Cities in Flight

“How would you recognize a civilized mind?” Amalfi demanded. But he knew that it was certainly a fruitless question, and possibly a spiteful one. He could see well enough that she was the same girl he had met during the Utopia-Gort affair, the same woman he had loved, the same bright physical image he would cherish to the nearing end of time; but she was getting old, and how do you tell a woman that? The Hevians and the children alike were approaching the end of the world as a new experience, but Dee, and Amalfi, and Mark, and indeed the whole of New Earth were approaching it from age, with the two forms of matter subsequent to the impact; Dee had no thought but to stave off new experience, to dwell safely in accomplished fact. He himself would not accept that such a thing was to happen; Dee would not let the children learn a new language; they were exhibiting all the stigmata of the onset of old age, and so was their culture. The drugs still worked; physically they were still young; but age was with them nonetheless, and for good. In the long run there was no cheating time and the entropy gradient, nor any hope but that of putting one’s hope into Hevians and other children. The cancer-scarred giant King of Buda-Pesht and the Acolyte jungle had been as old as Amalfi was now when Amalfi had met and bested him, and he had even then settled into an idée fixe; he had been still physically arrested, but mentally he was already used up.

There were only two ways to go toward death; you accept that you are going to die, or you refuse to believe it. To deny that the problem is there is childish, or senile; it lacks the fluidity of adjustment which is that process called maturity; and when children and savages are more fluid at this than you are, you must see that curfew has struck for you and go gracefully. Otherwise, they will bury you, their titular leader, nominally alive.

Dee had not, of course, bothered to answer the question; she simply looked grim. The aborted argument had been conducted mostly sotto voce anyhow, for the rest of the Hevian council-room was deeply embroiled in an attempt to quanticize the amount of gamma radiation which would be produced when the two universes passed through each other, and its degree of convertibility into either of the two forms of matter subsequent to the impact; Dee had been forced to push her way into the meeting to find Web and Estelle, who by now had become accepted silent partners at such skull-sessions.

“I’m not content with that at all,” Retma was saying. “Dr. Schloss is assuming that a substantial part of this energy will go off as sheer noise, as though the meeting of the two universes were analogous to the clashing of cymbals. To allow that, one has to assume that Planck’s Constant holds true in Hilbert space, for which we haven’t a shred of evidence. One can’t superimpose an entropy gradient at right angles to a reaction which itself involves entropies of opposite sign on each side of the equation.”

“But why can’t you?” Dr. Schloss said. “That’s what Hilbert space is for: to provide a choice of axes for just such an operation. If you have such a choice, the rest is only a simple exercise in projective geometry.”

“I don’t deny that,” Retma said, somewhat stiffly. “I’m questioning its applicability. We have no data which suggest that handling the problem in this way would be anything more than an exercise—so whether it would be a simple exercise or a complex exercise is not to the point.”

“I think we’d better go,” Dee said. “Web, Estelle, please come along; we’re only interrupting, and there’s a lot we have to do.”

Her penetrating stage whisper rasped across the discussion more effectively than any speech at normal conversational volume could have done. Dr. Schloss’s face pinched with annoyance. For a moment, the faces of the Hevians went politely blank; then Miramon turned and looked first at Dee, and then at Amalfi, slightly raising one eyebrow. Amalfi nodded, a little embarrassed.

“Do we have to go, grandmother?” Web protested. “I mean, all this is what we’re here for. And Estelle’s good at math; now and then Retma and Dr. Schloss want her to match up Hevian names for terms with ours.”

Dee thought about it. “Well,” she said, “I suppose it can’t do any harm.”