They Shall Have Stars

by James Blish

  It was not too far from the truth to call it a form of cancer. The compound seemed to be as close as Jupiter came to an indigenous form of life. It grew, fed, reproduced itself, and showed something of the characteristic structure of an Earthly virus, such as tobacco mosaic, Of course it grew from outside by accretion like any nonliving crystal, rather than from the inside, by intussusception, like a cell; but viruses grew that way too, at least in vitro.

  It was no stuff to hold up the piers of humanity's greatest engineering project, that much was sure. Perhaps it was a suitable ground substance for the ribs of some Jovian jellyfish; but in a Bridge caisson, it was cancer.

  There was a scraper mechanism working on the edge of the lesion, flaking away the shearing arninos and laying down new ice. In the meantime, the decay in the caisson face was working deeper. The scraper could not possibly get at the core of the trouble which was not the calcium carbide dust, with which the atmosphere was charged beyond redemption, but was instead one imbedded speck of metallic sodium which was taking no part in the reaction fast enough to extirpate it. It could barely keep pace with the surface spread of the disease.

  And laying new ice over the surface of the wound was worthless, as Eva should have known. At this rate, the whole caisson would slough away and melt like butter, within an hour, under the weight of the Bridge above it.

  Helmuth sent the futile scraper aloft. Drill for the speck of metal? No it was far too deeply buried already; and its location was unknown.

  Quickly he called two borers up from the shoals below, where constant blasting was taking the foundation of the caisson deeper and deeper into Jupiter's dubious "soil." He drove both blind, firesnouted machines down into the lesion.

  The bottom of that sore turned out to be a hundred feet within the immense block of ice. Helmuth pushed the red button all the same.

  The borers blew up, with a heavy, quite invisible 'blast, as they had been designed to do. A pit appeared on the face of the caisson.

  The nearest truss bent upward in the wind; It fluttered for a moment, trying to resist. It bent farther.

  Deprived of its major attachment, it tore free suddenly, and went whirling away into the blackness. A sudden flash of lightning picked it out for a moment, and Helmuth saw it dwindling like a bat with torn wings being borne away by a cyclone.

  The scraper scuttled down into the pit and began to fill it with ice from the bottom. Helmuth ordered down a new truss and a squad of scaffolder. Damage of this order of magnitude took time to repair. He watched the tornado tearing ragged chunks from the edges of the pit until he was sure that the catalysis cancer had been stopped. Then suddenly, prematurely, dismally tired he took off the helmet.

  He was astounded by he white fury that masked Eva's big boned, mildly pretty face.

  "You'll blow the Bridge up yet, won't you?" she said, evenly, without preamble. "Any pretext will do!"

  Baffled, Helmuth turned his head helplessly away; but that was no better. The suffused face of Jupiter peered swollenly through the pictureport, just as it did on the foreman's deck.

  He and Eva and Charity and the gang and the whole of satellite V were falling forward toward Jupiter; their uneventful, cooped up lives on Jupiter V were utterly unreal compared to the four hours of each changeless day spent on Jupiter's ever-changing surface. Every new day brought their minds, like ships out of control, closer and closer to that gaudy inferno.

  There was no other way for a manor a woman on Jupiter V to look at the giant planet. It was simple experience, shared by all of them, that planets do not occupy four fifths of the whole sky, unless the observer is himself up there in that planet's sky, falling toward it, falling faster and faster "I have no intention," he said tiredly, "of blowing up the Bridge. I wish you could get it through your head that I want the Bridge to stay up even though I'm not starry-eyed to the point of incompetence about the project. Did you think that that rotten spot was going to go away by itself after you'd painted it over? Didn't you know that"

  Several helmeted, masked heads nearby turned blindly toward the sound of his voice. Helmuth shut up. Any distracting conversation or other activity was taboo down here on the gang deck. He motioned Eva back to duty.

  The girl donned her helmet obediently enough, but it was plain from the way that her normally full lips were thinned that she thought Helmuth had ended the argument only in order t4ave the last word.

  Helmuth strode to the thick pillar which ran down the central axis of the operations shack, and mounted the spiraling cleats toward his own foremati's cubicle. Already he felt in anticipation the weight of the helmet upon his own head.

  Charity Dillon, however, was already wearing the helmet. He was sitting in Helmuth's chair.

  Charity was characteristically oblivious of Helmuth's entrance. The Bridge operator must learn to ignore, to be utterly unconscious of, anything happening about his' body except the inhuman sounds of signals; must learn to heed only those senses which report something going on thousands and hundreds of thousands of miles away.

  Helmuth knew better than to interrupt him. Instead, he watched Dillon's white, bladelike fingers roving with blind sureness over the controls.

  Dillon, evidently, was making a complete tour of the Bridge not only from end to end, but up and down, too. The tally board showed that he had already activated nearly two thirds of the ultraphone eyes. That meant that he had been up all night at the job; had begun it immediately after he had last relieved Helmuth.

  Why?

  With a thrill of unfocused apprehension, Helmuth looked at the foreman's jack, which allowed the operator here in the cubicle to communicate with the gang when necessary, and which kept him aware of anything said or done on the gang boards.

  It was plugged in.

  Dillon sighed suddenly, took the helmet off,' and turned.

  "Hello, Bob," he said. "It's funny about this job. You can't see, you can't hear, but when somebody's watching you, you feel a sort of pressure on the back of your neck. Extrasensory perception, maybe. Ever felt it?"

  "Pretty often, lately. Why the grand tour, Charity?"

  "There's to be an inspection," Dillon said. His eyes met Helmuth's. They were frank and transparent. "A couple of Senate subcommittee chairmen, coming to see that their eight billion dollars isn't being wasted. Naturally, I'm a little anxious to see to it that they find everything in order."

  "I see," Helmuth said. "First time in five years, isn't it?"

  "Just about. What was that dustup down below just now? Somebody, you, I'm sure, from the drastic handiwork involved, bailed Eva out of a mess, and then I heard her talk about your wanting to blow up the Bridge I checked the area when I heard the fracas start, and it did seem as if she had let things go rather far, but. What was it all about?"

  Dillon ordinarily hadn't the guile for cat-and-mouse games, and he had never looked less guileful than now. Helmuth said carefully: "Eva was upset, I suppose. On the subject of Jupiter we're all of us cracked by now, in our different ways. The' way she was dealing with the catalysis didn't look to me to be a suitable difference of opinion, resolved in my favor because I had the authority. Eva didn't. That's all."

  "Kind of an expensive difference, Bob. I'm not nigeling by nature, you know that. But an incident like that while the subcommittees are here"

  "The point is," said Helmuth, "are we going to spend, an extra ten thousand, or whatever it costs to replace a truss and reinforce a caisson, or are we to lose the whole caisson and as much as a third of the whole Bridge along with it?"

  "Yes, you're right there, of course. That could be explained even to a pack of senators. But it would be difficult to have to explain it very often. Well, the board's yours, Bob; you could continue my spot-check, if you've time."

  Dillon got up. Then he added suddenly, as though it were forced out of him:

  "Bob, I'm trying to understand your state of mind. From what Eva said, I gather that you've made it fairly public. I ... I don't think it's a good
idea to infect your fellow workers with your own pessimism. It leads to sloppy work. I know. I know that you won't countenance sloppy work, regardless of your own feelings, but one foreman can do only so much. And you're making extra work for yourself not for me, but for yourself by being openly gloomy about the Bridge.

  "It strikes me that maybe you could use a breather, maybe a week's junket to Ganymede or something like that. You're the best man on the Bridge, Bob, for all your grousing about the job and your assorted misgivings. I'd hate to see you replaced."

  "A threat, Charity?" Helmuth said softly.

  "No. I wouldn't replace you unless you actually went nuts, and I firmly believe that your fears in that respect are groundless. It's a commonplace that only sane men suspect their own sanity, isn't it?"

  "It's a common misconception. Most psychopathic obsessions begin with a mild worry one that can't be shaken."

  Dillon made as if to brush, that subject away. "Anyhow, I'm not threatening; I'd fight to keep you here. But my say-so only covers Jupiter V and the Bridge; there are people higher up on Ganymede, and people higher yet back in Washington and in this inspecting commission.

  "Why don't you try to look on the bright side for a change? Obviously the Bridge isn't ever going to inspire you. But you might at least try thinking about all those dollars piling up in your account back home, every hour you're on this job. And about the bridges and ships and who knows what all that you'll be building, at any fee you ask, when you get back down to Earth. All under the magic words: 'One of the men who built the Bridge on Jupiter!'"

  Charity was bright red with embarrassment and, enthusiasm. Helmuth smiled.

  "I'll try to bear it in mind, Charity," he said. "And I think I'll pass up a vacation for the time being. When is this gaggle of senators due to arrive?"

  "That's hard to say. They'll be coming to Ganymede directly from Washington, without any routing, and they'll stop there for a while. I suppose they'll also make a stop at Callisto before they come here. They've got something new on their ship, I'm told, that lets them flit about more freely than the usual uphill transport can."

  An icy lizard suddenly was nesting in Helmuth's stomach, coiling and coiling but never settling itself. The persistent nightmare began to seep back into his blood; it was almost engulfing him already.

  "Something ... new?" he echoed, his voice as flat and noncommittal as he could make it. "Do you know what it is?"

  "Well, yes. But I think I'd better keep quiet about it until"

  "Charity, nobody on this deserted rock heap could possibly be a Soviet spy. The whole habit of 'security' is idiotic out here, Tell me now and save me the trouble of dealing with senators; or tell me at least that you know I know. They have antigravity! Isn't that it?"

  One word from Dillon, and the nightmare would be real.

  "Yes," Dillon said. "How did you know? Of course, it couldn't be a complete gravity screen by any means. But it seems to be a good long step toward it. We've waited a long time to see that dream come true "But you're the last man in the world to take pride in the achievement, so there is no sense in exulting about it to you. I'll let you know when I get a definite arrival date. In the meantime, will you think about what I said before?"

  "Yes, I will." Helmuth took the seat before the board.

  "Good. With you, I have to be grateful for small victories. Good trick, Bob."

  "Good trick, Charity."

  CHAPTER SEVEN: New York

  When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase 'transvaluation of all values' for the first time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are living found at last its formula. Transvaluation of all values is the most fundamental character of every civilization; for it is the beginning of a Civilization that remoulds all the forms of the Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practices them in a different way,

  OSWALD SPENGLER

  PAIGE'S GIFT for putting two and two together and getting 22 was in part responsible for the discovery of the spy, but the almost incredible clumsiness of the man made the chief contribution to it. Paige could hardly believe that nobody had spotted the agent before. True, he was only one of some two dozen technicians in the processing lab where Paige had been working; but his almost open habit of slipping notes inside his lab apron, and his painful furtiveness every time he left the Pfitzner laboratory building for the night, should have aroused someone's suspicions long before this.

  It was a fine example, Paige thought, of the way the blunderbuss investigation method currently popular in Washington allowed the really dangerous man a thousand opportunities to slip away unnoticed. As was usual among groups of scientists, too, there was an unspoken covenant among Pfitzner's technicians against informing on each other. It protected the guilty as well as the innocent, but it would never have arisen at all under any fair system of juridical defense.

  Paige had not the smallest idea what to do with his fish once he had hooked it. Re took an evening which he greatly begrudged away from seeing Anne, in order to trace the man's movements after a day which had produced two exciting advances in the research, on the hunch that the spy would want to ferry the information out at once.

  This hunch proved out beautifully, at least at first. Nor was the, man difficult to follow; his habit of glancing continually over first one shoulder and then the other, evidently to make sure that he was not being followed, made him easy to spot over long distances, even in a crowd. He left the city by train to Hoboken, where he rented a motor scooter and drove directly to the crossroads town of Secaucus. It was a long pull, but not at all difficult otherwise.

  Outside Secaucus, however, Paige nearly lost his man for the first and last time. The crossroads, which lay across U.S. 46 'to the Lincoln Tunnel, turned out also to be the site of the temporary trailer city of the Believers nearly 300,000 of them, or almost half of the 700,000 who had been pouring into town for two weeks now for the Revival. Among the trailers Paige saw license plates from as far away as Eritrea.

  The trailer city was far bigger than any nearby town except Passaic. It included a score of supermarkets, all going full blast even in the middle of the night, and about as many coin-in-slot laundries, equally wide open. There were at least a hundred public baths, and close to 360 public toilets. Paige counted ten cafeterias, and twice that many hamburger stands and one arm joints, each of the stands no less than a hundred feet long; at one of these he stopped long enough to buy a "Texas wiener" nearly as long as his forearm, covered with mustard, meat sauce, sauerkraut, corn relish, and piccalilli. 'There were ten highly conspicuous hospital tents, too and after eating the Texas wiener Paige thought he knew why the smallest of them perfectly capable of homing a one ring circus.

  And, of course, there were the trailers, of which Paige guessed the number at sixty thousand, from two wheeled jobs to Packards, in all stages of repair and shininess. Luckily, the city was 'cell lit, and since everyone living in it was a Believer, there were no boobytraps or other forms of proselytizing. Paige's man, after a little thoroughly elementary doubling on his tracks and setting up false trails, ducked into a trailer with a Latvian license plate. After half an hour at exactly 0200the trailer ran up a stubby VHF radio antenna as thick through as Paige's wrist.

  And the rest, Paige thought grimly, climbing back on to his own rented scooter, is up to the FBI if I tell them.

  But what would he say? He had every good reason of his own to stay as far out of sight of the FBI as possible. Furthermore, if he informed on the man now, it would mean immediate curtains on the search for the anti-agathic, and a gross betrayal of the trust, enforced though it had been, that Anne and Gunn had placed in him. On the other hand, to remain silent would give the Soviets the drug at the same time that Pfitzner found it in other words, before the West had it as a government. And it would mean, too, that he himself would have to forego an important chance to prove that he was loyal, when the inevitable showdown with MacHinery came around.

  By the next day, howe
ver, he had hit upon what should have been the obvious course in the beginning. He took a second evening to rifle his fish's laboratory benchthe incredible idiot had stuffed it to bulging with incriminating. photomicrograph negatives, and with bits of paper bearing the symbols of a simple substitution code once circulated to Tom Mix's Square Shooters on behalf of Shredded Ralston and a third to take step-by-step photos of the hegira to the Believer trailer city, and the radiotransmitter-equipped trailer with the buffer state license. Assembling everything into a neat dossier, Paige cornered Gunn in his office and dropped the whole mess squarely in the vice-president's lap.

  "My goodness," Gunn said, blinking. "Curiosity is a disease with you, isn't it, Colonel Russell? And I really doubt that even Pfitzner will ever find the antidote for that."

  "Curiosity has very little to do with it. As you'll see in the folder, the man's an amateur evidently a volunteer from the Party, Rosenberg, rather than a paid expert. He practically led me by the nose."

  "Yes, I see he's clumsy," Gunn agreed. "And he's been reported to us before, Colonel Russell. As a matter of fact, on several occasions we've had to protect him from his own clumsiness."

  "But why?" Paige demanded. "Why haven't you cracked down on him?"

  "Because we can't afford to," Gunn said. "A spy scandal in the plant now would kill the work just where it stands. Oh, we'll report him sooner or later, and the work you've done here on him will be very useful then to all of us, yourself included. But there's no hurry."

  "No hurry!"

  "No," Gunn said. "The material he's ferrying out now is of no particular consequence. When we actually have the drug"