Cities in Flight

“It’s perfectly possible that a rational cosmology is going to have to accommodate all three events,” Gifford Bonner said. “I mean by that the monobloc, the heat death, and this thing—this event that seems to fall midway between the two. Curious; there are a number of myths, and ancient philosophical systems, that allow for such a break or discontinuity right in the middle of the span of existence; Giordano Bruno, Earth’s first relativist, called it the period of Inter-destruction, and a compatriot of his named Vico allowed for it in what was probably the first cyclical theory of ordinary human history; and in Scandanavian mythology it was called the Ginnangu-Gap. But I wonder, Dr. Schloss, if the destruction is going to be quite as total as you suggest. I am nobody’s physicist, I freely confess, but it seems to me that if these two universes are opposite in sign at every point, as everyone at this meeting has been implying, then the result cannot be only a general transformation of the matter on both sides into energy. There will be energy transformed into matter, too, on just as large a scale, after which the gravitational pressure should begin to build up again and the two universes, having in effect passed through each other and exchanged hats, will begin retreating from each other once more. Or have I missed something crucial?”

“I’m not sure that the argument is as elegant as it appears on the surface,” Retma said. “That awaits Dr. Schloss’s mathematical analysis, of course; but in the meantime I cannot help but wonder why, for instance, if this simultaneous creation-interdestruction-destruction cycle is truly cyclical, it should have this ornamental waterspout of continuous creation attached to it? A machinery of creation which involves no less than three universal cataclysms in each cycle should not need to be powered by a sort of continuous drip; either the one is too grandiose, or the other is insufficient. Besides, continuous creation implies a steady state, which is irreconcilable.”

“I don’t know about that,” Jake said. “It doesn’t sound like anything the Milne transformations couldn’t handle; it’s probably just a clock function.”

“Defined, as I recall, as a mathematical expression about the size of a bottle of aspirin,” Carrel said ruefully.

“Well, there’s one thing I’m perfectly certain of,” Amalfi growled, “and that is that it’s damned unlikely anybody is going to be around to care about the exact results of the collision after it happens. At least not at the rate this hassle is going. Is there actually anything useful that we can do, or would we be better off spending all this time playing poker?”

“That,” Miramon said, “is exactly what we know least about. In fact it would appear that we know nothing about it whatsoever.”

“Mr. Miramon—” Web Hazleton’s voice spoke from the shadows and stopped. Obviously he was waiting to be told that he was breaking his promise not to interrupt, but it was as plain to Amalfi as it was to the rest of the group that he was interrupting nothing now; his voice had broken only a dead and despairing silence.

“Go ahead, Web,” Amalfi said.

“Well, I was just thinking. Mr. Miramon came here looking for somebody to help him do something he doesn’t know how to do himself. Now he thinks we don’t know how to do it either. But what was it?”

“He’s just said that he doesn’t know,” Amalfi said gently.

“That isn’t what I mean,” Web said hesitantly. “What I mean is, what would he like to do, even if he doesn’t know how to do it? Even if it’s impossible?”

Bonner’s voice chuckled softly in the still shipboard air. “That’s right,” he said, “the ends determine the means. A hen is only an egg’s device for producing another egg. Is that Hazleton’s grandson? Good for you, Web.”

“There are a good many experiments that ought to be performed, if only we knew how to design them,” Miramon admitted thoughtfully. “First of all, we ought to have a better date for the catastrophe than we have now; ‘the near future’ is a huge block of time under these conditions, almost as shapeless a target as ‘sometime��; we would need it defined to the millisecond just to begin with. I applaud the young Earthman’s brilliant common sense, but I refuse to delude myself by asking for more than that; even that seems hopeless.”

“Why?” Amalfi said. “What would you need to calculate it from? Given the data, the City Fathers can handle the calculations; they were designed to handle any mathematical operation once the parameters were filled, and in a thousand years I’ve never known them to fail to come through on that kind of thing, usually within two or three minutes; never as long as a day.”