Cities in Flight Retelling: The Triumph of Time Part 2 - When Universes Collide
Chapter 2 opens with a late-night conversation between Amalfi and Dee Hazleton, and it is one of the most emotionally raw scenes in the entire series. Dee shows up at Amalfi’s door wearing a black sheath skirt, deliberately styled to look exactly how she looked when they first met centuries ago. She wants something from him. Something real.
But Amalfi is Amalfi. He keeps his distance. He keeps asking the wrong questions. “Did Mark send you?” No. Mark is too busy with his new philosophical group, the Stochastics, to notice his wife anymore. Dee is lonely. She’s been lonely for a very long time.
The Confession
What follows is weeks of talking. They share memories, argue, make up, argue again. And finally Dee says the thing she came to say: she wants to leave Mark, go with Amalfi when the city flies again, and bear him a child.
It’s a brutal scene because Amalfi has to tell her the truth. During the population boom after landing on New Earth, they ran an artificial insemination program. Amalfi contributed. The results were stillbirths and deformed survivors. Too many centuries in space had damaged his genes beyond repair. He ordered the survivors dealt with. He is, biologically, a dead end.
So when Dee offers him the one gift she believes is ultimate, he has to tell her it’s the one thing he cannot accept. Not because he doesn’t want it. Because his body is broken from all those years in the void.
She leaves. He lets her go. And Blish writes one of his sharpest lines about the difference between men and women: for a woman, life is being born again and again. For a man, it’s dying, piece by piece. The trick, Amalfi thinks, is to do it slowly and without generosity.
Nova Magellanis
After Dee leaves, Amalfi wanders back to the old Okie city. He runs into two teenagers sneaking around the abandoned streets: Web Hazleton (Mark’s grandson) and Estelle Freeman (Jake the astronomer’s daughter). They want to fly with the city when it goes up. Kids with big dreams in a dead city.
But the real news is waiting in the computation section. Jake Freeman has figured out that the “nova” he’s been tracking isn’t a nova at all. It’s a planet. About 7,500 miles across. It has an atmosphere like Earth’s. And it’s flying under spindizzy power, heading straight for New Earth.
The obvious guess? It’s the planet He. Back in 3850, the Okies ripped that world out of its orbit and sent it flying toward the Andromeda galaxy. Now, a century and a half later, it’s coming home. The Hevians somehow mastered the spindizzy technology that was left behind and turned their runaway planet into a controlled spaceship.
Amalfi calls Hazleton. They argue about how to communicate with the incoming planet. Hazleton tried the Dirac (the universal instantaneous communicator), but the Hevians never had Dirac technology. Amalfi tells him to try the ultraphone instead, and eventually sends a ship to make direct contact.
Web and Estelle get to tag along.
Chapter 3: The Nursery of Time
And here is where the book shifts into something else entirely. This is where Blish stops writing space opera and starts writing cosmology. Hard, dense, philosophical cosmology.
Amalfi reaches He and meets Miramon, the same Hevian leader from 150 years ago. The Hevians have changed. They managed to synthesize anti-agathic drugs from their jungle plants before the jungle died off. They developed controlled spindizzy flight within 30 years of the city leaving. And then they went exploring.
They visited the Andromeda galaxy. They passed through M-33. They crossed to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. These people turned an entire planet into a starship and drove it across intergalactic space. Impressive doesn’t cover it.
But they came back. And the reason they came back is the core of this entire novel.
The Discovery
During their journey, the Hevians shut down their spindizzies for repairs while drifting in the silence between galaxies. With all that noise removed, their instruments picked up something nobody had ever heard before: the sound of continuous creation. Individual hydrogen atoms being born, one by one, out of absolutely nothing.
At first it looked like proof of God. Atoms appearing from nowhere. Creation in real time. The Hevians, being a people with deep religious traditions but also scientific discipline, were smart enough to be suspicious. If this discovery seemed to give a simple answer to 25,000 years of theology, something was probably wrong. Real discoveries are never that clean.
So they shut down everything and listened harder. And they heard a second voice. Each new hydrogen atom wasn’t alone. It was born as a pair: one normal atom appearing in our universe, and one anti-matter atom dying into our universe from somewhere else.
That “somewhere else” is a whole second universe. Made entirely of anti-matter. Running backwards in time. And it’s heading toward us.
Two Universes, One Collision
Here’s the science as Blish presents it. Our universe is expanding and cooling down, moving toward heat death. The anti-matter universe is contracting and heating up, moving toward a monobloc (everything compressed into a single point). The two universes are mirror images. They’ve been separated by opposite gravitational fields. But that separation is weakening.
At some point in the near future, the repulsive force drops to zero. The two universes meet. Point for point, matter touches anti-matter. Everything converts to energy. Everything.
The scientists gather on Amalfi’s ship to discuss it. Jake, Dr. Schloss, Gifford Bonner the philosopher, Miramon, Retma. They talk about it from every angle. Schloss says the monobloc was a wet firecracker compared to what’s coming. Carrel, the pilot, sums up the entire conversation in two words: “Translation: blooey.”
Amalfi fights it. He brings up every historical precedent of failed end-of-the-world predictions. Voliva who thought Earth was flat. The Believers sect. Roger Bacon predicting Anti-Christ. The nuclear war scare of the twentieth century. He argues brilliantly, passionately, and wrong.
Jake cuts him off. “The time for forensics is past. This question does not have two sides, except for the right side and the wrong side.”
The Question Nobody Can Answer
The room falls into silence. Everyone agrees the universe is ending. Nobody has any idea what to do about it. For temporal creatures to survive the end of time is, as Schloss puts it, like a fish hoping to survive being thrown into a sun.
Then Web Hazleton, the teenager, asks the obvious question that all the brilliant adults missed. Miramon came here looking for help doing something. What was that something? Not how to do it. What would he like to do, even if it seems impossible?
Bonner, the philosopher, chuckles. “The ends determine the means. A hen is only an egg’s device for producing another egg.”
This breaks the deadlock. Miramon admits they need a precise date for the collision, down to the millisecond. For that, they need an energy-level reading from the anti-matter universe. Jake says he thinks he can build a probe. Not a physical one. Something immaterial, made from whatever they can pick up in the space between the two universes.
Miramon offers them his entire planet. His resources. Everything. “We remember you now,” he tells the humans. “You have always had that boundless ambition.”
And Amalfi looks around the table and says: “I think we have begun already.”
What Blish Is Doing Here
These two chapters shift the entire series into its final gear. The personal drama of Amalfi and Dee gives way to the largest possible question: the end of everything. Not just Earth. Not just humanity. Everything. Both universes. All of time.
And Blish handles it the way only a hard science fiction writer would. He doesn’t wave his hands. He walks you through the physics. Antimatter. Continuous creation. The entropy gradient. Cyclical versus steady-state cosmology. He wrote this in the 1950s, and the science holds up remarkably well for its age.
But the human side matters just as much. Amalfi’s refusal to accept the end, his stubborn fight against the evidence, feels completely real. This is a man who survived a thousand years by never giving up. Being told that nothing he does can matter is the one thing he can’t process.
And it takes a teenager to ask the right question. Not “can we survive?” but “what would we like to do?” That shift from possibility to intention is what finally gets these brilliant, tired old men moving again.
The clock is ticking. The universes are closing in. And somewhere in the gap between them, there might be an answer.
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