Cities in Flight (13 page)

4th January 2020

Dear Seppi,

Lord knows I have better sense than to mail this, send it to you by messenger, or leave it anywhere in the files-or indeed on the premises-of the Joint Committee; but if one is sensible about such matters these days, one never puts anything on paper at all, and then burns the carbons. As a bad compromise, I am filing this among my personal papers, where it will be found, opened and sent to you only after I will be beyond reprisals.

That's not meant to sound as ominous as, upon rereading, I see it does. By the time you have this letter, abundant details of what I've been up to should be available to you, not only through the usual press garble, but through verbatim testimony. You will have worked out, by now, a rational explanation of my conduct since my re-election (and before it, for that matter). At the very least, I hope you now know why I authorized such a monstrosity as the Bridge, even against your very good advice.

All that is water over the dam (or ether over the Bridge, if you boys are following Dirac's lead back to the ether these days. How do I know about that? You'll see in a moment.). I don't mean to rehash it here. What I want to do in this letter is to leave you a 'more specialized memo, telling you in detail just how well the research system you suggested to me worked out form.

Despite my surface appearance of ignoring that advice, we were following your suggestion, and very closely. I took a particular interest in your hunch that there might be "crackpot" ideas on gravity which needed investigation. Frankly, I had no hope of finding anything, but that would have left me no worse off than I had been before I talked to you. And actually it wasn't very long before my research chief came up with the Locke Derivation.

The research papers which finally emerged from this particular investigation are still in the Graveyard file, and I have no hope that they'll be released to non-government physicists within the foreseeable future. If you don't get the story from me, you'll never get it from anyone; and I've enough on my conscience now to be indifferent to a small crime like breaking Security. Besides, as usual, this particular "secret" has been available for the taking for years. A man named Schuster-you may know more about him than I do-wondered out loud about it as far back as 1891, before anybody had thought of trying to keep scientific matters a secret. He wanted to know whether or no every large rotating mass, like the Sun for instance, was a natural magnet (That was before the sun's magnetic field had been discovered, too.) And by the 1940's it was clearly established for small rotating bodies like electrons-a thing called the Lande factor with which I'm sure you're familiar. I myself don't understand Word One of it. (Dirac was associated with much of that part of the work.) Finally, a man named W. H. Babcock, of Mount Wilson, pointed out in the 1940's that the Lande factor for the Earth, the Sun, and a star named 78 Virginius was identical, or damned close to it.

Now all this seemed to me to have nothing to do at all with gravity, and I said so to my team chief, who brought the thing to my attention. But I was wrong (I suppose you're already ahead of me by now). Another man, Prof. P. M. S. Blackett, whose name was even familiar to me, had pointed out the relationship. Suppose, Blackett said (I am copying from my notes now), we let P be magnetic moment, or what I have to think of as the leverage effect of a magnet-the product of the strength of the charge times the distance between the poles. Let U be angular momentum-rotation to a slob like me; angular speed times moment of inertia to you. Then if C is the velocity of light, and G is the acceleration of gravity (and they always are in equations like this, I'm told), then:

(B is supposed to be a constant amounting to about 0.25. Don't ask me why.) Admittedly this was all speculative; there would be no way to test it, except on another planet with a stronger magnetic field than Earth's-preferably about a hundred-times as strong. The closest we could come to that would be Jupiter, where the speed of rotation is about 25,000 miles an hour at the equator and that was obviously out of the question.

Or was it? I confess that I never thought of using Jupiter, except in wish-fulfillment daydreams, until this matter of the Locke Derivation came up. It seems that by a simple algebraic manipulation, you can stick 0 on one side of the equation, and all the other terms on the other, and come up with this:

To test that, you need a gravitational field little more than twice the strength of Earth's. And there, of course, is Jupiter again. None of my experts would give the notion a nickel-they said, among other things, that nobody even knew who Locke was, which is true, and that his algebraic trick wouldn't stand up under dimensional analysis, which turned out to be true-but irrelevant. (We did have to monkey with it a little after the experimental results were in.) What counted was that we could make a practical use of this relationship.

Once we tried that, I should add, we were astonished at the accompanying effects: the abolition of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald relationship inside the field, the intolerance of the field itself to matter outside its influence, and so on; not only at their occurring at all—"-the formula doesn't predict them-but at their order of magnitude. I'm told that when this thing gets out, dimensional analysis isn't the only scholium that's going to have to be revamped. It's going to be the greatest headache for physicists since the Einstein theory; I don't know whether you'll relish this premonitory twinge or not.

Pretty good going for a "crackpot" notion, though.

After that, the Bridge was inevitable. As soon as it became clear that we could perform the necessary tests only on the surface of Jupiter itself, we had to have the Bridge. It also became clear that the Bridge would have to be a dynamic structure. It couldn't be built to a certain size and stopped there. The moment it was stopped, Jupiter would tear it to shreds. We had to build it to grow-to do more than just resist Jupiter-to push back against Jupiter, instead. It's double the size that it needed to be to test the Locke Derivation, now, and I still don't know how much longer we're going to have to keep it growing. Not long, I hope; the thing's a monster already.

But Seppi, let me ask you this: Does the Bridge really fall under the interdict you uttered against the gigantic research projects? It's gigantic, all right. But-is it gigantic on Jupiter? I say it isn't. It's peanuts. A piece of attic gadgetry and nothing more. And we couldn't have performed the necessary experiments on any other planet.

Not all the wealth of Ormus or of Ind, or of all the world down the ages, could have paid for a Manhattan District scaled to Jupiter's' size.

In addition-though this was incidental-the apparent giganticism involved was a useful piece of misdirection. Elephantine research' projects may be just about played out, but government budgetary agencies are used to them and think them normal. Getting the Joint Committee involved in one helped to revive the committeemen from their comatose state, as nothing else could have. It got us appropriations we never could have corralled otherwise, because people associate such projects with weapons research. And-forgive me, but there is a sort of science to politics too-it seemed to show graphically that I was not following the suspect advice of the suspect Dr. Corsi. I owed you that, though it's hardly as large a payment as I would like to make.

But I don't mean to talk about the politics of crackpot-mining here; only about the concrete results. You should be warned, too, that the method has its pitfalls.

You will' know by now about the anti-agathic research, and what we got out of it. I talked to people, Who might know what the chances were, and got general agreement from them as to how we should proceed. This straight-line approach looked good to me from the beginning.

I set the Pfitzner people to work on it at once, since they already had that HWS appropriation for similar research, and HWS wouldn't be alert enough to detect the moment when Pfitzner's target changed from just plain old age to death itself. But we didn't overlook the crackpots-and before long we found a real dilly.

This was a man named Lyons, who insisted that the standard Lansing hypothesis, which postulates the existence of an aging-toxin, was exactly the opposite of the truth. (I go into this subject with a certain relish, because I suspect that you know as little about it as I do; it's not often that I find myself in that situation.) Instead, he said, what happens is that it's the young mothers who pass on to their offspring some substance which makes them long-lived. Lansing's notion that the old mothers were the ones who did the passing along, and that the substance passed along speeding up ageing, was unproven, Lyons said.

Well, that threw us into something of a spiral. Lansing's Law—"Senescence begins when growth ends"-had been regarded as gospel in gerontology for decades. But Lyons had a good hypothetical case. He pointed out that, among other things, all of Lansing's long-lived rotifers showed characteristics in common with polyploid individuals. In addition to being hardy and long-lived, they were of unusually large size, and they were less fertile than normal rotifers. Suppose that the substance which was passed along from one generation to another was A chromosome-doubler, like colchicine?

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 microscopic animals. Except for their eggs, their body cells are invisible even under the microscope. 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 coichicine, 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 microscope, 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 id 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 scot-free.