Cities in Flight

“I’d be afraid to give it a name,” Gifford Bonner said, with a ghastly smile. “Any name we could give it would promise too much. How about a number? Back at the beginning of spaceflight, when the first unmanned satellites were going up, they numbered them like comets or other celestial objects, with the year-date and a Greek letter; the first sputnik, for instance, was called Object 1957-a.”

“That appeals to me,” Jake said. “Except for the Greek letter. This thing ought not to be indexed with any character that’s ever been used before to label a known or knowable situation. How about using the trans-finite integers?”

“Very good,” Gifford Bonner said. “Who will do the honors?”

“I will,” Estelle said. She stepped forward. She did not dare to touch the object, but she raised her hand toward it. “I christen thee Object 4001-Alephnull.”

The next one, presuming that we’re so lucky,” Jake said, “can be Object 4001-C, which is the power of the continuum; and the next one—”

There was a soft chime. Startled, Amalfi looked up at the clock. The red hand was just passing over the third quartile of the first second after Zero. In the center of the room, the smoke spun in a turbulent spiral; the bubble with the pinpoint lights had vanished.

Object 4001-Alephnull had departed without anyone’s seeing it go.

Some quartiles of a second later, he remembered to let go of the key. His millennium-firmed right hand continued to tremble for the next fifteen minutes.

The suspense was dreadful. Certainly nobody expected the messenger to return within a few hours, or even within a few days; were that to happen, it would mean that the Ginnangu-Gap itself would be right on its heels, leaving no time to analyze the colored stars or indeed do anything but fold one’s hands and wait to be snuffed out. Yet the mere fact that that very possibility existed was enough to guarantee the maintenance of a death-watch in the huge, dark old room—a death-watch enlivened by the discovery that all the instruments which had been watching the missile while it was still there had dropped back to nothing on the instant of its departure, having recorded no phenomenon of any kind about the departure itself. Not even the spindizzies—as interpreted for by the City Fathers—were prepared to say how the surge of power with which they had launched the messenger had been applied; which should have been reassuring, at least as negative evidence that the messenger had not been shoved off in some known and hence useless direction, but which under the circumstances only added to the gloom and tension. All that power shot; and where had it gone? Apparently nowhere at all.

Ordinarily Amalfi rarely dreamed (or rather, like most Okies, he dreamed most of every night, but remembered what he had dreamt in the morning less often than once every few years); but these nights were haunted by that spherical smoke-wreathed ghost with the glowing Argus eyes, wandering in a maze of twisted ingeodesics from which it would never escape, in its center a tiny crystalline figurine piping in Amalfi’s voice,

I grow not out of salt nor out of soil

But out of that which pains me until the ingeodesics suddenly snapped into a strangling web which burned like fire, and in an explosion of light Amalfi saw that it was—no, not morning yet, but time to go back to the death-watch.

But he was already there; he had dozed off, and had been awakened by the clamor of the alarms. Now that he was more or less awake, the noise was ominously less loud than he knew it should be; there was an alarm for every star inside the messenger, and less than a third of them were ringing. The ghostly sphere floated again in the center of the room, now no bigger than a basketball, most of its Argus-eyes out, and those that remained glowing as fitfully as corpse-fires. For all Amalfi knew, this ghost of a ghost, with so many ashes cold and cruel on its internal hearths, was no more ominous than any other outcome of a scientific experiment; it might even be promising; but he could not rid himself this early of the dread which had informed the dream.

“That was fast,” Jake’s voice said.

“Pretty fast,” Dr. Schloss’s voice said. “But now that it’s back home, it’s got only about twenty-one hours of life left. Let’s get those readings—there’s not much time.”

“I’m counting down the probes now. The cameras are rolling.”

Inside the ghost, another star died. There was a brief silence; then one of Dr. Schloss’s technicians said, in a neutral voice: “Pimeson shower from the iron nucleus. Looks like a natural death. No—not quite: high on the gamma side.”

“Mark. The rhodium-palladium series should go next. Watch out for diagonal disintegration; it may cross with the iron series—” A star flared and burst.

“There it goes!”

“Mark,” Schloss said, squinting through a gamma-ray polariscope.

“Got it. Cripes. It crossed at cesium; what does that mean?”