Cities in Flight

A steward came in silently with the drinks and left again. Helmuth tasted his. As far as he could tell, it was exactly like many he had mixed for himself back in the control shack from standard space rations. The only difference was that it was cold, which Helmuth found startling but not unpleasant after the first sip. He tried to relax. “I’ll do my best,” he said.

“Good enough. Now: Dillon says that you regard the Bridge as a monster. I’ve examined your dossier pretty closely—as a matter of fact I’ve been studying both you and Paige far more intensively than you can imagine—and I think perhaps Dillon hasn’t quite the gist of your meaning. I’d like to hear it straight from you.”

“I don’t think the Bridge is a monster,” Helmuth said slowly. “You see, Charity is on the defensive. He takes the Bridge to be conclusive evidence that no possible set of adverse conditions will ever stop man for long, and there I’m in agreement with him. But he also thinks of it as Progress, personified. He can’t admit—you asked me to speak my mind, Senator—he can’t admit that the West is a decadent and dying culture. All the other evidence that’s available shows that it is. Charity likes to think of the Bridge as giving the lie to that evidence.”

“The West hasn’t many more years,” Wagoner agreed, astonishingly.

Paige Russell mopped his forehead. “I still can’t hear you say that,” the spaceman said, “without wanting to duck under the rug. After all, MacHinery’s with that pack on Ganymede—”

“MacHinery,” Wagoner said calmly, “is probably going to die of apoplexy when we spring this thing on him, and I for one won’t miss him. Anyhow, it’s perfectly true; the dominoes have been falling for some time now, and the explosion Anne’s outfit has cooked up is going to be the final blow. Still and all, Mr. Helmuth, the West has been responsible for some really towering achievements in time. Perhaps the Bridge could be considered as the last and mightiest of them all.”

“Not by me,” Helmuth said. “The building of gigantic projects for ritual purposes—doing a thing for the sake of doing it—is the last act of an already dead culture. Look at the pyramids in Egypt for an example. Or at an even more enormous and more idiotic example, bigger than anything human beings have accomplished yet—the laying out of the ‘Diagram of Power’ over the whole face of Mars. If the Martians had put all that energy into survival instead, they’d probably be alive yet.”

“Agreed,” Wagoner said, “with reservations. You’re right about Mars, but the pyramids were built during the springtime of the Egyptian culture. And ‘doing a thing for the sake of doing it’ is not a definition of ritual; it’s a definition of science.”

“All right. That doesn’t greatly alter my argument. Maybe you’ll also agree that the essence of a vital culture is its ability to defend itself. The West has beaten the Soviets for half a century now—but as far as I can see, the Bridge is the West’s ‘Diagram of Power,’ its pyramids, or what have you. It shows that we’re mighty, but mighty in a non-survival sort of way. All the money and the resources that went into the Bridge are going to be badly needed, and won’t be there, when the next Soviet attack comes.”

“Correction: it has already come,” Wagoner said. “And it has already won. The USSR played the greatest of all von Neumann games far better than we did, because they didn’t assume as we did that each side would always choose the best strategy; they played also to wear down the players. In fifty years of unrelenting pressure, they succeeded in converting the West into a system so like the Soviets’ as to make direct military action unnecessary; we Sovietized ourselves, and our moves are now exactly predictable.

“So in part I agree with you. What we needed was to sink the energy and the money into the game—into social research, since the menace was social. Instead, typically, we put it into a physical research project of unprecedented size. Which was, of course, just what the theory of games said we would do. For a man who’s been cut off from Earth for years, Helmuth, you seem to know more about what’s going on down there than most of the general populace does.”

“Nothing promotes an interest in Earth like being off it,” Helmuth said. “And there’s plenty of time to read out here.” Either the drink was stronger than he had expected—which was reasonable, considering that he had been off the stuff for some time now—or the senator’s calm concurrence in the collapse of Helmuth’s entire world had given him another shove toward the abyss; his head was spinning.

Wagoner saw it. He leaned forward suddenly, catching Helmuth flat-footed. “However,” he said, “it’s difficult for me to agree that the Bridge serves, or ever did serve, a ritual purpose. The Bridge served several huge practical purposes which are now fulfilled. As a matter of fact, the Bridge, as such, is now a defunct project.”

“Defunct?” Helmuth said faintly.