Cities in Flight (4 page)

Does it not appear as if one who lived habitually on one side of the pain threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lives on the other?

-WILLIAM JAMES

THE GIRL—whose full name, Paige found, was Anne Abbott—looked moderately acceptable in her summer suit, on the left lapel of which she wore a model of the tetracycline molecule with the atoms picked out in tiny synthetic gems. But she was even less inclined to talk when he picked her up than she had been in Pfitzner's reception room. Paige himself had never been expert at making small talk, and in the face of her obvious, continuing resentment, his parched spring of social invention went underground completely.

Five minutes later, all talk became impossible anyhow. The route to the restaurant Paige had chosen lay across Foley Square, where there turned out to be a Believer Mission going. The Caddy that Paige had hi-red-at nearly a quarter of his leave-pay, for commercial kerosene-fueled taxis were strictly a rich man's occasional luxury-was bogged down almost at once in the groaning, swaying crowd.

The main noise came from the big plastic proscenium, where one of the lay preachers was exhorting the crowd in a voice so heavily amplified as to be nearly unintelligible. Believers with portable tape recorders, bags of tracts and magazines, sandwich-boards lettered with fluorescent inks, confessions for sinners to sign, and green baize pokes for collections were well scattered among the pedestrians, and the streets were crossed about every fifteen feet with the straight black snakes of compressed-air triggers.

As the Caddy pulled up for the second time, a nozzle was thrust into the rear window and a stream of iridescent bubbles poured across the back seat directly under Paige's and Anne's noses. As each bubble burst, there was a wave of perfume-evidently it was the "Celestial Joy" the Believers were using this year-and a sweet voice said:

—Brothers—and—Sisters
—

—Have—you—seen—the—Light?
—

Paige fought at the bubbles with futile windmillings,
 while Anne Abbott leaned back against the cushions of the Caddy and watched him with a faint smile of contemptuous amusement. The last bubble contained no word, but only an overpowering burst of perfume. Despite herself, the girl's smile deepened: the perfume, in addition to being powerfully euphoric, was slightly aphrodisiac as well. This year, apparently, the Believers were readier than ever to use any means that came to hand.

The driver lurched the Caddy ahead. Then, before Paige could begin to grasp what was happening, the car stopped, the door next to the steering wheel was wrenched open, and four spidery, many-fingered arms plucked the driver neatly from his seat and deposited him on his knees on the asphalt outside.

"SHAME! SHAME!" the popai-robot 
thundered. "YOUR SINS HAVE FOUND YOU OUT! REPENT, AND FIND FORGIVENESS!"

A thin glass globe of some gas, evidently a narcosynthetic, broke beside the car, and not only the unfortunate chauffeur but also the part of the crowd which had begun to collect about him-mostly women, of course-began to weep convulsively.

"REPENT!" the robot intoned, over a sneaked-in-choir now singing "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-h-h-h-h" somewhere in the warm evening air. "REPENT, FOR THE TIME IS AT HAND!"

Paige, astonished to find himself choking with sourceless maudlin self-pity, flung himself out of the Caddy in search of a nose to break. But there were no live Believers in sight. The members of the order, all of whom were charged with spreading the good word by whatever means seemed good to them, had learned decades ago that their proselytizing was often resented, and had substituted technology for personal salesmanship wherever possible.

Their machines, too, had been forced to learn. The point-of-purchase robot retreated as Paige bore down upon it. The thing had been conditioned against allowing itself to be broken.

The Caddy's driver, rescued, blew his nose resentfully and started the car again. The wordless choir, with its eternal bridge-passage straight out of the compositions of Dmitri Tiomkin, diminished behind them, and the voice of the lay preacher came roaring back through to them over the fading, characterless music.

"I say to you," the P.A. system was moaning unctuously, like a lady hippopotamus reading A. E. Housman, "I say to you, the world, and the things which are the world's come to an end and a quick end. In his overweening pride, man has sought even to wrest the stars from their courses, but the stars are not man's, and he shall rue that day. Ah, vanity of vanities, all is vanity (Preacher v: 796). Even on mighty Jove man dared to erect a great Bridge, as once in Babel he sought to build a tower to heaven. But this also is vanity, it is vicious pride and defiance, and it too shall bring calamity upon men. Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down! (Ezra XXXI: 99). Let there be an end to pride, and there shall be peace. Let there be love, and there shall be understanding. I say to you-“ At this point, the Believers' over-enthusiastic booby trapping of the square cut off whatever the preacher was going to say next as far as the occupants of the Caddy were concerned. The car passed over another trigger, and there was a blinding, rose-colored flash. When Paige could see again, the car seemed to be floating in mid-air, and there were actual angels flapping solemnly around it. The vox humana of a Hammond organ sobbed among the clouds.

Paige supposed that the Believers had managed to crystallize temporarily, perhaps with a supersonic pulse, the glass of the windows, which he had rolled up to prevent another intromission of bubbles, and to project a 3-V tape against the glass crystals with polarized ultra-violet light. The random distribution of fluorescent trace compounds in ordinary window glass would account for the odd way the "angels" changed color as they moved.

Understanding the vision's probable modus operandi left Paige no less furious at the new delay, but luckily the thing turned out to be a trick, left over from last year's Revival, for which the Caddy was prepared. The driver touched something on the dash and the saccharine scene vanished, hymns and all. The car lunged abruptly through an opening in the crowd, and a moment later the square was behind them.

"Whew!" Paige said, leaning back at last. "Now I understand why taxi depots have vending machines for trip insurance policies. The Believers weren't much in evidence the last time I was on Earth."

"Every tenth person you meet is a Believer now," Anne said. "And eight of the other nine claim that they've given up religion as a bad job. While you're caught in the middle of one of those Revivals, though, it's hard to believe the complaints you read about our times-that people have no faith and so on."

"I don't find it so," Paige said reflectively. This certainly did not strike him as light social conversation, but since it was instead- a kind of talk he much more enjoyed-talk which was about something-he could only be delighted that the ice was broken. "I've no religion of my own, but I think that when the experts talk about 'faith' they mean something different than the shouting kind, the kind the Believers have. Shouting religions always strike me as essentially like pep-meetings among salesmen; their ceremonies and their manners are so aggressive because they don't really believe the code themselves. Real faith is so much a part of the world you live in that you seldom notice it, and it isn't always religious in the formal sense. Mathematics is based on faith, for instance, for those who know it."

"I should have said that it was based on the antithesis of faith," Anne said, turning a little cooler. "Have you had any experience in the field, Colonel?"

"Some," he said, without rancor. "I'd never have- been allowed to pilot a ship outside the orbit of the Moon without knowing tensors, and if I expect to get my next promotion, I'm going to have to know spinner calculus as well-which I do."

"Oh," the girl said. She sounded faintly dashed. "Go on; I'm sorry I interrupted."

"You were 'Eight to interrupt; I made my point badly. I meant to say that the mathematician's belief that there is some relationship between maths and the real world is a faith; it can't be proven, but he feels it very strongly. For that matter, the totally irreligious man's belief that there even is a real world, corresponding to what his senses show him, can't be proven. John Doe and the most brilliant of physicists both have to take that on faith."

"And they don't conduct ceremonies. symbolizing the belief," Anne added, "and train specialists to reassure them of it every seven days."

"That's right. In the same way, John Doe used to feel that the basic religions of the West had some relationship to the real world which was valid even though it couldn't be proven. And that includes Communism, which was born in the West, after all. John Doe doesn't feel that way any more-and by my guess, neither do the Believers or they wouldn't be shouting so loud. In that sense, there's not much faith lying around loose these days anywhere, as far as I can see. None for me to pick up, that much I've found out the hard way."

"Here you are," the chauffeur said.

Paige helped the girl out of the car, trying not to notice how much fare he had to pay, and the two were shown to a table in the restaurant. Anne was silent again for a while after they were seated. Paige had about decided that she had chosen to freeze up once more and had begun to wonder if he could arrange to have the place invaded by Believers to start the conversation again when she said, "You seem to have been thinking about faith quite a bit. You talk as though the problem meant something to you. Could you tell me why?"

"I'd be glad to try," he said slowly. "The standard answer would be that while you're out in space you have lots of time to think-but people use thinking time differently. I suppose I've been looking for some frame of reference that could be mine ever since I was four, when my father and mother split up. She was a Christian Scientist and he was a Dianeticist, so they had a lot to fight about. There was a court battle over custody that lasted for nearly five years.

"I joined the army when I was seventeen, and- it didn't take me very long to find out that the army is no substitute for a family, let alone a church. Then I volunteered for space service school. That was no church either. The army got jurisdiction over space travel when the whole field was just a baby, because it had- a long tradition of grafting off land-grants, and it didn't want the navy or the air force to grab off the gravy from any such grants that might be made on the planets. That's one of the army's historic prerogatives; the idea is that anything that's found on an army site-diamonds, uranium, anything of value-is found money, to be lived off during peacetime when the Congress gets stingy with appropriations. I spent more time helping the army space-travel department fight unification with the space arms of the other services than I did doing real work in space. That was what I was ordered to do-but it didn't help me to think of space as the ultimate cathedral.

"Somewhere along in there, I got married and we had one son;-he was born the same day I entered space school. Two years later, the marriage was annulled. That sounds funny, I know, but the circumstances were-unusual.

"When Pfitzner approached me and asked me to pick up soil samples for them, I suppose I saw another church with which I could identify myself-something humanitarian, long-range, impersonal. And when I found this afternoon that the new church wasn't going to welcome the convert with glad cries-well, the result is that I'm now weeping on your shoulder." He smiled. "That's hardly flattering, I know. But you've already helped me to talk myself into a spot where the only next step is to apologize, which I hereby do. I hope you'll accept it."

"I think I will," she said, and then, tentatively, she smiled back. The result made him tingle as though the air-pressure had dropped suddenly by five pounds per square inch. Anne Abbott was one of those exceedingly rare plain girls whose smiles completely transform them, as abruptly as the bursting of a star-shell. When she wore her normal, rather sullen expression, no one would ever notice her-but a man who had seen her smile might well be willing to kill himself working to make her smile again, as often as possible. A woman who was beautiful all the time, Paige thought, probably never could know the devotion Anne Abbott would be given when she found that man.

"Thank you," Paige said, rather inadequately. "Let's order, and then I'd like to hear you talk. I dumped The Story of My Life into your lap rather early in the game, I'm afraid."

"You order," she said. "You talked about flounder this afternoon, so you must know the menu here-and you handed me out of the Caddy so nicely that I'd like to preserve the illusion."

"Illusion?"

"Don't make me explain," she said, coloring faintly "But. . . . Well, the illusion of there being one or two cavaliers in the world still. Since you haven't been a surplus woman on a planet full of lazy males, you wouldn't understand the value of a small courtesy or two. Most men I meet want to be shown my mole before they'll bother to learn my last name."

Paige's surprised shout of laughter made heads turn all over the restaurant. He throttled it hurriedly, afraid that it would embarrass the girl, but she was smiling again, making him feel instead as though he had just had three whiskies in quick succession.

"That's a quick transformation for me," he said, "This afternoon I was a blackmailer, and by my own intention,, too. Very well, then, let's have the flounder; it's a specialty of the house. I had visions of it while I was on Ganymede munching my concentrates."

"I think you had the right idea about Pfitzner," Anne said slowly when the waiter had gone. "I can't tell you any secrets about it, but maybe I can tell you some bits of common knowledge that you evidently don't know. The project the plant is working on now seems to me to fit your description exactly: it's humanitarian, impersonal, and just about as long-range as any project I can imagine. I feel rather religious about it, in your sense. It's something to tie to, and it's better for me than being a Believer or a WAC. And I think you could understand why I feel that way-better than either Hal Gunn or I thought you could."

It was his turn to be embarrassed. He covered by dosing his Blue Points with Worcestershire until they flinched visibly. "I'd like to know."

"It goes like this," she said. "In between 1940 and 1960, a big change took place in Western medicine. Before 1940-in the early part of the century-the infectious diseases were major killers. By 1960 they were all but knocked out of the running. The change started with the sulfa drugs; then came Fleming and Florey and mass production of penicillin during World War II. After that war we found a whole arsenal of new drugs against tuberculosis, which had really never been treated successfully before-streptomycin, PAS, isoniazid viomycin, and so on, right up to Bloch's isolation of the TB toxins and the development of the metabolic blocking agents.

"Then came the broad-spectrum antibiotics, like tarramycin, which attacked some virus diseases, protozoan diseases, even worm diseases; that gave us a huge clue to a whole set of tough problems. The last major infectious disease-bilharzia, or schistosomiasis-was reduced to the status of a nuisance by 1966."

"But we still have infectious diseases," Paige objected. "Of course we do," the girl said, the little atomic points in her brooch picking up the candle-light as she leaned forward. "No drug ever wipes out a disease, because it's impossible to kill all the dangerous organisms in the world just by treating the patients they invade. But you can reduce the danger. In the 1950's, for instance, malaria was the world's greatest killer. Now it's as rare as diphtheria. We still, have both diseases with us-but how long has it been since you heard of a case of either?"