Cities in Flight

“Come, dear,” Dee said. The door closed.

There was a very long silence in the room after that.

“You are letting those children go to waste, Mayor Amalfi,” Miramon said at last. “Why do you do it? If only you would fill their brains with the facts that they need—and it is so easy, as you well know, you taught us how to do it—”

“It’s no longer so easy with us,” Amalfi said. “We are older than you are; we no longer share your preoccupation with the essences of things. It would take too long to explain how we came to that pass. We have other things to think about now.”

“If that is true,” Miramon said slowly, “then indeed we must hear no more about it. Otherwise I shall be tempted to feel sorry for you; and that must not happen, otherwise we all are lost.”

“Not so,” Amalfi said, smiling tightly. “Nothing is ever that final. Where were we? This is only the beginning of the end.”

“Were the universe to last forever, Mayor Amalfi,” Miramon said, “I should never understand you.”

And so the betrayal was complete. Web and Estelle never heard the stiff and bitter exchange between Amalfi and Hazleton, across the trillions and trillions of miles of seethingly empty space between He and the New Earth, which resulted in Hazleton’s being forced to call his wife home before she antagonized the Hevians any further; nor did they know precisely why Dee’s recall had to mean their recall. They simpy went, mute and grieving, willy-nilly, expressing by silence—the only weapon that they had—their revolt against the insanities of adult logic. In their hearts they knew that they had been denied the first real thing that they had ever wanted, except for each other.

And time was running out.

CHAPTER FIVE: Jehad

THAT conversation had been unusually painful for Amalfi, too, despite his many centuries of experience at having differences of opinion with Hazleton, ending ordinarily in enforcement of Amalfi’s opinion if there was no other way around it. There had been something about this quarrel which had been tainted for Amalfi, and he knew very well what it was: the abortive, passionless and fruitless autumnal affair with Dee. Sending her home to Mark now, necessary though he believed it to be, was too open to interpretation as an act of revenge upon the once-beloved for being no longer loved. Such things happened between lovers, as Amalfi knew very well.

But there was so much to be done that he managed to forget about it after Dee and the children had left on the recall ship. He was not, however, allowed to forget about it for long—only, in fact, for three weeks.

The discussion of the forthcoming catastrophe had at last entered the stage where it was no longer possible to avoid coming to grips with the contrary entropy gradients, and hence had entered an area where words alone no longer sufficed—in fact, could seldom be called upon at all. This had had the effect of driving those participants who were primarily engineers or administrators or both, like Miramon and Amalfi, or primarily philosophers, like Gifford Bonner, into the stance of bystanders; so that the discussions now had been shifted to Retma’s study. Amalfi stuck with them whenever he could, for he never knew when Retma, Jake or Schloss might drop back out of the symbolic stratosphere and say something he could comprehend and use.

It was being heavy weather in the study today, however. Retma was saying:

“The problem as I see it is that time in our experience is not retro-dictable. We write a diffusion equation like this, for instance.” He turned to his blackboard—the immemorial “research instrument” of theoretical physicists everywhere—and wrote:

Over Retma’s head, for Jake’s benefit, a small proxy fixed its television eye on the precise chalkmarks. “In this situation a-squared is a real constant, so it is predictive only for a future time t, but not for an earlier time t, because the retrodictive expression diverges.”

“An odd situation,” Schloss agreed. “It means that in any thermodynamic situation we have better information about the future than we do about the past. In the anti-matter universe it has to be the other way around—but only from our point of view; a hypothetical observer living under their laws and composed of their energies, I assume, couldn’t tell the difference.”

“Can we write a convergent retrodictive equation?” Jake’s voice said. “One which describes what their situation is as we would see it, if we could? If we can’t, I don’t see how we can design instruments to detect any difference.”

“It can be done,” Retma said. “For instance.” He turned to the blackboard and the symbols flowed squeakily:

“Ah-ha,” Schloss said. “Thus giving us an imaginary constant in place of a real one. But your second equation isn’t a mirror of your first; parity is not conserved. Your first equation is an equalization process, but this one is oscillatory. Surely the gradient on the other side doesn’t pulsate!”