Cities in Flight

“Two of them are from Ganymede; and the other one is from Jupiter V, right in the shadow of the Bridge gang’s shack. The normal temperature on both satellites is about two hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Ever try to swing a pick against ground frozen that solid—working inside a spacesuit? But I got the dirt for you. Now I want to see why Pfitzner wants dirt.”

The girl shrugged. “I’m sure you were told why before you even left Earth.”

“Supposing I was? I know that you people get drugs out of dirt. But aren’t the guys who bring in the samples entitled to see how the process works? What if Pfitzner gets some new wonder-drug out of one of my samples—couldn’t I have a sentence or two of explanation to pass on to my kids?”

The swinging doors bobbed open, and the affable face of the stocky man was thrust into the room.

“Dr. Abbott not here yet, Anne?” he said.

“Not yet, Mr. Gunn. I’ll call you the minute he arrives.”

“But you’ll keep me sitting at least another ninety minutes,” Paige said flatly. Gunn looked him over, staring at the colonel’s eagle on his collar and stopping at the winged crescent pinned over his pocket.

“Apologies, Colonel, but we’re having ourselves a small crisis today,” he said, smiling tentatively. “I gather you’ve brought us some samples from space. If you could possibly come back tomorrow, I’d be happy to give you all the time in the world. But right now—”

Gunn ducked his head in apology and pulled it in, as though he had just cuckooed 2400 and had to go somewhere and lie down until 0100. Just before the door came to rest behind him, a faint but unmistakable sound slipped through it.

Somewhere in the laboratories of Jno. Pfitzner & Sons a baby was crying.

Paige listened, blinking, until the sound was damped off. When he looked back down at the desk again, the expression of the girl behind it seemed distinctly warier.

“Look,” he said. “I’m not asking a great favor of you. I don’t want to know anything I shouldn’t know. All I want to know is how you plan to process my packets of soil. It’s just simple curiosity—backed up by a trip that covered a few hundred millions of miles. Am I entitled to know for my trouble, or not?”

“You are and you aren’t,” the girl said steadily. “We want your samples, and we’ll agree that they’re unusually interesting to us because they came from the Jovian system—the first such we’ve ever gotten. But that’s no guarantee that we’ll find anything useful in them.”

“It isn’t?”

“No. Colonel Russell, you’re not the first man to come here with soil samples, believe me. Granted that you’re the first man to bring anything back from outside the orbit of Mars; in fact, you’re only the sixth man to deliver samples from any place farther away than the Moon. But evidently you have no idea of the volume of samples we get here, routinely. We’ve asked virtually every space pilot, every Believer missionary, every commercial traveler, every explorer, every foreign correspondent to scoop up soil samples for us, where-ever they may go. Before we discovered ascomycin, we had to screen one hundred thousand soil samples, including several hundred from Mars and nearly five thousand from the Moon. And do you know where we found the organism that produces ascomycin? On an over-ripe peach one of our detail men picked up from a peddler’s stall in Baltimore!”

“I see the point,” Paige said reluctantly. “What’s ascomycin, by the way?”

The girl looked down at her desk and moved a piece of paper from here to there. “It’s a new antibiotic,” she said. “We’ll be marketing it soon. But I could tell you the same kind of story about other such drugs.”

“I see.” Paige was not quite sure he did see, however, after all. He had heard the name Pfitzner fall from some very unlikely lips during his many months in space. As far as he had been able to determine after he had become sensitized to the sound, about every third person on the planets was either collecting samples for the firm or knew somebody who was. The grapevine, which among spacemen was the only trusted medium of communication, had it that the company was doing important government work. That, of course, was nothing unusual in the Age of Defense, but Paige had heard enough to suspect that Pfitzner was something special—something so big, perhaps, as the historic Manhattan District and at least twice as secret.

The door opened and emitted Gunn for the second time hand-running, this time all the way.

“Not yet?” he said to the girl. “Evidently he isn’t going to make it. Unfortunate. But I’ve some spare time now, Colonel—”

“Russell, Paige Russell, Army Space Corps.”

“Thank you. If you’ll accept my apologies for our preoccupation, Colonel Russell, I’ll be glad to show you around our little establishment. My name, by the way, is Harold Gunn, vice-president in charge of exports for the Pfitzner division.”