Cities in Flight

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.