Cities in Flight Retelling: They Shall Have Stars Part 1 - The Bridge and the Drug

They Shall Have Stars opens not with rockets or alien planets. It opens with two tired men talking by a fireplace in Washington. And the shadows on the walls are making them nervous.

That tells you everything about the world Blish is building here.

The Prelude: Washington Is Watching

The year is 2013. Senator Bliss Wagoner sits in the home of Dr. Guiseppi Corsi, a once-powerful scientist who got basically blacklisted. Corsi used to run the Bureau of Standards, used to lead the World Health Organization, and now heads the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But in this version of America, the AAAS gets called “the left-wing Triple A-S.” So that’s the kind of mood we’re in.

There’s a guy named Francis Xavier MacHinery who runs what is basically the FBI, and he has spies everywhere. Both Wagoner and Corsi know they’re being watched. Wagoner was followed to this meeting. Gunshots ring out on the street outside and nobody even reacts, because that’s just what Washington sounds like now. Someone’s spy shooting at someone else’s spy.

If this feels like McCarthyism, that’s because it is. Blish wrote this in the 1950s, right in the middle of the Red Scare. He just pushed it forward sixty years and turned up the volume. Scientists get investigated for who they roomed with in college. People write hate mail signed “True American.” Anyone who knows anything important is automatically suspected of being a traitor. Sound familiar?

Wagoner is a senator who ended up chairing the Joint Congressional Committee on Space Flight, and he’s realizing that space exploration is dying. Not because of money or engineering limits, but because the security state killed innovation. Here’s the thing: when every piece of research is classified, scientists can’t share results. When the government only hires people who can pass endless loyalty checks, you get third-rate minds doing the work. And third-rate minds follow the cookbook. They don’t make real discoveries.

Corsi lays it out plain. Scientific method isn’t broken. But scientific method needs open information to work. Kill the free flow of data, and you kill science itself.

So what does Corsi tell Wagoner to do? Go to the crackpots. Not the total crackpots, he says. But the fringe scientists, the ones with discarded theories. Look through the rejected ideas and find the one that shouldn’t have been thrown away. And if you want a place to start? Try gravity. Nobody understands it, everybody has wild theories about it, and none of the “respectable” theories can actually do anything useful.

Wagoner leaves. He walks home through surveilled streets, thinking about one thing: an immortal man who flies faster than light between the stars.

That’s the seed. That one thought is going to grow into everything.

Chapter 1: New York and the Dirt Business

We switch to Colonel Paige Russell, a spaceman on leave, sitting in the lobby of a pharmaceutical company called Pfitzner. He’s been waiting for an hour and a half, watching a parade of important people walk through: Senator Wagoner, Dr. Corsi, MacHinery himself, a seven-star general. All visiting a company that makes drugs. That’s a lot of heavy traffic for a pill factory.

Paige is here because Pfitzner asked him (and apparently every other space traveler in the solar system) to collect soil samples from wherever they go. He’s brought back dirt from Ganymede and Jupiter V, frozen ground he had to dig out wearing a spacesuit in minus-200-degree conditions. He just wants to know what they’re doing with it.

The receptionist, a girl named Anne, explains the basic process. They screen soil samples for microorganisms that produce antibiotics. It’s a numbers game. Before they found their latest drug, ascomycin, they screened a hundred thousand samples. The winning organism? Found on a rotten peach from a street vendor in Baltimore. Not exactly a glamorous origin story.

Eventually a man named Harold Gunn, a vice president, gives Paige a tour of the labs. The process is real pharmaceutical science: grow the organisms, isolate what they produce, test it against diseases, check for toxicity, send it to hospitals for trials. Pretty standard stuff on the surface.

But Paige notices something wrong. There’s a baby crying somewhere in the labs. A newborn. Gunn says it belongs to a technician with childcare problems. Paige doesn’t buy it. He’s been married, he knows what a days-old infant sounds like versus an older baby. This one was brand new.

Then Paige hears something he really shouldn’t have. General Horsefield storms out of a meeting and starts yelling at Gunn about “death-dopes” and military control of the project, right there in the reception room. Horsefield catches himself when he notices Paige, but the word is out: death-dopes.

Paige puts it together. The baby, the secrecy, the “death-dopes,” the parade of powerful visitors. Pfitzner isn’t just looking for antibiotics. They’re working on something much bigger. Something that involves testing on human subjects. Maybe very young human subjects.

He pushes Anne for a dinner date by threatening to accuse Pfitzner of human experimentation if she won’t talk. It’s a bluff and they both know it. But she agrees, mostly to keep him from making trouble.

What Pfitzner is actually working on, though we don’t know it yet, is anti-agathics. Drugs that stop aging. Drugs that could make people immortal. And that baby? Well, if you’re testing a drug that’s supposed to prevent death, you need to start with subjects who haven’t aged yet.

Chapter 2: Jupiter V and the Bridge

Now we go to Jupiter. And this is where Blish really shows off.

Robert Helmuth sits on Jupiter V, one of Jupiter’s moons, operating a remote-controlled vehicle called a beetle on the surface of the Bridge. The Bridge is a massive engineering structure being built on Jupiter itself, five thousand miles below the visible cloud tops.

The numbers are insane. The Bridge is eleven miles wide, thirty miles tall, fifty-four miles long and still growing. Most of it is made of ice, because at a million atmospheres of pressure and minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, water becomes Ice IV, a dense white material stronger than steel. Regular steel at these pressures crumbles like talc. Aluminum becomes some weird transparent stuff that shatters if you tap it.

The winds blow at twenty-five thousand miles per hour. It rains ammonia drops that hit like cannonballs because Jupiter’s gravity is two and a half times Earth’s. Hydrogen explodes on the surface thirty miles below. There are constant tornadoes. Nobody is actually on Jupiter. The Bridge builds itself with machines. Helmuth and the crew on Jupiter V just watch through remote scanners and guide the beetles when something goes wrong.

And something has gone wrong. Helmuth drives his beetle to the edge of the Bridge and finds that the end section is wrecked. Twisted shadows in the darkness. The end of the Bridge, destroyed. He backs away and takes off his control helmet.

Here’s what I find interesting about the Bridge. Nobody in the story really knows why they’re building it. It’s a government project, classified, burning through enormous resources. The characters doing the work feel the pointlessness of it. Helmuth is depressed, ground down by the constant storm and the feeling that the whole thing might be for nothing.

But remember what Corsi told Wagoner back in Washington? Look at the discarded theories. Look at gravity. The Bridge is an experiment. A massive, insane, very expensive experiment. And on Jupiter, where the conditions are extreme enough to test things that can’t be tested anywhere else, it just might produce results that change everything.

What Blish Is Doing

Three storylines, three settings: Washington politics, New York pharmaceuticals, Jupiter engineering. They seem unrelated. A senator looking for fringe science. A spaceman stumbling onto secret drug research. An engineer watching his giant project crumble in the storms of Jupiter.

But they’re all connected through one person: Senator Wagoner. He’s the one who set all of this in motion. He’s the one who took Corsi’s advice and went looking through the crackpot ideas. And somewhere in the overlap between gravity research on Jupiter and drug research in the Bronx, the future is being built.

Blish was doing something bold here. He was writing science fiction about the conditions that make science possible in the first place. Not lasers and spaceships, but politics and funding and intellectual freedom. The real enemies in this story aren’t aliens. They’re loyalty commissions and classification stamps and generals who want to cut back to basics.

This is 1950s science fiction, written by a man watching McCarthyism eat American science alive. And it still hits.

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