Cities in Flight Retelling: They Shall Have Stars Part 2 - Secrets and Pressure

In Part 1, we met our three storylines: Colonel Paige Russell poking around a secretive drug company, the Bridge crew building an impossible structure on Jupiter, and Senator Wagoner playing a quiet political chess game. Now all three threads get more interesting. And more uncomfortable.

Chapter 3: New York - Dinner, Drugs, and Babies

Paige Russell takes Anne Abbott out to dinner. Getting there is already an adventure. Their taxi gets stuck in a Believer Revival in Foley Square, which is basically a religious street event on steroids. Robots spray perfume bubbles into cars, holograms of angels appear on the windows, and some kind of narcotic gas makes everyone in the crowd start crying. The Believers are using straight-up chemical and psychological manipulation to recruit people.

Here’s the thing. This is Blish writing in the 1950s about weaponized marketing and emotional manipulation through technology. The Believers don’t even show their faces anymore. They send machines to do the converting. It feels way too familiar for something written seventy years ago.

Once Paige and Anne actually make it to dinner, they have a real conversation. Paige opens up about his broken family, his search for meaning, and how he thought Pfitzner’s research might be something worth believing in.

And Anne starts talking. She explains what Pfitzner is actually doing. The short version: humanity mostly beat the infectious diseases by mid-20th century. Antibiotics, vaccines, all of that worked. But then the degenerative diseases started climbing. Cancer, heart disease, hardening of the arteries. These are the things your body does to itself. No virus to blame, no bacteria to kill. Just your own cells going wrong.

The government threw a billion dollars at the problem. Pfitzner got the main contract. And they found something. Anne won’t say exactly what, but she says it’s a major key to the whole degenerative disease puzzle. Every test it’s passed so far looks good.

Then comes the part that makes Paige’s coffee cup rattle. Anne tells him about the babies. Pfitzner gets foundlings from a local orphanage and uses them as test subjects. They screen new drugs on the infants to check for a specific growth-stimulating effect. It’s technically legal, she says. There’s precedent from the 1950s polio vaccine trials. But it’s the kind of thing that could destroy the company if it got out.

Paige is honest with her. He says it’s cold-blooded. She gets angry. They argue. And in the middle of this fight, Paige figures out that Anne is not just a receptionist. She knows too much, takes too many policy risks. Her last name is Abbott. The mysterious Dr. Abbott that everyone at Pfitzner was waiting for? That’s her father.

Anne confirms it, furious, and demands to go home. The date ends badly. But now Paige knows something important. The drug research at Pfitzner is bigger than anyone outside the building realizes, and it’s connected to something that people at the top are willing to bend ethics for.

Chapter 4: Jupiter V - A Mind Breaking Down

Back on Jupiter’s fifth moon, Helmuth takes off the VR helmet after another shift on the Bridge, and he’s not okay. He’s never okay anymore.

The transition is the worst part. Four hours a day, Helmuth’s mind is down there on the Bridge. His eyes, ears, and hands are robotic instruments working in a place where the pressure would crush a human instantly. And then he takes the helmet off and he’s sitting in a quiet room on a small moon, with weak gravity and stale air. Every time, the shift back feels worse.

He goes to the window and stares at Jupiter. The planet fills almost the entire sky. It’s only 112,600 miles away. And somewhere down there, under six thousand miles of poisonous clouds, is the Bridge. Thirty miles high, eleven miles wide, fifty-four miles long. On Earth it would be the greatest engineering achievement in history. On Jupiter it’s a snowflake.

Helmuth reports to Charity Dillon that a chunk of something, at least two miles across, got thrown through the end of the Bridge. The northwest end is twisted, the deck is smashed. Standard damage. The big storms are about to get worse.

But the damage report is just the surface. Dillon keeps pressing Helmuth. Are you pleased? Are you sure you’re not pleased? There’s a suspicion that the psychological conditioning the Bridge workers received might be breaking down. Or worse, working in ways nobody intended.

And then Helmuth cracks a little. He talks about what it feels like to spend four hours a day mentally inhabiting Jupiter. He can’t always remember Chicago. Sometimes he can’t believe Earth exists at all. He’s afraid that when Jupiter finally destroys the Bridge, his mind will go with it, tumbling through millions of cubic miles of poison while his body sits in a chair on Jupiter V.

Dillon tries to help. The Bridge is just a laboratory, he says. Jupiter is just a set of conditions. But Helmuth pushes back. Building something colossal to fight something colossal is a losing game. Jupiter doesn’t even have to try. The whole approach is wrong.

“It isn’t going anywhere,” Helmuth says about the Bridge. “It’s a bridge to noplace.”

Dillon, missing the point, explains that the Bridge doesn’t need to go anywhere, it’s a research platform. He tells Helmuth to sleep it off. But Helmuth knows that sleep means dreams, and the dreams are getting worse.

Blish is writing isolation and psychological pressure in a way that still hits hard. Helmuth isn’t in physical danger. He’s never been to the actual surface of Jupiter. But his mind has, over and over, and it’s wearing him down to nothing.

Intermezzo: Washington - The Senator and His Secrets

Now we get inside Wagoner’s head as he reads the Senate subcommittee report on the Jupiter Project. It’s sixteen hundred pages of Top Secret analysis, and Wagoner reads every word looking for one thing: does anyone understand what the Bridge is really for?

Nobody does. The senators investigated the money, the operations, the personnel. They found one supply captain selling overpriced soap on Ganymede. That’s it. They assume the Bridge is weapons research. They’re wrong, but Wagoner is glad they think that.

The report mentions the 231 men who died placing the Bridge’s foundation. It calls them heroes. It says nothing about what they died for, because the senators don’t know.

Here’s where Blish shows us the weight on Wagoner’s shoulders. He thinks about Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Would the Millennium be worth having if you had to torture a single child to get it? The children at Pfitzner aren’t being tortured, Wagoner tells himself. But they’re not living normal lives either. And 231 men are frozen somewhere at the bottom of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

“Wagoner had not been cut out to be a general,” Blish writes. And then, at the end: “As a god he was even more inept.”

We also learn how the Bridge came to exist. Wagoner had a secret team searching for neglected scientific ideas. They found the Blackett equation, relating electron spin and magnetic moment. One manipulation gives you the Locke Derivation, which isolates gravity on one side of the equals sign. Nobody knew if it was correct, but it could be tested. Testing it required conditions only found on Jupiter. That’s how a four-billion-dollar project on the biggest planet in the solar system got started.

The subcommittee also called in Dr. Corsi, and this part reads like a courtroom thriller. The senators try to get him to reveal what the Bridge is for. He dodges perfectly, even refusing to give an expert opinion without being paid. Corsi probably knows what the Bridge is for, Wagoner realizes. But he said nothing to the committee. That silence saved everything.

And the chapter ends with Wagoner picking up Colonel Paige Russell’s dossier from Pfitzner. He’s tired. He doesn’t want to play god with another man’s life. But he chose this job, and now he has to do it.

What’s Really Happening Here

All three storylines are about the same thing: the cost of knowledge. Pfitzner is testing drugs on orphans. The Bridge is grinding men’s minds to dust. Wagoner is carrying the deaths of 231 soldiers on his conscience. And none of them can talk about why.

The secrecy is the pressure cooker. Anne can’t tell Paige what Pfitzner really found. Helmuth can’t explain his terror because it comes from conditioning he can barely detect. Wagoner can’t tell the Senate what any of it is building toward. Everyone is isolated by what they know, or what they suspect, or what they’ve been made to believe.

Blish is asking a question that science fiction doesn’t always ask: is the knowledge worth what you pay for it? Not in money. In people.

We’ll find out in Part 3.

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