Cities in Flight

“Why do they do that?” Amalfi asked Miramon. “Don’t your people have any survival urge at all?”

“I am not surprised,” Miramon said. “They live by stable values. They would rather die with them than survive without them. Certainly they have the survival urge, but it expresses itself differently than yours does, Mayor Amalfi. What they want to see survive are the things they think valuable about living at all—and this project presents them with very few of those.”

“Then what about you, and Retma?”

“Retma is a scientist; that is perhaps sufficient explanation. As for me, Mayor Amalfi, as you very well know, I am an anachronism. I no more share the major value system of He than you do of New Earth.”

Amalfi was answered, and he was sorry that he had asked.

“How close do you think we are?” he said.

“Very close now,” Schloss answered from the control desk. Outside the huge windows, which completely encircled the room, there was still little to be seen but the all-consuming and perpetual night If one had sharp eyes and stood outside for half an hour or so to become dark-adapted, it was possible to see as many as five galaxies of varying degrees of faintness, for this near the center the galaxy density was higher than it was anywhere else in the universe; but to the ordinary quick glance the skies appeared devoid of as much as a single pinprick of light.

“The readings are falling off steadily,” Retma agreed. “And there is something else odd: locally we are getting too much power on everything. We have been throttling down steadily for the past week, and still the output rises—exponentially, in fact. I hope that the curve does not maintain that shape all the way, or we shall simply be unable to handle our own machines when we reach our destination.”

“What’s the reason for that?” Hazleton said. “Has Conservation of Energy been repealed at the center?”

“I doubt it,” Retma said. “I think the curve will flatten at the crest—”

“A Pearl curve,” Schloss put in. “We ought to have anticipated this. Naturally anything that happens at the center will work with much more efficiency than it could anywhere else, since the center is stress free. The curve will begin to flatten as the performance of our machines begins to approximate the abstractions of physics—the ideal gas, the frictionless surface, the perfectly empty vacuum and so on. All my life I’ve been taught not to believe in the actual existence of any of those ideals, but I guess I’m going to get at least a fuzzy glimpse of them!”

“Including the gravity-free metrical frame?” Amalfi said worriedly. “We’ll be in a nice mess if the spindizzies have nothing to latch onto.”

“No, it cannot possibly be gravity-free,” Retma said. “It will be gravitationally neutral—again making for unprecedented efficiency—but only because all the stresses are balanced. There cannot be any point in the universe that is gravitationally unstressed, not so long as a scrap of matter is left in it.”

“Suppose the spindizzies did quit,” Estelle said. “We’re not going anywhere after the center anyhow.”

“No,” Amalfi agreed, “but I’d like to maintain my maneuverability until we see what our competitors are doing—if anything. Any sign of them, Retma?”

“Nothing yet. Unfortunately we don’t know exactly what it is that we are looking for. But at least there are no other dirigible masses like ours anywhere in this vicinity; in fact, no patterned activity at all that we can detect.”

“Then we’re ahead of them?”

“Not necessarily,” Schloss said. “If they’re at the center right now, they could be doing a good many things we couldn’t detect, under a very low screen. However, they would already have detected us and done something about us if that were the case. Let’s assume we’re ahead until the instruments say otherwise; I think that’s a fairly safe assumption.”

“How much longer to the center?” Hazleton said.

“A few months, perhaps,” Retma said. “If we’re right in assuming that this curve has a flat spot on top of it.”

“And the necessary machinery?”

“The last installation will be in at the end of this week,” Amalfi said. “We can begin countdown the moment we arrive … providing that we can learn to handle equipment operating at ten or a hundred times its rated efficiency, without blowing some of it out in the process. We’d better start practicing the moment the system is complete.”

“Amen,” Hazleton said fervently. “Can I borrow your slide-rule? I’ve got a few setting-up exercises I’d better start on right now.” He left the room. Amalfi looked uneasily out at the night. He would almost have preferred it had the Web of Hercules been there ahead of them and promptly taken a sitting-duck shot at them; this uncertainty as to whether or not someone really was lurking out there—coupled with the totally unknown nature of their opponents—was more unsettling than open battle. However, there was no help for it; and if He really was first, it gave them a sizable advantage ….