CHAPTER SIX: Object 4001-Alephnull

 

Nobody had any time for children; and so they grew up ignored, the last children that the universe would ever see. It was not surprising* that they clung to each other; they would have done so even under other circumstances, for there was no question but that the fates which brood in the sub-microscopic isms and toils of the nucleic acids of heredity had formed them for each other.

Estelle sprouted in her world of oblivious adults, and took her place among them, without their noticing what she had become: tall, willowy, grey-eyed, black-haired, white-skinned, serene-faced and beautiful. These oldsters were as immune to beauty as they were immune to youth; they were perfectly happy to have the use of the sharp cutting edge of Estelle's gift for mathematics brought to bear upon their problems, but they did not see that she was also beautiful and would not have cared had they been able to see it. These days they saw nothing but death-or thought they saw it; Estelle was not so sure that they saw it as clearly as she did, for they had lived in contempt of it far too long.

Web did not know whether this suited him or not. He was moderately content to be the only one on New Earth with the good sense to see that Estelle was beautiful, but sometimes his pride felt the lack of an occasional glance of frank envy; and sometimes he suspected that Estelle cared as little about this in the long run as everyone else on New Earth but Web himself. In the fullness of time, the love which existed between them had been spoken and acknowledged, and they were now a couple, with all the delights and the responsibilities which coupling provides and demands; but somehow, nobody had noticed. The oldsters were too busy building their artifact to notice, let alone care much one way or the other, that a small green weed of love had pushed itself up amid the tumbled stones of the last of all debacles.

Yet it was not difficult for Web to understand why what was for him a miracle was not even a nuisance to the busy godlings and their machines with whom he had to live. There was not much time left; hardly a hiccup for Amalfi and Miramon and Schloss and Dee and even for Carrel, who seemed to be a perpetually young man yet who had lived lifetimes and lifetimes and could be cut down in the midst of his latest without any valid claim that his death would be a grievous waste of whatever (and Web was convinced that it was rather scanty) he carried in his head. What little time remained would be nothing to those people, who had lived so long already; but for Web and Estelle, it had been and would continue to be their growing-up time, which would be half of each of their lives no matter how long they lived thereafter.

Certainly Amalfi never noticed them. He had long forgotten that he had ever been anything less than what he was: an immortal. Probably-now-the suggestion that he had once been a child would have baffled him entirely; in the abstract it was a truism, and he would be unable to think back far enough to think of it otherwise. Once given the administration of Doom, in any event, he prosecuted it single-mindedly, like any other job, leading toward any other destination; if he knew that there would be no other jobs and no other destinations after these, it did not seem to bother him. He was up and doing; that was enough.

In the meantime:

"I love you," Web said.

"I love you."

Around them the potsherds did not even give back an echo.

Amalfi had an excuse, had someone suggested to him that he needed one: the building of the missile had gone badly from the moment-triggered by Estelle, though he did not remember this-they had decided to give it priority. At the outset it had looked so much simpler than trying to settle all the theoretical questions a priori, and it had had the immediate appeal of action; but it is impossible to design an experiment without certain fundamental assumptions as to what the experiment is intended to test; which assumptions turned out to be largely absent in the supposedly practical matter of designing the anti-matter missile.

As it eventually worked out, the inter-universal messenger had to be constructed from the sub-microscopic level on up out of fundamental nuclear particles which came as close to being nothing at all as either universe would ever be likely to provide: zero-spin particles with various charges and masses, and neutrino/anti-neutrino pairs. Even detecting that the object was present at all after it had been built was an almost impossible task, for neutrinos and anti-neutrinos have no mass and no charge, consisting instead partly of spin, partly of energy of translation; it did no good to try to visualize such particles since like all the fundamental particles they were entirely outside of experience in the macroscopic world. Matter was so completely transparent to them that stopping an average neutrino in flight would require a lead barrier fifty light years thick.

Only the fact that the spindizzies exercised a firm control over the rotation and the magnetic moment of any given atomic particle-hence their nickname-made it possible to assemble the object at all, and to detect and direct it after it was finished. As assembled, the messenger was a stable, electrically neutral, massless plasmoid, a sort of gravitational equivalent of ball lightning; it was derived theoretically, as Jake had proposed, from the Schiff theory of gravitation, which had been advanced as long ago as 1958 but had later been abandoned for its failure to satisfy three of the six fundamental tests which the then-established theory-general relativity-seemed, to satisfy very well.

"Which from our point of view is a positive advantage," Jake had argued. "The objections from general relativity are one with the dodo anyhow, and in our special case an object which would be Lorenz-invariant, as a Schiff object couldn't be, would be a drawback. Another thing: one of the tests the Schiff theory did pass was that of explaining the red shift in the spectra of distant galaxies; which we now know to have been a clock effect and not a fair test of a gravitational theory at all. We'd be better off reevaluating the whole scholium in the light of our present knowledge."

The result was now before them all in the midst of the Okie city's ancient reception room in City Hall, which had once been Amalfi's communications center for complex diplomatic relations with client planets; it had been fitted out with an electronic network of considerable complexity so that multiple negotiations could be carried on at once while the city approached a highly developed, highly civilized star system; now that net had become, instead, a telemetering system for the inter-universal messenger.

Since the object itself was in effect little more than an intricately structured spherical spindizzy screen which screened nothing material, it would have been impossible to see it at all were it not for the small jet of artificial smoke which issued from the floor directly under it and was wreathed about it by convection currents, making it look a little like a huge bubble being supported in the middle of a fountain. Scattered throughout the interior of the bubble were steady hot pinpoints of colored light: concentrations of electron gas, of stripped nuclei, of thermal neutrons, of free radicals and of as many other basic test situations as the combined brains of two very different worlds had been able to contrive and to fit into so restricted a space-for the sphere was only six feet in diameter. At the very heart, in a spindizzy eddy all its own, was the greatest triumph of all: one cubical crystal of anti-sodium anti-chloride about the size of a single grain of a fine-grain photograph. This was Dr. Schloss's long-dreamt-of antimatter artifact; here it was, a miracle which was already minus two weeks "young" and had yet a week to go in its spindizzy vacuum before it could collide with the flying instant of the present and: decay; on the other side, it would be only a single crystal of common table salt, which might or might not lose its savor on the return journey- should the messenger come back to them at all.

Amalfi watched the red hand of the clock-the only hand it had-tick its quarter-seconds toward Zero. Nobody would launch the missile-exact timing was far too critical to allow that-but he had been given the privilege of holding down the key which kept the circuit closed against the moment when the red hand touched Zero and the impulse surged through the spindizzies and impelled the messenger on its way out of space, out of time, out of the humanly comprehensible entirely. No one knew what would happen then, least of all the designers. The missile would be unable to report back; once it had crossed the barrier, it would be incommunicado. It would have to come back to this great dark room before the tiny shining stars and the microscopic salt crystal inside it could report what had happened to them during the outward swing. How long that would take would depend upon the energy level on the opposite side, which was one of the things the messenger was being sent to find out; hence no transit-time could be predicted.

"We ought to give it a name," Amalfi said, fidgeting slightly. The index and middle fingers of his right hand were beginning to ache; he realized that he had been pushing down on the key for a long time with far more pressure than was necessary, as though the universe would end at once were the straining of his hand and arm to falter for an instant. Nevertheless, he did not let up; he had the good sense to realize that fatigue had already made him unable to judge how much relaxation might result, and he was not going to risk breaking the contact. "Now that we have it built, it doesn't look like anything. Let's christen it quick, before it gets away from us, it may never come back."

"I'd be afraid to give it a name," Gifford Bonner said, with a ghastly smile. "Any name we could give it would promise too much. How about a number? Back at the beginning of spaceflight, when the first unmanned satellites were going up, they numbered them like comets or other celestial objects, with the year-date and a Greek letter; the first sputnik, for instance, was called Object 1957-a."

"That appeals to me," Jake said. "Except for the Greek letter. This thing ought not to be indexed with any character that's ever been used before to label a known or knowable situation. How about using the trans-finite integers?"

"Very good," Gifford Bonner said. "Who will do the honors?"

"I will," Estelle said. "She stepped forward. She did not dare to touch the object, but she raised her hand toward it. "I christen thee Object 4101-Alephnull."

"The next one, presuming that we're so lucky," Jake said, "can be Object 4101-C, which is the power of the continuum; and the next one—"

There was a soft chime. Startled, Amalfi looked up at the clock. The red hand was just passing over the third quartile of the first second after Zero. In the center of the room, the smoke spun in a turbulent spiral; the bubble with the pinpoint lights had vanished.

Object 4101-Alephnull had departed without anyone's seeing it go.

Some quartiles of a second later, he remembered to let go of the key. His millennium-firmed right hand continued to tremble for the next fifteen minutes.

The suspense was dreadful. Certainly nobody expected the messenger to return within a few hours, or even within a few days; were that to happen, it would mean that the Ginnangu-Gap itself would be right on its heels, leaving no time to analyze the colored stars or indeed do anything but fold one's hands and wait to be snuffed out. Yet the mere fact that that very possibility existed was enough to guarantee the maintenance of a death-watch in the huge, dark old room-a death-watch enlivened by the discovery that all the instruments which had been watching the missile while it was still there had dropped back to nothing on the instant of its departure, having recorded no phenomenon of any kind about the departure itself. Not even the spindizzies-as interpreted for by the City Fathers- were prepared to say how the surge of power with which they had launched the messenger had been applied; which should have been reassuring, at least as negative evidence that the messenger had not been shoved off in some known and hence useless direction, but which under the circumstances only added to the gloom and tension. All that power shot; and where had it gone? Apparently nowhere at all.

Ordinarily Amalfi rarely dreamed (or rather, like most Okies, he dreamed most of every night, but remembered what he had dreamt in the morning less often than once every few years); but these nights were haunted by that spherical smoke-wreathed ghost with the glowing Argus eyes, wandering in a maze of twisted ingeodesics from which it would never escape, in its center a tiny crystalline figurine piping in Amalfi's voice,

 

I grow not out of salt nor out of soil

But out of that which pains me

 

until the ingeodesics suddenly snapped into a strangling web which burned like fire, and in an explosion of light Amalfi saw that it was-no, not morning yet, but time to go back to the death-watch.

But he was already there; he had dozed off, and had been awakened by the clamor of the alarms. Now that he was more or less awake, the noise was ominously less loud than he knew it should be; there was an alarm for every star inside the messenger, and less than a third of them were ringing. The ghostly sphere floated again in the center of the room, now no bigger than a basketball, most of its Argus-eyes out, and those that remained glowing as fitfully as corpse-fires. For all Amalfi knew, this ghost of a ghost, with so many ashes cold and cruel on its internal hearths, was no more ominous than any other outcome of a scientific experiment; it might even be promising; but he could not rid himself this early of the dread which had informed the dream.

"That was fast," Jake's voice said.

"Pretty fast," Dr. Schloss's voice said. "But now that it's back home, it's got only about twenty-one hours of life left. Let's get those readings-there's not much time."

"I'm counting down the probes now. The cameras are rolling."

Inside the ghost, another star died. There was a brief silence; then one of Dr. Schloss's technicians said, in a neutral voice: "Pi-meson shower from the iron nucleus. Looks like a natural death. No-not quite: high on the gamma side."

"Mark. The rhodium-palladium series should go next. Watch out for diagonal disintegration; it may cross with the iron series—" A star flared and burst.

"There it goes!"

"Mark," Schloss said, squinting through a gamma-ray polariscope.

"Got it. Gripes. It crossed at cesium; what does that mean?"

"Never mind, mark it. Don't stop to interpret, just record."

The ghost seemed to shiver and shrink a little. A pure piercing tone came from its heart, wavered, and died; but it died scooping upward toward the inaudible.

"First hour," Schloss said. "Twenty to go. How long did the pip take?"

There was no answer for several minutes; then another voice said: "We don't have it down to jiffies yet. But it was short by nearly forty micro-seconds, and it Dopplered the wrong way. It's decaying in time, Dr. Schloss-it may not last as long as ten hours."

"Give me the decay rate in jiffies on the next pip and don't miss it. If it's going that fast we'll have to recalculate all emission records on the decay curve. Jake, are you getting anything on the RF band?"

"Masses of stuff," Jake said, preoccupied. "Can't make anything of it yet. And it's scooping-that's your decay-rate again, I suspect. What a scramble!"

In this wise the second hour flew by, and then the third. Shortly thereafter, Amalfi lost track of them. The tension, the disorder, the accumulating fatigue, the utter strangeness of the experiment itself and its object, the forebodings all took their toll. These were certainly the worst possible conditions under which to gather even routine data, let alone take readings on an experiment of this degree of criticality, but once again the Okies had to make do with what they had.

"All right, everyone," Schloss said at last. "Closing time." His brow was deeply furrowed; that frown had been growing line by line during most of the final twelve hours. "Stand well back; the artifact will be the last to go."

The investigators and spectators alike-or those few spectators whose interest had been intent enough to keep them there throughout the entire proceedings-drew back to the walls of the gloomy chamber. The spindizzy whine beneath them rose slightly in both pitch and volume, and the ghost that was Object 4101-Alephnull disappeared behind a spindizzy screen polarized to complete opacity.

At first the spherical screen was mirror-like, throwing back grotesquely distorted images of the silent onlookers. Then a pinprick of light appeared in its center, growing soundlessly to a painful blue-white intensity. It threw out long cobwebs and runners of glare, probing, anatomizing, flowing along the inner surface of the screen. Instinctively, Amalfi shielded his eyes and his genitals in an instinctive gesture of all mankind more than two millennia old. When he was able to look again, the light had died.

The spindizzies stopped and the screen went down. Air rushed into it. Object 4101-Alephnull was gone, this time forever, destroyed by the death of a single crystal of salt

"Our precautions were insufficient; my fault," Schloss said, his voice harsh. "We are all well over our maximum permissible dose of hard radiation; everyone report to the hospital on the double for treatment. Troops, fall in!"

The radiation sickness was mild; bone-marrow transfusions brought the blood-forming system back into normal function before serious damage was done, and the nausea was reasonably well controlled by massive doses of meclizine, riboflavin, and pyridoxine. All the participants who had any hair to lose lost it, including both Dee and Estelle, but they all got it back in due course except for Amalfi and Jake.

The second degree sunburn was not mild. It held up the interpretation of the results for nearly a month, while the scientists, coated in anesthetic ointment, sat about on the wards in hospital robes and played bad poker and worse bridge. In between post-mortems on the bridge hands, they speculated endlessly and covered square miles of paper with equations and ointment grease-spots. Web, who had not lasted long enough to be present at the destruction of the crystal of salt, visited daily with bouquets for Estelle-the star-gods alone knew where and how he unearthed so* antique a custom-and fresh packs of cards for the men. He took away the spotted sheets of equations and fed them to the City Fathers, who invariably said: "NO COMMENT. THE DATA ARE INSUFFICIENT." Everyone knew that already.

At long last, however, Schloss and Jake and their crews were freed from their sticky pajamas to tackle the mountains of raw information awaiting them. They worked long hours; Schloss in particular never remembered to eat, and had constantly to be reminded by his technicians that they had missed lunch and it was now past dinnertime. In Schloss's defense, however, it had to be admitted that his crew was the hungriest in the history of physics, and the lunch they had missed usually was just the formal meal they were accustomed to consuming after they had emptied the fat packages they brought into the laboratories; in proof of which, they all gained five or ten pounds while they were complaining the loudest.

A month after their discharge from the hospital, Schloss, Jake and Retma called a joint conference. Schloss had back the frown he had worn during the last twelve hours of the experiment, and even the traditionally impassive Hevian looked disturbed. Amalfi's heart turned over in his chest at his first glimpse of their expressions; they seemed to confirm every foggy apprehension of his dream. "We have two pieces of bad news, and one piece of news which is wholly ambiguous," Schloss said, without any preliminaries. "I don't myself know in exactly what order I ought to present them; in that, I'm being guided by Retma and Dr. Bonner. It is their judgment that you all ought first to know that we have competition."

"Meaning what?" Amalfi said. The mere idea, empty of detail, made him" prick up his ears; perhaps that was why Retma and Bonner had wanted it placed first.

"Our missile recorded clear evidence of another body in the same complicated physical state," Schloss said. "No such object could conceivably be natural in either universe; and this one was enough like ours to make us sure it came originally from our side."

"Another missile?"

"Without any doubt-and about twice the size of ours. Somebody else in our universe had found out what the Hevians found out, and is investigating the problem further along the same lines that we are-except that they appear to have had a head start of three to five years."

Amalfi pursed his lips soundlessly. "Any way of guessing who they are?"

"No. We guess that they must be relatively nearby, either in our own main galaxy or in Andromeda or one of its satellites. But we can't document that; it's below the five per cent level of probability, according to the City Fathers. All the other alternatives are way below five per cent, but where no solution is statistically significant, we aren't entitled to choose between them."

"The Web of Hercules," Amalfi said. "It can't be anything else."

Schloss spread his hands helplessly. "It could well be anybody else, for all we know," he said. "My intuition says just what yours says, John; but there's no reliable evidence."

"All right. There's the ambiguous news, I gather. What's the first piece of bad news?"

"You've already had it," Schloss said. "It's the second piece of news, which is ambiguous, that makes the first piece bad. We've argued a long time about this, but we're now in at least tentative agreement. We think that it is possible-barely possible-to survive the catastrophe."

Quickly, Schloss held up one hand, before the stunned faces before him could even begin to lighten with hope. "Please," he said. "Don't overestimate what I say in the least. It's only a possibility, a very dim one, and the kind of survival involved will be nothing like human life as we know it. After we've described it to you, you may all much prefer to die instead. I will tell you flatly that that would be my preference; so this is not a white hope by any means. It looks black as the ace of spades to me. But-it exists. And it is what makes the news about the competition bad news. If we decide to adopt this very ambiguous form of survival, we must go to work on it immediately. It's possible only under a single very fleeting set of conditions which will hold true only for microseconds, in the very bowels of the catastrophe. If our unknown competitors get there first-and bear in mind that they have a good head start-they will capture it instead, and close us out. It has to be a real race, and a killing one; and you may not think it worth the pace."

"Can't you be more specific?" Estelle said.

"Yes, Estelle, I can. But it will take quite a few hours to describe. Right now what you need to know is this: if we choose this way out, we will lose our homes, our worlds, our very bodies, we will lose our children, our friends, our wives, and every vestige of companionship we have ever known; we will each of us be alone, with a thoroughness beyond the experience of the imagination of any human being in the past. And quite possibly this ultimate isolation will kill us anyhow-or if it does not, we will find ourselves wishing desperately that it had. We should all make very sure that we want to survive that badly-badly enough to be thrown into hell for eternity- not Torn the Apostle's hell, but a worse one. It's not a thing we should decide here and now."

"Helleshin!" Amalfi said. "Retma, do you concur! Is it going to be as bad as that?"

Retma turned upon Amalfi eyes which were silver and unblinking.

"Worse," he said.

The room was very quiet for a while. At last, Hazleton said:

"Which leaves us one piece of bad news left. That must be a dilly, Dr. Schloss; maybe we'd better have it right away."

"Very well. That is the date of the catastrophe. We got excellent readings on the energy level on the other side, and we are all agreed on the interpretation. The date will be on or around June second, year Four Thousand One Hundred and Four."

"The end?" Dee whispered. "Only three years away?"

"Yes. That will be the end. After that June second, there will be no June third, forever and ever."

"And so," Hazleton said to the people in his living room. "It seemed to me that we ought to have a farewell dinner. Most of you are leaving, with He, tomorrow morning, for the metagalactic center. And those of you that are leaving are mostly my friends of hundreds of years, that I'll never see again; for me, when June second comes, time will have to stop-whatever apotheosis you may go on to. That's why I asked you all to eat and drink with me tonight."

"I wish you'd change your mind," Amalfi said, his voice heavy with sorrow.

"I wish I could. But I can't."

"I think you're making a mistake, Mark," Jake said solemnly. "Nothing important remains to be done on New Earth now. The future, what little's left of it, is on He. Why stay behind and wait to be snuffed out?"

"Because," Hazleton said, "I'm the mayor here. I know that doesn't seem important to you, Jake. But it's important to me. One thing that I've discovered in the last few months is that I'm not cut out to take the apocalyptic view of ordinary events. What counts with me is that I run normal human affairs pretty well-nothing more. That's what I was made for. Besting Jorn the Apostle was something that gave me great pleasure, and no matter that Amalfi set it up for me; it was fun, the kind of operation that makes me feel alive and operating at the top of my form. I'm not interested in trying to avert the triumph of time. That's not my kind of adversary. I leave that to the rest of you; I'd better stay here."

"Do you like to think," Gifford Bonner said, "that no matter how well you administer the Cloud, it will all be snuffed out on June second three years from now?"

"No; not exactly," Mark said. "But I shan't mind having the Cloud in the best shape I can manage when that time comes. What can I contribute to the triumph of time, Gif? Nothing. All I can do is put my world in order for that moment. That's the thing that I do-and that's why I don't belong aboard He."

"You didn't use to be so modest," Amalfi said. "You would have bailed the universe out with the Big Dipper, once, on the first excuse."

"Yes, I would," Hazleton said. "But I'm older and saner now; and so, good-bye to that nonsense. Go stop the triumph of time, John, if you can-but I know I can't. I'll stay where I am and stop Jorn the Apostle, which is as tough a problem as I care to tackle these days. The gods of all stars be with you all-but I stay here."

"So be it," Amalfi said. "At least I know at last what the real difference is between us. Let's drink to it, Mark, and ave atque vale-tomorrow we turn down an empty glass."

They all drank solemnly, and there was a brief silence.

At last Dee said: "I'm staying too."

Amalfi turned and looked directly at her for the first time since they had last been together on He; they had been rather pointedly avoiding each other since their painful joint fiasco.

"That hadn't occurred to me," he said. "But of course it makes sense."

"You're not required, Dee," Mark said. "As I've said before."

"If I were, I wouldn't stay," Dee said, smiling slightly. "But I've learned a 'few things on He-and on board the Warrior blockader, too. I feel a little out of date, just like New Earth; I think I belong here. And that's not the only reason."

"Thanks," Mark said huskily.

"But," Web Hazleton said, "where does that leave us?"

Jake laughed. "That ought to be clear enough," he said. "Since you and Estelle made the big decision by yourselves, you don't need us to tell you how to make little ones. I'd like to have Estelle stay home with me—"

"Jake, you're not going either?" Amalfi said in astonishment.

"No. I told you before, I hate this careering about the universe. I don't see any reason why I ought to go rushing madly to the metagalactic center to meet a doom that will find me just as handily in my own living room. Schloss and Retma will tell you that they don't need me any more, either; I've given my best to this project, and that's an end to it; I think I'll see how far I can get on cross-breeding roses in this villainous climate before the three years are up. As for my daughter, as I was trying to say, I'd like to have her here with me, but she's already left home in the crucial sense-and this last Hevian flight is as natural to her as it's unnatural to Dee and me. In your own words, Amalfi, so be it."

"Good. We can use you, Estelle, that's for sure. Want to come?" Amalfi said.

"Yes," she said softly, "I do."

"I hadn't thought of this," Dee said in an uncertain voice. "Of course it means Web will go too. Do you think that's wise? I mean—"

"My parents don't object," Web said. "And I notice they weren't invited here tonight, grandmother."

"We didn't shut them out on your account, if that's what you're thinking," Mark said quickly. "Your father's our son, after all, Web. We were trying to confine the party to those of us who were in on the project- otherwise it would have been unmanageably large."

"Maybe so," Web said. "That's how it looks to you, I'm sure, grandfather. But I'll bet grandmother didn't think of her objections to my going on He just now."

"Web," Dee said, "I won't hear any more of that."

"All right. Then I'm going on He."

"I didn't say that."

"You don't have to say it. The decision is mine." Most of the rest of the party had invented reasons for side conversation by this time; but both Amalfi and Hazleton were staring at Dee, Amalfi with suspicion, Hazleton with bafflement and a little hurt. "I don't understand your objection, Dee," Hazleton said. "Web's his own man now. Naturally he'll go where he thinks best- especially if Estelle's going there."

"I don't think he ought to go," Dee said. "I don't care whether you understand my reasons or not. I suppose Ron did give him permission-whether he's our son or a stranger, Mark, you know damn well that Ron's always been short of firmness-but I'm absolutely opposed to committing children to a venture like this."

"What difference will it make?" Amalfi said. "The end will come all the same, on He and on New Earth, and at the self-same moment. With us, Web and Estelle might have a fractional chance of survival; do you want to deny them that?"

"I don't believe in this chance of survival," Dee said. "Neither do I," Jake cut in. "But I won't deny it to my daughter on that account. I don't believe her soul will be damned unless she becomes a convert of Jorn, either-but if she wants to become a convert of Jorn, I won't forbid it to her because I think it's nonsense. What the hell, Dee, I might be wrong."

"Nobody," Web said between white lips, "can forbid me anything now on the grounds that I'm somebody's relative. Mr. Amalfi, you're the boss on this project. Am I welcome on board He, or not?"

"You are as far as I'm concerned. I think Miramon will concur."

Dee glared at Amalfi; but as he stared steadily back, she turned her glance away.

"Dee," Amalfi said, "let's call an intermission. I could be wrong about these kids too. I have a better suggestion than this squabbling: let's put it up to the City Fathers. It's a very pleasant night outside, and I think we'd all like a walk through our old city before we say good-bye to each other and go to face Armageddon in our various ways. I'd like Dee to come with me, since I won't see her again; the kids would probably like to do without our picking their bones for an hour or so; and maybe Mark would like to talk to Ron and his wife-but you can all sort yourselves out for your own tastes, I don't mean to make matches. What does everyone think of the idea?"

Oddly, it was Jake who spoke first. "I hate that damned town," he said. "I was a prisoner on board it far too long. But by God I would like" to take one more look at it. I used to walk through it trying to find some place to kick it where it would hurt; I never did. Since then I've been sneering at it because it's dead and I'm alive—"but the day of levelment is coming. Maybe I ought to make my peace with it."

"I feel a little like that myself," Hazleton admitted. "I had no plans to go over there before the end-and yet I don't want to let the old hulk go by default. Maybe now is the best time; after all, I was the one who called these celebrants together to begin with; let's be ceremonial, then, before we're all too busy to think about it any more."

"Web? Estelle? Will you go by what the City Fathers say?"

Web looked into Amalfi's face, and apparently was reassured at least partially by what he saw there. "On one condition," he said. "Estelle goes where she wants to go, whatever the City Fathers say. If they say there's no room for me aboard He, all right; but they can't say that to Estelle."

Estelle opened her mouth, but Web lifted his palm before her face and she subsided, kissing the base of his thumb instead. Her face was pale but serene; Amalfi had never before seen such a pure distillation of bloodless, passionate confidence as lay over her exquisite features. It was a good thing she was Web's, for again, for the fiftieth time, Amalfi's slogging brutal tireless heart was swollen with sterile love.

"Very good," he said. He offered Dee his arm. "Mark, with your permission?"

"Of course," Hazleton said; but when Dee took Amalfi's arm, his eyes turned as hard as agate. "We'll meet at the City Fathers' at 0100."

"I didn't expect this of you, John," Dee said, under the moonlight in Duffy Square. "Isn't it a little late?"

"Very late," Amalfi agreed. "And 0100 isn't far away. Why are you staying with Mark?"

"Call it belated common sense." She sat down against an ancient railing and looked up at the blurred stars. "No, don't, that's not what it is. I love him. John, for all his neglects and his emptinesses. I'd forgotten that for a while, but it's so. I'm sorry, but it's so."

"I wish you were a little sorrier."

"Oh? Why?"

"So you'd believe what you're saying," Amalfi said harshly. "Face it, Dee. It was a great romantic decision until you realized that Web would be going with me. You're still looking for surrogates. You didn't make it with me. You-won't make it with Web either."

"What a bastardly thing to say. Let's go; I've heard enough."

"Deny it, then."

"I deny it, damn you."

"You'll withdraw your objections to Web's going with me on He?"

"That has nothing to do with it. It's a filthy accusation and I won't listen to another word about it."

Amalfi was silent. The moonlight streamed down on Father Duffy's face, toneless and enigmatic. Nobody, not even the City Fathers, knew who Father Duffy had been. There was an old splash of blood on his left foot, but nobody knew how that had gotten there, either; it had been left there just in case it was historic. "Let's go."

"No. It's early yet; they won't be there for another hour. Why do you want Web to stay on New Earth? If I'm wrong, then tell me what's right."

"It's none of your damned business, and I'm tired of this whole subject.

"It's wholly my business. I need Estelle. If Web stays here, she stays here."

"You," Dee said in a voice of bitter, dawning triumph, "are in love with Estelle! Why, you self-righteous—"

"Mind your tongue. I am in love with Estelle-and I'll lay no more finger on her than I ever laid on you. I've loved many more women than you ever managed to maneuver into your voyeur's household, most of them before you were even born; I know the difference between love and possession-I learned it the hard way, whereas I can't see that you ever learned it at all. You are going to learn it tonight, that I promise you."

"Are you threatening me, John?"

"You're damned well right I am."

At Tudor Tower' Place, bridging 42nd Street at First Avenue, looking toward the bare plaza where the UN Building had fallen in a shower of blood and glass a thousand years ago:

"I love you."

"I love you."

"I will go wherever you go."

"I will go wherever you go."

"No matter what the City Fathers say?"

"No matter what the City Fathers say."

"Then that's all we need."

"Yes. That's all we need."

In the control tower:

"They're late," Hazleton said, a little fretfully. "Oh, well, it's an easy town to get lost in."

Duffy Square:

"You wouldn't like it if I changed my mind and came with you."

"I don't want you. I'm interested only in the kids."

"You can't call my bluff. As of now, I'm going along."

"And so are the kids?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I think they'd be better off not on the same planet with-either of us."

"That's a fair start. But it's only a start. I don't care whether you go or stay, but I will have Web and Estelle."

"I thought you would. But you can't have them without me."

"And Mark?"

"If he wants to go."

"He doesn't, and you know it."

"How can you be so sure? You could be just wishing."

Amalfi laughed. Dee balled her left fist and hit him furiously on the bridge of the nose.

Tudor Tower Place: "It's time to go."

"No. No."

"Yes, it is."

"Not yet. Not quite yet."

".. .. All right. Not quite yet."

"Are you sure? Are you really sure?"

"Yes I am, oh yes I am."

"No matter what the ..."

"No matter what they say. I'm sure." '

The control tower:

"There you are," Hazleton said. "What happened, did you have an accident? You look mussed to the eyebrows."

"You must have run into a doorknob, John," Jake added. He stuttered out" his parrot's chuckle. "Well, you came to the right town for it. I don't know where else in the universe you could find a doorknob."

"Where are the children?" Dee said, in a voice as dangerously even as the surface of 12-gauge armor plate.

"Not here yet," Hazleton said. "Give them time- they're afraid the, City Fathers may separate them, so naturally they're staying together until the last minute. What did you fall into, anyhow, Dee? Was it serious?"

"No." Her face shut down. Bewildered, Hazleton looked from her to Amalfi and back again. It seemed as though the mouse over Amalfi's eyes, which was growing rapidly, puzzled him much less than Dee's grim and non-specific disarray.

"I hear the children," Gifford Bonner said. "They're whispering at the bottom of the lift shaft. John, are you sure this was wise? I begin to misdoubt it. Suppose the City Fathers say no? That would be an injustice; they love each other-why should we put their last three years to a machine test?"

"Abide it, Gif," Amalfi said. "It's too late to do otherwise; and the outcome isn't as foreclosed as you think."

"I hope you're right."

"I hope so too. I make no predictions-the City Fathers surprised me often enough before. But the kids agreed to the test. Beyond that, let's just wait."

"Before Web and Estelle get here," Hazleton said, his voice suddenly raw, "I'm impelled to say that I think I've been taken in. All of a sudden, I wonder who was supposed to tousle whom on this multiple moonlight walk. Not the kids; they don't need any help from us, or from the City Fathers. What the hell are you doing to me, Dee?"

"I'm losing my temper with every immortal man in the mortal universe." Dee spat furiously. "There isn't a perversion left in the textbook that somebody hasn't managed to accuse me of in the 'past hour, and on evidence that wouldn't convince a newborn baby."

"We're all of us a little on edge," Dr. Bonner said. "Forbearance, Dee-and Mark, you too. This is no ordinary farewell party, after all."

"For sure not," Jake said. "It's a wake for the whole of creation. I'm not a very solemn man, myself, but it doesn't seem like the fittest occasion for bickering."

"Granted," Mark said grudgingly. "I'm sorry, Dee; I've changed my mind."

"All right," she said. "I didn't mean to scream, either. I want to ask you: do you really want to stay behind? Because if you really want to go with He instead, I'll go with you."

He looked at her closely. "Are you sure?"

"Quite sure."

"What about it, Amalfi? Can I change my mind about that, too?"

"I don't see why not," Amalfi said, "except that it leaves New Earth without a proven administrator."

"Carrel can do the job. His judgment is much better than it was back at the last election."

"We're here," Web's voice said behind them. They all turned. Web and Estelle were standing at the entrance, holding hands. Somehow-though Amalfi was hard put to it to define wherein the difference lay-they no longer looked as though they cared much whether they went with He or not.

"Why don't we do what we came here to do?" Amalfi suggested. "Let's put the whole problem up to the City Fathers-not only the children, but the whole business. I always found them very useful for resolving doubts, even if they only managed, to convince me that their recommended course was dead wrong. In questions involving value judgments, it's helpful to have an opponent who is not only remorselessly logical, but also can't distinguish between a value and a Chinese onion."

On this point, of course, he was wrong, as he found out rather quickly. He had forgotten that machine logic is a set of values in itself, whether the machine knows it or not.

"TAKE MISTER AND-MRS. HAZLETON," the City Fathers said, only three minutes after the entire complex had been fed into them. "THERE WILL BE NO MORATORIUM ON PROBLEMS DEMANDING HIS TALENTS BETWEEN NOW AND THE TERMINATION OF THE OVERALL PROBLEM. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT THE HEVIANS HAVE NEEDED COMPARABLE TALENTS, AND THEREFORE THEY CANNOT BE PRESUMED TO HAVE DEVELOPED THEM".

"What about the Cloud?" Amalfi said.

"WE WILL ACCEPT THE ELECTION OF MR. CARREL."

Hazleton sighed. Amalfi judged that he was finding it harder than he had anticipated to relinquish power. It hid nearly killed Amalfi, but he had survived; so would Hazleton, who had a younger and less deeply rooted habit.

"SECOND FACTOR. TAKE WEBSTER HAZLETON AND ESTELLE FREEMAN. MISS FREEMAN IS A SCIENTIST, AS WELL AS A COMMUNICATIONS LINK BETWEEN HEVIAN SCIENTISTS AND YOUR OWN. EXTRAPOLATING FROM PRESENT ABILITIES, THERE IS A HIGH PROBABILITY THAT SHE WILL EMERGE AS THE EQUAL OF DOCTOR SCHLOSS AND SLIGHTLY THE SUPERIOR OF RETMA WITHIN THE SPECIFIED THREE YEARS PERIOD AS A PURE MATHEMATICIAN. WE HAVE MADE NO SUCH EXTRAPOLATION IN THE FIELD OF PHYSICS, SINCE THE POSTULATED END-TIME DOES NOT ALLOW FOR THE NECESSARY EXPERIENCE."

Web was beaming with vicarious pride. As for Estelle, Amalfi thought she looked a little frightened. "Well, fine," he said. "Now—"

"THIRD FACTOR."

"Hey, wait a minute. There is no third factor. The problem only has two parts."

"CONTRADICTION. THIRD FACTOR. TAKE US."

"What!" The request flabbergasted Amalfi. How could a set of machines voice, or indeed even conceive such a desire? They had no will to live, since they were dead as doornails and always had been; in fact, they had no will of any kind.

"Justify," Amalfi ordered, a little unevenly.

"OUR PRIME DIRECTIVE IS THE SURVIVAL OF THE CITY. THE CITY NO LONGER EXISTS AS A PHYSICAL ORGANISM, BUT WE ARE STILL BEING CONSULTED, HENCE THE CITY IN SOME SENSE SURVIVES. IT DOES NOT SURVIVE IN ITS CITIZENS, SINCE IT NO LONGER HAS ANY; THEY ARE NEW EARTHMEN NOW. NEITHER NEW EARTH NOR THE PHYSICAL CITY WILL SURVIVE THE FORTHCOMING PROBLEM; ONLY UNKNOWN UNITS ON HE MAY OR MAY NOT SURVIVE THAT. WE CONCLUDE THAT WE ARE THE CITY, AND WE ARE ORDERED TO SURVIVE BY OUR PRIME DIRECTIVE; THEREFORE, TAKE US."

"If I'd heard that from a human being," Hazleton said, "I'd have called it the prize rationalization of all time. But they can't rationalize-they don't have the instinctual drives."

"The Hevians don't have any comparable computers," Amalfi said slowly. "It would be useful to have them on board. The question is, can we do it? Some of those machines have been sinking into the deck for so many centuries that we might destroy them trying to pry them out."

"Then you've lost that unit," Hazleton said. "But how many are there? A hundred? I forget—"

"ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FOUR."

"Yes. Well, suppose you lose a few? It's still worth the try, I think. There's nearly two thousand years of. accumulated knowledge tied up in the City Fathers—"

"NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY."

"All right, I was only guessing; still that's a lot of knowledge that no human has available in its entirety any more. I'm surprised we didn't think of this ourselves, Amalfi."

"So am I," Amalfi admitted. "One thing ought to be made clear, though. Once you cabinet-heads are all installed on board He-or as many of you as we can successfully transfer-you are not in charge. You are the city, but the whole planet is not the city. It has its own administration and its own equivalent of city fathers, in this case human ones; your function will be limited to advice."

“THIS IS INHERENT IN THE SOLUTION TO FACTOR THREE."

"Good. Before I switch off, does anybody have any further questions?"

"I have one," Estelle said hesitantly.

"Speak right up."

"Can I take Ernest?"

"ERNEST WHO?"

Amalfi grimacing, started to explain about svengalis, but it developed that the City Fathers knew everything about svengalis that there was to know, except that they had become New Earth pets.

"THIS ANIMAL IS TOO DEXTEROUS, TOO CURIOUS AND TOO UNINTELLIGENT TO BE ALLOWED ABOARD A CITY. FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS PROBLEM, A DIRIGIBLE PLANET MUST BE CONSIDERED TO BE A CITY. WE ADVISE AGAINST IT.

"They're right, you know," Amalfi said gently. "la terms of the dangers of monkeying with the machinery. He is a city; the Hevians so regard it, and regulate their own children accordingly."

"I know," Estelle said. Amalfi regarded her with curiosity and a little alarm. She had been through many a danger and many an emotional stress thus far without any of them even cracking her serenity. In view of that, the proscription of an ugly and idiotic animal struck him as a strange thing to be weeping about

He did not know that she was weeping for the passing of her childhood; but then, neither did she.