Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  It was indeed a poor piece of fiction upon which to hang the lives of Dee and Web and Estelle; but he had to make do with what he had.

  It appeared to be working. Within the week, all Warrior leaves were cancelled in favor of special “orientation devotions” at which attendance was mandatory. Though there was no direct way to tell whether or not the Warriors resented the cancellation of their leaves to secure their faith, the predicated accident inside the city happened the next day, and the “Commissioner of Public Safety” was promptly taxed by Hazleton to explain how he had allowed it to happen; Amalfi trotted forth the prepared lie, and retreated to an ancient communications sub-station deep in the bowels of the City Fathers themselves.

  The Warrior patrol was roving through the Okie city the very next day, and Amalfi was isolated; the rest had to be up to Hazleton.

  By the end of that week, the Warriors had been ordered to turn in their spindillies for regulation police stun-guns, and Amalfi knew that he had won. When a conquering army is disarmed by its own officers, it is through; in a while it will begin to tear itself apart, with very little help from outside. When that order of the day got back to Jorn, he would act, and act rapidly; Hazleton had evidently been a little too thorough as was his custom. But there was nothing that Amalfi could do now but wait.

  The last Warrior blockade ship had barely touched down before Web and Estelle were scrambling out of the airlock and making straight for Amalfi.

  “We have a message for you,” Estelle said, out of breath, her eyes preternaturally wide. “From Jorn the Apostle. The ship’s captain said to bring it to you right away.”

  “All right, there’s not that much hurry,” Amalfi growled, to hide his apprehension. “Are you all right? Did they take proper care of you?”

  “They didn’t hurt us,” Web said. “They were so proper and polite, I wanted to kick them. They kept us in a stateroom and gave us tracts to read. It got pretty boring after a while, just reading tracts and playing tic-tac-toe on them with grandmother.” Suddenly, he could not help grinning at Estelle; obviously he had gotten away with something in those quarters, all the same.

  Amalfi felt a vague emotional twinge, though he was unable to identify just what kind of emotion it was; it passed too quickly. “All right, good,” he said to Estelle. “Where’s the message?”

  “Here.” She passed over a yellow flimsy, torn from the ship’s Dirac printer. It said:

  XXX CMNDR SSG GABRIEL SPG

  32 JOHN AMALFI N EARTH V HSTGS RPT 32

  I AM GIVING YOU BENEFIT OF DOUBT, RPT DOUBT. YOU ALONE KNOW TRUTH. IF THIS DEFEAT SOLELY YOUR INVENTION BE SURE THE END IS NOT YET. BUT IT WILL BE SOON.

  JORN APOSTLE OF GOD

  Amalfi crumpled the flimsy and dropped it onto the flaked concrete of the spaceport.

  “And so it will,” he said.

  Estelle looked down at the wad of yellow paper, and then back at Amalfi’s somber face. “Do you know what he means?” she said.

  “Yes, I know what he means, Estelle. But I hope you never do.”

  CHAPTER SIX: Object 4001-Alephnull

  NOR DID Estelle ever know—though in the long run she was in no doubt about it in her own mind—that the first break in the problem of how to cross the information-barrier of the coming Ginnangu-Gap sprang from her suggestion to her father that to know No-Man’s-Land, one must study it with bullets. Web and Estelle were, after all, only children, and in the ensuing years nobody had any time to spare for children; they were far too gone in the fever of putting together the immaterial object which would be their bullet across No-Man’s-Land into the vast, complementary, opposite infinity of the universe of anti-matter. For the time being, speculation had been abandoned in favor of fact-finding; what was needed was some direct assessment of the contemporary energy level of the anti-matter universe; once that was known, one could hope to date precisely the coming moment of catastrophe, and know how much or how little time one had left to make such preparations for going down into death as one could bring oneself to think meaningful in the face of an imminent and complete cancellation of all meaning—and of the time of experience which alone gave meaning to the concept of meaning.

  Nobody had any time for children; and so they grew up ignored, the last children that the universe would ever see. It was not surprising that they clung to each other; they would have done so even under other circumstances, for there was no question but that the fates which brood in the sub-microscopic coils and toils of the nucleic acids of heredity had formed them for each other.

  Estelle sprouted in her world of oblivious adults, and took her place among them, without their noticing what she had become: tall, willowy, grey-eyed, black-haired, white-skinned, serene-faced and beautiful. These oldsters were as immune to beauty as they were immune to youth; they were perfectly happy to have the use of the sharp cutting edge of Estelle’s gift for mathematics brought to bear upon their problems, but they did not see that she was also beautiful and would not have cared had they been able to see it. These days they saw nothing but death—or thought they saw it; Estelle was not so sure that they saw it as clearly as she did, for they had lived in contempt of it far too long.

  Web did not know whether this suited him or not. He was moderately content to be the only one on New Earth with the good sense to see that Estelle was beautiful, but sometimes his pride felt the lack of an occasional glance of frank envy; and sometimes he suspected that Estelle cared as little about this in the long run as everyone else on New Earth but Web himself. In the fullness of time, the love which existed between them had been spoken and acknowledged, and they were now a couple, with all the delights and the responsibilities which coupling provides and demands; but somehow, nobody had noticed. The oldsters were too busy building their artifact to notice, let alone care much one way or the other, that a small green weed of love had pushed itself up amid the tumbled stones of the last of all debacles.

  Yet it was not difficult for Web to understand why what was for him a miracle was not even a nuisance to the busy godlings and their machines with whom he had to live. There was not much time left; hardly a hiccup for Amalfi and Miramon and Schloss and Dee and even for Carrel, who seemed to be a perpetually young man yet who had lived lifetimes and lifetimes and could be cut down in the midst of his latest without any valid claim that his death would be a grievous waste of whatever (and Web was convinced that it was rather scanty) he carried in his head. What little time remained would be nothing to those people, who had lived so long already; but for Web and Estelle, it had been and would continue to be their growing-up time, which would be half of each of their lives no matter how long they lived thereafter.

  Certainly Amalfi never noticed them. He had long forgotten that he had ever been anything less than what he was: an immortal. Probably—now—the suggestion that he had once been a child would have baffled him entirely; in the abstract it was a truism, and he would be unable to think back far enough to think of it otherwise. Once given the administration of Doom, in any event, he prosecuted it single-mindedly, like any other job, leading toward any other destination; if he knew that there would be no other jobs and no other destinations after these, it did not seem to bother him. He was up and doing; that was enough.

  In the meantime:

  “I love you,” Web said.

  “I love you.”

  Around them the potsherds did not even give back an echo.

  Amalfi had an excuse, had someone suggested to him that he needed one: the building of the missile had gone badly from the moment—triggered by Estelle, though he did not remember this—they had decided to give it priority. At the outset it had looked so much simpler than trying to settle all the theoretical questions a priori, and it had had the immediate appeal of action; but it is impossible to design an experiment without certain fundamental assumptions as to what the experiment is intended to test; which assumptions turned out to be largely absent in the supposedly practical matter of designing the anti-mat
ter missile.

  As it eventually worked out, the inter-universal messenger had to be constructed from the sub-microscopic level on up out of fundamental nuclear particles which came as close to being nothing at all as either universe would ever be likely to provide: zero-spin particles with various charges and masses, and neutrino/anti-neutrino pairs. Even detecting that the object was present at all after it had been built was an almost impossible task, for neutrinos and antineutrinos have no mass and no charge, consisting instead partly of spin, partly of energy of translation; it did no good to try to visualize such particles since like all the fundamental particles they were entirely outside of experience in the macroscopic world. Matter was so completely transparent to them that stopping an average neutrino in flight would require a lead barrier fifty light years thick.

  Only the fact that the spindizzies exercised a firm control over the rotation and the magnetic moment of any given atomic particle—hence their nickname—made it possible to assemble the object at all, and to detect and direct it after it was finished. As assembled, the messenger was a stable, electrically neutral, massless plasmoid, a sort of gravitational equivalent of ball lightning; it was derived theoretically, as Jake had proposed, from the Schiff theory of gravitation, which had been advanced as long ago as 1958 but had later been abandoned for its failure to satisfy three of the six fundamental tests which the then-established theory—general relativity—seemed to satisfy very well.

  “Which from our point of view is a positive advantage,” Jake had argued. “The objections from general relativity are one with the dodo anyhow, and in our special case an object which would be Lorenz-invariant, as a Schiff object couldn’t be, would be a drawback. Another thing; one of the tests the Schiff theory did pass was that of explaining the red shift in the spectra of distant galaxies; which we now know to have been a clock effect and not a fair test of a gravitational theory at all. We’d be better off reevaluating the whole scholium in the light of our present knowledge.”

  The result was now before them all in the midst of the Okie city’s ancient reception room in City Hall, which had once been Amalfi’s communications center for complex diplomatic relations with client planets; it had been fitted out with an electronic network of considerable complexity so that multiple negotiations could be carried on at once while the city approached a highly developed, highly civilized star system; now that net had become, instead, a telemetering system for the inter-universal messenger.

  Since the object itself was in effect little more than an intricately structured spherical spindizzy screen which screened nothing material, it would have been impossible to see it at all were it not for the small jet of artificial smoke which issued from the floor directly under it and was wreathed about it by convection currents, making it look a little like a huge bubble being supported in the middle of a fountain. Scattered throughout the interior of the bubble were steady hot pinpoints of colored light: concentrations of electron gas, of stripped nuclei, of thermal neutrons, of free radicals and of as many other basic test situations as the combined brains of two very different worlds had been able to contrive and to fit into so restricted a space—for the sphere was only six feet in diameter. At the very heart, in a spindizzy eddy all its own, was the greatest triumph of all: one cubical crystal of anti-sodium anti-chloride about the size of a single grain of a fine-grain photograph. This was Dr. Schloss’s long-dreamt-of anti-matter artifact; here it was a miracle which was already minus two weeks “young” and had yet a week to go in its spindizzy vacuum before it would collide with the flying instant of the present and decay; on the other side, it would be only a single crystal of common table salt, which might or might not lose its savor on the return journey—should the messenger come back to them at all.

  Amalfi watched the red hand of the clock—the only hand it had—tick its quarter-seconds toward Zero. Nobody would launch the missile—exact timing was far too critical to allow that—but he had been given the privilege of holding down the key which kept the circuit closed against the moment when the red hand touched Zero and the impulse surged through the spindizzies and impelled the messenger on its way out of space, out of time, out of the humanly comprehensible entirely. No one knew what would happen then, least of all the designers. The missile would be unable to report back; once it had crossed the barrier, it would be incommunicado. It would have to come back to this great dark room before the tiny shining stars and the microscopic salt crystal inside it could report what had happened to them during the outward swing. How long that would take would depend upon the energy level on the opposite side, which was one of the things the messenger was being sent to find out; hence no transit-time could be predicted.

  “We ought to give it a name,” Amalfi said, fidgeting slightly. The index and middle fingers of his right hand were beginning to ache; he realized that he had been pushing down on the key for a long time with far more pressure than was necessary, as though the universe would end at once were the straining of his hand and arm to falter for an instant. Nevertheless, he did not let up; he had the good sense to realize that fatigue had already made him unable to judge how much relaxation might result, and he was not going to risk breaking the contact. “Now that we have built, it doesn’t look like anything. Let’s christen it quick, before it gets away from us, it may never come back.”

  “I’d be afraid to give it a name,” Gifford Bonner said, with a ghastly smile. “Any name we could give it would promise too much. How about a number? Back at the beginning of spaceflight, when the first unmanned satellites were going up, they numbered them like comets or other celestial objects, with the year-date and a Greek letter; the first sputnik, for instance, was called Object 1957-a.”

  “That appeals to me,” Jake said. “Except for the Greek letter. This thing ought not to be indexed with any character that’s ever been used before to label a known or knowable situation. How about using the trans-finite integers?”

  “Very good,” Gifford Bonner said. “Who will do the honors?”

  “I will,” Estelle said. She stepped forward. She did not dare to touch the object, but she raised her hand toward it. “I christen thee Object 4001-Alephnull.”

  The next one, presuming that we’re so lucky,” Jake said, “can be Object 4001-C, which is the power of the continuum; and the next one—”

  There was a soft chime. Startled, Amalfi looked up at the clock. The red hand was just passing over the third quartile of the first second after Zero. In the center of the room, the smoke spun in a turbulent spiral; the bubble with the pinpoint lights had vanished.

  Object 4001-Alephnull had departed without anyone’s seeing it go.

  Some quartiles of a second later, he remembered to let go of the key. His millennium-firmed right hand continued to tremble for the next fifteen minutes.

  The suspense was dreadful. Certainly nobody expected the messenger to return within a few hours, or even within a few days; were that to happen, it would mean that the Ginnangu-Gap itself would be right on its heels, leaving no time to analyze the colored stars or indeed do anything but fold one’s hands and wait to be snuffed out. Yet the mere fact that that very possibility existed was enough to guarantee the maintenance of a death-watch in the huge, dark old room—a death-watch enlivened by the discovery that all the instruments which had been watching the missile while it was still there had dropped back to nothing on the instant of its departure, having recorded no phenomenon of any kind about the departure itself. Not even the spindizzies—as interpreted for by the City Fathers—were prepared to say how the surge of power with which they had launched the messenger had been applied; which should have been reassuring, at least as negative evidence that the messenger had not been shoved off in some known and hence useless direction, but which under the circumstances only added to the gloom and tension. All that power shot; and where had it gone? Apparently nowhere at all.

  Ordinarily Amalfi rarely dreamed (or rather, like most Okies, he dreamed most of ev
ery night, but remembered what he had dreamt in the morning less often than once every few years); but these nights were haunted by that spherical smoke-wreathed ghost with the glowing Argus eyes, wandering in a maze of twisted ingeodesics from which it would never escape, in its center a tiny crystalline figurine piping in Amalfi’s voice,

  I grow not out of salt nor out of soil

  But out of that which pains me until the ingeodesics suddenly snapped into a strangling web which burned like fire, and in an explosion of light Amalfi saw that it was—no, not morning yet, but time to go back to the death-watch.

  But he was already there; he had dozed off, and had been awakened by the clamor of the alarms. Now that he was more or less awake, the noise was ominously less loud than he knew it should be; there was an alarm for every star inside the messenger, and less than a third of them were ringing. The ghostly sphere floated again in the center of the room, now no bigger than a basketball, most of its Argus-eyes out, and those that remained glowing as fitfully as corpse-fires. For all Amalfi knew, this ghost of a ghost, with so many ashes cold and cruel on its internal hearths, was no more ominous than any other outcome of a scientific experiment; it might even be promising; but he could not rid himself this early of the dread which had informed the dream.

  “That was fast,” Jake’s voice said.

  “Pretty fast,” Dr. Schloss’s voice said. “But now that it’s back home, it’s got only about twenty-one hours of life left. Let’s get those readings—there’s not much time.”

  “I’m counting down the probes now. The cameras are rolling.”

  Inside the ghost, another star died. There was a brief silence; then one of Dr. Schloss’s technicians said, in a neutral voice: “Pimeson shower from the iron nucleus. Looks like a natural death. No—not quite: high on the gamma side.”