Cities in Flight Retelling: The Triumph of Time Part 4 - Object at Infinity
The chapter title is “Object 4001-Alephnull.” If you’re not a math person, aleph-null is the smallest infinity. It’s the number mathematicians use when they need to count things that never stop. That’s what this chapter is about. Building something at the edge of what’s countable, what’s knowable, and sending it into a place that shouldn’t exist.
The Last Children
Before we get to the science, Blish does something quietly devastating. He shows us Web and Estelle growing up.
Years have passed since Estelle suggested they should study the gap between universes by shooting something into it. Nobody remembers it was her idea. Nobody notices them at all. The adults on New Earth are completely consumed by the project. They’re building a missile to cross the barrier between matter and antimatter, and they have no time for children.
So Web and Estelle grow up ignored. The last children the universe will ever see.
Estelle becomes tall, black-haired, grey-eyed, and beautiful. Nobody notices. She also becomes a brilliant mathematician. The adults are happy to use her math skills. But the beauty? They don’t see it. They see nothing but death these days, and they’ve lived in contempt of death for so long that they can’t see it clearly either.
Web is the only person who sees Estelle for what she is. They fall in love. They become a couple. Nobody notices that either. The old immortals are too busy building their artifact to care that a small green weed of love has pushed itself up among the ruins.
And Amalfi? He has forgotten he was ever a child. He runs the project the same way he ran every city contract for a thousand years. Single-minded, efficient, forward. If he knows there will be no more jobs after this one, it doesn’t seem to bother him. He’s up and doing. That’s enough.
Between the cracks of all this busy dying, Web says “I love you.” Estelle says it back. The walls don’t even give them an echo.
Building the Impossible
Now the hard science. And Blish goes deep here. This is 1950s hard sci-fi at its most ambitious.
The plan is to build a messenger, a probe, that can cross the Ginnangu-Gap into the antimatter universe. The problem is fundamental. Anything made of regular matter would be annihilated on contact with antimatter. So the probe can’t be made of regular matter. It has to be built from the most nothing-like particles the universe can provide.
They use neutrinos, anti-neutrinos, zero-spin particles. Stuff that barely exists. Neutrinos have no mass and no charge. They pass through everything. To stop an average neutrino you’d need a lead wall fifty light-years thick. Building anything useful out of neutrinos is like trying to build a house out of ghosts.
Only the spindizzies make it possible. Remember, spindizzies control the rotation and magnetic moment of individual particles. That’s literally what they were named for. So the team uses spindizzy technology to assemble these ghost-particles into a stable, electrically neutral, massless sphere. A gravitational version of ball lightning. Six feet across. You can’t see it at all unless you blow smoke at it.
Inside the bubble, scattered like tiny stars, are test samples. Concentrations of electron gas, stripped nuclei, thermal neutrons, free radicals. Every kind of basic physics experiment the combined brains of two civilizations could fit into six feet.
And at the very center, in its own spindizzy pocket, is the real prize. A single crystal of anti-sodium chloride. Antimatter salt. About the size of a grain in a photograph. Dr. Schloss’s masterpiece. This crystal exists in a time-reversed state, already minus two weeks “young” with one week left before it catches up to the present and decays. On the other side of the barrier, it would just be regular table salt. Whether it keeps its properties on the return trip is anyone’s guess.
Launch
They assemble in the old Okie city’s reception room in City Hall. The place where Amalfi once negotiated with client planets has been converted into a telemetry center for the messenger.
Amalfi holds down the launch key. Not because he’s actually launching it. The timing is too critical for human hands. He just has to keep the circuit closed until the clock hits zero. But he presses down so hard his fingers ache. He’s pushing with far more force than needed, as if the universe would end the instant he let go.
Someone suggests they should name it. Gifford Bonner says any name would promise too much. Jake suggests numbering it like the old satellites, but with transfinite integers instead of Greek letters.
Estelle steps forward. She raises her hand toward the bubble she can’t touch. “I christen thee Object 4101-Alephnull.”
Jake is already planning the next one. Object 4101-C, the power of the continuum. And the next one after that…
A soft chime sounds. The red hand on the clock passes zero. The smoke in the center of the room spirals wildly. The bubble with its tiny stars is gone.
Nobody saw it leave.
A few fractions of a second later, Amalfi remembers to let go of the key. His thousand-year-old hand trembles for the next fifteen minutes.
The Death-Watch
Nobody expects the messenger back in hours or days. If it came back that fast, it would mean the end of everything was right behind it. But that possibility is enough to keep people watching in the dark room around the clock.
And there’s a bad discovery. Every instrument that was monitoring the missile dropped to zero the instant it vanished. No readings on the departure at all. Not even the spindizzies can explain where the power went. It simply left. Went apparently nowhere.
Amalfi starts having nightmares. The ghostly sphere with its glowing eyes wandering through impossible geometries. A tiny salt crystal singing in his voice. Then the curves snap into a burning web and he wakes up, but not really. He’s dozed off at the death-watch.
Alarms are ringing. The messenger is back. But it’s smaller now, the size of a basketball. Most of its internal stars are out. The ones still lit flicker like dying fires.
Schloss says it only has about twenty-one hours left. They start reading the data. Stars inside the probe die one by one. Pi-meson showers from the iron nucleus. The rhodium-palladium series crosses at cesium, which makes no sense. They don’t stop to interpret. They just record.
Hours blur together. The tension, the fatigue, the strangeness of what they’re doing. Then Schloss calls closing time. Everyone stands back against the walls. The spindizzy screen goes opaque around the messenger.
A pinprick of light appears inside, grows to painful blue-white, throws out long tendrils of glare. Amalfi shields his eyes and his body in an instinct older than civilization. When the light dies and the screen drops, Object 4101-Alephnull is gone forever. Destroyed by the death of a single crystal of salt.
And then Schloss tells them they’ve all been hit with radiation. Everyone to the hospital.
The Aftermath
The radiation sickness is manageable. Bone marrow transfusions, anti-nausea drugs, the usual. Everyone who had hair lost it, including Dee and Estelle. Most grew it back. Amalfi and Jake did not.
The sunburn was worse. Second degree. The scientists spent a month in hospital robes, covered in ointment, playing bad poker and scribbling equations on greasy paper. Web visited daily with flowers for Estelle and fresh cards for the men. He fed the equations to the City Fathers, who always said the same thing: “NO COMMENT. THE DATA ARE INSUFFICIENT.”
Three Pieces of News
When Schloss, Jake, and Retma finally present their findings, they have three things to report. Two bad. One ambiguous.
First: they have competition. The messenger detected another probe in the antimatter universe. Similar to theirs but twice the size. Someone else figured out the same thing the Hevians did, and they have a three-to-five year head start. Amalfi immediately says “The Web of Hercules.” No proof. Just instinct.
Second, and this is the ambiguous one that makes the first piece bad: it might be possible to survive the catastrophe. Barely. But the kind of survival Schloss describes sounds worse than death. You would lose your body, your home, your world, your friends, your family. Every person would be completely alone. More alone than any human being has ever been. And quite possibly that isolation would kill you anyway, or make you wish it had.
Retma, the Hevian, confirms it. Is it really that bad? “Worse,” he says.
And third: the date. June second, year 4104. Three years away. After that June second, there will be no June third. Forever.
The Farewell Dinner
Hazleton throws a dinner party. And the personal politics of this scene are as complicated as the physics.
Hazleton announces he’s staying on New Earth. He’s the mayor. That’s what he does. He runs human affairs. He’s not interested in trying to fight the end of the universe. That’s not his kind of problem. He’ll keep things in order until the moment comes.
Jake is staying too. He hates careering around the universe. He’ll grow roses in the bad climate until time runs out.
But Dee surprises everyone. She’s staying with Mark. And she doesn’t want Web to go.
This is where Amalfi gets brutal. He takes Dee for a walk through the old Okie city under the moonlight. In Duffy Square, he tells her she’s not staying for Mark. She’s staying because she can’t let go of Web. She’s looking for surrogates. She didn’t make it with Amalfi. She won’t make it with Web either.
Dee punches him in the face.
They eventually bring the whole mess to the City Fathers. And the machines deliver one of the best moments in the entire series. Three factors, they say. Take the Hazletons. Take Web and Estelle. And factor three: “TAKE US.”
The City Fathers want to survive. Their prime directive is the survival of the city. The physical city is dead. The citizens have moved on. So the machines have concluded that they are the city now. And they are ordered to survive.
Hazleton says if he heard that from a human, he’d call it the greatest rationalization of all time. But machines can’t rationalize. They don’t have instinctual drives.
Or do they?
Amalfi agrees to take them. One hundred and thirty-four ancient computer units, carrying nine hundred and ninety years of accumulated knowledge. But he makes one thing clear: on the planet He, the City Fathers will advise. They will not be in charge.
The last thing Estelle asks is whether she can bring Ernest, her pet svengali. The City Fathers say no. Too dexterous, too curious, too stupid. A dirigible planet is a city, and cities don’t allow monkeys near the machinery.
Estelle cries. Amalfi thinks it’s a strange thing to weep about after everything she’s been through. He doesn’t understand that she’s crying for her childhood.
But then, neither does she.
This is Blish writing at the top of his game. He packs real physics, real mathematics, and real human emotion into one chapter. The science of the messenger probe is detailed enough to make you believe it. The love story of Web and Estelle is simple enough to break your heart. And the City Fathers asking to survive is one of the genuinely unsettling moments in all of science fiction. Machines don’t have feelings. But they have logic. And sometimes logic arrives at the same place feelings do.
Three years until the end. A possible survival that’s worse than death. A competitor with a head start. And now the whole crew, humans and machines, heads for the center of everything.
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