Cities in Flight

Chris had originally been alarmed to find that his ID card assigned him lodgings with a family, and horrified when the assignment number turned out to belong to Sgt. Anderson. His first few weeks in the Andersons’ apartment—it was in the part of the city once called Chelsea—were prickly with suspicion, disguised poorly by as much formality as his social inexperience would allow.

It soon became impossible, however, to continue believing that the perimeter sergeant was an ogre; and his wife, Carla, was as warm and gracious a woman as Chris had ever met. They were childless, and could not have welcomed Chris more whole-heartedly had he been one of their own. Furthermore, as the City Fathers had of course calculated, Anderson was the ideal guardian for a brand-new young passenger, for few people, even the Mayor, knew the city better.

He was, in fact, considerably more than a cop, for the city’s police force was also its defense force—and its Marines, should the need for a raid or a boarding party ever arise. Technically, there were many men on the force who were superior to the perimeter sergeant, but Anderson and one counterpart, a dark taciturn man named Dulany, headed picked squads and were nearly independent of the rest of the police, reporting directly to Mayor Amalfi.

It was this fact which opened the first line of friendly communication between Chris and his guardian. He had not yet even seen Amalfi with his own eyes. Although everyone in the city spoke of him as if they knew him personally, here at last was one man who really did, and saw him several times a week. Chris was unable to restrain his curiosity.

“Well, that’s just the way people talk, Chris. Actually hardly anyone sees much of Amalfi, he’s got too much to do. But he’s been in charge here a long time and he’s good at his job; people feel that he’s their friend because they trust him.”

“But what is he like? ”

“He’s complicated—but then most people are complicated. I guess the word I’m groping for is ‘devious.’ He sees connections between events that nobody else sees. He sizes up a situation like a man looking at a coat for the one thread that’ll make the whole thing unravel. He has to—he’s too burdened to deal with things on a stitch-by-stitch basis. In my opinion he’s killing himself with overwork as it is.”

It was to this point that Chris returned after his upsetting argument with Piggy. “Sergeant, the other day you said that the Mayor was killing himself with overwork. But the City Fathers told me he’s several centuries old. On the drugs, he ought to live forever, isn’t that so?”

“Absolutely not,” Anderson said emphatically: “Nobody can live forever. Sooner or later, there’d be an accident, for one thing. And strictly speaking, the drugs aren’t a ‘cure’ for death anyhow. Do you know how they work?”

“No,” Chris admitted. “School hasn’t covered them yet.”

“Well, the memory banks can give you the details—I’ve probably forgotten most of them. But generally, there are several antiagathics, and each one does a different job. The main one, ascomycin, stirs up a kind of tissue in the body called the reticuloendothelial system—the white blood corpuscles are a part of it—to give you what’s called ‘nonspecific immunity.’ What that means is that for about the next seventy years, you can’t catch any infectious disease. At the end of that time you get another shot, and so on. The stuff isn’t an antibiotic, as the name suggests, but an endotoxin fraction—a complex organic sugar called a mannose; it got its name from the fact that it’s produced by fermentation, as antibiotics are.

“Another is TATP—triacetyltriparanol. What this does is inhibit the synthesis in the body of a fatty stuff called cholesterol; otherwise it collects in the arteries and causes strokes, apoplexy, high blood pressure and so on. This drug has to be taken every day, because the body goes right on trying to make cholesterol every day.”

“Doesn’t that mean that it’s good for something?” Chris objected tentatively.

“Cholesterol? Sure it is. It’s absolutely essential in the development of a fetus, so women have to lay off TATP while they’re carrying a child. But it’s of no use to men—and men are far more susceptible to circulatory diseases than women.

“There are still two more anti-agathics in use now, but they’re minor; one, for instance, blocks the synthesis of the hormone of sleep, which again is essential in pregnancy but a thundering nuisance otherwise; that one was originally found in the blood of ruminant animals like cows, whose plumbing is so defective that they’d die if they lay down.”

“You mean you never sleep?”

“Haven’t got the time for it,” Anderson said gravely. “Or the need any longer, thank goodness. But ascomycin and TATP between them prevent the two underlying major causes of death: heart diseases and infections. If you prevent those alone, you extend the average lifetime by at least two centuries.