James Blish - Cities in Flight

“I wish you wouldn’t be so graphic,” Dee complained, but her heart did not really seem to be in it. She was, Amalfi noted, wearing that same peculiarly strained expression she had worn when she had said that she wanted to bear Amalfi a child. Some instinct made him turn to look at Estelle and Web. All their hands were piled up together confidingly on the table. Estelle’s face was serene, and her eyes were luminous, almost like a child waiting for a party to begin. Web’s expression was more difficult to interpret: he was frowning slightly, more in puzzlement than in worry, as if he couldn’t quite understand why he was not more worried than he was.

Outside, there was a thin whining sound which rose suddenly to a howl and then died away again. It was windy today on the mountain.

“What about the table, the glasses, the chairs?” Amalfi asked. “Do those go with us too?”

“No,” Dr. Schloss said. “We don’t want to risk having any possible condensation nuclei near us. We’re using a modification of the technique we used to build Object 4001-Alephnull in the future; the furniture will start to make the crossing with us, but we’ll use the last available energy to push it a micro-second into the past. The result will be that it will stay in our universe. What its fate will be thereafter, we can only guess.”

Amalfi lifted his glass reflectively. It was silky in his fingers; the Hevians made fine glass.

“This frame of reference I’ll find myself in,” Amalfi said. “It will really have no structure at all?”

“Only what you impose on it,” Retma said. “It will not be space, and will have no metrical frame. In other words, your presence there will be intolerable—”

“Thank you,” Amalfi said drily, to Retma’s obvious bafflement. After a moment the scientist went on without comment: “What I am trying to say is that your mass will create a space to accommodate it, and it will take on the metrical frame that already exists in you. What happens after that will depend upon in what order you dismantle the suit. I would recommend discharging the oxygen bottles first, since to start a universe like our present one will require a considerable amount of plasma. The oxygen in the suit itself will be sufficient for the time at your disposal. As the last act, discharge the suit’s energy; this will, in effect, touch a match to the explosion.”

“How large a universe will be the outcome, eventually?” Mark said. “I seem to remember that the original monobloc was large, as well as ultra-condensed.”

“Yes, it will be a small universe,” Retma said, “perhaps fifty light years across at its greatest expansion. But that will be only at first. As continuous creation comes into play, more atoms will be added to the whole, until a mass is reached sufficient to form a monobloc on the next contraction. Or so we see it; you must understand that this is all somewhat conjectural. We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.”

“ZERO MINUS THIRTY MINUTES.”

“That’s it,” Dr. Schloss said. “Suits, everybody. We can continue to talk by radio.”

Amalfi drained the wine. Another last act. He got into his suit, slowly recapturing his old familiarity with the grotesque apparatus. He saw to it that the radio switch was open, but he found that he could think of nothing further to say. That he was about to die suddenly had very little reality to him, in the face of the greater death of which his would be a part. No comment that occurred to him seemed anything but the uttermost of trivia.

There was some technical conversation as they checked each other out in the suits, with particular attention to Web and Estelle. Then the talk died out, as if they, too, found words intolerable.

“ZERO MINUS FIFTEEN MINUTES.”

“Do you understand what is about to happen to you?” Amalfi said suddenly.

“YES, MR. MAYOR. WE ARE TO BE TURNED OFF AT ZERO.”

“That’s good enough.” He wondered, however, if they thought that they might be turned on again in the future. It was of course foolish to think of them as entertaining anything even vaguely resembling an emotion, but nevertheless he decided not to say anything which might disabuse them. They were only machines, but they were also old friends and allies.

“ZERO MINUS TEN MINUTES.”

“It’s all going so fast all of a sudden,” Dee’s voice whispered in the earphones. “Mark, I … I don’t want it to happen.”

“No more do I,” Hazleton said. “But it will happen anyhow. I only wish I’d lived a more human life than I did. But it happened the way it happened, and so there’s no more to say.”

“I wish I could believe,” Estelle said, “that there will be no sorrow in the universe I make.”

“Then create nothing, my dear,” Gifford Bonner said. “Stay here. Creation means sorrow, always and always.”

“And joy,” Estelle said.

“Well, yes. There’s that.”

“ZERO MINUS FIVE MINUTES.”

“I think we can do without the rest of the countdown,” Amalfi said. “Otherwise from now on they will count every minute, and they’ll do the last one by seconds. Do we want to go out to the tune of that gabble? Anybody want to say ‘yes’?”

They were silent. “Very well,” Amalfi said. “Stop counting.”

“VERY WELL, MR. MAYOR. GOOD-BYE.”

“Good-bye,” Amalfi said with amazement.

“I won’t say that, if you don’t mind,” Hazleton said in a choked voice. “It brings the deprivation too close for me to stand. I hope everybody will consider it said.”

Amalfi nodded, then realized that the gesture could not be seen inside the helmet.

“I agree,” he said. “But I don’t feel deprived. I loved you all. You have my love to take with you, and I have it too.”

“It is the only thing in the universe that one can give and still have,” Miramon said.

The deck throbbed under Amalfi’s feet. The machines were preparing for their instant of unimaginable thrust. The sound of their power was comforting; so was the solidity of the deck, the table, the room, the mountain, the world—

“I think—” Gifford Bonner said.

And with those words, it ended.

There was nothing at first but the inside of the suit. Outside there was not even blackness, but only nothingness, something not to be seen, like that which is not seen outside of the cone of vision; one does not see blackness behind one’s own head, one simply does not see in that direction at all; and so here. Yet for a little while, Amalfi found that he was still conscious of his friends, still a part of the circle though the room and everything in it had vanished from around them. He did not know how he knew that they were still there, but he could feel it.

He knew that there was no hope of speaking to them again; and indeed, as he tried to grasp how he knew they were there at all, he realized that they were drawing away from him. The circle was widening. The mute figures became smaller—not by distance, for there was no distance here, but nevertheless in some way they were passing out of each other’s ken. Amalfi tried to lift his hand in farewell, but found it almost impossible. By the time he had only half completed the gesture, the others had faded and were gone, leaving behind only a memory also fading rapidly, like the memory of a fragrance.

Now he was alone and must do what he must do. Since his hand was raised, he continued the gesture to let the gas out of his oxygen bottles. The unmedium in which he was suspended seemed to be becoming a little less resistant; already a metrical frame was establishing itself. Yet it was almost as difficult to halt the motion as it had been to start it.

Nevertheless, he halted it. Of what use was another universe of the kind he had just seen die? Nature had provided two of those, and had doomed them at the same moment. Why not try something else? Retma in his caution, Estelle in her compassion, Dee in her fear all would be giving birth to some version of the standard model; but Amalfi had driven the standard model until all the bolts had come out of it, and was so tired at even the thought of it that he could hardly bring himself to breathe. What would happen if, instead, he simply touched the detonator button on his chest, and let all the elements of which he and the suit were composed flash into plasma at the same instant?