Cities in Flight (79 page)

"So we are," Hazleton said, his eyes snapping. "Now what the hell happened to the metering? I can understand the local apparatus going wild-but why did the input meters from outside rise instead of dropping back to zero?"

"Noise, I believe," Retma said. "Noise? How so?"

"It takes power to operate a meter-not a great deal, but it consumes some. Consequently, the input meters ran as wild as the machines did, because operating at peak efficiency with no incoming signals to register, they picked up the signals generated by their own functioning."

"I don't like that," Hazleton said. "Do we have any way of finding out on what level it's safe to run any instrument under these circumstances? I'd like to see generation curves on the effect so we can make such a calculation-but there's not much point in consulting the records if we just burn out the machine in the process."

Amalfi picked up the only instrument on the Hevian board that was "his"-the microphone to the City Fathers. "Are you still alive down there?" he said.

"YES, MR. MAYOR," the answer came promptly. Miramon looked startled; since everything of which he had any knowledge had gone dead, even the lights-they were sitting bathed only in the barely ascertainable glow of the zodiacal light, that belt of tenuous ionized gas in He's atmosphere brought to life by He's magnetic field, plus the even dimmer glow of the few nearby galaxies- the sudden voice of the speakers must have alarmed him. "Good. What are you operating on?"

"WET CELLS IN SERIES AT TWENTY-FIVE HUNDRED VOLTS."

"All of you?"

"YES, MR. MAYOR."

Amalfi grinned in the virtual darkness. "All right, apply your efficiency figures to a set of standard instrumental situations."

"DONE."

"Give me an operating level for Mr. Miramon's line down to you, allowing for pilot lights on his board so he can see his settings."

"MR. MAYOR, THAT IS NOT NECESSARY. WE HAVE ALREADY RESET THE MASTER CUTOUT AT THE NECESSARY BLOWPOINT LEVEL. WE CAN RE-ACTUATE ALL THE CIRCUITS AT ONCE."

"No, don't do that, we don't want the spindizzies back on too—"

"THE SPINDIZZIES ARE OFF," the City Fathers said, with austere simplicity.

"Well, Miramon? Do you trust them? Or would you rather have them tie in to you first and print their data for you, so you can turn the planet back on piecemeal?"

He heard Miramon draw in his breath slightly to answer, but he was never to know what that answer would have been; for at the same moment, Miramon's whole board came alive at once.

"Hey!" Amalfi squalled. "Wait for orders down there, dammit!"

"STANDING ORDERS, MR. MAYOR. AFTER COUNTDOWN BEGINS WE ARE TO ACT AT THE FIRST SIGN OF OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE. COUNTDOWN BEGAN TWELVE HUNDRED SECONDS AGO, AND SEVEN SECONDS AGO OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE BECAME STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT."

"What do they mean?" Miramon said, trying to read every instrument on his board at once. "I thought I understood your language, Mayor Amalfi, but—"

"The City Fathers don't speak Okie, they speak Machine," Amalfi said grimly. "What they mean is that the Web of Hercules-if that's who it is-is coming in on us. And coming in on us fast."

With a single, circumscribed flip of his closed fingers, Miramon turned off the lights.

Blackness. Then, seeping faintly over the windows around the tower, the air-glow of the zodiacal light; then, still later, the dim pinwheels of island universes. On Miramon's board, there was a single spearpoint of yellow-orange which was only the heater of a vacuum tube smaller than an acorn; in this central gloom at the heart and birthplace of the universe, it was almost blinding. Amalfi had to turn his back on it to maintain the profound dark-adaptation that his vision needed to operate at all in the tower on his mountain.

While he waited for his sight to come back, he wondered at the speed of Miramon's reaction, and the motives behind it. Surely the Hevian could not believe that a set of pilot lights in a tower on top of a remote mountain could be bright enough to be seen from space; for that matter, blacking out even as large an object as a whole planet could serve no military purpose-it had been two millennia since any reasonably sophisticated enemy depended upon light alone to see by. And where in Miramon's whole lifetime could he have acquired the blackout reflex? It made no sense; yet Miramon had restored the blackout with all the trained positiveness of a boxer riding with a punch.

When the light began to grow, he had his answer-and no time left to wonder how Miramon had anticipated it.

It began as though the destruction of the inter-universal messenger were about to repeat itself in reverse, encompassing the whole of creation in the process. Crawls of greenish-yellow light were beginning to move high up in the Hevian sky, at first as ghostly as auroral traces, then with a purposeful writhing and brightening which seemed as horrifyingly like life as the copulation of a mass of green-gold nematode worms seen under phase-contrast lighting. Particle counters began to chatter on the board, and Hazleton jumped to monitor the cumulative readings.

"Where is that stuff coming from-can you tell?" Amalfi said.

"It seems to come from nearly a hundred discrete point-sources, surrounding us in a sphere with a diameter of about a light year," Miramon said. He sounded preoccupied; he was doing something with controls whose purpose was unknown to Amalfi.

"Hmm. Ships, without a doubt. Well, now we know where they get their name, anyhow. But what is it they're using?"

"That's easy," Hazleton said grimly. "It's anti-matter."

"How can that be?"

"Look at the frequency analysis on this secondary radiation we're getting, and you'll see. Every one of those ships must be primarily a particle accelerator of prodigious size. They're sending streams of stripped heavy antimatter atoms right down the gravitational ingeodesics toward us-that's what makes the paths the stuff is following look so twisted. They've found a way to generate and project primary cosmics made of anti-matter atoms, and in quantity. When they strike our atmosphere, both disintegrate—"

"And the planet gets a dose of high-energy gamma radiation," Amalfi said. "And they must have known how to do it for a long time, since they're named after the technique. Helleshin! What a way to conquer a planet! They can either sterilize the populace, or kill it off, at will, without ever even coming close to the place."

"We've had the sterility dose already," Hazleton said quietly.

"That can hardly matter now," Estelle said, in an even softer voice.

"The killing dose won't matter either," Hazleton said, "Radiation sickness takes months to develop, even when it's going to be fatal."

"They could disable us quickly enough," Amalfi said harshly. "We've got to stop this somehow. We need these last days!"

"What do you propose?" Hazleton said. "Nothing that we've set up will work in a globe at a distance of a light year .. .except—"

"Except the base surge," Amalfi said. "Let's use it, and quick."

"What is this?" Miramon said.

"We've got your spindizzies set up for a single burn-out overload pulse. In the position we're in, the resulting single wave-front ought to tie space into knots for-well, we don't know how far the effect will carry, but a long way."

"Maybe even all the way to the limits of the universe," Dr. Schloss said.

"Well, what of it?" Amalfi demanded. "It's due to be destroyed anyhow in only ten days—"

"Not if you destroy it first," Schloss said. "If it isn't here when the anti-matter universe passes through it, all bets are off; there'll be nothing we can do."

"It'll still be here."

"Not in any useful sense-not if the matter in it is tied up in billions of gravitational whirlpools. Better let the Web kill us than destroy the future evolution of two universes, Amalfi! Can't you give over playing god, even now?"

"All right," Amalfi said. "Look at those dosimeters, and look at that sky. What have you to suggest?"

The sky was now one even intensity of glow, like a full overcast lit by a dull sun. Outside, the lower mountains of the range stood with their tree-covered flanks, so completely without shadow as to suggest that the windows ringing the tower were actually parts of a flat mural done by an unskilled hand. The counters had given over chattering and were putting out a subdued roar.

"Only what I just suggested," Schloss said hopelessly.

"Load up on anti-radiation drugs, and hope we can stay On our feet for ten days. What else is there? They've got us."

"Excuse me," Miramon said. "That is not altogether certain. We have some resources of our own. I have just launched one; it may be sufficient."

"What is it?" Amalfi demanded. "I didn't know you mounted any weapons. How long will we have to wait before it acts?"

"One question at a time," Miramon said. "Of course we mount weapons. We never talk about them, because there were children on our planet, and still are, the gods receive them. But we had to face the fact that we might some day be invested by a hostile fleet, considering how far afield we were ranging from our home galaxy, and how many stars we were visiting. Thus we provided several means for defense. One of these we meant never to use, but we have just used it now."

"And that is?" Hazleton said tensely.

"We would never have told you, except for the coming end," Miramon said. "You have praised us as chemists, Mayor Amalfi. We have applied chemistry to physics. We discovered how to poison an electromagnetic field by resonance-the way the process of catalysis is poisoned in chemistry. The poison field propagates itself along a carrier wave, and controlling field, almost any signal which is continuous and conforms to the Faraday equations. Look."

He pointed out the window. The light did not seem to have lessened any; but it was now mottled with leprous patches. In a space of seconds, the patches spread and flowed into each other, until the light was now confined to isolated luminous clouds, rapidly being eaten away at the edges, like dead cells being dissolved by the enzymes of decay bacteria.

When the sky went totally dark, Amalfi could see the hundred streamers of the particle streams pointed inward at He; at least it looked a hundred, though actually he could hardly have seen more than fifteen from any one spot on the planet. And these too were being eaten away, receding into blackness.

The counters went back to stuttering, but they did not quite stop.

"What happens when the effect gets back to the ships?" Web asked.

"It will poison the circuits themselves," Miramon said.

"The entities in the ships will suffer total nerve-block. They will die, and so will the ships. Nothing will be left but a hundred hulks."

Amalfi let out a long, ragged sigh.

"No wonder you weren't interested in our breadboard rigs," he said. "With a thing like that, you could have become another Web of Hercules yourselves."

"No," Miramon said. "That we could never become."

"Gods of all stars!" Hazleton said. "Is it over? As fast as that?"

Miramon's smile was wintery. "I doubt that we will hear from the Web of Hercules again," he said. "But what your City Fathers call the countdown continues. It is only ten days to the end of the world."

Hazleton turned back to the dosimeters. For a moment, he simply stared at them. Then, to Amalfi's astonishment, he began to laugh.

"What's so funny?" Amalfi growled.

"See for yourself. If Miramon's people had ever tangled with the Web in the real world, they would have lost."

"Why?"

"Because," Hazleton said, wiping his eyes, "while he was beating them off, we all passed the lethal dose of hard radiation. We are all dead as doornails as we sit here!"

"And this is a joke?" Amalfi said.

"Of course it's a joke, boss. It doesn't make the faintest bit of difference. We don't live in that kind of 'real world' any more. We have a dose. In two weeks well begin to become dizzy, and lose our hair, and vomit. In three weeks we'll be dead. And you still don't see the joke?"

"I see it," Amalfi said. "I can subtract ten from fourteen and get four; you mean we'll live until we die."

"I cant abide a man who kills my jokes."

"It's a pretty old joke," Amalfi said slowly. "But maybe it's still funny, at that; if it was good enough for Aristophanes, I guess it's good enough for me."

"I think that's pretty damn funny, all right," Dee said with bitter fury. Miramon was staring from one New Earthman to another with an expression of utter bafflement. Amalfi smiled.

"Don't say so unless you think so, Dee," he said. "It's always been a joke, after all. The death of one man is just as funny as the death of a universe. Don't repudiate the last laugh of all. It may be the only legacy we'll leave."

"MIDNIGHT," the City Fathers said. "THE COUNT IS ZERO MINUS NINE."

As Amalfi opened the door and went back into the room, the City Fathers said: 
"N-DAY. ZERO MINUS ONE HOUR." 

At this hour, everything had meaning; or nothing had; it depended on what had been worth investing with meaning over a lifetime of several thousand years. Amalfi had left the room to go to the toilet. Now he would never do that again, nor would anybody else; the demise of the whole was so close at hand that it was outrunning even the physiological rhythms of the body by which man has told time since he first thought to count it. Was diuresis as "worth mourning as love? Well, perhaps it was; the senses should have their mourners too; no sensation, no thought, no emotion is meaningless if it is the last of its kind.

And so farewell to all tensions and all reliefs, from amour to urea, from entrances to exits, from redundancy to noise, from beer to skittles. "What's new?" Amalfi said. "Nothing any more," Gifford Bonner said. "We're waiting. Sit down, John, and have a drink."

He sat down at the long table and looked at the glass before-him. It was red, but there was a faint tinge of blue in the liquid too, independent and not adding up to violet even in the bad light of the fluorescents in the midst of dead center's ultimate blackness. At the lip of the glass a faint meniscus climbed upward from the wine, and little tendrils of condensation meandered back down. Amalfi tasted it tentatively; it was raw and peppery-the Hevians were not great wine-growers, their climate had been too chancy for that-but even the sting of it was an edgy pleasure that made him sigh.

"We should suit up at the half hour," Dr. Schloss said. "I'd leave more free time, except that some of us haven't been inside a spacesuit in centuries, and some of us never. We don't want to take chances on their not being trim and tight."

"I thought we were going to be surrounded by some sort of field," Web said.

"Not for long, Web. Let me go through this once more, to be sure everybody has it straight in his head. We will be protected by a stasis-field during the actual instant of transition, when time will to all intents and purposes be abolished-it becomes just another coordinate of Hilbert space then. That will carry us over into the first second of time on the other side, after the catastrophe. But then the field will go down, because the spindizzies, which will be generating it, will have* been annihilated. We will then find ourselves occupying as many independent sets of four dimensions as there are people in this room, and every set completely empty. The spacesuits won't protect you long, either, because you'll be the only body of organized energy and matter in your particular, individual universe; as soon as you disturb the metrical frame of that universe, you, the suit, the air in it, the power in the accumulators, everything will surge outwards, creating space as it goes. Every man his own monobloc. But if we don't have the suits on for the crossing, not even that much will happen."

"I wish you wouldn't be so graphic," Dee complained, but her heart did not really seem to be in it. She was, Amalfi noted, wearing that same peculiarly strained expression she had worn when she had said that she wanted to bear Amalfi a child. Some instinct made him turn to look at Estelle and Web. All their hands were piled up together confidingly on the table. Estelle's face was serene, and her eyes were luminous, almost like a child waiting for a parity to begin. Web's expression was more difficult to interpret: he was frowning slightly, more in puzzlement than in worry, as if he couldn't quite understand why he was not more worried than he was.

Outside, there was a thin whining sound which rose suddenly to a howl and then died away again. It was windy today on the mountain.

"What about the table, the glasses, the chairs?" Amalfi asked. "Do those go with us too?"

"No," Dr. Schloss said. "We don't want to risk having any possible condensation nuclei near us. We're using a modification of the technique we used to build Object 4101-Alephnull in the future; the furniture will start to make the crossing with us, but we'll use the last available energy to push it a micro-second into the past. The result will be that it will stay in our universe. What its fate will be thereafter, we can only guess."

Amalfi lifted his glass reflectively. It was silky in his fingers; the Hevians made fine glass.

"This frame of reference I'll find myself in," Amalfi said. "It will really have no structure at all?"

"Only what you impose on it," Retma said. "It will not be space, and will have no metrical frame. In other words, your presence there will be intolerable—"

"Thank you," Amalfi said dryly, to Retma's obvious bafflement. After a moment the scientist went on without comment: "What I am trying to say is that your mass will create a space to accommodate it, and it will take on the metrical frame that already exists in you. What happens after that will depend upon in what order you dismantle the suit. I would recommend discharging the oxygen bottles first, since to start a universe like our present one will require a considerably amount of plasma. The oxygen in the suit itself will be sufficient for the time at your disposal. As the last act, discharge the suit's energy; this will, in effect, touch a match to the explosion."

"How large a universe will be the outcome, eventually?" Mark said. "I seem to remember that the original monobloc was large, as well as ultra-condensed."

"Yes, it will be a small universe," Retma said, "perhaps fifty light years across at its greatest expansion. But that will be only at first. As continuous creation comes into play, more atoms will be added to the whole, until a mass is reached sufficient to form a monobloc on the next contraction. Or so we see it; you must understand that this is all somewhat conjectural. We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know."

"ZERO MINUS THIRTY MINUTES."

"That's it," Dr. Schloss said. "Suits, everybody. We can continue to talk by radio."

Amalfi drained the wine. Another last act. He got into his suit, slowly recapturing his old familiarity with the grotesque apparatus. He saw to it that the radio switch was open, but he found that he could think of nothing further to say. That he was about to die suddenly had very little reality to him, in the face of the greater death of which his would be a part. No comment that occurred to him seemed anything but the uttermost of trivia.

There was some technical conversation as they checked each other out in the suits, with particular attention to Web and Estelle. Then the talk died out, as if they, too, found words intolerable.

"ZERO MINUS FIFTEEN MINUTES."

"Do you understand what is about to happen to you?" Amalfi said suddenly.

"YES, MR. MAYOR. WE ARE TO BE TURNED OFF AT ZERO."

"That's good enough." He wondered, however, if they thought that they might be turned on again in the future. It was of course foolish to think of them as entertaining anything even vaguely resembling an emotion, but nevertheless he decided not to say anything which might disabuse them. They were only machines, but they were also old friends and allies.

"ZERO MINUS TEN MINUTES."

"It's all going so fast all of a sudden," Dee's voice whispered in the earphones. "Mark, I ... I don't want it to happen."

"No more do I," Hazleton said. "But it will happen anyhow. I only wish I'd lived a more human life than I did. But it happened the way it happened, and so there's no more to say."

"I wish I could believe," Estelle said, "that there will be no sorrow in the universe I make."

"Then create nothing, my dear," Gifford Bonner said. "Stay here. Creation means sorrow, always and always."

"And joy," Estelle said.

"Well, yes. There's that.''

"ZERO MINUS FIVE MINUTES."

"I think we can do without the rest of the countdown," Amalfi said. "Otherwise from now on they will count every minute, and they'll do the last one by seconds. Do we want to go out to the tune of that gabble? Anybody want to say 'yes'?"

They were silent. "Very well," Amalfi said. "Stop counting."

"VERY WELL, MR. MAYOR. GOOD-BYE."

"Good-bye," Amalfi said with amazement.

"I won't say that, if you don't mind," Hazleton said in a choked voice. "It brings the deprivation too close for me to stand. I hope everybody will consider it said."

Amalfi nodded, then realized that the gesture could not be seen inside the helmet.

"I agree," he said. "But I don't feel deprived. I loved you all. You have my love to take with you, and I have it too."

"It is the only thing in the universe that one can give and still have," Miramon said.

The deck throbbed under Amalfi's feet. The machines were preparing for their instant of unimaginable thrust. The sound of their power was comforting; so was the solidity of the deck, the table, the room, the mountain, the world-

"I think—" Gifford Bonner said.

And with those words, it ended.

There was nothing at first but the inside of the suit. Outside there was not even blackness, but only nothingness, something not to be seen, like that which is not seen outside of the cone of vision; one does not see blackness behind one's own head, one simply does not see in that direction at all; and so here. Yet for a little while, Amalfi found that he was still conscious of his friends, still a part of the circle though the room and everything in it had vanished from around them. He did not know how he knew that they were still there, but he could feel it.

He knew that there was no hope of speaking to them again; and indeed, as he tried to grasp how he knew they were there at all, he realized that they were drawing away from him. The circle was widening. The mute figures became smaller-not by distance, for there was no distance here, but nevertheless in some way they were passing out of each other's ken. Amalfi tried to lift his hand in farewell, but found it almost impossible. By the time he had only half completed the gesture, the others had faded and were gone, leaving behind only a memory also fading rapidly, like the memory of a fragrance.

Now he was alone and must do what he must do. Since his hand was raised, he continued the gesture to let the gas out of his oxygen bottles. The unmedium in which he was suspended seemed to be becoming a little less resistant; already a metrical frame was establishing itself. Yet it was almost as difficult to halt the motion as it had been to start it.

Nevertheless, he halted it. Of what use was another universe of the kind he had just seen die? Nature had provided two of those, and had doomed them at the same moment. Why not try something else? Retma in his caution, Estelle in her compassion, Dee in her fear all would be giving birth to some version of the standard model; but Amalfi had driven the standard model until all the bolts had come out of it, and was so tired at even the thought of it that he could hardly bring himself to breathe. What would happen if, instead, he simply touched the detonator button on his chest, and let all the elements of which he and the suit were composed flash into plasma at the same instant?

That was unknowable. But the unknowable was what he wanted. He brought his hand down again.

There was no reason to delay. Retma had already pronounced the epitaph for Man: We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.

"So be it," Amalfi said. He touched the button over his heart.

Creation began.