Cities in Flight

It appeared to be working. Within the week, all Warrior leaves were cancelled in favor of special “orientation devotions” at which attendance was mandatory. Though there was no direct way to tell whether or not the Warriors resented the cancellation of their leaves to secure their faith, the predicated accident inside the city happened the next day, and the “Commissioner of Public Safety” was promptly taxed by Hazleton to explain how he had allowed it to happen; Amalfi trotted forth the prepared lie, and retreated to an ancient communications sub-station deep in the bowels of the City Fathers themselves.

The Warrior patrol was roving through the Okie city the very next day, and Amalfi was isolated; the rest had to be up to Hazleton.

By the end of that week, the Warriors had been ordered to turn in their spindillies for regulation police stun-guns, and Amalfi knew that he had won. When a conquering army is disarmed by its own officers, it is through; in a while it will begin to tear itself apart, with very little help from outside. When that order of the day got back to Jorn, he would act, and act rapidly; Hazleton had evidently been a little too thorough as was his custom. But there was nothing that Amalfi could do now but wait.

The last Warrior blockade ship had barely touched down before Web and Estelle were scrambling out of the airlock and making straight for Amalfi.

“We have a message for you,” Estelle said, out of breath, her eyes preternaturally wide. “From Jorn the Apostle. The ship’s captain said to bring it to you right away.”

“All right, there’s not that much hurry,” Amalfi growled, to hide his apprehension. “Are you all right? Did they take proper care of you?”

“They didn’t hurt us,” Web said. “They were so proper and polite, I wanted to kick them. They kept us in a stateroom and gave us tracts to read. It got pretty boring after a while, just reading tracts and playing tic-tac-toe on them with grandmother.” Suddenly, he could not help grinning at Estelle; obviously he had gotten away with something in those quarters, all the same.

Amalfi felt a vague emotional twinge, though he was unable to identify just what kind of emotion it was; it passed too quickly. “All right, good,” he said to Estelle. “Where’s the message?”

“Here.” She passed over a yellow flimsy, torn from the ship’s Dirac printer. It said:

XXX CMNDR SSG GABRIEL SPG

32 JOHN AMALFI N EARTH V HSTGS RPT 32

I AM GIVING YOU BENEFIT OF DOUBT, RPT DOUBT. YOU ALONE KNOW TRUTH. IF THIS DEFEAT SOLELY YOUR INVENTION BE SURE THE END IS NOT YET. BUT IT WILL BE SOON.

JORN APOSTLE OF GOD

Amalfi crumpled the flimsy and dropped it onto the flaked concrete of the spaceport.

“And so it will,” he said.

Estelle looked down at the wad of yellow paper, and then back at Amalfi’s somber face. “Do you know what he means?” she said.

“Yes, I know what he means, Estelle. But I hope you never do.”

CHAPTER SIX: Object 4001-Alephnull

NOR DID Estelle ever know—though in the long run she was in no doubt about it in her own mind—that the first break in the problem of how to cross the information-barrier of the coming Ginnangu-Gap sprang from her suggestion to her father that to know No-Man’s-Land, one must study it with bullets. Web and Estelle were, after all, only children, and in the ensuing years nobody had any time to spare for children; they were far too gone in the fever of putting together the immaterial object which would be their bullet across No-Man’s-Land into the vast, complementary, opposite infinity of the universe of anti-matter. For the time being, speculation had been abandoned in favor of fact-finding; what was needed was some direct assessment of the contemporary energy level of the anti-matter universe; once that was known, one could hope to date precisely the coming moment of catastrophe, and know how much or how little time one had left to make such preparations for going down into death as one could bring oneself to think meaningful in the face of an imminent and complete cancellation of all meaning—and of the time of experience which alone gave meaning to the concept of meaning.

Nobody had any time for children; and so they grew up ignored, the last children that the universe would ever see. It was not surprising that they clung to each other; they would have done so even under other circumstances, for there was no question but that the fates which brood in the sub-microscopic coils and toils of the nucleic acids of heredity had formed them for each other.