Cities in Flight

“Gods of all stars,” Hazleton said …. “Helleshin! Gods of all stars is what we’re racing the Web of Hercules to become, isn’t it? Well, I’m punished for my oldest, most comfortable oath. I never thought I’d become one—and I’m not even sure I want to be.”

“Is there any other choice?” Amalfi said. “What happens if the Web of Hercules gets there first?”

“Then they remake the universes as they choose,” Retma said. “Since we know nothing about them, we cannot even guess how they would choose.”

“Except,” Dr. Bonner added, “that their choices are not very likely to include us, or anything like us.”

“That sounds like a safe bet,” Amalfi said. “I must confess I feel about as uninspired as Mark does about the alternative, though. Or—is there a third alternative? What happens if the metagalactic center is empty when the catastrophe arrives? If neither the Web nor He is there, prepared to use it?”

Retma shrugged. “Then—if we can speak at all about so grand a transformation—history repeats itself. The universe is born again, goes through its travails, and continues its journey to its terminal catastrophes: the heat-death and the monobloc. It may be that we will find ourselves carrying on as we always did, but in the antimatter universe; if so, we would be unable to detect the difference. But I think that unlikely. The most probable event is immediate extinction, and a re-birth of both universes from the primordial ylem.”

“Ylem?” Amalfi said. “What’s that? I’ve never heard the word before.”

“The ylem was the primordial flux of neutrons out of which all else emerged,” Dr. Schloss said. “I’m not surprised that you hadn’t heard it before; it’s the ABC of cosmogony, the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow premise. Ylem in cosmogony is an assumption like ‘zero’ in mathematics—something so old and so fundamental that it would never occur to you that somebody had to invent it.”

“All right,” Amalfi said. “Then what Retma is saying is that the most probable denouement, if dead-center is empty when June second comes, is that we will all be reduced to a sea of neutrons?”

“That’s right,” Dr. Schloss said.

“Not much of a choice,” Gifford Bonner said reflectively.

“No,” Miramon said, speaking for the first time. “It is not much of a choice. But it is all the choice we will have. And we will not have even that, if we fail to reach the metagalactic center in time.”

Nevertheless, it was only in the last year that Web Hazleton began to grasp, and then only dimly, the true nature of the coming end. Even then, the knowledge did not come home to him by way of the men who were directing the preparations; what they were preparing for, though it was not kept secret, remained mostly incomprehensible, and so could not shake his confidence that what was being aimed at was a way to prevent the Ginnangu-Gap from happening at all. He ceased to believe that, finally and dismally, only when Estelle refused to bear him a child.

“But why?” Web said, seizing her hand with one of his, and with the other gesturing desperately at the walls of the apartment the Hevians had given them. “We’re permanent now—it isn’t only that we know we are, everybody agrees we are. It isn’t a tabu line for us any longer!”

“I know,” Estelle said gently. “It isn’t that. I wish you hadn’t asked; it would have been simpler that way.”

“It would have occurred to me sooner or later. Ordinarily I would have gone off the pills right away, but there was so much confusion about moving to He—anyhow I only just realized you were still on them. I wish you’d tell me why.”

“Web, my dear, you’d know why if you thought a little more about it. The end is the end, that’s all. What would be the sense of having a child that would live only a year or two?”

“It may not be that certain,” Web said darkly.

“Of course it’s certain. Actually I think I’ve known it was coming ever since I was born—perhaps even before I was born. I could feel it coming.”

“Honestly, Estelle, don’t you know that’s nonsense?”

“I can see why it would sound that way,” Estelle admitted. “But I can’t help that. And since the end is on the way, I can’t call it nonsense, can I? I had the premonition, and it was right.”

“I think what this all means is that you don’t want children.”

“That’s true,” Estelle said, surprisingly. “I never have had any drive toward children—not even much drive toward my own survival, really. But that’s all part of the same thing. In a way, I was lucky; a lot of people are not at home in their own times. I was born in the time that was right for me—the time of the end of the world. That’s why I’m not oriented toward child-bearing—because I know that there won’t be another generation after yours and mine. For all I know, I might even actually be sterile; it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Estelle, don’t. I can’t listen to you talk like that.”