Cities in Flight

We put that question to Lansing’s only surviving student, a living crotchet named MacDougal. He wouldn’t hear of it; to him it was like questioning the Word of God. Besides, he said, if Lyons is right, how do you propose to test it? Rotifers are miscroscopic animals. Except for their eggs, their body cells are invisible even under the miscroscope. Technically speaking, in fact, they don’t seem to have any body-cells as adults—just a sort of generalized protoplasmic continuum in which the nuclei are scattered at random, rather like the Plasmodium of a slime-mold. It would be quite a few months of Sundays before we ever got a look at a rotifer chromosome.

Lyons thought he had an answer for that. He proposed to develop a technique of microtome preparation which would make, not one, but several different slices through a rotifer’s egg. With any sort of luck, he said, we might be able to extend the technique to rotifer spores, and maybe even to the adult critters.

We thought we ought to try it. Without telling Pfitzner about it, we gave Pearl River Labs that headache. We put Lyons himself in charge and assigned MacDougal to act as a consultant (which he did by sniping and scoffing every minute of the day, until not only Lyons, but everybody else in the plant hated him). It was awful. Rotifers, it turns out, are incredibly delicate animals, just about impossible to preserve after they’re dead, no matter what stage of their development you catch them in. Time and time again, Lyons came up with microscope slides which, he said, proved that the long-lived rotifers were at least triploid—three labeled chromosomes per body-cell instead of two—and maybe even tetraploid. Every other expert in the Pearl River plant looked at them, and saw nothing but a blur which might have been rotifer chromosomes, and might equally well have been a newspaper halftone of a grey cat walking over a fur rug in a thick fog. The comparative tests— producing polyploid rotifers and other critters with drugs like colchicine, and comparing them with the critters produced by Lansing’s and MacDougal’s classical breeding methods—were just as indecisive. Lyons finally decided that what he needed to prove his case was the world’s biggest and most expensive X-ray miscroscope, and right then we shut him down.

MacDougal had been right all the time. Lyons was a crackpot with a plausible line of chatter, enough of a technique at microdissection to compel respect, and a real and commendable eagerness to explore his idea right down to the bottom. MacDougal was a frozen-brained old man with far too much reverence for his teacher, a man far too ready to say that a respected notion was right because it was respected, and a man who had performed no actual experiments himself since his student days. But he had been right—purely intuitively—in predicting that Lyons’ inversion of Lansing’s Law would come to nothing. I gather that victory in the sciences doesn’t always go to the most personable man, any more than it does in any other field. I’m glad to know it; I’m always glad to find some small area of human endeavor which resists the con-man and the sales-talk.

When Pfitzner discovered ascomycin, we had HWS close Pearl River out entirely.

Negative results of this kind are valuable for scientists too, I’m told. How you will evaluate your proposed research method in the light of these two experiences is unknown to me; I can only tell you what I think I learned. I am convinced that we must be much slower, in the future, to ignore the fringe notion and the marginal theorist. One of the virtues of these crackpots—if that is what they are—is that they tend to cling to ideas which can be tested. That’s worth hanging on to, in a world where scientific ideas have become so abstract that even their originators can’t suggest ways to test them. Whoever Locke was, I suppose he hadn’t put a thousandth as much time into thinking about gravity as Blackett had; yet Blackett couldn’t suggest a way to test his equation, whereas the Locke Derivation was testable (on Jupiter) and turned out to be right. As for Lyons, his notion was wrong; but it too fell down because it failed the operational test, the very test it proposed to pass; until we performed that test, we had no real assessment of Lansing’s Law, which had been traveling for years on prestige because of the “impossibility” of weighing any contrary hypothesis. Lyons forced us to do that, and enlarged our knowledge.

And so, take it from there; I’ve tried to give back as good as I have gotten. I’m not going to discuss the politics of this whole conspiracy with you, nor do I want you to concern yourself with them. Politics is death. Above all, I beg you—if you’re at all pleased with this report—not to be distressed over the situation I will probably be in by the time this reaches you. I’ve been ruthless with your reputation to advance my purposes; I’ve been ruthless with the careers of other people; I’ve been quite ruthless in sending some men—some hundreds of men—to deaths they could surely have avoided had it not been for me; I’ve put many others, including a number of children, into considerable jeopardy. With all this written against my name, I’d think it a monstrous injustice to get off scott-free.

And that is all I can say; I have an appointment in a few minutes. Thank you for your friendship and your help.

BLISS WAGONER

CHAPTER NINE: New York

It is sometimes claimed that religious intolerance is the fruit of conviction. If one be absolutely certain that one’s faith is right and all others wrong, it seems criminal to permit one’s neighbors’ obvious error and perdition. I am tempted to think, however, that religious fanaticism often is the result not of conviction but rather of doubt and insecurity.

—GEORGE SARTON

R UTHLESSNESS, ANNE had said, is what it takes. But—Paige thought afterwards—is it?

Does faith add up to its own flat violation? It was all well enough to have something in which you could believe. But when a faith in humanity-in-general automatically results in casual inhumanity toward individual people, something must have gone awry. Should the temple bell be struck so continually that it has to shatter—make all its worshippers ill with terror until it is silenced?

Silence. The usual answer. Or was the fault not in faith itself, but in the faithful? The faithful were usually pretty frightening as people, Believers and humanitarians alike.

Paige’s time to debate the point with himself had already almost run out—and with it, his time to protect himself, if he could. Nothing had emerged from his soil samples. Evidently bacterial life on the Jovian moons had never at any time been profuse and consisted now only of a few hardy spores of common species, like Bacillus subtilis, which occurred on every Earth-like world and sometimes even in meteors. The samples plated out sparsely and yielded nothing which had not been known for decades—as, indeed, the statistics of this kind of research had predicted from the beginning.

It was now known around the Bronx plant that some sort of investigation of the Pfitzner project was rolling, and was already moving too fast to be derailed by any method the company’s executives could work out. Daily reports from Pfitzner’s Washington office—actually the Washington branch of Interplanet Press, the public relations agency Pfitzner maintained—were filed in the plant, but they were apparently not very informative. Paige gathered that there was some mystery about the investigation at the source, though neither Gunn nor Anne would say so in so many words.

And, finally, Paige’s leave was to be over, day after tomorrow. After that, the Proserpine station—and probably an order to follow, emerging out of the investigation, which would maroon him there for the rest of his life in the service.

And it wasn’t worth it.

That realization had been staring him in the eyes all along. For Anne and Gunn, perhaps, the price was worth paying, the tricks were worth playing, the lying and the cheating and the risking of the lives of others were necessary and just to the end in view. But when the last card was down, Paige knew that he himself lacked the necessary dedication. Like every other road toward dedication that he had assayed, this one had turned out to have been paved with pure lead—and had left him with no better emblem of conduct than the miserable one which had kept him going all the same: self-preservation.

He knew then, with cold disgust toward himself, that he was going to use what he knew to clear himself, as soon as the investigation hit the plant. Senator Wagoner, the grapevine said, would be conducting it—oddly enough, for Wagoner and MacHinery were deadly political enemies; had MacHinery gotten the jump on him at last?—and