James Blish - Cities in Flight

“I don’t like that,” Hazleton said. “Do we have any way of finding out on what level it’s safe to run any instrument under these circumstances? I’d like to see generation curves on the effect so we can make such a calculation—but there’s not much point in consulting the records if we just burn out the machine in the process.”

Amalfi picked up the only instrument on the Hevian board that was “his”—the microphone to the City Fathers. “Are you still alive down there?” he said.

“YES, MR. MAYOR,” the answer came promptly. Miramon looked startled; since everything of which he had any knowledge had gone dead, even the lights—they were sitting bathed only in the barely ascertainable glow of the zodiacal light, that belt of tenuous ionized gas in He’s atmosphere brought to life by He’s magnetic field, plus the even dimmer glow of the few nearby galaxies—the sudden voice of the speakers must have alarmed him.

“Good. What are you operating on?”

“WET CELLS IN SERIES AT TWENTY-FIVE HUNDRED VOLTS.”

“All of your

“YES, MR. MAYOR.”

Amalfi grinned in the virtual darkness. “All right, apply your efficiency figures to a set of standard instrumental situations.”

“DONE.”

“Give me an operating level for Mr. Miramon’s line down to you, allowing for pilot lights on his board so he can see his settings.”

“MR. MAYOR, THAT IS NOT NECESSARY. WE HAVE ALREADY RESET THE MASTER CUTOUT AT THE NECESSARY BLOWPOINT LEVEL. WE CAN RE-ACTUATE ALL THE CIRCUITS AT ONCE.”

“No, don’t do that, we don’t want the spindizzies back on too—”

“THE SPINDIZZIES ARE OFF,” the City Fathers said, with austere simplicity.

“Well, Miramon? Do you trust them? Or would you rather have them tie in to you first and print their data for you, so you can turn the planet back on piecemeal?”

He heard Miramon draw in his breath slightly to answer, but he was never to know what that answer would have been; for at the same moment, Miramon’s whole board came alive at once.

“Hey!” Amalfi squalled. “Wait for orders down there, dammit!”

“STANDING ORDERS, MR. MAYOR. AFTER COUNTDOWN BEGINS WE ARE TO ACT AT THE FIRST SIGN OF OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE. COUNTDOWN BEGAN TWELVE HUNDRED SECONDS AGO, AND SEVEN SECONDS AGO OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE BECAME STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT.”

“What do they mean?” Miramon said, trying to read every instrument on his board at once. “I thought I understood your language, Mayor Amalfi, but—”

“The City Fathers don’t speak Okie, they speak Machine,” Amalfi said grimly. “What they mean is that the Web of Hercules—if that’s who it is—is coming in on us. And coming in on us fast.”

With a single, circumscribed flip of his closed fingers, Miramon turned off the lights.

Blackness. Then, seeping faintly over the windows around the tower, the air-glow of the zodiacal light; then, still later, the dim pinwheels of island universes. On Miramon’s board, there was a single spearpoint of yellow-orange which was only the heater of a vacuum tube smaller than an acorn; in this central gloom at the heart and birthplace of the universe, it was almost blinding. Amalfi had to turn his back on it to maintain the profound dark-adaptation that his vision needed to operate at all in the tower on his mountain.

While he waited for his sight to come back, he wondered at the speed of Miramon’s reaction, and the motives behind it. Surely the Hevian could not believe that a set of pilot lights in a tower on top of a remote mountain could be bright enough to be seen from space; for that matter, blacking out even as large an object as a whole planet could serve no military purpose—it had been two millennia since any reasonably sophisticated enemy depended upon light alone to see by. And where in Miramon’s whole lifetime could he have acquired the blackout reflex? It made no sense; yet Miramon had restored the blackout with all the trained positiveness of a boxer riding with a punch.

When the light began to grow, he had his answer—and no time left to wonder how Miramon had anticipated it.

It began as though the destruction of the inter-universal messenger were about to repeat itself in reverse, encompassing the whole of creation in the process. Crawls of greenish-yellow light were beginning to move high up in the Hevian sky, at first as ghostly as auroral traces, then with a purposeful writhing and brightening which seemed as horrifyingly like life as the copulation of a mass of green-gold nematode worms seen under phase-contrast lighting. Particle counters began to chatter on the board, and Hazleton jumped to monitor the cumulative readings.

“Where is that stuff coming from—can you tell?” Amalfi said.

“It seems to come from nearly a hundred discrete point-sources, surrounding us in a sphere with a diameter of about a light year,” Miramon said. He sounded preoccupied; he was doing something with controls whose purpose was unknown to Amalfi.

“Hmm. Ships, without a doubt. Well, now we know where they get their name, anyhow. But what is it they’re using?”

“That’s easy,” Hazleton said grimly. “It’s anti-matter.”

“How can that be?”

“Look at the frequency analysis on this secondary radiation we’re getting, and you’ll see. Every one of those ships must be primarily a particle accelerator of prodigious size. They’re sending streams of stripped heavy anti-matter atoms right down the gravitational ingeodesics toward us—that’s what makes the paths the stuff is following look so twisted. They’ve found a way to generate and project primary cosmics made of anti-matter atoms, and in quantity. When they strike our atmosphere, both disintegrate—”

“And the planet gets a dose of high-energy gamma radiation,” Amalfi said. “And they must have known how to do it for a long time, since they’re named after the technique. Helleshin! What a way to conquer a planet! They can either sterilize the populace, or kill it off, at will, without ever even coming close to the place.”

“We’ve had the sterility dose already,” Hazleton said quietly.

“That can hardly matter now,” Estelle said, in an even softer voice.

“The killing dose won’t matter either,” Hazleton said. “Radiation sickness takes months to develop, even when it’s going to be fatal.”

“They could disable us quickly enough,” Amalfi said harshly. “We’ve got to stop this somehow. We need these last days!”

“What do you propose?” Hazleton said. “Nothing that we’ve set up will work in a globe at a distance of a light year … except—”

“Except the base surge,” Amalfi said. “Let’s use it, and quick.”

“What is this?” Miramon said.

“We’ve got your spindizzies set up for a single burn-out overload pulse. In the position we’re in, the resulting single wave-front ought to tie space into knots for—well, we don’t know how far the effect will carry, but a long way.”

“Maybe even all the way to the limits of the universe,” Dr. Schloss said.

“Well, what of it?” Amalfi demanded. “It’s due to be destroyed anyhow in only ten days—”

“Not if you destroy it first,” Schloss said. “If it isn’t here when the anti-matter universe passes through it, all bets are off; there’ll be nothing we can do.”

“It’ll still be here.”

“Not in any useful sense—not if the matter in it is tied up in billions of gravitational whirlpools. Better let the Web kill us than destroy the future evolution of two universes, Amalfi! Can’t you give over playing god, even now?”

“All right,” Amalfi said. “Look at those dosimeters, and look at that sky. What have you to suggest?”

The sky was now one even intensity of glow, like a full overcast lit by a dull sun. Outside, the lower mountains of the range stood with their tree-covered flanks, so completely without shadow as to suggest that the windows ringing the tower were actually parts of a flat mural done by an unskilled hand. The counters had given over chattering and were putting out a subdued roar.