Cities in Flight Retelling: They Shall Have Stars Part 3 - The Race Heats Up
Things are picking up speed now. Both storylines in “They Shall Have Stars” start moving fast in chapters 5 through 8. The drug research in New York gets tangled up with love and spies. And out on Jupiter, the Bridge crew is cracking under the weight of that giant planet staring down at them. Let’s get into it.
Paige Falls in Love (at the Worst Possible Moment)
Remember Paige Russell, the spaceman who brought soil samples to Pfitzner? He had a bad date with Anne Abbott that ended in a fight. Now he’s sitting over cold eggs at breakfast, replaying everything in his head, and decides he needs to go back and apologize.
Here’s the thing. He doesn’t fully understand why he cares so much. His leave is running out. He’s probably heading to Proserpine, the loneliest outpost in the solar system. But something about Anne and the mysterious work at Pfitzner touched a deep nerve. He wants to see her smile again. Simple as that.
So he walks back into the Pfitzner reception room. And who’s sitting there waiting? Francis X. MacHinery, the head of the FBI.
This guy is the worst person Paige could run into right now. MacHinery inherited the FBI directorship from his grandfather (yes, the FBI is a family business in this future). He doesn’t care about catching actual threats. He cares about headlines. He would happily destroy Pfitzner and everyone in it just for three more inches of newspaper clippings.
MacHinery starts grilling Paige. Why are you here? What’s your business? And Paige, backed into a corner, blurts out the truth nobody expected: “I happen to be in love with Miss Abbott.”
Even Paige didn’t know he was going to say that. Anne goes rigid behind her desk. Gunn’s jaw drops. But MacHinery doesn’t care about romance. He wants to know why an unauthorized spaceman is hanging around a defense project.
Anne saves the situation with a quick, careful lie. She tells MacHinery that Paige is a planetary ecologist whose samples are critical to the research. That his work could save taxpayer money. And MacHinery, who hates government waste almost as much as he loves catching “subversives,” backs off. For now.
After MacHinery leaves, everyone explodes. Anne and Gunn start yelling at each other and at Paige. But they calm down and realize they need to make the lie true. They need to turn Paige into a convincing scientist. And to do that, they have to tell him everything.
The Real Secret: Fighting Death Itself
So Paige finally learns what Pfitzner is really doing. And it’s bigger than curing diseases.
Anne’s father explains the science, and Paige practices the explanation over dinner with Anne. The short version: Pfitzner found a broad-range antitoxin called ascomycin that fights degenerative diseases. That part is done.
But ascomycin only handles disease. Animals treated with it still died on schedule, like they had a clock inside them ticking down from birth. There’s a separate aging toxin that all complex animals produce as part of normal growth. A scientist named Lansing proved this back in 1952 with tiny creatures called rotifers, extending their lifespan from 24 days to 104 days just by breeding from young mothers.
So the real goal isn’t anti-disease drugs. It’s anti-death drugs. Anti-agathics, they call them. Pfitzner is close. But they’re running on borrowed time. If they release ascomycin now, the government money dries up before they finish the anti-agathic research. So they’re secretly dragging their feet on the disease drug to buy time for the death drug.
Paige realizes he’s now sitting on a pile of secrets that could get everyone jailed or shot.
Cancer on Jupiter
Meanwhile, on Jupiter V, things are rough.
Helmuth walks onto the gang deck and finds three Critical warning lights blazing on Eva Chavez’s panel. Eva is passionate about the Bridge but she has a problem: she gets lost in the bigness of it all right when she needs to be making fast decisions.
The crisis is a chemical decay eating into one of the Bridge caissons. Tiny specks of calcium carbide carried by Jupiter’s winds embed themselves in the ice structures. Under crushing pressure, they trigger a chain reaction that builds protein-like compounds and spreads like cancer. Eva’s response was to scrape the surface and paint over it. Band-aid on a broken leg.
Helmuth takes over. He sends two boring machines deep into the infected ice and blows them up. A truss tears free in the wind and vanishes into the darkness. But the cancer is stopped. The alternative was losing a third of the entire Bridge.
Eva is furious. Helmuth is too tired to argue. Everyone on Jupiter V is going a little crazy, spending four hours a day mentally connected to Jupiter’s surface and the rest of their time trapped on a tiny moon with that enormous planet filling their sky.
Antigravity is Coming (and Helmuth is Terrified)
Charity Dillon, the supervisor, has been doing an all-night inspection of the Bridge. Senators are coming to check on their eight-billion-dollar investment. And Dillon has news: the senators are arriving on a ship with something new. Something that lets them move more freely than normal transport.
Helmuth guesses it immediately. Antigravity.
And instead of being excited, Helmuth is terrified. Antigravity means people might have to work on the Bridge in person. No more controlling robots from the safety of Jupiter V. Someone will have to stand on Jupiter’s surface, in that crushing gravity, in those poisonous winds.
Dillon tries to cheer him up. Think about the money. Think about your future career. But Helmuth is past being cheered.
A Spy in the Lab, and Nobody Cares
Back in New York, Paige discovers a spy inside Pfitzner. The guy is so clumsy it’s almost funny. He stuffs stolen notes into his lab apron, looks over his shoulder constantly. Paige follows him one night to a massive trailer city where 300,000 Believers have gathered for a revival. The spy ducks into a trailer with a Latvian license plate, and up goes a radio antenna.
Paige documents everything and drops the whole file on Gunn’s desk. And Gunn’s response? “We know about him. We’ve been protecting him.”
Wait, what?
Turns out Pfitzner has been deliberately ignoring the spy. A spy scandal would kill the project. And the information he’s stealing isn’t the important stuff yet. Gunn figures they’ll deal with it later.
Paige is livid. He takes it to Anne, and she gives him the most radical argument yet. The anti-death drug isn’t just for the West. It’s for everyone. East and West. Soviet and American. Because you can’t keep a natural law secret. Once scientists know something is possible, they’ll figure out how. So why give either side a temporary advantage?
Anne even argues the drug will hurt the West more than the Soviets. Think about inheritance laws, insurance companies, compound interest, religious beliefs. The Believers’ motto is “Millions now living will never die.” What if that becomes literally true for everyone?
Paige realizes he’s in deep. Every day he stays, he breaks more laws. And Anne admits she planned to involve him from the start. She won’t say why. “That is what it takes,” she tells him.
Eva’s Declaration
The last scene is back on Jupiter V, and it’s one of the strangest in the book. Eva comes to Helmuth’s cabin and announces she wants to have a child on Jupiter V.
Helmuth laughs. He mocks her. A child on an airless rock? But Eva isn’t talking about domesticity. She’s making a point about humanity’s future. If people can only survive on warm, comfortable worlds, they’ll never really leave Earth. Having a child here would prove something.
Helmuth can’t hear it. He’s too afraid, too worn down. Eva calls him out: “A man crying Mamma, Mamma, all the stellar days and nights long.”
She leaves. Helmuth falls asleep and drops straight into his recurring nightmare: being on the Bridge in person when the antigravity fails, feeling Jupiter’s full gravity crush down on him.
He greets morning with his customary scream.
What’s Coming Together
Two separate races are running now. In New York, the anti-agathic drug is almost ready, but spies, the FBI, and political pressure could shut everything down at any moment. On Jupiter, the Bridge experiments keep revealing new science while the crew slowly loses its grip. And connecting both: the arrival of antigravity, a technology that will change everything.
The pieces are moving toward each other. We just don’t see how they fit yet.
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