Cities in Flight

“I like it,” Estelle said. At the same instant the pipings of the invisible birds came to an end with a metallic snap, and Mark Hazleton’s voice said in the middle of the air: “Boss, are you looking for me?”

Amalfi lifted the microphone back to his lips with a grim smile, the children instantly forgotten.

“You bet I am. Are you on top of this dirigible planet which seems to be heading for u s?”

“Yes; I didn’t know you were interested. In fact I didn’t know that it was a planet instead of a star until yesterday, when Schloss and Carrel came in to see me about it.” Amalfi threw Jake a meaningful glance. “I gather you’re calling me from the city; what do the City Fathers think?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t talked to them,” Amalfi said. “But Jake is here, and he’s come to the obvious conclusion, as I’m sure you have. What I want to know is, have you or Carrel made any attempt to communicate with this object?”

“Yes, but I can’t say that it’s been very fruitful,” Hazleton’s voice said. “We’ve called them four or five times on the Dirac, but if they’ve answered us, it’s gotten lost in the general babble of Dirac ’casts we’re surrounded with from the home galaxy. It puzzles me a little bit; they do seem to be homing on us, without any question, but it’s hard to imagine what kind of signal from us they could be using to guide on.”

“Do you really think that this is He come back again?” Amalfi said cautiously.

“Yes, I think I do,” Hazleton said, with apparent equal caution. “I don’t see what other conclusion one could come to with the data as they stand now.”

“Then use your head,” Amalfi said. “If this really is He, you’ll never be able to reach it with a Dirac ’cast. While we were on He, we never even let the Hevians hear a Dirac ’cast, or see a Dirac transmitter; they had no reason to suspect that any such universal transmitter even existed, or could exist. And if by the same token this is not He, but some exploring vessel coming in toward us for the first time from another galaxy, and out of an entirely different culture than any we know, then it’s obvious that they cannot have the Dirac, otherwise they would have heard every one of the millions of Dirac messages which have gone out from our galaxy since the day they found the device. Try the ultraphone instead.”

“He didn’t have the ultraphone either, when last we saw it,” Hazleton’s voice said amusedly. “And if we don’t know how to drive an ultraphone carrier through a spindizzy screen, I very much doubt that they do. If we’re going to go all the way back to methods of communications as primitive as that, shouldn’t we first try wigwagging?”

“I think probably there is an ultraphone message from that planet on its way here,” Amalfi said. “It would be the part of common sense to precede such a flight as that planet is conducting into so densely populated an area as the Greater Magellanic Cloud with a general identification signal, which you could hardly do with a Dirac signal in any event; a signal which is received uniformly everywhere simultaneously with its being sent is not a proper beacon signal. It doesn’t matter whether this is He or a visitor coming to us from the entirely unknown; they will be sending some sort of pip in advance, which they would absolutely have to do by ultraphone, there being no other way to do it, and if this requires them to work out a way to punch an ultraphone signal through a spindizzy screen, then they will have done so and you should be listening for it; and you can put a return signal through the same hole.” He took a deep breath. “At the very least, Mark, stop wasting my time telling me it’s impossible before you’ve even tried it.”

“I tell you,” Webster Hazleton said under his breath and turned a bright scarlet. Behind him, Estelle’s father chortled alarmingly on the edge of his metaphorical crackerbarrel.

The riot act, however, had been becoming less and less effective with Hazleton in the past few decades, as Amalfi knew well; perhaps it dated from Hazleton’s new preoccupation with the Stochastics, about which Amalfi had not known until Dee had brought it up; or perhaps—though this was a much less attractive possibility—from an awareness in Hazleton, paralleling Amalfi’s own, of Amalfi’s growing impotence on New Earth. “Nevertheless,” Hazleton said gravely, “I will raise one further objection, boss, if I may. Even supposing that they are putting out an ultraphone beam we can tie to, they’re still roughly fifty light-years away; by the time they hear anything we say to them by ultraphone and get a message back to us the same way, we’ll be seventy-five years into the next millennium.”