James Blish - Cities in Flight

“Only what I just suggested,” Schloss said hopelessly. “Load up on anti-radiation drugs, and hope we can stay on our feet for ten days. What else is there? They’ve got us.”

“Excuse me,” Miramon said. “That is not altogether certain. We have some resources of our own. I have just launched one; it may be sufficient.”

“What is it?” Amalfi demanded. “I didn’t know you mounted any weapons. How long will we have to wait before it acts?”

“One question at a time,” Miramon said. “Of course we mount weapons. We never talk about them, because there were children on our planet, and still are, the gods receive them. But we had to face the fact that we might some day be invested by a hostile fleet, considering how far afield we were ranging from our home galaxy, and how many stars we were visiting. Thus we provided several means for defense. One of these we meant never to use, but we have just used it now.”

“And that is?” Hazleton said tensely.

“We would never have told you, except for the coming end,” Miramon said. “You have praised us as chemists, Mayor Amalfi. We have applied chemistry to physics. We discovered how to poison an electromagnetic field by resonance—the way the process of catalysis is poisoned in chemistry. The poison field propagates itself along a carrier wave, and controlling field, almost any signal which is continuous and conforms to the Faraday equations. Look.”

He pointed out the window. The light did not seem to have lessened any; but it was now mottled with leprous patches. In a space of seconds, the patches spread and flowed into each other, until the light was now confined to isolated luminous clouds, rapidly being eaten away at the edges, like dead cells being dissolved by the enzymes of decay bacteria.

When the sky went totally dark, Amalfi could see the hundred streamers of the particle streams pointed inward at He; at least it looked a hundred, though actually he could hardly have seen more than fifteen from any one spot on the planet. And these too were being eaten away, receding into blackness.

The counters went back to stuttering, but they did not quite stop.

“What happens when the effect gets back to the ships?” Web asked.

“It will poison the circuits themselves,” Miramon said. “The entities in the ships will suffer total nerve-block. They will die, and so will the ships. Nothing will be left but a hundred hulks.”

Amalfi let out a long, ragged sigh.

“No wonder you weren’t interested in our breadboard rigs,” he said. “With a thing like that, you could have become another Web of Hercules yourselves.”

“No,” Miramon said. “That we could never become.”

“Gods of all stars!” Hazleton said. “Is it over? As fast as that?”

Miramon’s smile was wintery. “I doubt that we will hear from the Web of Hercules again,” he said. “But what your City Fathers call the countdown continues. It is only ten days to the end of the world.”

Hazleton turned back to the dosimeters. For a moment, he simply stared at them. Then, to Amalfi’s astonishment, he began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Amalfi growled.

“See for yourself. If Miramon’s people had ever tangled with the Web in the red world, they would have lost.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Hazleton said, wiping his eyes, “while he was beating them off, we all passed the lethal dose of hard radiation. We are all dead as doornails as we sit here!”

“And this is a joke?” Amalfi said.

“Of course it’s a joke, boss. It doesn’t make the faintest bit of difference. We don’t live in that kind of ‘real world’ any more. We have a dose. In two weeks we’ll begin to become dizzy, and lose our hair, and vomit. In three weeks we’ll be dead. And you still don’t see the joke?”

“I see it,” Amalfi said. “I can subtract ten from fourteen and get four; you mean we’ll live until we die.”

“I can’t abide a man who kills my jokes.”

“It’s a pretty old joke,” Amalfi said slowly. “But maybe it’s still funny, at that; if it was good enough for Aristophanes, I guess it’s good enough for me.”

“I think that’s pretty damn funny, all right,” Dee said with bitter fury. Miramon was staring from one New Earthman to another with an expression of utter bafflement. Amalfi smiled.

“Don’t say so unless you think so, Dee,” he said. “It’s always been a joke, after all. The death of one man is just as funny as the death of a universe. Don’t repudiate the last laugh of all. It may be the only legacy we’ll leave.”

“MIDNIGHT,” the City Fathers said. “THE COUNT IS ZERO MINUS NINE.”

As Amalfi opened the door and went back into the room, the City Fathers said:

“N-DAY. ZERO MINUS ONE HOUR.”

At this hour, everything had meaning; or nothing had; it depended on what had been worth investing with meaning over a lifetime of several thousand years. Amalfi had left the room to go to the toilet. Now he would never do that again, nor would anybody else; the demise of the whole was so close at hand that it was outrunning even the physiological rhythms of the body by which man has told time since he first thought to count it. Was diuresis as worth mourning as love? Well, perhaps it was; the senses should have their mourners too; no sensation, no thought, no emotion is meaningless if it is the last of its kind.

And so farewell to all tensions and all reliefs, from amour to urea, from entrances to exits, from redundancy to noise, from beer to skittles. “What’s new?” Amalfi said.

“Nothing any more,” Gifford Bonner said. “We’re waiting. Sit down, John, and have a drink.”

He sat down at the long table and looked at the glass before him. It was red, but there was a faint tinge of blue in the liquid too, independent and not adding up to violet even in the bad light of the fluorescents in the midst of dead center’s ultimate blackness. At the lip of the glass a faint meniscus climbed upward from the wine, and little tendrils of condensation meandered back down. Amalfi tasted it tentatively; it was raw and peppery—the Hevians were not great wine-growers, their climate had been too chancy for that—but even the sting of it was an edgy pleasure that made him sigh.

“We should suit up at the half hour,” Dr. Schloss said. “I’d leave more free time, except that some of us haven’t been inside a space-suit in centuries, and some of us never. We don’t want to take chances on their not being trim and tight.”

“I thought we were going to be surrounded by some sort of field,” Web said.

“Not for long, Web. Let me go through this once more, to be sure everybody has it straight in his head. We will be protected by a stasis-field during the actual instant of transition, when time will to all intents and purposes be abolished—it becomes just another coordinate of Hilbert space then. That will carry us over into the first second of time on the other side, after the catastrophe. But then the field will go down, because the spindizzies, which will be generating it, will have been annihilated. We will then find ourselves occupying as many independent sets of four dimensions as there are people in this room, and every set completely empty. The spacesuits won’t protect you long, either, because you’ll be the only body of organized energy and matter in your particular, individual universe; as soon as you disturb the metrical frame of that universe, you, the suit, the air in it, the power in the accumulators, everything will surge outwards, creating space as it goes. Every man his own monobloc. But if we don’t have the suits on for the crossing, not even that much will happen.”