Cities in Flight

Yet the habit of power had never lost its grip on Hazleton; again and again, since the “nova” had first swum into New Earth’s ken, the Compleat Stochastic had been driven into taking action, into imposing his own sense of purpose and order upon the Stochastic universe of mindless jumble, like a Quaker at last goaded into hitting his opponent. During the tussle with Jorn the Apostle, Amalfi, watching the results of Mark’s operations without being able to observe the operations themselves, wondered in his behalf: Is it worth it, after all these years, to be finessed into another of these political struggles they had all thought were gone forever? What does it mean for a man who subscribes to such doctrines to be putting up a fight for a world he knows is going to die even sooner than his philosophy had given him to believe?

And on the simpler level, is Dee worth it to him? Does he know what she has become? As a young woman she had been an adventurer, but she had changed; now she was really very little more than a brooding hen, a clear shot on the nest for any poacher. For that matter, what did Mark know about the sterile affair?

Well, that last question was answered, but all the others were still as puzzling as ever. Did Hazleton’s abrupt decision to go with He after all represent a final relinquishing of the habit of power—or an affirmation of it? It should be visible to a man of Hazleton’s acumen that power over New Earth was no longer even faintly comparable to having power over Okies; it was about as rewarding as being the chaplain of a summer camp. Or he might well have seen that the Jorn incident had proven that Amalfi remained and would remain the figure of power in the minds of the New Earthman, to be turned to whenever New Earth was confronted by a concrete menace; the rest of the New Earthmen had lost the ability to be wily, to plan a battle, to think fast when the occasion demanded it, and would not concede that anybody else still retained those abilities but their legendary ex-mayor—leaving any current mayor, even Hazleton, only the dregs of rule in peacetime when very little rule was needed or wanted. In fact, Amalfi realized suddenly and with amazement, the fraud he had practised upon Jorn the Apostle had been no fraud at all, at least to this extent: that the New Earthmen were content with randomness, just as the Stochastics professed themselves to be, and had no interest in imposing purpose upon it or upon their own lives except as it was forced upon them from outside, either by someone like Jorn, or by someone like Amalfi in opposition to Jorn. So the possibility that Stochasticism would seep into and make soggy the souls of the Warriors of God had been real all along, whether or not the New Earthmen themselves would recognize it as Stochasticism; the times and the philosophy had found each other, and it was even probable that the very erudite Gifford Bonner was only a belated intellectualization of a feeling that had been floating mindlessly about New Earth for many years. Nothing else could account for Amalfi’s and Hazleton’s quick success in selling Jorn the Apostle something that Jorn had at first been far too intelligent to believe—nothing else but the fact, unsuspected by Amalfi at least, and possibly by Hazleton, that it was true. If Hazleton had seen that, then he was relinquishing nothing in abandoning New Earth for He; he was, instead, opting for the only center of power that meant anything in the few years that remained to him and to the universe at large.

Except, of course, for that unknown quantity, the Web of Hercules; but of course it was beyond Hazleton’s power to opt for that.

And even Amalfi was becoming infected with the Stochastic virus now. These questions still interested him, but the flavor of academicism which informed them in the face of the coming catastrophe was becoming more and more evident even to him. All that there was left to cleave to was the cannoning flight of the planet of He toward the metagalactic center, the struggle to finish the machinery that would be needed on arrival, the desperate urgency to be there before the Web of Hercules.

And so Dee’s was—if not the final victory—the last word. It was her judgment of Amalfi as the Flying Dutchman that stuck to him after all his other labels and masks had been stripped off by the triumph of time. The curse lay now, as it always had lain, not in flight itself but in the loneliness that drove a man to flight everlasting.

Except that now the end was in sight.