Cities in Flight

“Why?” Wagoner said. “You know the answer to that, Paige. You’ve known it all your life. I could see it in your face, as soon as I told Helmuth that we were going out to the stars. Supposing you tell me what it is.”

Anne swung her blurred eyes on Paige. He thought he knew what she expected to hear him say; they had talked about it often enough, and it was what he once would have said himself. But now another force seemed to him to be the stronger: a special thing, bearing the name of no established dogma, but nevertheless and unmistakably the force to which he had borne allegiance all his life. He in turn could see it in Wagoner’s face now, and he knew he had seen it before in Anne’s.

“It’s the thing that lures monkeys into cages,” he said slowly. “And lures cats into open drawers and up telephone poles. It’s driven men to conquer death, and put the stars into our hands. I suppose that I’d call it Curiosity.”

Wagoner looked startled. “Is that really what you want to call it?” he said. “Somehow it seems insufficient; I should have given it another name. Perhaps you’ll amend it later, somewhere, some day out by Aldebaran.”

He stood up and looked at the two for a moment in silence. Then he smiled.

“And now,” he said gently, “nunc dimittis … suffer thy servant to depart in peace.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Jupiter V

… the social and economic rewards for such scientific activities do not primarily accrue to the scientist or to the intellectual. Still, that has perhaps been his own moral speciation, a choice of one properly humane activity: to have knowledge of things, not to have things. If he loves and has knowledge, all is well.

—WESTON LA BARRE

“AND SO, that’s the story,” Helmuth said.

Eva remained silent in her chair for a long time.

“One thing I don’t understand,” she said at last. “Why did you come to me? I’d have thought that you’d find the whole thing terrifying.”

“Oh, it’s terrifying, all right,” Helmuth said, with quiet exultation. “But terror and fright are two different things, as I’ve just discovered. We were both wrong, Evita. I was wrong in thinking that the Bridge was a dead end. You were wrong in thinking of it as an end in itself.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I didn’t understand myself. My fears of working in person on the Bridge were irrational; they came from dreams. That should have tipped me off right away. There was really never any chance of anyone’s working in person on Jupiter; but I wanted to. It was a death wish, and it came directly out of the goddamned conditioning. I knew, we all knew, that the Bridge couldn’t stand forever, but we were conditioned to believe that it had to. Nothing else could justify the awful ordeal of keeping it going even one day. The result: the classical dilemma that leads to madness. It affected you, too, and your response was just as insane as mine: you wanted to have a child here.

“Now all that’s changed. The work the Bridge was doing was worth while after all. I was wrong in calling it a bridge to nowhere. And Eva, you no more saw where it was going than I did, or you’d never have made it the be-all and end-all of your existence.

“Now, there’s a place to go to. In fact, there are places—hundreds of places. They’ll be Earthlike places. Since the Soviets are about to win the Earth, those places will be more Earthlike than Earth itself, at least for the next century or so!”

She said: “Why are you telling me this? Just to make peace between us?”

“I’m going to take on this job, Evita … if you’ll go along.”

She turned swiftly, rising out of the chair with a marvelous fluidity of motion. At the same instant, all the alarm bells in the station went off at once, filling every metal cranny with a jangle of pure horror.

“Posts!” the loudspeaker above Eva’s bed roared, in a distorted, gigantic caricature of Charity Dillon’s voice. “Peak storm overload! The STD is now passing the Spot. Wind velocity has already topped all previous records, and part of the land mass has begun to settle. This is an A-1 overload emergency.”

Behind Charity’s bellow, they could hear what he was hearing, the winds of Jupiter, a spectrum of continuous, insane shrieking. The Bridge was responding with monstrous groans of agony. There was another sound, too, an almost musical cacophony of sharp, percussive tones, such as a dinosaur might make pushing its way through a forest of huge steel tuning-forks. Helmuth had never heard the sound before, but he knew what it was.

The deck of the Bridge was splitting up the middle.

After a moment more, the uproar dimmed, and the speaker said, in Charity’s normal voice: “Eva, you too, please. Acknowledge, please. This is it—unless everybody comes on duty at once, the Bridge may go down within the next hour.”

“Let it,” Eva responded quietly.

There was a brief, startled silence, and then a ghost of a human sound. The voice was Senator Wagoner’s, and the sound just might have been a chuckle.

Charity’s circuit clicked out.

The mighty death of the Bridge continued to resound in the little room.

After a while, the man and the woman went to the window, and looked past the discarded bulk of Jupiter at the near horizon, where there had always been visible a few stars.

CODA: Brookhaven National Laboratories (the pile-dump)

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more? do not even the publicans so?

“E VERY END, ” Wagoner wrote on the wall of his cell on the last day, “is a new beginning. Perhaps in a thousand years my Earthmen will come home again. Or in two thousand, or four, if they still remember home then. They’ll come back, yes; but I hope they won’t stay. I pray they will not stay.”

He looked at what he had written and thought of signing his name. While he debated that, he made the mark for the last day on his calendar, and the point on his stub of pencil struck stone under the calcimine and snapped, leaving nothing behind it but a little coronet of frayed, dirty blond wood. He could wear that away against the window-ledge, at least enough to expose a little graphite, but instead he dropped the stub in the waste can.

There was writing enough in the stars that he could see, because he had written it there. There was a constellation called Wagoner, and every star in the sky belonged to it. That was surely enough.

Later that day, a man named MacHinery said: “Bliss Wagoner is dead.”

As usual, MacHinery was wrong.

A LIFE FOR THE STARS

CHAPTER ONE: Press Gang