Cities in Flight

“That’s hard to say. They’ll be coming to Ganymede directly from Washington, without any routing, and they’ll stop there for a while. I suppose they’ll also make a stop at Callisto before they come here. They’ve got something new on their ship, I’m told, that lets them flit about more freely than the usual uphill transport can.”

An icy lizard suddenly was nesting in Helmuth’s stomach, coiling and coiling but never settling itself. The persistent nightmare began to seep back into his blood; it was almost engulfing him—already.

“Something … new?” he echoed, his voice as flat and non-committal as he could make it. “Do you know what it is?”

“Well, yes. But I think I’d better keep quiet about it until—”

“Charity, nobody on this deserted rock-heap could possibly be a Soviet spy. The whole habit of ‘security’ is idiotic out here. Tell me now and save me the trouble of dealing with senators; or tell me at least that you know I know. They have antigravity! Isn’t that it?”

One word from Dillon, and the nightmare would be real.

“Yes,” Dillon said. “How did you know? Of course, it couldn’t be a complete gravity screen by any means. But it seems to be a good long step toward it. We’ve waited a long time to see that dream come true—

“But you’re the last man in the world to take pride in the achievement, so there’s no sense in exulting about it to you. I’ll let you know when I get a definite arrival date. In the meantime, will you think about what I said before?”

“Yes, I will.” Helmuth took the seat before the board.

“Good. With you, I have to be grateful for small victories. Good trick, Bob.”

“Good trick, Charity.”

CHAPTER SEVEN: New York

When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase ‘transvaluation of all values’ for the first time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are living found at last its formula. Transvaluation of all values is the most fundamental character of every civilization; for it is the beginning of a Civilization that remoulds all the forms of the Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practises them in a different way.

—OSWALD SPENGLER

P AIGE’S GIFT for putting two and two together and getting 22 was in part responsible for the discovery of the spy, but the almost incredible clumsiness of the man made the chief contribution to it. Paige could hardly believe that nobody had spotted the agent before. True, he was only one of some two dozen technicians in the processing lab where Paige had been working; but his almost open habit of slipping notes inside his lab apron, and his painful furtiveness every time he left the Pfitzner laboratory building for the night, should have aroused someone’s suspicions long before this.

It was a fine example, Paige thought, of the way the blunderbuss investigation methods currently popular in Washington allowed the really dangerous man a thousand opportunities to slip away unnoticed. As was usual among groups of scientists, too, there was an unspoken covenant among Pfitzner’s technicians—against informing on each other. It protected the guilty as well as the innocent, but it would never have arisen at all under any fair system of juridical defense.

Paige had not the smallest idea what to do with his fish once he had hooked it. He took an evening—which he greatly begrudged— away from seeing Anne, in order to trace the man’s movements after a day which had produced two exciting advances in the research, on the hunch that the spy would want to ferry the information out at once.

This hunch proved out beautifully, at least at first. Nor was the man difficult to follow; his habit of glancing continually over first one shoulder and then the other, evidently to make sure that he was not being followed, made him easy to spot over long distances, even in a crowd. He left the city by train to Hoboken, where he rented a motor scooter and drove directly to the crossroads town of Secaucus. It was a long pull, but not at all difficult otherwise.

Outside Secaucus, however, Paige nearly lost his man for the first and last time. The crossroads, which lay across U.S. 46 to the Lincoln Tunnel, turned out also to be the site of the temporary trailer city of the Believers—nearly 300,000 of them, or almost half of the 700,000 who had been pouring into town for two weeks now for the Revival. Among the trailers Paige saw license plates from as far away as Eritrea.