Cities in Flight

“There you are both right and wrong,” Miramon said, with a trace of what could have been pride; it was hard to tell, for his face was extremely solemn. “We obtained reasonably close control of the anti-gravity machines only about thirty years after you and I parted company, Mayor Amalfi. When the full implications of what we had found were borne in upon us, we were highly elated. Now we had a real planet, in the radical meaning of the word, a real wanderer which could go where it chose, settling in one solar system or another and leaving it again when we so decided. By that time we were almost self-sufficient, there was obviously no need for us to become migrant workers, as your city and its enemies had been. And since we were well on the way to the second galaxy in any event, and since there seemed to be absolutely no limit to the velocities we could mount with the huge mass of our planet on which to operate, we chose to go on and explore.”

“To the Andromeda galaxy?”

“Yes, and beyond. Of course we saw very little of that galaxy, which is as vast as our home; we think that it is not inhabited by any widespread, space-cruising race such as yours and mine, but in the brief sampling of its stars that we were able to take we might well simply have missed hitting upon an inhabited or colonized system. By that time, in any event, we had made the discovery which was to become the basis of our lives and purposes from then onward, and knew that we should have to return home very shortly. We left the Andromeda nebula for its satellite, the one that you identified for us as M-33 on our old star-tapestries from the Great Age, and thence took the million and a half light year leap to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. It was during our transition from the Lesser to the Greater Cloud that you detected us. That was, to be sure, an accident; we had intended to go directly through into the home galaxy and onward to Earth, where, our experience with you had given us good reason to believe, we might find a reservoir of knowledge great enough to cope with what we had discovered. That our own knowledge was insufficient was never for a moment in doubt.

“But it is an accident of the greatest good omen that we should have been found again by you as we were returning home, Mayor Amalfi. Surely the gods must have arranged such an accident, which otherwise is impossibly unlikely; for if there is any man not on Earth itself who can help us, you are that man.”

“You were not once such a believer in the gods, as I recall,” Amalfi said, smiling tightly.

“Opinions change with age; otherwise what is age for?”

“So does history,” Amalfi said. “And, whether I can help you or not, it is a lucky accident that you stopped here before carrying on into the home lens. Earth is no longer dominant there. We’ve had considerable difficulty in understanding what actually is going on, the messages that we get from there come pouring in to us in such an enormous garble; but of one thing I’m sure: there’s a huge new imperialism on the rise there, on its way to becoming as powerful as Earth once was, and as Vega was before Earth. It calls itself the Web of Hercules, and what remains of Earth’s interstellar empire doesn’t appear to be putting up much of a resistance against it. If you want my advice, I would suggest that you stay out of the home galaxy entirely, or you may well be gobbled down whole.”

There was a long silence around the Hevian council table. At last, Miramon said:

“This leaves us with little recourse indeed. It may well be that there is no answer, as we have often suspected. Or it may be that the gods have indeed brought us back to the one source of wisdom that we need.”

“We will know soon enough,” Retma said quietly. “If in that instant there will be time enough to know anything. Or enough of time left thereafter to remember it.”

“I shall probably be unable to advise you so long as I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amalfi said, impressed in spite of himself by the tone of high seriousness with which the Hevians spoke. “Just what was the discovery that turned you back? What is the forthcoming event that you seem to dread?”

“Nothing less,” Retma said evenly, “than the imminent coming to an end of time itself.”