Retma long since, but without Estelle it made Amalfi feel uncomfortable. Besides, though he knew intellectually that all the important battles against a problem in physics are won in such blackboard sessions as this, he was not temperamentally fitted to them. He liked to see things happening.

  They began to happen forthwith. As soon as the door was decently closed on the visible and invisible physicists, the young Hevian said:

  “I am sorry to disturb you, Mr. Amalfi. But there is an urgent call for you from New Earth. It is Mayor Hazleton.”

  “Helleshin!” Amalfi said. The word was Vegan; no one now alive knew what it meant. “All right, let’s go.”

  “Where is my wife?” Hazleton demanded without preamble. “And my grandson, and Jake’s daughter? And where have you been these past three weeks? Why didn’t you call in? I’ve been losing my mind, and the Hevians gave me the Force Four blowaround before they’d let me through to you at all—”

  “What are you talking about, Mark?” Amalfi said. “Stop sputtering long enough to let me know what this is all about.”

  “That’s what I want to know. All right. I’ll begin again. Where is Dee?”

  “I don’t know,” Amalfi said patiently. “I sent her home three weeks ago. If you can’t find her, that’s your problem.”

  “She never got here.”

  “She didn’t? But—”

  “Yes, but. That recall ship never landed. We never heard from it at all. It just vanished, Dee, children and all. I’ve been phoning you frantically to find out whether or not you ever sent it; now I know that you did. Well, we know what that means. You’d better give up dabbling in physics, Amalfi, and get back here on the double.”

  “What can I do?” Amalfi said. “I don’t know any more about it than you do.”

  “You can damn well come back here and help me out of this mess.”

  “What mess?”

  “What have you been doing the past three weeks?” Hazleton yelled. “Do you mean to tell me that you haven’t heard what’s been happening?”

  “No,” Amalfi said. “And stop yelling. What did you mean, ‘We know what that means’? If you think you know what’s happened, why aren’t you doing something about it, instead of jamming the Dirac raising me? You’re the mayor; I’ve got work of my own to do.”

  “I’ll be the mayor about two days longer, if my luck holds,” Hazleton said in a savage voice. “And you’re directly responsible, so you needn’t bother trying to duck. Jorn the Apostle began to move two weeks ago. He has a navy now, though where he raised it is beyond me. His main body’s nowhere near New Earth, but he’s about to take New Earth all the same—the whole planet is swarming with farm kids with fanatical expressions and dismounted spindillies. As soon as they get to me, I’m going to surrender out of hand—you know as well as I do what one of those machines can do, and the farmers are using them as side-arms. I’m not going to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives just to maintain my administration; if they want me out, they can have me out.”

  “And this is my fault? I once told you the Warriors of God were dangerous.”

  “And I didn’t listen. All right. But they’d never have moved if it hadn’t been for the fact that you and Miramon didn’t censor what you’re up to. It’s given Jorn his cause; he’s telling his followers that you’re meddling with the pre-ordained Armageddon and jeopardizing their chances of salvation. He’s proclaimed a jehad against the Hevians for instigating it, and the jehad includes New Earth because we’re working with the Hevians—”

  Over the phone came four loud, heavy strokes of fist upon metal.

  “Gods of all stars, they’re here already,” Hazleton said. “I’ll leave the line open as long as I can—maybe they won’t notice ….” His voice faded. Amalfi hung on grimly, straining to hear every sound.

  “Sinner Hazleton,” a young and desperately frightened voice said, almost at once, “you have been found out. By the Word of Jorn, you—you are ordered to corrective discipline. Are you gone-tuh—will you submit humbly?”

  “If you fire that thing in here,” Hazleton’s voice said, quite loudly—he was obviously projecting for the benefit of the mike—“you’ll uproot half the city. What good will that do you?”

  “We will die in the Warriors,” the other voice said. It was still tense, but now that it spoke of dying it seemed more self-assured. “You will go to the flames.”

  “And all the other people—?”

  “Sinner Hazleton, we do not threaten,” a deeper, older voice said. “We think there is some good in everyone. Jorn commands us to redeem, and that we will do. We have hostages for your good conduct.”

  “Where are they?”

  “They were picked up by the Warriors of God,” the deep voice said. “Jorn in his blessedness was kind enough to grant us a cordon sanitaire for this Godless world. Will you yield, for the salvation of this woman and these two helpless children? I advise you, Sinner—hey, what the hell, that phone’s open! Jody, smash that switch, and fast! What did I ever do to be saddled with a cadre of lousy yokels—”

  The speaker began a thin howl and went dead before the cry was properly born.

  For a moment, Amalfi sat stunned. He had gotten too much information too fast; and he was much older now than he had been on like occasions in the past. He had never expected that such an occasion would arise again—but here it was.

  A jehad against He? No, not likely—at least, not directly. Jorn the Apostle would be wary of tackling a world so completely mysterious to him, especially with forces more mob than military. But New Earth was wholly vulnerable; it was a logical first step to invest that planet. And now Jorn had Dee and the children.

  Move!

  How to move was another matter; it needed to be done in a vessel which no possible Warrior cordon would have the strength to
attack, but no such vessel existed on He. The only other alternative was a very small, very fast ship with a low detectability index; but that was equally impossible across so long a distance, since there is a minimum size for even one spindizzy. Or was there? Carrel was on He, and Carrel had had considerable experience in designing relatively small spindizzy-powered proxies; one such had followed the March of Earth all the way, without anybody’s paying the slightest attention to it. Of course the proxy had been magnificently, noisily detectable by ordinary standards, and only Carrel’s piloting of it had kept the massed cities from distinguishing between the traces that it made and the traces that were made adventitiously by ordinary interstellar matter ….

  “Can you do that again, Carrel? Remember that this time you won’t have a flock of massive cities to confuse the issue. The gamut you’ll have to run will be one thin shell of orbiting warships, around one planet—and we don’t know how many of them there are, what arms they mount, how careful a watch they keep—”

  “Assume the worst,” Carrel said. “They caught the recall ship, after all, and they didn’t even know we’d sent it. I can do it, Mr. Amalfi, if you’ll let me do the maneuvering when the chips are down; otherwise I think you’ll be caught, no matter how small the ship is.”

  “Helleshin!” But there was no way around it; Amalfi would have to subject himself to at least two days of Carrel’s violent evasive-confusive maneuvers, without once touching the space-stick himself. It was going to be a rough do for an old man, but Carrel was quite right, there was no other available course.

  “All right,” he said. “Just make sure I’m alive when I touch down.”

  Carrel grinned. “I’ve never lost a cargo,” he said. “Providing it’s been properly secured. Where do you want to land?”

  That was not an easy question either. In the long run, Amalfi settled for a landing in Central Park, in the heart of the old Okie city. This was perhaps dangerously close to the Warriors’ center of operations, but Amalfi did not want to be forced to trek across a thousand miles of New Earth just for a meeting with Hazleton; and there was a fair chance that the old city would be taboo for the bumpkins, or at least avoided instinctively. Jorn the Apostle would not have overlooked patrolling such an obvious rallying-point for the ousted, but presumably Jorn was somewhere at the other end of the Cloud with his main body.

  Since there is, even with spindizzies, a limit to the amount of power that can be stored in a small hull, the trip was more than long enough for Amalfi to catch up, via ultraphone, on the Cloud events he had closeted himself away from on He. The picture Mark had given him had been accurate, if perhaps a little distorted in emphasis. Jorn the Apostle’s real concerns were still far away from New Earth, and his jehad had been announced against unbelievers everywhere, not just against the Hevians. The Hevians were simply the article in the indictment which applied specifically to New Earth—that, and New Earth’s unannounced but unconcealed intention of plumbing the end of time, which was blasphemy. It was Amalfi’s guess that the uprising on New Earth and the seizure of the central government there had been an unplanned byproduct of the proclamation of which Jorn was unprepared to take full advantage. Had he been planning on it, or militarily able to capitalize on it, he would have rushed in his main body on the double; as matters stood he had only—and belatedly—set up a token blockade. If his followers’ coup stuck, all well and good; if it did not, he would withdraw the blockade in a hurry, to save ships and men for another, more auspicious day.

  Or so Amalfi reasoned; but he was uncomfortably aware that in Jorn the Apostle he was for the first time dealing with an enemy whose thought-processes might be utterly unlike his, from first to last.

  The ship shifted abruptly from spindizzy to ion-blast drive. Amalfi stopped thinking entirely and just hung on.

  Once in the atmosphere, the craft was back in Amalfi’s hands; back on He, Carrel had relinquished his remote Dirac control over the space-stick. Amalfi was able to make a thistledown nightside landing in south Central Park, in a broad irregular depression which legend said had once been a lake. The landing was without incident; apparently it had been undetected. In the morning the abandoned proxy might be spotted by a Warrior flyer, but the old city was littered with such ambiguous mechanical objects; one had to be a student of the city, as knowledgeable as Schliemann was about the nine Troys, to know which was new and which was not. Amalfi was confident enough of this to leave the proxy behind without an attempt to camouflage it.

  Now the problem was, How to get in touch with Mark? Presumably he was still under arrest, or the next thing to it; “corrective discipline” was what the Warrior voice Amalfi had overheard had said. Did that mean that they were going to make the lazy, cerebral Hazleton make beds, sweep floors and pray six hours a day? Not very likely, especially the prayer part. Then what—?

  Suddenly, trudging south along a moonlit, utterly deserted Fifth Avenue toward the city’s control tower, Amalfi was sure he had it. Running a galaxy, even a small and mostly unexplored satellite galaxy like this one, is not simply a matter of taking papers out of the “IN” tray and transferring them to the “OUT” tray. It requires centuries of experience and a high degree of familiarity with the communications, data-filing and other machines which must do 98 per cent of the donkey-work. In the Okie days, for instance, it sometimes happened—though not very often—that a mayor was swapped to another city under the “rule of discretion” after he had lost an election; and generally it took him five to ten years to get used to running the new one, even in such a subordinate post as assistant to the city manager. It was not an art that a bumpkin, no matter how divinely inspired, could master in a week.

  Mark’s most likely theater of “corrective discipline,” then, would be his own office. He would be running the Cloud for the Warriors—and no doubt doing a far worse job of it than they would detect, even were they sensible enough, as they surely were, to suspect such sabotage. Amalfi, himself a master of making the wheels run backwards when necessary, would yield precedence in that art to Hazleton at any time; Hazleton had been known to work the trick on his friends, just to keep his hand in, or perhaps just out of habit.

  Very good; then the problem of getting in touch with Mark was solved, clearing the way for the hard questions: How to discombobulate, and, if possible, oust the Warriors; and how to get Dee and the children back unharmed?

  It would be difficult to decide which of these two hard questions was the harder. As Mark had pointed out, the uprooted spindillies in the hand of the rank-and-file Warriors were considerably more dangerous than muskets or pitchforks. Used with precision, the machine could degravitate a single opponent and send him shrieking skyward under the contrifugal thrust of New Earth’s rotation on its axis; or the same effect could be used against a corner or a wall of a building, if one wanted to demolish a strong point. But the menace lay in the fact that in the hands of a plowboy the spindilly would not be used with precision. It had been designed, not as a weapon, but as an adjunct to home weather control, and was somewhat larger, heavier and more ungainly than a Twentieth-Century home oil-burner. Considering the difficulties involved in toting this object at all, especially on foot, the temptation would be almost overwhelming to set it at maximum output before it was even unbolted from its cement pedestal in the cellar, and leave it set there, so that the strained arm and back muscles of the bearer would thereafter have to do nothing with it to make it function but point it—more or less—and push the starter button. This meant that every time one of the plowboys lost his temper or detected heresy in some casual remark, or fired nervously at a shadow or a sudden unfamiliar sound or a svengali, he might level two or three city blocks before he remembered where the “kill” button was; or the machine, dropped and abandoned in panic, might go on to level two or three more blocks before it discharged its accumulators and shut itself off of its own accord.

  Saving Dee and the children was certainly highly important, but disarming the Warriors
would have to take precedence.

  He caught himself bouncing a little as he stepped out of the spindizzy lift shaft onto the resilient concrete floor of the control room, and grinned ruefully. He felt alive again, after far too many years of grousing, browsing, vegetating. This was the kind of problem he had been formed for, the kind he approached with the confidence born of gusto. The end of time was certainly sizable enough as a problem; he would never find a bigger, and he was grateful for that; but it provided him with nobody with whom to negotiate and, if possible, swindle a little.

  It had been a long time; he had better be on his guard against overconfidence. That had been known to trip him now and then even when he had been in practice. In particular, it was suspiciously easy to see what steps ought to be taken in the present situation; that was not the test; it was his ancient skill as a cultural historian—in short, as a diagnostician—which would stand or fall by what he did now … and just incidentally, he might lose or save from three to a quarter of a million lives, one of them Estelle’s.

  Gently then, gently—but precisely and with decision, like a surgeon confronted with cardiac arrest. Waste no time debating alternate courses; you have four minutes to save the patient’s life, if you are lucky; the bone-saw is whining in your hand—slash open the rib-cage, and slash it quick.

  The City Fathers were already warmed up. He told them: “Communications. Get me Jorn the Apostle—for the survival of the city.”

  It would take a little while for the City Fathers to reach Jorn; though they would scan the possibilities in under a minute and select out only those worlds with high probability ratings for Jorn’s presence, the chances of their getting him on the first call were not very high. Amalfi regretted that it would be then necessary to talk to Jorn on the Dirac communicator, since it would make anyone who was listening anywhere in the Cloud—or anywhere else in the known universe where the apparatus existed, for that matter—privy to the conversations; but over interstellar distances the ultraphone was out of the question for twoway exchanges, since its velocity of information propagation was only 125 per cent of the speed of light, and even this was achieved only by a trick called negative phase velocity, since the carrier wave was electromagnetic and moved at light speed and no faster.