Cities in Flight

It was true that most of the other former Okies had seemed able to make the change-over—the youngsters in particular, whose experience of star wandering had been limited, were now putting their long life expectancies to the obvious use: launching vast research or development projects the fruition of which could not be expected in under five centuries or more. There was, for example, an entire research team now hard at work in New Manhattan on the overall problem of anti-matter. The theoretical brains of the project were being supplied largely by Dr. Schloss, an ex-Hruntan physicist who had boarded the city back in 3602 as a refugee during the reduction of the Duchy of Gort, a last surviving polyp of the extinct Hruntan Empire; administration of the project was in the hands of a comparative youngster named Carrel, who not so long ago had been the city’s co-pilot and ranking understudy to the City Manager. The immediate objective of the project, according to Carrel, was the elucidation of the theoretical molecular structures possible to anti-material atoms, but it was no secret that most of the young men in the group, with the active support of Schloss himself, were hoping in a few centuries to achieve the actual construction, not only of simple chemical compounds—that might come about in a matter of decades—of this radical type, but a visible, macroscopic artifact composed entirely of anti-matter. Upon this unthinkably explosive object they would no doubt paint, Amalfi surmised, had they by that time also composed an anti-material paint and something to keep it in, the warning Noli me tangere.

That was all very well; but it was equally impossible for Amalfi, who was not a scientist, to participate. It was, of course, perfectly possible for him to end his life; he was not invulnerable, nor even truly immortal; immortality is a meaningless word in a universe where the fundamental laws, being stochastic in nature, allow no one to bar accidents, and where life no matter how prolonged is at bottom only a local and temporary discontinuity in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The thought, however, did not occur to Amalfi; he was not the suicidal type. He had never felt less tired, less used-up, less despairing than he felt today; he was simply snarlingly bored, and too confirmed in his millennia-old patterns of thought and emotion to be able to settle for a single planet and a single social order, no matter how utopian; his thousand years of continuous translation from one culture to another had built up in him an enormous momentum which now seemed to be bearing him irresistibly toward an immovable inertial wall labeled, NoPLACE To Go.

“Amalfi! So it’s you. I might have guessed.”

Amalfi shot the “hold” switch closed convulsively and swung around on his stool. He had, however, recognized the voice at once from centuries of familiarity. He had heard it often since somewhere around 3500, when the city had taken its owner on board as chief of the astronomy section: a testy and difficult little man with a deceptively mild manner who had never been precisely the chief astronomer that the city needed, but who had come through in the pinches often enough to prevent the City Fathers from allowing him to be swapped to another Okie city during the period when such swaps were still possible for Amalfi’s town.

“Hello, Jake,” Amalfi said.

“Hello, John,” the astronomer said, peering curiously at the set-up board. “The Hazletons told me I might find you prowling around this old hulk, but I confess I’d forgotten about it by the time I decided to come over here. I wanted to use the computation section, but I couldn’t get in—the machines were all shuttling back and forth on their tracks and coupling and uncoupling like a pack of demented two-hundred-ton ballet dancers. I thought maybe one of the kids had wandered in up here in the control room and was fooling with the boards. What are you up to?”

It was an extremely pointed question which, up to now, Amalfi had not asked himself. Even to consider answering Jake by describing the message-analysis project was to reject it; not that Jake would care one way or the other, but to Amalfi’s inner self the answer would be an obvious blind. He said:

“I don’t quite know. I had an urge to look around the place again. I hate to see it going to rust; I keep thinking it must still be good for something.”

“It is, it is,” Jake said. “After all, there are no computers quite like the City Fathers anywhere else on New Earth, let alone anywhere else in the Magellanics. I call on them pretty frequently when there’s anything really complicated to be worked on; so does Schloss, I understand. After all, the City Fathers know a great deal that nobody else around here can know, and old though they are, they’re still reasonably fast.”