Cities in Flight

‘the near future’ is a huge block of time under these conditions, almost as shapeless a target as ‘sometime??; we would need it defined to the millisecond just to begin with. I applaud the young Earthman’s brilliant common sense, but I refuse to delude myself by asking for more than that; even that seems hopeless.”

“Why?” Amalfi said. “What would you need to calculate it from? Given the data, the City Fathers can handle the calculations; they were designed to handle any mathematical operation once the parameters were filled, and in a thousand years I’ve never known them to fail to come through on that kind of thing, usually within two or three minutes; never as long as a day.”

“I remember your City Fathers,” Miramon said, with a brief ironical motion of his eyebrows which was perhaps a last vestigial tremor of his old savage awe at the things which were the city and of the city. “But the major parameter that needs to be filled here is a precise determination of the energy level of the other universe.”

“Why, that shouldn’t be so very difficult,” Dr. Schloss said, in dawning astonishment. “That can’t be anything but a transform of energy level in our own universe; the mayor’s right, the City Fathers could give you that almost before you could finish stating the problem to them; t-tau transforms are the fundamental stuff of faster-than-light space travel—I’m astonished that you’ve been able to get along without them.”

“Not so,” Jake said. “No doubt the t-tau relationships are congruent on both sides of the barrier, I don’t doubt that for a minute, but you’re dealing in sixteen dimensions here; along what axis are you going to impose the congruency? Are you going to assume that t-time and tau-time apply uniformly and transformably along all sixteen axes? You can’t do that, unless you’re willing to involve the total system in such a double, which in t-time involves a monobloc for the whole apparatus; that’s hopeless. At least it’s hopeless for us, in the time we have left; we’d be frittering away our days in chase of endlessly retreating decimals. You might just as well set the City Fathers to work giving you a final figure for pi.”

“I stand corrected,” Dr. Schloss said, his tone halfway between wry humor and stiff embarrassment. “You’re quite right, Miramon; there’s a discontinuity here which we can’t read from theory. How inelegant.”

“Elegance can wait,” Amalfi said. “In the meantime, why is it so impossible to get an energy-level reading from the other side? Dr. Schloss, your research group used to talk about their hopes of constructing an anti-matter artifact. Couldn’t we use such a thing as an exploratory missile to the other side?”

“No,” Dr. Schloss said promptly. “You forget that such an object wouldn’t be on the other side—it would be on our side. We would have to work out some way of assembling it in the future of the experiment; by the time we were first able to see it, in the present of the experiment, it would be in an advanced state of decay, to say the least, and would then evolve only to the condition in which we assembled it. No reading that we got from it would tell us anything. but how anti-matter behaves in our universe; it would tell us nothing about any universe in which anti-matter is normal.”

After a moment, he added thoughtfully, “And besides, that would be a project hard to realize in anything under a century, I’d be more inclined to say it would take two; under the circumstances I too would rather be playing poker.”

“Well, I wouldn’t,” Jake said unexpectedly. “I think Amalfi may be right in principle. Difficult though the problem is, there ought to be some sort of probe that we could extend across the discontinuity. Mind you, I agree that the anti-matter artifact is the wrong approach entirely; the thing would have to be absolutely immaterial, a construct made entirely out of what we could pick up in No Man’s Land. But seeing across long distances under great odds is the discipline I was trained in. I don’t think we should count this an impossible problem. Schloss, how do you feel about this? If you and your group are willing to give up your anti-matter artifact for poker, would you be willing to work with me on this a while? I’ll need your background, but you’ll need my point of view; between us we just might devise the instrument and get the message. Mind you, Miramon, I hold out no hope, but—”

“—except the hope you hold out.” Miramon said, his eyes shining. “Now I am hearing from you what I hoped to hear. This is the voice of the Earth of memory. We will give you everything you need that is within our power to give; we give you our planet, to begin with; but the universe, the twin universes, the unthinkable meta-universe you must take for yourselves. We remember you now; you have always had that boundless ambition.” His voice darkened suddenly. “And we shall be your disciples; that, too, is as it has always been. Only begin; that is all we ask.”

Amalfi gathered the consensus of the present eyes around the chart table. Such agreement as he needed from the listeners on New Earth he was able to gather almost as well from the silence.

“I think,” he said slowly, “that we have begun already.”

CHAPTER FOUR: Fabr-Suithe

IT WAS HOT on the Hevian hillside in the post-noon glare of the great Cepheid about which the planet was now orbiting at the respectful distance of thirty-five astronomical units—thirty-five times the distance of old Earth from the Sun. At this distance the star, which had a mean absolute magnitude of plus one, was barely tolerable at the peak of its eight-day cycle; at the bottom of the cycle, when the star’s radiation had dropped by a factor of 25, it got cold enough on He to nip one’s ears—far from an ideal situation for a predominantly agricultural planet, but the Hevians did not expect to remain in the vicinity for as long as one growing season.

Web and Estelle lay in the long grass of the hillside under the hot regard of that swollen star and slowly got their breaths back. Web in particular was glad for the recess. The morning had begun in sober exploration of Fabr- Suithe, He’s greatest monument to its own past, and He’s present center of pure philosophy; thus far it was the only place they had found on He which they were allowed to explore by themselves, by both the adult Hevians and their own people. This morning, however, this freedom had had an unexpected but logical consequence: they had found that Fabr-Suithe was also one of the few cities on He where Hevian children were free to roam. Elsewhere there were far too many machines vital to the life of the planet as a whole; the Hevians could not afford the chance that children might get into the works, nor, with their sparse population, could they afford the loss of even a single life.

Web and Estelle had changed into the chiton-like Hevian costume the moment they had been told that they would be allowed to explore the city, albeit in very limited terms, but it did not take the Hevian youngsters long to penetrate this disguise, since Web and Estelle spoke their language only in a most rudimentary way. This language block was in part a nuisance—for although most adult Hevians spoke the mixture of English, Interlingua and Russian which was the beche-de-mer of deep space, learned long ago from the Okies, none of the children did—but it was also a blessing, since it precluded any extensive interrogation of Web and Estelle about their own world, culture and background. Shortly, instead, they found themselves involved in an elaborate chase game called Matrix, rather like run-sheep-run combined with checkers except that it was three-dimensional, for it was played in a twelve-story building with transparent floors so that one could always see the position of the other players, and with strategically placed spindizzy and friction-field shafts for fast transit from one floor to another. Web was the first to develop the suspicion that the building had either been designed for the game or had been totally abandoned to it, for the transparent floors were appropriately ruled, and the structure otherwise did not seem to contain anything or to be used for any other purpose.

Web had found the game itself exhilarating at first, but rather baffling too, and he was generally the first player to be eliminated. Had it not been for an impromptu change in the rules, he would have been It in nearly every new round, and even under the aegis of the new rules he did not make a very brave showing. Estelle, on the other hand, took to Matrix as though she had been born in the game, and within half an hour her lanky-legged, slender figure, as bosomless and hipless as any of the boys’, was darting in and out of the kaleidoscope of running figures with inordinate grace and swiftness. When time was called for lunch, Web’s laboring lungs and bruised ego more than welcomed the chance to escape from the city entirely for the hot stillness of the fallow hills.

“They’re nice; I like them,” Estelle said, rising to one elbow to attack, meditatively, a gourd-shaped green and silver melon which one of the Hevian boys had given her, apparently as a prize. At the first bite, there was a low but prolonged hiss, and the air around them became impregnated with a fragrance so overwhelmingly spicy that Estelle had to sneeze five times in quick succession. Web began to laugh, but the laughter ended abruptly in a paroxysmal sneeze of his own.

“They love us,” he said, wiping his eyes. “You’re so good at their game, they’ve given you a sneeze-gas bomb to keep you from playing it any longer.”