Cities in Flight Retelling: They Shall Have Stars Part 4 - Antigravity and Immortality

This is where everything pays off. All the political scheming, the impossible engineering on Jupiter, the secret drug research in the Bronx. In this final section of They Shall Have Stars, the two storylines crash into each other and we learn what Senator Wagoner was really doing all along.

Wagoner’s Letter: The Whole Plan on Paper

The Entr’acte section is a letter. Wagoner writes to his friend Seppi Corsi, knowing full well he won’t be around to explain himself in person. And in this letter, he lays it all out.

The Bridge on Jupiter? Not a pointless government boondoggle. It was built to test one specific thing: the Blackett-Dirac equations. These equations connect magnetism, rotation, and gravity. If they held up under Jupiter’s conditions, it would mean gravity and magnetism are both caused by the same thing: spinning mass. And that would mean you could control gravity.

Here’s the thing. The math came from established physicists like Blackett and Dirac. But the key insight, the thing that made it testable on Jupiter? That came from a nobody named Locke. A “crackpot” derivation that real scientists wouldn’t touch. Wagoner’s team tested it anyway. And it worked.

Wagoner also talks about the anti-agathic research. The Pfitzner drug company was already working on aging research with government money. Wagoner quietly redirected them toward actual immortality. They also chased a “crackpot” lead from a scientist named Lyons who had an alternative theory about aging. That one turned out to be wrong. But Wagoner’s point is clear: sometimes the fringe ideas are the ones worth testing. One crackpot gave them antigravity. The other one was a dead end. You won’t know which is which until you try.

The letter ends with Wagoner basically saying goodbye. He knows what’s coming for him. “Politics is death,” he writes.

New York: Paige’s Last Chance

Back in New York, Paige Russell is running out of time. His leave is almost over. The Proserpine station assignment is waiting. He’s decided he doesn’t have the ruthlessness that Anne and Gunn have. He plans to come clean about everything he knows, clear his own name, and disappear into deep space before anyone can stop him.

But when he walks into Gunn’s office the next morning, ready to rat everyone out, Senator Wagoner is sitting there. And instead of an interrogation, Wagoner says: “Colonel Russell, I have a security clearance for you and a new set of orders. You can forget Proserpine. You and Miss Abbott and I are leaving for Jupiter. Tonight.”

Just like that, everything flips.

They rush to the spaceport. There’s a tiny ship waiting, way too small for ten people. But Paige gets inside and finds a cabin bigger than anything a ship that size should hold. The take-off is brutal but way too short. Nine seconds of acceleration and then free fall. Then, somehow, normal gravity comes back. No spinning, no rockets. Just one steady G pressing him into his hammock like the ship is still on Earth.

Then the intercom announces they’ll be passing the Moon in about a minute.

Paige does the math in his head. This little ferry is moving at roughly a quarter of the speed of light. Forty thousand miles per second. Powered by practically nothing.

They have antigravity. And it works.

Jupiter V: Helmuth Gets the News

On Jupiter V, Helmuth watches the strange oversized ferry land with barely a whisper of rockets. He already suspects what’s going on. But he has his own problems. The Bridge is falling apart under the worst storm season Jupiter has thrown at them. He’s decided to resign. He’s done.

But first, Wagoner wants to talk to him.

And the conversation is one of the best scenes in the book. Wagoner doesn’t interrogate Helmuth. He listens. Helmuth talks about the Bridge being a monument to a dying culture, like the Egyptian pyramids. Wagoner agrees with him. Then he drops the bomb.

The Bridge is done. Its real purpose was never the engineering marvel itself. It was the data. Specifically, confirming the Blackett-Dirac equations that link magnetism, rotation, and gravity. Jupiter was the only planet massive enough to test the theory. And the theory checked out.

The result is the spindizzy. Officially called the Dillon-Wagoner gravitron polarity generator. It creates a field that ignores everything outside of it. Gravity, meteors, speed limits. Inside the field, you’re in your own little universe. The ship they arrived in made the trip from Earth to Ganymede in under two hours, doing 55,000 miles per second, running on three ordinary dry-cell batteries.

Three dry-cell batteries.

Wagoner tells Helmuth the plan. The West is falling. The Soviets have already won, not through war but through cultural pressure. So Wagoner’s answer isn’t to fight. It’s to leave. Scatter free people across the galaxy with the spindizzy and the anti-agathic drugs. Immortal people carrying the idea of freedom to the stars.

And he wants Helmuth to lead the whole thing.

The Bridge Falls

Helmuth goes to Eva Chavez and tells her everything. He asks her to come with him. And at that exact moment, every alarm on the station goes off. The Bridge is breaking apart. The worst storm in Jupiter’s history is ripping it to pieces. Charity Dillon calls for all hands to save it.

Eva’s response? “Let it.”

And somewhere in the background, they can hear Senator Wagoner chuckle.

The Bridge dies. The man and the woman stand at the window and look at the stars. Because now the stars are the point, not Jupiter.

The Coda: Wagoner’s Price

The last section is three paragraphs long and it’s devastating.

Wagoner is in a cell at Brookhaven National Laboratories. The pile-waste dump. That’s the punishment for treason. He writes one last message on his cell wall: “Every end is a new beginning. Perhaps in a thousand years my Earthmen will come home again.”

He looks up at the stars and knows he put the writing there. Every star in the sky belongs to a constellation called Wagoner. That’s enough for him.

Then MacHinery announces: “Bliss Wagoner is dead.”

And Blish gives us the perfect final line: “As usual, MacHinery was wrong.”

Because Wagoner isn’t dead. His people are out there among the stars, immortal, carrying his vision. The man who sacrificed everything won the only game that mattered.

What This Novel Actually Is

Looking back at They Shall Have Stars as a whole, it’s not really a space adventure. It’s a political thriller disguised as science fiction. Wagoner is playing a chess game against his own government, against the Soviets, against the dying of Western civilization itself. He uses a massive engineering project as cover for physics research. He uses a drug company as cover for immortality research. And when both projects deliver, he sends the results to the stars and stays behind to face the consequences.

The two big discoveries, the spindizzy and the anti-agathics, are the foundation for everything that comes next in Cities in Flight. Flying cities full of immortal people roaming the galaxy. Blish needed this entire novel just to explain how those two impossible things became possible. And he did it through politics, bureaucracy, and the stubbornness of scientists willing to test “crackpot” ideas.

It’s not a fast read. But it’s a smart one. And now that the setup is complete, the real story of the Okie cities can begin.

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