The second of the four Cities in Flight novels by James Blish, this is a ‘fix-up’ novel made by joining two long short stories, ‘Bridge’ and ‘At Death’s End’, which were originally published in sci-fi magazines.
In terms of internal chronology, these stories describe the two key discoveries which make possible the world of the flying cities which we met in Earthman, Come Home, namely anti-agathic drugs and the spindizzy anti-gravity drive.
Background to the plot
It is 2013 and the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West continues. It seems to be a big idea (or fixation, or worry) of Blish’s that this sustained animosity will undermine Western society and freedoms. It will require the West to spy on its own citizens, to curtail scientific enquiry, and to enforce voluntary censorship, not least because of the vast spying and political control enforced by the hereditary head of the FBI, Francis X. MacHinery (a character clearly modelled on the Red-baiting demagogue, Senator Joe McCarthy).
Characters are careful what they say to each other and, if speaking candidly, make nervous jokes about being overheard and reported.
(There’s a scene, mid-novel, where Senator Wagoner has reported to him the key discovery which enables the anti-gravity device and Blish says the characters had to speak more or less in code because both knew the senator’s office was bugged by the FBI (pp.52-54). Similarly, on their third date Anne Abbott shows her date, Paige Russell, that the powder compact she keeps looking into is in fact a device which detects bugging devices i.e. tells you when it is safe, or unsafe, to talk freely.)
There are roughly two locations – America, in either Washington DC or New York City, and ‘the Bridge’ on Jupiter, monitored from its control room on a moon of Jupiter’s, Jupiter V.
On earth
In Washington and New York we see Senator Bliss Wagoner take the helm of the Joint Congressional Committee on Space Flight and ask the opinion of Giusseppi Corsi, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, what he should do. Between them they make a number of points and recommendations. The basic one is that space travel is going nowhere. They’re still using the same rocket technology invented during the war. Rockets have now taken man to Mars and even Jupiter, but Wagoner is frustrated that no-one is thinking big, beyond the solar system: there’s still no viable kind of trans-space engine. Corsi replies that the entire existing structure of government sponsored science is fossilised, third rate men fine-tuning existing tech. He advises Wagoner to cast the net wide, to look at oddballs, freaks, weird experiments, renegades: the future has got to come from outside existing mind-sets.
In New York Colonel Paige Russell is waiting impatiently in the lobby of Pfitzner and sons, the big pharma company. He has in his pocket samples of soil from Ganymede and Jupiter V. He’s a rocketman, has been to those places, brought back these samples at Pfitzner’s request, and is irritated to be kept waiting. Eventually he is given a cursory guided tour by a flunkey but then superseded by a visiting general and more or less kicked out. Irritated, he hits on the receptionist and persuades her to come to dinner.
The dinner scene contains various bits of information: for a start we learn that there’s been a religious revival, because Paige and the receptionist’s taxi (her name is Anne Abbot) gets caught in a chanting crowd. The religious people are now called Believers and have developed perfume bubbles which they disperse at their rallies. When they burst they disperse narcosynthetic drugs which make people feel like repenting, make them feel guilty and self pitying.
Once at the dinner table Anne slowly opens up about work at Pfitzner which has been mainly focused on developing new antibiotics which have worked very well at combating not only infectious diseases but some of the viruses which cause some cancers and so on. But eliminating infectious disease has just revealed a substrate of harder-to-cure conditions, degenerative diseases, circulatory diseases and so on.
This all hooks up with something Russell had heard while taking the tour of the labs: he thought he had heard a baby crying. Now, to his astonishment, Anne admits that they are experimenting on babies: after years of giving antibiotics to animals to make them stronger and healthier, experiments are taking place on newborn babies, giving them small doses of a range of antibiotics to see what happens.
Jupiter V
Meanwhile, some 600 million miles away, we meet two men who work on a space base on Jupiter V, one of Jupiter’s satellites. Robert ‘Bob’ Helmuth works four hours a day with headgear, visor and headphones on, monitoring the machines which repair and build ‘the Bridge’. His supervisor is Charity Dillon.
The Bridge lies six thousand miles below the top of Jupiter’s cloud layer. It is thirty miles high, eleven miles wide, and fifty-four miles long. Most of it is made of ice, Ice IV to be precise, existing under a pressure of a million atmospheres, at a temperature of 94 below zero Fahrenheit. It takes millions of megawatts to maintain it and keep it growing in Jupiter winds of 25,000 miles per hour.
Bob emerges from his shifts maintaining the Bridge’s equipment shell-shocked and drained. From the dialogue between him and Dillon, we learn that the crew who work on the Bridge project have all had ‘conditioning’; that the Bridge doesn’t go anywhere – it is built with giant pillars based on one of the few stable pieces of ‘land’ they could find on Jupiter’s surface – is more like a travelling crane which is just adding bits to itself not to ‘reach’ anywhere, but to increase its stability. Why? Because. To find out. To see if they can. Bob says the whole thing is a deplorable waste of time and effort. Dillon tells him to get some rest.
Washington
Back at the Pfitzner plant Paige comes to see Anne Abbot again, to apologise, but discovers MacHinery in the waiting room, the scary, Beria-type head of the secret police, who cross-questions him. But when MacHinery’s left, Anne and a Pfitzner scientist finally reveal what they’re investigating. They have established that all complex life forms secrete an aging toxin. Research has moved on to try and identify a drug or drugs which will neutralise this aging toxin: an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug.
Jupiter V
Bob Helmuth over-rides a more junior tech in the Bridge control room, responding to an ‘infection’ of one of the Bridge’s caissons with chemical ‘cancer’ by sending into the leg drills which locate the core of the chemical infection then detonate – badly damaging the caisson, but the cancer would have destroyed it. At least that’s what Bob argues to his boss, Dillon, who warns that Bob’s pessimism about the project is making him enemies.
Especially since a group of earth politicians is about to arrive to inspect the works. Bob is puzzled that they can skip out here to the edge of the solar system so easily and pushes Dillon who concedes that they are using a ship with a new anti-gravity rive. Anti-gravity!?
New York
Paige – now working closely with Anne and a scientist named Harold Gunn (vice president in charge of exports at Pfitzner, p.16) spots a Soviet spy in the lab, follows him to a vast camp of Believers which has is growing up in New York state, watches him go into a trailer, run up an aeriel and, presumably, broadcast his secrets to his controllers.
But when Paige tells Gunn and Anne they reveal that a) they’ve known about him all along, b) they actively don’t want to report the spy to the authorities because that will provide an excuse for MacHinery to close them down, and c) in a long passage Anne explains how the revelation of anti-death drugs will destabilise society, undermine the whole economic, legal, political and moral fabric of civilisation: i) as soon as it is revealed in the west, the Soviets will learn of its feasibility and eventually make their own anyway ii) leaking it to the Soviets will crash their system, so it is not treason to let the spy carry on spying.
Jupiter V
The subordinate he reprimanded, Eva, comes to Helmuth’s quarters to carry on the argument and to announce that she wants to have a baby. It emerges that they had been lovers some time in the past. Now he mocks her and they have a fierce argument. After the leaves Helmuth falls asleep and as his customary nightmare, of using an anti-gravity device on Jupiter which fails so that he is squashed flat – and wakes up screaming.
Book three – Entre’acte: Washington
Wagoner writes a memo to Giusseppi Corsi dated 4 January 2020 in which he explains in some detail how he followed Corsi’s advice from the Prelude, namely to seek out crackpots and radical thinkers, and how two lines of investigation led to a) the anti-gravity impact of spinning electrons and b) the discovery of anti-agathic drugs at Pfitzner.
New York
Knowing that he’s due to be posted to the remotest outpost of the solar system, the base on the newly-discovered planet Proserpine – and hearing mounting rumours that Pfitzner is about to be the subject of an investigation by Senator Wagoner, Paige heads to the company’s offices determined to make a clean breast of what he knows.
But instead he finds Wagoner already there, who briskly orders him and Anne to accompany him in a Cadillac taxi to the New York space port. Here they are bundled into a spaceship the size of a standard planetary ferry without much ceremony, told to strap in, and off they go! (In all these space operas people, completely untrained unprepared people, just get into ‘spaceships’ and off they whizz; as far as you can imagine form the reality which crystallised during the Apollo space programme, that you in fact need highly trained physically fit people to go into space.)
It’s a trick or gag: Paige can’t believe the ship is so small; he can’t believe they’re told they’re beyond earth’s atmosphere in moments; he can’t believe there’s proper one-G earth gravity on the ship, there never is on normal shuttle ships; and he is blown away when he goes up to the control and sees, through the viewing window between Wagoner and Anne – Jupiter appearing.
It is, quite obviously, a new breed of spaceship powered by an anti-gravity drive.
Jupiter V
Bob Helmuth sees what he takes to be another ferry land on the landing platform, but is preoccupied by a particularly fierce outburst of interference near the Bridge, and sends a crawling bot equipped with camera down the nearest leg… and is flabbergasted to see a) white objects fleeting past at top speed and then b) a kind of large bubble attached to the leg. It’s a laboratory, manned by a many-tentacled robot. Nobody told him about this! There’s nothing in the blueprints or plans!
A call comes through on the switchboard, plugs his helmet in and hears Doc Barth, who explains this lab was set up top secret a year ago. They now know for sure there is life on Jupiter, a kind of ammonia-based jellyfish which seems to feed on microscopic plankton!
Wagoner reveals all
But this discovery is nothing to what comes next. Helmuth is politely invited over to the ferry ship (a short walk outside the command centre for which he has to wear a spacesuit), invited into Senator Wagoner’s comfy cabin and introduced to Paige and Anne Abbott.
Helmuth states the grounds of his gloomy pessimism to the threesome: his boss Dillon thinks the creation of the Bridge shows that Man can do anything he sets his mind to, and is also a testament to the power of the West. Helmuth radically disagrees, he thinks it is a sign of the West’s decadence.
Wagoner astonishes Helmuth by saying he is even righter than he thought: the Soviets have already won. The unrelenting pressure of the Reds has made the West into an identikit copy, complete with repressive spying apparatus exemplified by H’s FBI.
‘We Sovietised ourselves’
But this history and politics is beside the point. Wagoner tells Helmuth the Bridge project is complete. They’ll keep it up for a bit longer but it has fulfilled its purpose of confirming the Blackett-Dirac equations about the relationship between magnetism and the spinning of a massive body. It could only be tested on a spinning object of enormous mass – hence, Jupiter. And the experiment has proved it.
Hence, he goes on to explain, the functioning of the Dillon-Wagoner gravitron polarity generator which makes atoms within its field refuse to recognise the existence or function or forces exerted by atoms outside its field i.e. escapes gravity. It leads to both a faster-than-light travel and effective shielding for everything within the field of its operation.
Bring together a) the fact that the West is about to collapse with b) a new technology which permits superfast space travel and you come up with c) Wagoner’s plan to evacuate the West and send freedom-loving Americans to colonise the nearest star systems. The whole thing to be led by Paige, Anne and him, Helmuth!
The final part of the jigsaw is the anti-agathic drugs. Wagoner announces they’ve brought the entire existing supply in the hold of the ferry ship. Helmuth, Anne and Paige will take them, administer them to others, live forever and colonise the galaxy!
Meanwhile, Wagoner will return to earth to face the heat (accusations of treason), probably be executed: who cares; the job will be done.
The end of the Bridge
Helmuth explains all this to his former lover, Eva. They realise that their attachments to the Bridge were, in different ways, a result of the ‘conditioning’ all the Jupiter scientists were subject to. Now they both realise it is not work saving, but was a means to something greater. At this climactic moment, the alarm bells ring. The vast red spot on Jupiter is passing close to the Bridge and threatens to tear apart its fabric. Alarm bells deafen and they hear Charity Dillon’s voice calling for all hands on deck to man the repair bots and drones. Eva, the scales fallen from her eyes, says ‘Let it fall’. In the stunned silence, she and Helmuth both hear Wagoner’s dry chuckle.
Coda
One final page describes Bliss Wagoner’s last day in the atomic pile where, as he predicted, he has been locked after being found guilty of treason. (We realise that the letter date January 2020 which he wrote to Corsi explaining his actions, must have been written from prison). The narrative’s antagonist, MacHiney, has got his way when he announces later that day that ‘Bliss Wagoner is dead’. But Wagoner’s legacy will live on across the galaxy.
Chris Foss’s cover art
Back in the 1970s it was worth buying science fiction paperbacks purely to own the stupendous cover art by Chris Foss. Quite often though, as in this case, when you read the book you discovered the cover had almost nothing to do with the text inside. They Shall Have Stars concerns the bridge – which is buried deep in the stormy atmosphere of Jupiter – controlled from what appears to be a modest little cluster of space buildings on Jupiter V – but most of all in the labs and offices of Pfister Corp in New York – none of which look like anything in this fabulous illustration.
Cover of the 1974 Arrow Books edition of They Shall Have Stars, art by Chris Foss
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1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
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Books & Boots 