to electron rotation—sprang as if full-born. The overdrive, the meteor screen, and antigravity had all arrived in one compact package labeled “G = 2(PC/BU) 2 .”
Every culture has its characteristic mathematic, in which its toriographers can see its inevitable social form. This expression, couched in the algebra of the Magian culture, pointing toward the matrix mechanics of the new Nomad Era, remained essentially a Western discovery. At first its major significance seemed to lie in the fact that it was rooted in a variation of the value of C, the velocity of light, as a limit. The West used the spindizzy to scatter the nearby stars with colonists during the last fifty years of its existence; but even then, it did not realize the power of the weapon that it held in its faltering hands. Essentially, the West never found out that the spindizzy could lift
In the succeeding centuries, the whole concept of space flight was almost forgotten. The new culture on Earth, that narrow planar despotism called by historiographers the Bureaucratic State, did not think that way. Space flight had been a natural, if late, outcome of Western thought patterns, which had always been ambitious for the infinite. The Soviets, however, were opposed so bitterly to the very idea that they would not even allow their fiction writers to mention it. Where the West had soared from the rock of Earth like a sequoia, the Soviets spread like lichens over the planet, tightening their grip, satisfied to be at the bases of the pillars of sunlight the West had sought to ascend.
This was the way the Bureaucratic State had been born and had triumphed, and it was the way it meant to maintain its holdings. There had never been any direct military conquest of the West by the Soviets. Indeed, by 2105, the date usually assigned to the fall of the West, any such battle would have depopulated the Earth almost overnight. Instead, the West helped conquer itself, a long and painful process which many people foresaw but no one was able to halt. In its anxiety to prevent infiltration by the enemy, the West developed thought controls of its own, which grew ever tighter. In the end, the two opposing cultures could no longer be told apart—and since the Soviets had had far more practice at running this kind of monolithic government than had the West, Soviet leadership became a bloodless fact.
The ban on thinking about space flight extended even to the speculations of physicists. The omnipresent thought police were instructed in the formulae of ballistics and other disciplines of astronautics, and could detect such work—Unearthly Activities, it was called—long before it might have reached the proving-stand stage.
The thought police, however, could not ban atomic research because the new state’s power rested upon it. It had been from study of the magnetic moment of the electron that the Blackett equation had emerged. The new state had suppressed the spindizzy—it was too good an escape route—and the thought police had never been told that the original equation was one of those in the “sensitive area.” The Soviets did not dare let even that much be known about it.
Thus, despite all of the minority groups purged or “reeducated” by the Bureaucratic State, the pure mathematicians went unsuspected about the destruction of that state, innocent even in their own minds of revolutionary motives. The spindizzy was rediscovered, quite inadvertently, in the nuclear physics laboratories of the Thorium Trust.
The discovery spelled the doom of the flat culture, as the leveling menace of the nuclear reactor and the Solar Phoenix had cut down the soaring West. Space flight returned. For a while, cautiously, the spindizzy was installed only in new spaceships, and there was another period—comically brief—of interplanetary exploration. The tottering edifice fought to retain its traditional balance. But the center of gravity had shifted. The waste inherent in using the spindizzy only in a ship could not be disguised. There was no longer any reason why a man-carrying vehicle to cross space needed to be small, cramped, organized fore-and-aft, penurious of weight. Once anti-gravity was an engineering reality, it was no longer necessary to design ships specially for space travel, for neither mass nor aerodynamic lines meant anything any more. The most massive and awkward object could be lifted and hurled off the Earth, and carried almost any distance. Whole cities, if necessary, could be moved.
Many were. The factories went first; they toured Earth, from one valuable mineral lie to another, and then went farther aloft. The exodus began. Nothing could be done to prevent it, for by that time the whole trend was obviously in the best interests of the State. The mobile factories changed Mars into the Pittsburgh of the solar system; the spindizzy had lifted the mining equipment and the refining plants bodily to bring life back to that lichen-scabbed ball of rust. The blank where Pittsburgh itself had been was a valley of slag and ashes. The great plants of the Steel Trust gulped meteors and chewed into the vitals of satellites. The Aluminum Trust, the Germanium Trust, and the Thorium Trust put their plants aloft to mine the planets.
But the Thorium Trust’s Plant No. 8 never came back. The revolution against the planar culture began with that simple fact. The first of the Okie cities soared away from the solar system, looking for work among the colonists left stranded by the ebb tide of Western civilization. The new culture began among these nomad cities; and when it was all over, the Bureaucratic State, against its own will, had done what it had long promised to do “when the people were ready”—it had withered away. The Earth that it once had owned, right down to the last grain of sand, was almost deserted. Earth’s nomad cities—migratory workers, hobos, Okies—had become her inheritors.
Primarily the spindizzy had made this possible; but it could not have maintained it without heavy contributions from two other social factors. One of these was longevity. The conquest of so-called “natural” death had been virtually complete by the time the technicians on the Jovian Bridge had confirmed the spindizzy principle, and the two went together like hand in spacemitt. Despite the fact that the spindizzy would drive a ship—or a city—at speeds enormously faster than that of light, interstellar flight still consumed finite time. The vastness of the galaxy was sufficient to make long flights consume lifetimes, even at top spindizzy speed.
But when death yielded to the anti-agathic drugs, there was no longer any such thing as a “lifetime” in the old sense.
The other factor was economic: The rise of the metal germanium as the jinn of solid-state physics. Long before flight into deep space became a fact, the metal had assumed a fantastic value on Earth. The opening of the interstellar frontier drove its price down to a manageable level, and gradually it emerged as the basic, stable monetary standard of space trade. Nothing else could have kept the nomads in business.
And so the Bureaucratic State had fallen; but the social structure did not collapse entirely. Earth laws, though much changed, survived, and not entirely to the disadvantage of the Okies. The migrant cities found worlds that refused them landing permits. Others allowed them to land, but exploited them mercilessly. The cities fought back, but they were not efficient fighting machines. Steam shovels, by and large, had been more characteristic of the West than tanks, but in a fight between the two, the outcome was predictable; that situation never changed. It was, of course, a waste to bottle a spindizzy in so small an object as a spaceship, but a war vessel is meant to waste power—the more, the more deadly. The Earth police put the rebel cities down; and then, in self-protection, because the cities were needed, Earth passed laws protecting the cities.
Thus the Earth police held their jurisdiction, but the hegemony of Earth was weak, for the most part. There were many corners of the galaxy which knew Earth only as a legend, a green myth floating unknown thousands of parsecs away in space, known and ineluctable thousands of years away in history. Some of them remembered much more vividly the now-broken tyranny of Vega, and did not know—some of them never had known—even the name of the little planet that had broken that tyranny.
Earth itself became a garden planet, bearing only one city worth noticing, the sleepy capital of a galaxy. Pittsburgh valley bloomed, and rich honeymooners went there to frolic. Old bureaucrats went to Earth to die.
Nobody else went there at all.
CHAPTER ONE: Utopia
As John Amalfi emerged onto the narrow, worn granite ledge with its gritty balustrade, his memory encountered one of those brief boggles over the meaning of a word which had once annoyed him constantly, like a bubble in an otherwise smoothly blown French horn solo. Such moments of confusion were very rare now, but they were still a nuisance.
This time he found himself unable to decide on a name for where he was going at the moment. Was it a belfry,
