Cities in Flight

For a while, even after they had explained it to him, Amalfi was so unable to believe that the Hevians had meant what they said that he was prepared to dismiss it as one of those superstitions with which He had been riddled, like many another provincial planet, when the Okies had first made contact with it. That time must have a stop was a proposition that nothing in all his long life had prepared him to accept even for an instant. Even after it became reluctantly clear to him that what Miramon and the Hevians had found in the intergalactic deeps had been a real event with real implications, and one which Amalfi’s own people—particularly Schloss’ group—were prepared to document, event and implication alike, he continued to be unable to do more with it than dismiss it out of hand.

He said so, at a conference on shipboard which included Miramon, Retma, Dr. Schloss, Carrel, and—by Dirac—Jake and Dr. Gifford Bonner, the latter the leader of that group of New Earth philosophers which Hazleton had recently joined, called the Stochastics. “If what you say is true,” he said, “there’s nothing to be done about it anyhow. Time will come to an end, and that’s that. But the end of the world has been predicted often before, I seem to remember from history, and here we all are still; I can’t credit that so vast a process as the whole physical universe could possibly come to an end in the flicker of an eyelash, and since I can’t believe it, I’m not suddenly going to start behaving as if I did. No more do I see why anyone else should.”

“Amalfi, you’re quite right! You don’t understand,” Dr. Schloss said. “Of course the end of the universe has been predicted often before. It’s one of those two-pronged choices that any philosopher has to make: either you hold that the universe will at some time come to an end, or else you arrive at the position that it never can; there are intermediate guesses that you can make, that’s where we get our cyclical theories, but essentially they’re simply hedges. If you decided that the universe has a limited lifetime, then you must begin to think about when that life will come to an end, on the basis of whatever data are available to you. We have been agreed for millennia that the universe cannot last forever, however we’ve hedged the agreement, so that leaves us nothing to quarrel about but the date at which we fix the end. And sooner or later, too, the time was going to come when we had enough data to fix even the date without doubt. The Hevians have brought us sufficient facts to do that now; the date is fixed, whatever it proves to be, without cavil or quibble. If we are to talk about the matter intelligently at all, there is a fixed fact with which we must begin. It is not open to argument. It is a fact.”

“I think,” Amalfi said in a voice of steel, “that you have gone quietly insane. You should listen to the City Fathers for a while on this subject, as I have; if you like, I can give you a Dirac line to them from right here aboard ship, and you can hear some of the memories that they have stored up—some of them dating back long before spaceflight; our city is very old. You should hear particularly the stories about the end of the world which emerge as inevitably as a plant from a seed every time someone takes it into his head to believe that he has a direct wire to the Almighty. Some of the stories, of course, are just jokes, like the many predictions of the end of the world which were made by a man named Voliva, who knew that the Earth was flat; or the predictions of Armageddon that came repeatedly from an Earthly sect called the Believers, which was riding high on Earth during the very decade when both the spindizzy and the anti-agathics were discovered. But high intelligence doesn’t prevent you from falling into this kind of apocryphal madness, either; seven centuries before spaceflight on Earth, the greatest scientist of that time, a man named Bacon, was predicting the imminent arrival of Anti-Christ simply because he was unable to persuade his contemporaries to adopt scientific method, which he had just invented. Furthermore, I may add, in the decade just before spaceflight on Earth, all the best minds of the age saw no future for the human race, and all other air-breathing life on Earth, but complete obliteration in a world-wide thermonuclear war, which over a period of eight years could have broken out within any given twenty-minute period. And in that, Dr. Schloss, they were quite right; their world really could have ended during any one of these twenty-minute periods; the physical possibilities were there, but somehow the world managed to last until spaceflight became only a specter, burned out by starlight, as the ghosts of night-bound peoples evaporate from their mythologies as soon as they’re able to produce light even at midnight simply by tripping a switch.”