James Blish - Cities in Flight

AVON BOOKS

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They Shall Have Stars

Originally published under the title YEAR 2018!

Published by arrangement with the author.

For information address Avon Books.

Title page selection from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF

By permission of New Directions.

A Life for the Stars

Published by arrangement with G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-14388.

For information address G. P. Putnam's Sons,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10022.

Earth man Come Home

Copyright, 1955, by James Blish.

Published by arrangement with G. P. Putnam's Sons The material upon which this

by Street and Smith Publications, Inc., in the U.S.A. and Great Britain:

in the U.S.A. and Great Britain.

The Triumph of Time

Published by arrangement with the author.

For information address Avon Books.

portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Avon Books.

ISBN: 0-380-41616-6

First Avon Printing, February, 1970

Eighth Printing

AVON TRADEMARK BEG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND

FOREIGN COUNTRIES, REGISTERED TRADEMARK

MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.

Printed in the U.S.A.

(c) THEY SHALL HAVE STAHS 7

(c) A LIFE FOR THE STARS 131

(c) EARTHMAN COME HOME 235

(c) THE TRIUMPH OF TIME 466

(c) AFTERWORD

by Richard U. Mullen 597

THEY

SHALL

HAVE

STARS

And death shall have no dominion

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot...

DYLAN THOMAS

"...While Vegan civilization was undergoing this pecu. liar decline in

influence, while at the height of its political and military power, the

culture which was eventually to replace it was beginning 'to unfold. The

reader should bear in mind that at that time nobody had ever heard of the

Earth, and the planet's sun, Sol, was known only as an undistinguished type G0

star in the Draco sector. It is possible-although highly unlikely-that Vega

knew that the Earth had developed space flight some time before the events we

have just reviewed here. It was, however, only local interplanetary ifight; up

to this period, Earth had taken no part in Galactic history. It was

inevitable, however, that Earth should make the two crucial discoveries which

would bring it on to that starry stage. We may be very sure that Vega, had she

known that Earth was to be her successor, would have exerted all of her

enormous might to prevent it. That Vega failed to do so is evidence enough

that she had no real idea of what was happening on Earth at this time

-ACREFF-MONALES: The Milky Way:

Five Cultural Portraits

BOOK ONE

PRELUDE: Washington

We do not believe any group of men adequate enough-pr wise enough to operate

without scrutiny ot without cri~i~. cism. We know that the only way to avoid

error is tO detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to

inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will.' flourish and subvert.

-

-J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

Tun sii~nows flickered on the walls to his left and right, just inside the

edges of his vision, like shapes stepping quickly back into invisible

doorways. Despite his bone-deep weariness, they made him nervous, almost made

him wish that Dr. Corsi would put out the fire. Nevertheless, he remained

staring into the leaping orange ~1ight, feeling the heat tightening his cheeks

and the skin around his eyes, and soaking into his chest.

Corsi stirred a little beside him, but Senator Wagoner's own weight on the

sofa seemed to have been increasing ever since he had first sat down. He felt

dxained, lethargic, as old and heavy as a stone despite his forty-eight years;

it had been a bad day in a long succession of bad days. Good days in

Washington were the ones you slept through.

Next to him Corsi, for all that he was twenty years older, formerly Director

of the Bureau of Standards, formerly Director of the World Health

Organization, and presently head man of the American Association for the

Advancement of Science (usually referred to in Washington as "the left-wing

Triple A-S"), felt as light and restless and quick as a chameleon.

"I suppose you know what a chance you're taking, coming to see me," Corsi said

in his dry, whispery voice. "I wpuldn't be in Washington at all if I didn't

think the

0

interests of the AAAS required it. Not after the drubbing I've taken at

MacHinery's hands. Even outside the government, it's like living in an

aquarium-in a tank labeled 'Piranha.' But you know about all that."

"I know," the senator agreed. The shadows jumped forward and retreated. "I was

followed here myself. MacHinery's gumshoes have been trying to get something

on me for a long time. But I had to talk to you, Seppi. rye done my best to

understand everything I've found in the committee's files since I was made

chairman-but a non-scientist has inherent limitations. And I didn't want to

ask revealing questions of any of the boys on my staff. That would be a sure

way to a leak-probably straight to MacHinery."

"That's the definition -of a government expert these days," Corsi said, even

more dryly. "A man of whom you don't dare ask an important question."

"Or who'll give you only the answer he thinks you want to hear," Wagoner said

heavily. "I've hit that too. Working for the government isn't a pink tea for a

senator, either. Don't think I haven't wanted to be back in Alaska more than

once; I've got a cabin on Kodiak where I can en joy an open fire, without

wondering if the shadows it throws carry notebooks. But that's enough

self-pity. I ran for the office, and I mean to be good at it, as good as I can

be, anyhow."

"Which is good enough," Côrsi said unexpectedly, taking the brandy snifter out

of Wagoner's lax hand and replenishing the little amber lake at the bottom of

it. The vapors came welling up over his cupped hand, heavy and rich. 1'Bliss,

when I first heard that the Joint Congressional Committee on Space Flight was

going to fall into the hands of a freshman senator, one who'd been nothing but

a press agent before his election-"

"Please," Wagoner said, wincing with mock tenderness. "A public relations

counsel."

"As you like. Still and all, I turned the air blue. I knew it wouldn't have

happened if any senator with seniority had wanted the committee, and the fact

that none of them did seemed to me to be the worst indictment of the present

Congress anyone could ask for. Every word I said was taken down, of course,

and will be used against you, sooner or later. It's already been used against

me, and thank God that's over. But I was wrong about you. You've done a whale

of a good job; you've learned like

magic. So if you want to cut your political throat by asking me for advice,

then by God I'll give it to you."

Corn thrust the suifter back into Wagoner's hand with something more than mock

fury. "That goes for you, ad for nobody else," he added. "I wouldn't tell

anybody else in government the best way to pound sand-not -unless th~ AAAS

asked me to." -

"I know you wouldn't, Seppi. That's part of our trouble. Thanks, anyhow." He

swirled the brandy reflectively. "All right, then, tell me this: what's the

matter with space ifight?"

'~The army," Corsi said promptly.

"Yes, but that's not all. Not by a long shot. Sure, the Army Space Service is

graft-ridden, shot - through with jealousy and gone rigid in the brains. But

it was far worse back in the days when a half-dozen branches of government

were working on space flight at the same time-the weather bureau, the navy,

your bureau, the air force and so on. I've seen some documents dating back

that far. The Earth Satellite Program was announced in 1944 by Stuart

Symington; we didn't actually get a manned vehicle up there until 1962, after

the army was given full jurisdiction. They couldn't even get the damned thing

off the drawing boards; every rear admiral insisted that the plans include a

parking place for his pet launch. At least now we have space flight.

"But there's something far more radically wrong now. If space flight were

still a live proposition, by now some of it would have been taken away from

the army again. There'd be some merchant shipping maybe; or even small

passenger lines for a luxury trade, for the kind of people who'll go in

uncomfortable ways to uñliveable places just because it's horribly expensive."

He chuckled heavily. "Like fox-hunting- in England a hundred years ago; wasn't

it Oscar Wilde who called it 'the pursuit of the inedible by the

unspeakable'?"

"Isn't it still a little early for that?" Corsi said.

"In 2013? I don't think so. But if I'm rushing us on that one point, I can

mention others. Why have there been no major exploratory expeditions for the

past fifteen years? I should have thought that as soon as the tenth planet,

Proserpine, was discovered some university or foundation would have wanted to

go there. It has a big fat moon that would make a fine base-no weather exists

at those ternperatures-there's no sun in the sky out there to louse up

photographic plates-it's only another zero-magnitude star-and so on. That kind

of thing used to be meat and drink to pris~ate explorers. Given a millionaire

with a thirst for science, like old Hale, and a sturdy organizer with a little

grandstand in him-a Byrd-type--and we should have had a Proserpine Two station

long ago. Yet space has been dead since Titan Station was set up in 1981.

Why?"

He watched the flames for a moment.

"Then," he said, "there's the whole question of invention in the field. It's

stopped, Seppi. Stopped cold."

Corsi said: "I seem to remember a paper from the boys

on Titan not so long ago-" -

"On xenobacteriology. Sure. That's not space ifight, Seppi; space flight only

made it possible; their results don't update space flight itself, don't

improve it, make it more attractive. Those guys aren't even interested in it.

Nobody is any more. That's why it's stopped changing.

"For instance: we're still using ion-rockets, driven by an atomic pile. It

works, and there are a thousand minor variations on the principle; but the

principle itself was described by Coupling in i954! Think of it, Seppi-not one

single new, basic engine design in fifty years! And what about hull design?

That's still based on von Braun's work-older even than Coupling's. Is it

really possible that there's nothing better than those frameworks of hitched

onions? Or those powered gliders that act as ferries for them? Yet I can't

find anything in the committee's files that looks any better."

"Are you sure,you'd know a minor change from a major one?"

"You be the judge," Wagoner said grimly. "The hottest thing in current

spaceship design is a new elliptically wound spring for acceleration couches.

It drags like a leaf-spring with gravity, and pushes like a coil-spring

against it. The design wastes energy in one direction, stores it in the other.

At last reports, couches made with it feel like sacks stuffed with green

tomatoes, but we think we'll have the bugs out of it soon. Tomato bugs, I

suppose. Top Secret."

"There's one more Top Secret I'm not supposed to know," Corsi said. "Luckily

it'll be no trouble to forget."

'~ right, try this one. We have a new water-bottle for ships' stores. It's

made of aluminum foil, to be collapsed

from the bottom like a toothpaste tube to feed the water into the mati's

mouth." -

"But a plastic membrane collapsed by air pressure is handier, weighs less---"

"Sure it does. An~ this foil tube is already standard for paste rations. All

that's new abotit this thing is the proposal that we use it for water too. The

proposal came to us from a lobbyist for CanAm Metals, with strong endorsements

by a couple of senators from the Pacific Northwest. You can guess what we did

with it." -

"I am beginning to see your drift." -

"Then I'll wind it up as fast as I can," Wagoner said. "What it all comes to

is that the whole Structure of space ifight as it stands now is creaking,

obsolescent, over-elaborate, decaying. The field is static; no, worse than

that, it's losing ground. By this time, our ships ought to be sleeker and

faster, and able to carry bigger payloads. We ought to have done away with

this dichotomy between ships that can land on a planet, and ships that can fly

from

one planet to another. -

"The whole question of using the -planets for something..-. something, that

is, besides research-ought to be within sight of settlement. Instead, nobody

even discusses it any more. And our chances to settle it grow worse every

year. Our appropriations are dwindling, as it gets harder and harder to

convince the Congress that space ffight is really good for anything. You can't

sell the Congress on the long-range rewards of basic research, anyhow;

representatives have to stand for election every two yeais, senators every six

years; that's just about as far ahead as most of them are prepared to look.

And suppose we tried to explain to them the basic research - -we're doing? We

couldn't; it's classified! -

"And above all, Seppi-this may be only my personal ignorance speaking, but if

so, I'm stuck with it-above all, I think that by now we ought. to have some

slight clue toward an interstellar drive. We ought even to have a model, no

matter- how crude-as crude as a Fourth of July rocket compared to a Coupling

engine, but with the principle visible. But we don't. As a matter of fact,

we've written off the stars. Nobody I can talk to thinks we'll ever reach

them."

Corsi got up and walked lightly to the window, where he stood with his back to

the room, as though trying to

look through the light-tight blind down on to the deserted street. -

To Wagoner's fire-dazed eyes, he was scarcely more than a shadow hip~self. The

senator found himself thinking, for perhaps the twentieth time in the past six

months, that Corsi might even be glad to be out of it all, branded unreliable

though he was. Then, again for at least the twentieth time, Wagoner remembered

the repeated clearance hearings, the oceans of dubious testimony and gossip

from witnesses with no faces or names, the clamor in the press when Corsi was

found to have roomed in college with a man suspected of being an ex-YPSL~

member, the denunciation on the senate floor by one of MacHinery's captive

solons, more hearings, the endless barrage of vilification and hatred, the

letters beginning "Dear Doctor Corsets, You bum," and signed "True American."

To get out of it that way was worse than enduring it, no matter how stoutly

most of your - fellow scholars stood by you afterwards.

"I shan't be the first to say so to you," the physicist said, turning at last.

"I don't think we'll ever reach the stars either, Bliss. And I am not - very

conservative, as physicists go. We just don't live long enough for us to

become a star-traveling race. - A mortal man limited to speeds below that of -

light is as unsuited to interstellar travel as a moth would be to crossing the

Atlantic. I'm sorry to believe that, certainly; but I do believe it."

Wagoner nodded and filed the speech away. On that subject be had expected even

less than Corsi had given him -

"But," Corsi said, lifting his snifter from the table, "it isn't impossible

that interplanetary flight could be bettered. I agree with you that it's

rotting away now. I'd suspected that it might be, and your showing tonight is

conclusive."

"Then why is it happening?" Wagoner demanded.

"Because scientific method doesn't work any more."

"What! Excuse me, Seppi, but that's sort of like hearing an archbishop say

that Christianity doesn't work any more. What do you mean?"

Corsi smiled sourly. "Perhaps I was overdramatic. But it's true that, under

present conditions, scientific method is

a blind alley. It depends on freedom of information, and we deliberately

killed that. In my bureau, when it was mine, we seldom knew who was working on

what project

at any given time; we seldom knew whether or not somebody else m the bureau

was duplicating it; we never knew whether or not some other department might

be duplicating it. All we could -be sure of was that many men, working in

similar fieIds~ -- were - stamping their resuib Secret because that was

the~easy way-not only to keep the work out of Russian hands, but lo keep the

workers in the clear -if their own government should investigate them. How can

you apply scientific method - to a problem when you're forbidden to see the

data? -

"Then there's the caliber of scientist we have working for the government now.

The few first-rate men we have are so harassed by the security set-up--and by

the constant suspicion that's focused on them because they are top men in

their fields, and hence anything they might leak would be particularly

valuable-that it takes them years to solve what used to be very simple

problems. As for the rest-well, our staff at Standards consisted almost

entirely of third-raters: some of them were very dogged and patient men

indeed, but low on courage and even lower on imagination. They spent all their

time operating mechanically by the cook-book-the routine of scientific

method-and had less to show for it every year."

"Everything you've said could be applied to the spaceifight research that's

going on now, without changing a comma," Wagoner said. "But, Seppi, if

scientific. method used to be sound, it should still be sound. It ought to

work for anybody, even third-raters. Why has it suddenly turned sour now-after

centuries of unbroken successes?" -

"The time lapse," Corsi said somberly, "is of the first importance. Remember,

Bliss, that scientifiQ method is not a natural law. It doesn't exist in

nature, but only in our heads; in short, it's a way of thinking about things-a

way of sifting evidence. It was bound to become obsolescent sooner or later,

just as sorites and paradigms and syllogisms became obsolete before it.

Scientific method works fine while there are thousands of obvious facts lying

about for the taking-fact& as obvious and measurable as how fast a stone

falls, or what the order of the colors is in a rainbow. But the more subtle

the facts to be discovered become-the more they retreat into the realms of the

invisible, the intangible, the unweighable, the submicroscopic, the

abstract-the more expensive and timeconsuming it is to investigate them by

scientific method.

"And when you reach a stage where the only researeh

worth doing costs millions Of dollars per experiment, then those experiments

can be paid for only by government. Governments can make the best use only of

third-rate men, men who can't leaven the instructions in the cookbook with the

flashes of insight you need to make basic discoveries. The result is what you

see: sterility, stasis, dry

rot." -- -

"Then what's left?' Wagoner said. "What are we 9oing to do now? I know you

well enough to suspect that you're not going to give up all hope."

"No," Corsi said, "I haven't given up, but I'm quite helpless to change the

situation you're complaining about After all, I'm on the outside. Which is

probably good for me." He paused, and then said suddenly: "There's no hope of

getting the government to drop the security system completely?"

"Completely?'

"Nothing else would do."

"No," Wagoner said. "Not even partially, I'm afraid. Not any longer."

Corsi sat down and leaned forward, his elbows on his knobby knees, staring

into the dying coals. "Then I have two pieces of advice to give you, Bliss.

Actually they're two sides of the same coin. First of all, begin by abandoning

these multi-million-dollar, Manhattan-District approaches. We don't need a

newer, still finer measurement of electron resonance one-tenth so badly as we

need new pathways, new categories of knowledge. The colossal research project

is defunct; what we need now is pure skullwork."

"From my staff?'

"From wherever you can get it. That's the other half of my recommendation. If

I were you, I would go to the crackpots."

Wagoner waited. Corsi said these things for effect; he liked drama in small

doses. He would explain in a moment.

"Of course I don't mean total crackpots," Corsi said. "But you'll have to draw

the line yourself. You need marginal contributors, scientists of good

reputation generally whose obsessions don't strike fire with other members of

their profession. Like the Crehore atom, or old Ehrenhaft's theory of magnetic

currents, or the Milne cosmology-you'll have to find the fruitful one

yourself. Look for discards, and then find out whether or not the idea

deserved to be totally discarded. And-don't accept the first 'expert' opinion

that you get."

"Winnow chaff, in other words." -

"What else is there to winnow?" Corsi said. "Of course it's a long chance, but

you can't turn to scientists of real stature now; it's too late for that. Now

you'll have to use sports, freaks, near-misses."

"Starting where?"

"Oh," said Corsi, "how ab-out gravity? I don't know any other subject that's

attracted a greater quota of idiot speculations. Yet the acceptable theories

of what gravity is are of no practical use to us. They can't be -put to work

to help lift a spaceship. We can't manipulate gravity as a field; we don't

even have a set of equations for it that we can agree upon. No more will we

find such a set by spending fortunes and decades on the project. The law of

diminishing returns has washed that approach out."

Wagoner got up. "You don't leave me much," he said glumly. -

"No," Corsi agreed. "I leave you only what you- started with. That's more than

most of us are left with, Bliss." -

Wagoner grinned tightly at him and the two men shook hands. As Wagoner left,

he saw Corsi silhouetted against the fire, his back to the doOr, his shoulders

bent. While he stood there, a shot blatted not far away, and the echoes

bounded back from the face of the embassy across the street. It was not a

common sound in Washington, but neither was it unusual: it was almost surely

one of the city's thousands of anonymous snoopers firing at a counter-agent, a

cop, or a shadow.

Corsi made no responding movement. The senator closed the door quietly. -

He was shadowed all the way back to his own apartment, but this time he hardly

noticed. He was thinking about an immortal man who flew from star to Star

faster than light.

CHAPTER ONE~ New York

In the newer media of communication ... the popularization of science is-

confounded by rituals of mass entertainment. One standard routine dramatizes

science through the biography of a hero scientist: at the denouement, lie is

discovered in a lonely laboratory crying 'Eureka' at a murky test tube held up

to a bare light bulb.

-GERARD PIEL

-THE PARADE of celebrities, notorieties, and just plain brass that passed

through the reception. room of Jno. Pfltzner & Sons was marvelous to behold.

During the hour and a half that Colonel Paige Russell had been cooling his

heels, he had identified the following publicity-saints: Senator Bliss Wagoner

(Dem., Alaska) chairman of the Joint CongresiIonal Committee on Space Flight;

Dr. Guiseppi Corsi, president of the American Association for the Advancement

of Science, and a former Director of the World Health Organization; and

Francis Xavier MacHinery, hereditary head of the FBI.

He had seen also a number of other notables, of lesser caliber, but whose

business at a firm which made biologicals was an equally improper subject for

guessing games. He fidgeted.

At the present moment, the girl at the desk was talking softly with a

seven-star general, which was a rank nearly as high as a man could rise in the

army. The general was so preoccupied that he had failed completely to

recognize Paige's salute. He was passed through swiftly. One of the two

swinging doors with the glass ports let into them moved outward behind the

desk, and Paige caught a glimpse of a stocky, dark-haired, pleasant-faced man

in a conservative grosse-pointilliste suit.

"Gen. Horsefleld, glad to see you. Come in."

The door closed, leaving Paige once more with nothing to look at but the motto

written over the entrance in German black-letter:

~tbev ben ~ob t~t hem ~xaut1ein ~eb,atb%en!

Since he did not know the language, he had already translated this by the

If-only-it-were-English system, which made it come out, "The fatter toad is

waxing on the kine's cole-slaw." This did not seem to fit what little he knew

about the eating habits of either animal, and it was certainly no fit

admonition for workers.

Of course, Paige could always look at the receptionist- but after an hour and

a half he had about plumbed the uttermost depths of that ecstasy. The girl was

pretty in a way, but hardly striking, even to a recently returned spaceman.

Perhaps if someone would yank those black-rimmed pixie glasses away from her

and undo that bun at the back of~ her head, she might pass, at least in the

light of a whale-oil lamp in an igloo during a record blizzard.

This too was odd now that he thought about it. A firm as large as Pfitzner

could have its pick of the glossiest of office girls, especially these days.

Then again, the whole of~ Pfitzner might well be pretty small potatoes to the

parent organization, A. 0. LeFevre - et Cie. Certainly at least Le Fevre's

Consolidated Warfare Service operation was bigger than the Pfltzner division,

and Peacock Camera and Chemicals probably was too; Pfitzner, which was the

pharmaceuticals side of the cartel, was a recent acquisition, bought after

some truly remarkable broken-field running around the diversification

amendments to the anti-trust laws.

All in all, Paige was- thoroughly well -past mere mild annoyance with being

stalled. He was, ~after all, here at these people's specific request, doing

them a small favor which they had- asked of him-and soaking up good leave-time

in the process. Abruptly he got up and strode to the desk.

"Excuse me, miss," he said, "but I think you're being goddamned impolite. As a

matter of fact, I'm beginning to think you people are making a fool of me. Do

you want these, or don't you?" -

He unbuttoned his right breast pocket and pulled out three little plioflim

packets, heat-sealed to -plastic mailing tags. Each packet contained a small

spoonful of dirt. The tags were addressed to Jno. Pfitzner & Sons, div. A. 0.

LeFevre et Cie, the Bronx 153, WPO 249920, Earth; and

each card carried a $25 rocket-mail stamp for which Pfltzner had paid, still

uncancelled.

"Colonel Russell, I agree with you," the girl said, looking up at him-

seriously. She looked even less glamorous than she had -at a distance, but she

did have a pert and interesting nose, and -the current royal-purple -

lip-shade suited her better tba~ it did most of the starlets to be seen on 3-V

these days. - "It's just that you've caught us on a very bad day. We do want

the samples, of course. They're very important to us, otherwise we wouldn't

have put you to the trouble of collecting them for us."

"Then why can't I give them to someone?"

"You could give them to me," the girl suggested gently. "I'll pass them along

faithfully, I promise you."

Paige shook his head. "Not after this run-around. I did just what your firm

asked me to do, and I'm here to see the results. I picked up. soils from every

one of my ports of call, even when it was a nuisance to do it. I mailed in a

lot of them; these are only the last of a series. Do you know where these bits

of dirt came from?" -

"I'm sorry, it's slipped my mind. It's been a very busy day."

- "Two of them are from Ganymede; and the other one is from Jupiter V, right

in the shadow of the Bridge gang's shack. The normal temperature on both

satellites is about two hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Ever try to

swing a pick against ground frozen that solid-working inside a spacesuit? But

I got the dirt for you. Now I want to see why Pfltzner wants dirt."

The girl shiugged. "I'm sure you were told why before you even left Earth."

"Supposing I was? I know that you people get drugs out of dirt. But aren't the

guys who bring in the samples entitled to see how the process works? What if

Pfltzner gets some new wonder-drug out of one of my samples- couldn't I have a

sentence or two of explanation to pass on to- my kids?"

The swinging doors bobbed open, and the affable face of the stocky man was

thrust into the room.

"Dr. Abbott not here yet, Anne?" he said.

"Not yet, Mr. Gunn. I'll call you the minute he arfives."

~"But you'll keep me sitting at least another ninety minutes," Paige said

flatly. Gunn looked him over, staring

at the colonel's eagle on his collar and stopping at the winged crescent

pinned over his pocket.

"Apologies, Colonel, but we're having ourselves a small crisis today," he

said,- Smiling tentatively. "I gather you've brought us some samples from

space. If you could possibly come back tomorrow, I'd be happy to give you all

the time in the world. But right now-" -

Gunn ducked his head in apology and pulled it in, as though he had just

cuckooed 2400 and had to go somewhere and lie down until 0100. Just before the

door came to rest behind him, a faint but unmistakable sound slipped through

it.

Somewhere in the laboratories of Jno. Pfitzner & Sons a baby was crying.

Paige listened, blinking, until the sound was damped off. When he looked back

down at the desk again, the expression of the girl behind it seemed distinctly

warier. -

"Look," he said. "I'm not asking a great favor of you. I don't want to know

anything I shouldn't know. All I want to know is how you plan to process my

packets of soil. It's just simple curiosity-backed up -by a trip that covered

a few hundred millions of miles. Am I entitled to know for my trouble, or

not?"

"You are and you aren't" the girl said steadily. "We want your samples, and

we'll agree that they're unusually interesting to us because they came from

the Jovian system-the first such we've ever gotten. But that's no guarantee

that we'll find anything useful in them."

"It isn't?" -

"No. Colonel Russell, you're not the first man to come here with soil samples,

believe me. Granted that you're the first man to bring anything back from

outside the orbit of Mars; in fact, you're only the sixth man to deliver

samples from any place farther away than the Moon. But evidently you have no

idea of the volume of samples we get here, routinely. We've asked virtually

every space pilot, every Believer missionary, every commercial traveler, every

explorer, every foreign correspondent to scoop up soil samples for us,

wherever they may go. Before we discovered ascomycin, we had to screen one

hundred thousand soil samples, including several hundred from Mars and nearly

five thousand from the Moon. And do you know where we found the organism that

produces ascomycin? On an over-ripe peach one of our detail men picked up from

a peddler's stall in Baltimore!" -

"I~ see the point," Paige said reluctantly. "What's as..

comycin, by the way?' - -

- The girl looked down at her desk and moved a piece of paper from here to

there. "It's a new antibiotic," she said. 'We'll be marketing it soon. But I

could tell you the same kind of story about other such drugs." -

"I see." Paige was not quite sure he did see, however, after all. He had heard

the name Pfltzner fall from some very unlikely lips during his many months in

space. As far as he had been able to determine after he had become sensitized

to the sound, about every third person on the planets was either collecting

samples for the firm or knew somebody who was. The grapevine, which among

space-men was the only trusted medium of communication, had it that the

company was doing important government work. That, of course, was nothing

unusual in the Age of Defense, but Paige bud heard enough to suspect that

Pfitzner was something special-.something as big, perhaps, as the historic

Manhattan District and at least twice as secret. -

The door opened and emitted Gunn for the second time hand-running, this time

all the way. - -

"Not yet?" he said to the girl. "Evidently he isn't going to make it.

Unfortunate. But I've some spare time now, Colonel-" -

"Russell, Paige Russell, Army Space Corps."

"Thank you. If you'll accept my apologies for our preoccupation, Colonel

Russell, I'll be glad to show you around our little establishment My name, by

the way, is Harold Gunn, vice-president in charge of exports for the Pfitzner

division." -

"I'm importing at the moment," Paige said, holding out the soil samples. Gunn

took them reverently and dropped them in a pocket of his jacket. "But Fd enjoy

seeing the labs."

He nodded to the girl and the doors closed between them. He was inside.

The place was at least as fascinating as he had expected it to be. Gunn showed

him, first, the rooms where the incoming samples were classified and then

distributed to the laboratories proper. In the first of these, a measured

fraction of a sample was dropped into a one-litre flask of sterile distilled

water, swirled to distribute it evenly, and then passed through a series of

dilutions. The final suspensions were then used to inoculate test-tube slants

and petri

plates, containing a wide variety of nutrient media, which went into the

incubator.

"In the next lab here-Dr. Aquino isn't in at the moment, so we mustn't touch

anything, but you can see through the glass quite clearly-we transfer from the

plates and agar slants to a new set of media," Gunn explained. "But here each

organism found in the sample has a set of cultures of its own, so that if it

secretes anything into one of the media, that something won't be

contaminated."

"If it does, the amount must be very tiny," Paige said "How do you detect it?"

-

"Directly, by its action. Do you see the rows- of plates with the white paper

discs in their centers, and the four furrows in the agar radiating from the

discs? Well, each one of those furrows is impregnated with culture medium from

one of the pure cujtures. If all four streaks grow thriving bacterial

colonies,- then the medium on the paper disc contains no antibiotic against

those four germs. If one or more of the streaks fails to grow, or is retarded

compared to the others, then we have hope."

In the succeeding laboratory, antibiotics which had been found by the disc

method were pitted against a whole spectrum of dangerous organisms. About 90

per cent of the discoveries were eliminated here, Gunn explained, either

beáause they were insufficiently actiVe or because they duplicated the

antibiotic spectra of already known drugs. "What we call 'insufficiently

active' varies with the circumstances, however," he added. "An antibiotic

James Blish - Cities in Flight

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