Cities in Flight (71 page)

"Come, dear," Dee said. The door closed.

There was a very long silence in the room after that.

"You are letting those children go to waste, Mayor Amalfi," Miramon said at last. "Why do you do it? If only you would fill their brains with the facts that they need- and it is so easy, as you well know, you taught us how to do it—"

"It's no longer so easy with us," Amalfi said. "We are older than you are; we no longer share your preoccupation with the essences of things. It would take too long to explain how we came to that pass. We have other things to think about now."

"If that is true," Miramon said slowly, "then indeed we must hear no more about it. Otherwise I shall be tempted to feel sorry for you; and that must not happen, otherwise we all are lost."

"Not so," Amalfi said, smiling tightly. "Nothing is ever that final. Where were we? This is only the beginning of the end."

"Were the universe to last forever, Mayor Amalfi," Miramon said, "I should never understand you."

And so the betrayal was complete. Web and Estelle never heard the stiff and hitter exchange between Amalfi and Hazleton, across the trillions and trillions of miles of seethingly empty space between He and the New Earth, which resulted in Hazleton's being forced to call his wife home before she antagonized the Hevians any further; nor did they know precisely why Dee's recall had to mean their recall. They simply went, mute and grieving, willy-nilly, expressing by silence-the only weapon that they had-their revolt against the insanities of adult logic. In their hearts they knew that they had been denied the first real thing that they had ever wanted, except for each other.

And time was running out.

That conversation had been unusually painful for Amalfi, too, despite his many centuries of experience at having differences of opinion with Hazleton, ending ordinarily in enforcement of Amalfi's opinion if there was no other way around it. There had been something about this quarrel which had been tainted for Amalfi, and he knew very well what it was: the abortive, passionless and fruitless autumnal affair with Dee. Sending her home to Mark now, necessary though he believed it to be, was too open to interpretation as an act of revenge upon the once-beloved for being no longer loved. Such things happened between lovers, as Amalfi knew very well.

But there was so much to be done that he managed to forget about it after Dee and the children had left on the recall ship. He was not, however, allowed to forget about it for long-only, in fact, for three weeks.

The discussion of the forthcoming catastrophe had at last entered the stage where it was no longer possible to avoid coming to grips with the contrary entropy gradients, and hence had entered an area where words alone no longer sufficed-in fact, could seldom be called upon at all. This had had the effect of driving those participants who were primarily engineers or administrators or both, like Miramon and Amalfi, or primarily philosophers, like Gifford Bonner, into the stance of bystanders; so that the discussions now had been shifted to Retma's study. Amalfi stuck with them whenever he could, for he never knew when Retma, Jake or Schloss might drop back out of the symbolic stratosphere and say something he could comprehend and use.

It was being heavy weather in the study today, however. Retma was saying:

"The problem as I see it is that time in our experience is not retrodictable. We write a diffusion equation like this, for instance." He turned to his blackboard-the immemorial "research instrument" of theoretical physicists everywhere-and wrote:

Over Retina's head, for Jake's benefit, a small proxy fixed its television eye on the precise chalkmarks. "In this situation a-squared is a real constant, so it is predictive only for a future time
t
, but not for an earlier time
t
, because the retrodictive expression diverges."

"An odd situation," Schloss agreed. "It means that in any thermodynamic situation we have better information about the future than we do about the past. In the anti-matter universe it has to be the other way around- but only from our point of view; a hypothetical observer living under their laws and composed of their energies, I assume, couldn't tell the difference."

"Can we write a convergent retrodictive equation?" Jake's voice said. "One which describes what their situation is as we would see it, if we could? If we can't, I don't see how we can design instruments to detect any difference."

"It can be done," Retma said. "For instance." He turned to the blackboard and the symbols flowed squeakily:

"Ah-ha," Schloss said. "Thus giving us an imaginary constant in place of a real one. But your second equation isn't a mirror of your first; parity is not conserved. Your first equation is an equalization process, but this one is oscillatory. Surely the gradient on the other side doesn't pulsate!"

"Parity is not conserved anyhow in these weak reactions," Jake said. ''But I think the objection may be well taken all the same. If Equation Two describes anything at all, it can't be the other side. It has to be both sides-the whole vast system, providing that it is cyclical, which we don't know yet. Nor do I see any way to test it, it's as ultimately and finally unprovable as the Mach Hypothesis—"

The door opened quietly and a young Hevian beckoned silently to Amalfi. He got up without too much reluctance; the boys were giving him a hard time today, and he found that he missed Estelle, It had been her function to remind the group of possible pitfalls in Retma's notation: here, for instance, Retma was using the d which in Amalfi's experience was an increment in calculus, as simply an expression for a constant; he was using the G which to Amalfi was the gravitational constant, to express a term in thermodynamics Amalfi was accustomed to seeing written with the greek capital letter; and could Schloss be sure that Retma's i was equivalent to the square root of minus one, as it was in New Earth math? Doubtless Schloss had good reason to feel that agreement on that very simple symbol had been established between the New Earthmen and Retma long since, but without Estelle it made Amalfi feel uncomfortable. Besides, though he knew intellectually that all the important battles against a problem in physics are won in such blackboard sessions as this, he was not temperamentally fitted to them. He liked to see things happening.

They began to happen forthwith. As soon as the door was decently closed on the visible and invisible physicists, the young Hevian said:

"I am sorry to disturb you, Mr. Amalfi. But there is an urgent call for you from New Earth. It is Mayor Hazleton."

"Helleshin!" Amalfi said. The word was Vegan; no one now alive knew what it meant. "All right, let's go."

"Where is my wife?" Hazleton demanded without preamble. "And my grandson, and Jake's daughter? And where have you been these past three weeks? Why didn't you call in? I've been losing my mind, and the Hevians gave me the Force Four blowaround before they'd let me through to you at all—"

"What are you talking about, Mark?" Amalfi said.

"Stop sputtering long enough to let me know what this is all about."

"That's what 7 want to know. All right. I'll begin again. Where is Dee?"

"I don't know," Amalfi said patiently. "I sent her home three weeks- ago. If you can't find her, that's your problem."

"She never got here."

"She didn't? But—"

"Yes, but. That recall ship never landed. We never heard from it at all. It just vanished, Dee, children and all. I've been phoning you frantically to find out whether or not you ever sent it; now I know that you did. Well, we know what that means, "You'd better give up dabbling in physics, Amalfi, and get back here on the double."

"What can I do?" Amalfi said. "I don't know any more about it than you do."

"You can damn well come back here and help me out of this mess."

"What mess?"

"What have you been doing the past three weeks?" Hazleton yelled. "Do you mean to tell me that you haven't heard what's been happening?"

"No," Amalfi said. "And stop yelling. What did you mean, 'We know what that means'? If you think you know what's happened, why aren't you doing something about it, instead of jamming the Dirac raising me? You're the mayor; I've got work of my own to do."

"I'll be the mayor about two days longer, if my luck holds," Hazleton said in a savage voice. "And you're directly responsible, so you needn't bother trying to duck. Jorn the Apostle began to move two weeks ago. He has a navy now, though where he raised it is beyond me. His main body's nowhere near New Earth, but he's about to take New Earth all the same-the whole planet is swarming with farm kids with fanatical expressions and dismounted spindillies. As soon as they get to me, I'm going to surrender out of hand-you know as well as I do what one of those machines can do, and the farmers are using them as side-arms. I'm not going to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives just to maintain my administration; if they want me out, they can have me out."

"And this is my fault? I once told you the Warriors of God were dangerous."

"And I didn't listen. All right. But they'd never have moved if it hadn't been for the fact that you and Miramon didn't censor what you're up to. It's given Jorn his cause; he's telling his followers that you're meddling with the pre-ordained Armageddon and jeopardizing their chances of salvation. He's proclaimed a jihad against the Hevians for instigating it, and the jihad includes New Earth because we're working with the Hevians—"

Over the phone came four loud, heavy strokes of fist upon metal.

"Gods of all stars, they're here already," Hazleton said. "I'll leave the line open as long as I can-maybe they won't notice. ..." His voice faded. Amalfi hung on grimly, straining to hear every sound.

"Sinner Hazleton," a young and desperately frightened voice said, almost at once, "you have been found out. By the Word of Jorn, you-you are ordered to corrective discipline. Are you gone-tuh-will you submit humbly?"

"If you fire that thing in here," Hazleton's voice said, quite loudly-he was obviously projecting for the benefit of the mike—"you'll uproot half the city. What good will that do you?"

"We will die in the Warriors," the other voice said. It was still tense, but now that it spoke of dying it seemed more self-assured. "You will go to the flames."

"And all the other people-?"

"Sinner Hazleton. we do not threaten," a deeper, older voice said. "We think there is some good in everyone. Jorn commands us to redeem, and that we will do. We have hostages for your good conduct."

"Where are they?"

"They were picked up by the Warriors of God," the deep voice said. "Jorn in his blessedness was kind enough to grant us a cordon sanitaire for this Godless world. Will you yield, for the salvation of this woman and these two helpless children? I advise you, Sinner-hey, what the hell, that phone's open! Jody, smash that switch, and fast! What did I ever do to be saddled with a cadre of lousy yokels—"

The speaker began a thin howl and went dead before the cry was properly born.

For a moment, Amalfi sat stunned. He had gotten too much information too fast; and he was much older now than he had been on like occasions in the past. He had never expected that such an occasion would arise again- but here it was.

A jihad against-He? No, not likely-at least, not directly. Jorn the Apostle would be wary of tackling a world so completely mysterious to him, especially with forces more mob than military. But New Earth was wholly vulnerable; it was a logical first step to invest that planet. And now Jorn had Dee and the children.

Move!

How to move was another matter; it needed to be done in a vessel which no possible Warrior cordon would have the strength to attack, but no such vessel existed on He. The only other alternative was a very small, very fast ship with a low detectability index; but that was equally impossible across so long a distance, since there is a minimum size for even one spindizzy. Or was there? Carrel was on He, and Carrel had had considerable experience in designing relatively small spindizzy-powered proxies; one such had followed the March of Earth all the way, without anybody's paying the slightest attention to it. Of course the proxy had been magnificently, noisily detectable by ordinary standards, and only Carrel's piloting of it had kept the massed cities from distinguishing between the traces that it made and the traces that were made adventitiously by ordinary interstellar matter. .. .

"Can you do that again, Carrel? Remember that this time you won't have a flock of massive cities to confuse the issue. The gamut you'll have to run will be one thin shell of orbiting warships, around one planet-and we don't know how many of them there are, what arms they mount, how careful a watch they keep—"

"Assume the worst," Carrel said. "They caught the recall ship, after all, and they didn't even know we'd sent it. I can do it, Mr. Amalfi, if you'll let me do the maneuvering when the chips are down; otherwise I think you'll be caught, no matter how small the ship is."

"Helleshin!" But there was no way around it; Amalfi would have to subject himself to at least two days of Carrel's violent evasive-confusive maneuvers, without once touching the space-stick himself. It was going to be a rough do for an old man, but Carrel was quite right, there was no other available course.

"All right," he said. "Just make sure I'm alive when I touch down."

Carrel grinned. "I've never lost a cargo," he said.

"Providing it's been properly secured. Where do you want to land?"

That was not easy question either. In the long run, Amalfi settled for a landing in Central Park, in the heart of the old Okie city. ;This was perhaps dangerously close to the Warriors' center of operations, but Amalfi did not want to be forced to trek across a thousand miles of New Earth just for a meeting with Hazleton; and there was a fair chance that the old city would be taboo for the bumpkins, or at least avoided instinctively. Jorn the Apostle would not have overlooked patrolling such an obvious rallying-point for the ousted, but presumably Jorn was somewhere at the other end of the Cloud with his main body.

Since there is, even with spindizzies, a limit to the amount of power that can be stored in a small hull, the trip was more than long enough for Amalfi to catch up, via ultraphone, on the Cloud events he had closeted himself away from on He. The picture Mark had given him had been accurate, if perhaps a little distorted in emphasis. Jorn the Apostle's real Concerns were still far away from New Earth, and his jihad had been announced against unbelievers everywhere, not just against the Hevians. The Hevians were simply the article in the indictment which applied specifically to New Earth-that, and New Earth's unannounced but unconcealed intention of plumbing the end of time, which was blasphemy. It was Amalfi's guess that the uprising on New Earth and the seizure of the central government there had been an unplanned byproduct of the proclamation of which Jorn was unprepared to take full advantage. Had he been planning on it, or militarily able to capitalize on it, he would have rushed in his main body on the double; as matters stood he had only-and belatedly-set up a token blockade. If his followers' coup stuck, all well and good; if it did not, he would withdraw the blockade in a hurry, to save ships and men for another, more auspicious day.

Or so Amalfi reasoned; but he was uncomfortably aware that in Jorn the Apostle he was for the first time dealing with an enemy whose thought-processes might be utterly unlike his, from first to last.

The ship shifted abruptly from spindizzy to ion-blast drive. Amalfi stopped thinking entirely and just hung on.

Once in the atmosphere, the craft was back in Amalfi's hands; back on Ha, Carrel had relinquished his remote Dirac control over the space-stick. Amalfi was able to make a thistledown nightside landing in south Central Park, in a broad irregular depression which legend said had once been a lake. The landing was without incident; apparently it had been undetected. In the morning the abandoned proxy might be spotted by a Warrior flyer, but the old city was littered with such ambiguous mechanical objects; one had to be a student of the city, as knowledgeable as Schliemann was about the nine Troys, to know which was new and which was not. Amalfi was confident enough of this to leave the proxy behind without an attempt to camouflage it.