James Blish - Cities in Flight

Outside Secaucus, however, Paige nearly lost his man for the first and last time. The crossroads, which lay across U.S. 46 to the Lincoln Tunnel, turned out also to be the site of the temporary trailer city of the Believers—nearly 300,000 of them, or almost half of the 700,000 who had been pouring into town for two weeks now for the Revival. Among the trailers Paige saw license plates from as far away as Eritrea.

The trailer city was far bigger than any nearby town except Passaic. It included a score of supermarkets, all going full blast even in the middle of the night, and about as many coin-in-slot laundries, equally wide open. There were at least a hundred public baths, and close to 360 public toilets. Paige counted ten cafeterias, and twice that many hamburger stands and one-arm joints, each of the stands no less than a hundred feet long; at one of these he stopped long enough to buy a “Texas wiener” nearly as long as his forearm, covered with mustard, meat sauce, sauerkraut, corn relish, and piccalilli. There were ten highly conspicuous hospital tents, too—and after eating the Texas wiener Paige thought he knew why—the smallest of them perfectly capable of housing a one-ring circus.

And, of course, there were the trailers, of which Paige guessed the number at sixty thousand, from two-wheeled jobs to Packards, in all stages of repair and shininess. Luckily, the city was well lit, and since everyone living in it was a Believer, there were no booby-traps or other forms of proselytizing. Paige’s man, after a little thoroughly elementary doubling on his tracks and setting up false trails, ducked into a trailer with a Latvian license plate. After half an hour —at exactly 0200—the trailer ran up a stubby VHF radio antenna as thick through as Paige’s wrist.

And the rest, Paige thought grimly, climbing back on to his own rented scooter, is up to the FBI—if I tell them.

But what would he say? He had every good reason of his own to stay as far out of sight of the FBI as possible. Furthermore, if he informed on the man now, it would mean immediate curtains on the search for the anti-agathic, and a gross betrayal of the trust, enforced though it had been, that Anne and Gunn had placed in him. On the other hand, to remain silent would give the Soviets the drug at the same time that Pfitzner found it—in other words, before the West had it as a government. And it would mean, too, that he himself would have to forego an important chance to prove that he was loyal, when the inevitable showdown with MacHinery came around.

By the next day, however, he had hit upon what should have been the obvious course in the beginning. He took a second evening to rifle his fish’s laboratory bench—the incredible idiot had stuffed it to bulging with incriminating photomicrograph negatives, and with bits of paper bearing the symbols of a simple substitution code once circulated to Tom Mix’s Square Shooter’s on behalf of Shredded Ralston—and a third to take step-by-step photos of the hegira to the Believer trailer city, and the radio-transmitter-equipped trailer with the buffer-state license. Assembling everything into a neat dossier, Paige cornered Gunn in his office and dropped the whole mess squarely in the vice-president’s lap.

“My goodness,” Gunn said, blinking. “Curiosity is a disease with you, isn’t it, Colonel Russell? And I really doubt that even Pfitzner will ever find the antidote for that.”

“Curiosity has very little to do with it. As you’ll see in the folder, the man’s an amateur—evidently a volunteer from the Party, a Rosenberg, rather than a paid expert. He practically led me by the nose.”

“Yes, I see he’s clumsy,” Gunn agreed. “And he’s been reported to us before, Colonel Russell. As a matter of fact, on several occasions we’ve had to protect him from his own clumsiness.”

“But why?” Paige demanded. “Why haven’t you cracked down on him?”

“Because we can’t afford to,” Gunn said. “A spy scandal in the plant now would kill the work just where it stands. Oh, we’ll report him sooner or later, and the work you’ve done here on him will be very useful then—to all of us, yourself included. But there’s no hurry.”

“No hurry!”

“No,” Gunn said. “The material he’s ferrying out now is of no particular consequence. When we actually have the drug—”

“But he’ll already know the production method by that time. Identifying the drug is a routine job for any team of chemists—your Dr. Agnew taught me that much.”

“I suppose that’s so,” Gunn said. “Well, I’ll think it over, Colonel. Don’t worry about it, we’ll deal with it when the time seems ripe.”

And that was every bit of satisfaction that Paige could extract from Gunn. It was small recompense for his lost sleep, his lost dates, the care he had taken to inform Pfitzner first, or the soul-searching it had cost him to put the interests of the project ahead of his officer’s oath and of his own safety. That evening he said as much to Anne Abbott and with considerable force.

“Calm down,” Anne said. “If you’re going to mix into the politics of this work, Paige, you’re going to get burned right up to the armpits. When we do find what we’re looking for, it’s going to create the biggest political explosion in history. I’d advise you to stand well back.”

“I’ve been burned already,” Paige said hotly. “How the hell can I stand back now? And tolerating a spy isn’t just politics. It’s treason, not only by rumor, but in fact. Are you deliberately putting everyone’s head in the noose?”

“Quite deliberately. Paige, this project is for everyone—every man, woman and child on the Earth and in space. The fact that the West is putting up the money is incidental. What we’re doing here is in every respect just as anti-West as it is anti-Soviet. We’re out to lick death for human beings, not just for the armed forces of some one military coalition. What do we care who gets it first? We want everyone to have it.”

“Does Gunn agree with that?”

“It’s company policy. It may even have been Hal’s own idea, though he has different reasons, different justifications. Have you any idea what will happen when a death-curing drug hits a totalitarian society—a drug available in limited quantities only? It won’t prove fatal to the Soviets, of course, but it ought to make the struggle for succession over there considerably bloodier than it is already. That’s essentially the way Hal seems to look at it.”

“And you don’t,” Paige said grimly.

“No, Paige, I don’t. I can see well enough what’s going to happen right here at home when this thing gets out. Think for a moment of what it will do to the religious people alone. What happens to the after-life if you never need to leave this one? Look at the Believers. They believe in the literal truth of everything in the Bible—that’s why they revise the book every year. And this story is going to break before their Jubilee year is over. Did you know that their motto is: ‘Millions now living will never die’? They mean themselves, but what if it turns out to be everybody?

“And that’s only the beginning. Think of what the insurance companies are going to say. And what’s going to happen to the whole structure of compound interest. Wells’s old yarn about the man who lived so long that his savings came to dominate the world’s whole financial structure— When the Sleeper Wakes, wasn’t it?—well, that’s going to be theoretically possible for everybody with the patience and the capital to let his money sit still. Or think of the whole corpus of the inheritance laws. It’s going to be the biggest; blackest social explosion the West ever had to take. We’ll be much too busy digging in to care about what’s happening to the Central Committee in Moscow.”