CHAPTER TWO: Nova Magellanis

"You'll have to make me more welcome than that, John," Dee said.

Amalfi said nothing. He lowered his head like a bull contemplating a charge, spread his feet slightly, and clasped his hands behind him.

"Well, John?" Dee insisted gently.

"You don't want me to go," he said baldly. "Or, you suspect that if I do go; Mark just may throw up the managership and New Earth along with it and take off with me."

Dee walked slowly all the way across the room and stood, hesitating, beside the great deep cushion. "Wrong, John, on both counts. I had something else altogether in mind. I thought-well, I'll tell you later what I thought. Right now, may I have a drink?"

Amalfi was forced to abandon his position, which by being so firm had imparted a certain strength to his desire to oppose her, in order to play host. "Did Mark send you, then?"

She laughed. "King Mark sends me on a good many errands, but this wouldn't be a very likely one for him." She added bitterly, "Besides, he's so wrapped up in Gifford Bonner's group that he ignores me for months on end."

Amalfi knew what she meant: Dr. Bonner was the teacher-leader of an informal philosophical group called the Stochastics; Amalfi hadn't bothered to inform himself in detail on Bonner's tenets, but he knew in general that Stochasticism was the most recent of many attempts to construct a complete philosophy, from esthetics to ethics, using modern physics as the metaphysical base. Logical positivism had been only the first of those; Stochasticism, Amalfi strongly suspected, would be far from the last.

"I could see something had been keeping his mind off the job lately," he said grimly. "He might do better to study the doctrines of Jorn the Apostle. The Warriors of God control no less than fifteen of the border planets right now, and the faith doesn't lack for adherents right here on New Earth. It appeals to the bumpkin type-and I'm afraid we've been turning out a lot of those lately."

If Dee recognized this as in part a shaft at the changes in New Earth's educational system which she had helped to institute, she showed no sign of it.

"Maybe so," she said. "But I couldn't persuade him, and I wonder if you could either. He doesn't believe there's any real threat; he thinks that a man simple-minded enough to be a Fundamentalist is too simple-minded to hold together an army."

"Oh? Mark had fetter ask Bonner to tell about Godfrey of Bouillon."

"Who was-?"

"The leader of the First Crusade."

She shrugged. Possibly only Amalfi, as the only New Earthman who had actually been born and raised on Earth, could ever have heard of the Crusades; doubtless they were unknown on Utopia.

"Anyhow, that isn't what I came here to talk about, either."

The wall treacher opened and floated the drinks out. Amalfi captured them and passed one over silently, waiting.

She took her glass from him but, instead of sinking down with it as he had half-pictured her doing, she walked nervously back to the door and took her first sip as if she might put it aside and be leaving at any moment.

He discovered that he did not want her to go. He wanted her to walk some more. There was something about the gown she was wearing-

That there were fashions again was a function of being earthbound. One simple utilitarian style had sufficed both men and women all their centuries aloft when there had been the unending demands of the city's spaceworthiness to keep all hands occupied. Now that the ex-Okies were busily fulfilling Franklin's law that people will breed to the point of overpopulating any space available to them, they were also frittering away their time with pets and flower-gardens and fashions that changed every time a man blinked. Women were floating around this year of 3995 in diaphanous creations that totaled so much yardage a man might find himself treading on their skirts. Dee, however, was wearing a simple white covering above and a clinging black tubular affair below that was completely different. The only diaphanous part of her outfit was a length of something gossamer and iridescent that circled her throat under a fold of the white garment and hung down between her still delicate, still gently rounded breasts, as girlish in appearance as the day Utopia had sent her out to New York, in a battleship, to ask for help.

He had it. "Dee, you looked just as you look now when I first saw you!"

"Indeed, John?"

"That black thing—"

"A sheath-skirt," she interpolated helpfully.

"-I noticed it particularly when you came aboard. I'd never seen anything like it. Haven't seen anything like it since." He refrained from telling her that during all the centuries he had loved her, he had pictured her in that black thing, turning to him instead of Hazleton. Would the course of history have been any different, had she done so? But how could he have done anything but reject her?

"It took you long enough to notice it tonight," she said. "I had it made up especially for this evening's dinner. I've been tired of all this float and flutter for a year. Essentially I'm still a product of Utopia, I guess. I like stern clothes and strong men and a reasonably hard life."

She was certainly trying to tell him something, but he was still adrift. The situation was impossible, on the face of it. He was not in the habit of discussing fashion with his best and oldest friend's wife at an hour when all sensible planet-bound pioneers were abed. He said, "It's very pretty."

To his astonishment, she burst into tears. "Oh, don't be stuffy, John!" She put the glass down and reached for her cloak.

"All right, Dee." Amalfi put the cloak out of her reach. "Your 'King Mark' sounds reasonably stern and hard. Suppose you sit down and tell me what this is all about."

"I want to go with you, John. You won't be the mayor of New York, you won't be bound by the old rules, if you take the city aloft now. I want-I want to—"

It was weeks before he got her to state that ultimate desire. They had talked without ceasing after that blundering beginning. When it finally penetrated his cautious bald head that the message all his senses had been clamoring from the moment of her arrival was not another daydream from the chilly past, but warm actuality, he had folded her in his arms and they had been silent for a time. But then the flow of words began again and could not be checked. They had reminisced endlessly and how-it-might-have-beens and even of certain ways it had been. He was amazed to discover that she had taken into her household however briefly every companion whose bed he had honored during the officially celibate years; in her position as First Lady of New Earth, during the intensive family years, she could have installed twenty nursemaids simultaneously without attracting undue notice, just as she launched every new fashion and many of the fads that made New Earth what it was. That Dee had been cruelly bored had simply never occurred to him.

But she told him the full tale of that discontent, more indeed than he wanted to hear. They quarreled like giddy young lovers-except that their first and worst quarrel followed a complaint he could have wept to hear wrung from her.

"John," she said, "aren't you ever going to take me to bed?"

He spread his hands in exasperation. "I'm not at all sure I want to take Mark's wife to bed. Besides," he added, knowing he was being cruel, "you've already had it. You've pumped every woman I resorted to in half a thousand years. I should think I would bore you in actuality as much as everything else does."

Their reconciliations were not much like those of young love; they were more and more like the creeping home of a rebellious daughter to her father's arms. And still he held off. Now that he had for the taking what he had only dreamed of wanting for so many years, he made the Adamic discoveries all over again: there is wanting the unobtainable, and there is the obtaining of desire, and the greatest of these is the wanting. Especially since the object of desire always turns out to exist only in some other universe, to be mocked by actuality.

"You don't believe me, John," she said bitterly. "But it's true. When you go, I want to go with you-all the way, don't you understand? I want to-I want to bear you a child."

She looked at him through a film of tears-somehow he had never, in all the centuries of fancy, imagined or seen her in tears, but the actuality wept as predictably as New Earth's skies-and waited. She had shot her bolt, he saw. This was the supreme thing that Dee Hazleton wanted to give him.

"Dee, you don't know what you're saying! You can't offer me your girlhood all over again-that's irretrievably Mark's, and you know it. Besides, I don't want—"

He stopped. She was weeping again. He had never wanted to hurt her, although he knew he had done so unintentionally more times than he would ever know.

"Dee, I've had a child."

Now she was listening, wide-eyed, and he winced as he saw pity take the place of resentment. He laid the encysted pain bare like a surgeon before her. "When the population balance shifted after the landing and there were all those excess females-remember? Do you also remember the artificial insemination program? They asked me to contribute. The good old argument against it was supposed to be by-passed by the assurance that I'd never know which children carried my genes-only the doctors supervising the program would know. But there was an unprecedented wave of miscarriages and stillbirths-and some survivors that shouldn't have survived, all with the same set of ... disadvantages, I was told about it; as mayor. I had to decide what was to be done with them."

"John," she whispered. "No. Stop."

"We were taking over the Cloud," he continued implacably. Presenting him with a wizened, squalling, scarlet, normal baby boy was one favor she could not do him, and there was no way to tell her so but this. "We couldn't afford bad genes. I ordered the survivors . . . dealt with; and I had a brief conference with the genetics team. They had planned not to tell me-they were going to keep up the farce, like good-hearted dolts. But I'd been in space too long; my germ plasm is damaged beyond hope; I am no longer a contributor. Do you understand me, Dee?"

Dee tried to draw his head down on her breast. Amalfi moved violently away. It irritated him unreasonably that she still thought she had anything to give him.

"The city was yours," she said tonelessly. "And now it's grown up and gone away and left you. I saw you grieving, John, and I couldn't bear it-oh, I don't mean that I was pretending. I love you, I think I always have. But I should have known that the time for us had gone by. There's nothing at all left for me to give you that you haven't had in full measure."

She bowed her head, and he stroked her hair awkwardly, wishing it had never begun, since it had to end like this. "And what now?" he said. "Now that life with father has turned out to be nothing more than that? Can you leave home again and go to Mark?"

"Mark? He doesn't even know I've been . .. away. As his wife, I'm dead and buried," she said in a low voice. "Living seems to be a process of continually being born again. I suppose the trick is to learn how to make that crucial exit without suffering the trauma each time. Goodbye, John."

She didn't look as if she were being too successful at mastering the trick, but he made no move to help her. She was going to have 'to find her own way back; she was beyond his aid now.

He thought that, what she had said was probably the truth-for a woman, For a man. he knew, life is a process of dying, again and again; and the trick, he thought, is to do it piecemeal, and ungenerously.

For the first time in weeks, he walked the streets of New Manhattan again. He had never felt so utterly done with the purpose he had sowed in his people. Now that it was coming to fruition, he urgently needed to be seeking some purpose far removed from theirs.

Inevitably, he found himself leaving cats, birds, svengalis, dogs and Dee for the dilapidated streets of the Okie city. He was almost all the way down to the banks of the City Fathers, when a suspicion that he was again being followed turned into a certainty. For a panic moment he feared it might be Dee, spoiling both her exit and his; but it was not.

"All right, who is it?" he said. "Stop skulking and name yourself."

"You wouldn't remember me, Mr. Mayor," a frightened voice said in several registers at once.

"Remember you? Of course I do. You're Webster Hazleton. Who's your friend? What are you doing here in the old city? It's off limits for children."

The boy drew himself up to his full height.

"This is Estelle. She and I are in this together." Web appeared to have some difficulty in going on. "There's been talk-I mean, Estelle's father, he's Jake Freeman, kind of hinted about it-that is, if the city's really going up again. Mr. Mayor—"

"Maybe it is. I don't know yet. What of it?"

"If it is, we want on," the boy said in a rush.

Amalfi had had no further plans to try and convert Jake, who certainly appeared to be as lost a cause as Hazleton himself; but the Freeman-Hazleton partnership represented by Web and Estelle meant that he would have to broach the subject again to Jake sooner or later. Of course it was out of the question that the children should be allowed to go-and yet it was not within the bounds of fairness to forbid them out of hand, without knowing what their elders thought of it. Children had gone adventuring on Okie cities many a time before; but of course that had been back in the old days, when the cities had been as well equipped as any earthbound community to take good care of them, at least most of the time. Every thread he touched these days, it seemed to Amalfi, had knots in it.

Temporarily, however, the fates allowed him to shelve that part of the problem; for Jake was waiting for him again in the computation section, in a state of excitement so febrile that the sight of his daughter and Web tagging behind Amalfi barely raised his eyebrows.

"You're just in time," he said as though there had been some prior appointment.- "You recall the nova I was talking to you about? Well, it isn't a nova at all, and at this point it's no longer an astronomical problem; in fact, it's your problem."

"What do you mean?" Amalfi said. "If it isn't a nova, what is it?"

"Just what I was asking myself," Jake said. One of his more irritating failings was his inability to get to a point by any but a pre-selected route. "I have a remarkable collection of spectrographs for this thing; if you looked at them without any clue as to what they were, you'd think they represented a stellar catalogue, rather than a single object-and a catalogue containing stars from all over the Russell diagram, too. On top of which, all of them show a blue shift in the absorption lines, particularly in the lines contributed by New Earth's own atmosphere, which made no sense whatsoever, up to now."

"It still doesn't make any sense to me," Amalfi admitted.

"All right," Jake said, "try this on for size; when the spectra turned out to be far too dim for an object of the apparent magnitude of this thing-remember, it's been getting brighter all the time-I asked Schloss and his crew to neglect anti-matter long enough to do a wave-trap analysis of the incoming light. It turns out to be about seventy-five per cent false photons; the thing must be leaving behind a tremendous contrail, if we were only in a position to see it—"

"Spindizzies!" Amalfi shouted. "And under damn near full deceleration! But how could an object that size-no, wait a minute; do you actually know the size yet?"

The astronomer chuckled, a noise which from Jake never failed to remind Amalfi of a demented parrot. "I think we have the size, and all the rest of the answers, at least as far as astronomy is concerned," he said. "The rest, as I said, is your problem. The thing is a planetary body, roughly seventy-five hundred miles in diameter, and much closer than we thought it was-right now, in fact, it's actually inside the Greater Magellanic, and coming our way, directly for the system of New Earth. The change in spectra simply means that it's shining by the reflected light of the different suns it's passing, and the blue shift in the Frauenhofer lines strongly suggests an atmosphere very much like ours. I don't know offhand what that reminds you of, but I know what it should remind you of-and the City Fathers agree with me."

Web Hazleton could contain himself no longer. "I know, I know! It's the planet He! It's coming home! Isn't that it, Mr. Mayor?"

The boy knew his city history well; nobody from the old days could have been confronted with such a set of data as Jake had just trotted out without responding with the same wild surmise. The planet He had been one of the city's principal jobs of work, the outcome of which, for very complicated reasons, had entailed the installation on the planet itself of a number of spindizzies sufficient to rip He from her orbit around her home sun and send her careening, wholly out of control, out of the galaxy and into intergalactic space. The city had been carried a considerable distance with her, enabling it to re-enter the galaxy far away from any area where New York, N. Y., was being actively sought by the cops, but it had been a near thing. She. herself, presumably, had been hurtling toward the Andromeda galaxy ever since that moment in 3850 when she and the city had parted company, each vanishing to the other as abruptly and finally as a blown-out candle-flame.

"Let's not jump to conclusions," Amalfi said. "The tipping of He took place only a century and a half ago-and at that time the Hevians didn't have the technology or the resources to master controlled spindizzy flight; in fact, they weren't very far from being savages. Smart savages, I grant you, but still savages. Is this planet that's coming our way truly dirigible, or don't you know yet?"

"It looks that way," lake said. "That's what first tipped me off that there was something unnatural about the object. It kept changing velocity and line of flight erratically-in fact, in a totally irrational way, unless one assumed that the changes were in fact rational. Whoever they are, they know enough to prevent that world of theirs from zigging when they want to zag. And they're headed our way, Amalfi."

"Have you made any attempt to get in touch with them, whoever they are?" Amalfi said.

"No, indeed. In fact, I haven't even told anybody else about it yet. Not even Mark. Somehow it struck me as peculiarly your baby."

"That was just a waste of pussyfooting, Jake. Dr. Schloss isn't an idiot; surely he can read his own figures as well as you can and draw obvious conclusions from the very question you asked Mm; he must have told Mark by now, and a good thing, too. Mark is probably calling your object right now; let's go directly up to the control room and find out."

They made an oddly assorted procession through the haunted streets of the Okie city: the bald-headed keg-chested mayor with his teeth deeply sunk in a dead cigar, the bird-like and slightly crestfallen astronomer, the bright-eyed skipping youngsters now darting ahead of them, then falling behind to wait to be shown the way. Their eagerness moved Amalfi unexpectedly, bringing home to him the realization that their dream of the city back in flight had always been, like this, a very fragile one; and that this incoming dirigible planet, whatever else it might portend, would probably put the quietus to it, serious business and the dull cold morning light it thrived in being immemorially fatal to dreams.

On an impulse, he stopped at a station that he knew and called for an aircab, partly, he assured himself, to see whether or not the City Fathers still considered that service worth maintaining at this stage in the city's long death. In due course one came, to the obvious delight of the children, leaving Amalfi with the rueful realization that his had not been a fair test; a million years from now, with the last ergs of energy remaining in the pile, the City Fathers would of course still send a cab for the mayor; if he wanted to know whether or not the entire garage was still alive, he would have to ask the City Fathers directly. But Web and Estelle were so delighted at soaring through the silent canyons of the city in the metal and crystal bubble, and in exploring the limited and very respectful repartee of the Tin Cabby, that they fell entirely off their precarious adolescent dignity with squeals of laughter, alternating with gasps of not very real alarm as the cab cut around corners and came close to grazing the structures of the city which familiarity had worn smooth to the point of contempt inside the Tin Cabby's flat little black box of a brain. It was, in a way, a shame that the youngsters were unable to make out, even had they known where to look for it, the graven letters of the city's ancient motto-MOW YOUR LAWN, LADY?-if only for the sense it might have given them of the reason why Okie cities once flew; but the motto had become unreadable a long time ago, as its meaning had become obliterated soon after. Only the memory remained to remind Amalfi that were the city ever to go aloft again-which, suddenly, he did not even believe-it would not be for the purpose of mowing lawns for hire; there were no more; that was all over and done with.

The control room in City Hall muted the children considerably, as well it might, for no one much below the age of a century had ever been allowed in it before, and the many screens which lined its walls had seen events in a history unlikely to be matched for drama (or even simple interest) in any imaginable future saga of New Earth. In this dim stagnant-smelling room the very man who was with them now had watched the rise and fall of a galaxy-dominating race-of which, to be sure, these children were genetically a part, but whose inheritors they could never be; history had passed them by.

"And don't touch anything," Amalfi said. "Everything in this room is alive, more or less. We've never had the time to disarm the city totally; I'm not even sure we'd know how to go about it now. That's why it's off limits. You'd better come stand behind me. Web and Estelle, and watch what I do; it'll keep you out of reach of the boards."

"We won't touch anything," Web said fervently. "I know you won't, intentionally. But I don't want any accidents. Better you learn how to run the board from scratch; come stand right here-you too, Estelle-and call your grandfather's house for me. Touch the clear plastic bar-that's it, now wait for it to light up. That lets the City Fathers know that you want to talk to somebody outside the city; that's very important; otherwise they'd give you a long argument, believe you me. Now you see the five little red buttons just above the bar; the one you touch is number two; four and five are ultraphone and Dirac lines, which you don't need for a local call. One and three are inside trunk lines, which is why they're not lit up. Go ahead, push it."

Web touched the glowing red stud tentatively. Over his head, a voice said: "Communications."

"Now it's my turn," Amalfi said, picking up the microphone. "This is the mayor. Get me the city manager, crash priority." He lowered the microphone and added, "That requires the Communications section to scan for your grandfather along all of the channels on which he's known to be available, and send him a 'call-in' signal wherever he may be; New Earth Hospital has much the same call-in system for its doctors."

"Can we hear him being called?" Estelle said.

"Yes, if you like," Amalfi said. "Here, take the microphone, and put your finger on the two-button as Web did. There."

"Communications," the invisible speaker again said briskly.

"Say, 'Reprise, please'," Amalfi whispered.

"Reprise, please," the girl said.

Immediately the air of the ancient room was filled with a series of twittering pure tones and chords, as though every shadow hid a bird with a silver throat. Estelle almost dropped the microphone; Amalfi took it from her gently.

"Machines don't call for people by name," he explained. "Only very complicated machines, like the City Fathers, are able to speak at all; a simple computer like the Communications section finds it easier to use musical tones. If you listen a while, you'll begin to hear a kind of melody; that's the code for Web's grandfather; the harmonies represent the different places where the computer is looking for him."

"I like it," Estelle said. At the same instant the pipings of the invisible birds came to an end with a metallic snap, and Mark Hazleton's voice said in the middle of the air: "Boss, are you looking for me?"

Amalfi lifted the microphone back to his lips with a grim smile, the children instantly forgotten.

"You bet I am. Are you on top of this dirigible planet which seems to be heading for us?"

"Yes; I didn't know you were interested. In fact I didn't know that it was a planet instead of a star until yesterday, when Schloss and Carrel came in to see me about it." Amalfi threw Jake a meaningful glance. "I gather you're calling me from the city; what do the City Fathers think?"

"I don't know, I haven't talked to them," Amalfi said. "But Jake is here, and he's come to the obvious conclusion, as I'm sure you have. What I want to know is, have you or Carrel made any attempt to communicate with this object?"

"Yes, but I can't say that it's been very fruitful," Hazleton's voice said. "We've called them four or five times on the Dirac, but if they've answered us, it's gotten lost in the general babble of Dirac 'casts we're surrounded with from the home galaxy. It puzzles me a little bit; they do seem to be homing on us, without any question, but it's hard to imagine what kind of signal from us they could be using to guide on."

"Do you really think that this is He come back again?" Amalfi said cautiously.

"Yes, I think I do," Hazleton said, with apparent equal caution. "I don't see what other conclusion one could come to with the data as they stand now."

"Then use your head," Amalfi said. "If this really is He, you'll never be able to reach it with a Dirac 'cast. While we were on He, we never even let the Hevians hear a Dirac 'cast, or see a Dirac transmitter; they had no reason to suspect that any such universal transmitter even existed, or could exist. And if by the same token this is not He, but some exploring vessel coming in toward us for the first time from another galaxy, and out of an entirely different culture than any we know, then it's obvious that they cannot have the Dirac, otherwise they would have heard every one of the millions of Dirac messages which have gone out from our galaxy since the day they found the device. Try the ultraphone instead."

"He didn't have the ultraphone either, when last we saw it," Hazleton's voice said amusedly. "And if we don't know how to drive an ultraphone carrier through a spin-dizzy screen, I very much doubt that they do. If we're going to go all the way back to methods of communications as primitive as that, shouldn't we first try wigwagging?"

"I think probably there is an ultraphone message from that planet on its way here," Amalfi said. "It would be the part of common sense to precede such a flight as that planet is conducting into so densely populated an area as the Greater Magellanic Cloud with a general identification signal, which you could hardly do with a Dirac signal in any event; a signal which is received uniformly everywhere simultaneously with its being sent is not a proper beacon signal. It doesn't matter whether this is He or a visitor coming to us from the entirely unknown; they will be sending some sort of pip in advance, which they would absolutely have to do by ultraphone, there being no other way to do it, and if this requires them to work out a way to punch an ultraphone signal through a spindizzy screen, then they will have done so and you should be listening for it; and you can put a return signal through the same hole." He took a deep breath. "At the very least, Mark, stop wasting my time telling me it's impossible before you've even tried it."

"I tell you," Webster Hazleton said under his breath and turned a bright scarlet. Behind him, Estelle's father chortled alarmingly on the edge of his metaphorical crackerbarrel.

The riot act, however, had been becoming less and less effective with Hazleton in. the past few decades, as Amalfi knew well; perhaps it dated from Hazleton's new preoccupation with the Stochastics, about which Amalfi had not known until Dee had brought it up; or perhaps-though this was a much less attractive possibility-from an awareness in Hazleton, paralleling Amalfi's own, of Amalfi's growing impotence on New Earth. "Nevertheless," Hazleton said gravely, "I will raise one further objection, boss, if I may. Even supposing that they are putting out an ultraphone beam we can tie to, they're still roughly fifty light-years away; by the time they hear anything we say to them by ultraphone and get a message back to us the same way, we'll be seventy-five years into the next millennium."

"True," Amalfi admitted. "Which means we'll have to send a ship. I'm all for taking ten years or so to make full contact, anyhow, since we really have no idea what it is we're confronted with, and we may need to lay in some armaments. But you'd better tell Carrel to stand ready to fly me out there no later than the beginning of next week, and in the meantime, try to eavesdrop on whatever transmission our visitor is broadcasting. I'll attend to the answering part later from shipboard."

"Right," Hazleton said, and switched out.

"Can we go too?" Web demanded immediately.

"What do you say to that, Jake? These kids were all for going with me on board the city, too."

The astronomer smiled and shrugged. "Wherever she gets the taste for spaceflight from, it can't be from me," he said. "But I knew she was going to ask sooner or later. It's an experience she'll have to have behind her before she's very much older, and I don't know of any commander in two galaxies that she'd be safer with. I think my wife will concur-though she's as uneasy about it as I am."

Web cheered; but Estelle only said, in a tone of utmost practicality:

"I'll go home and get my svengali."