Cities in Flight Read Free

The result is what you see: sterility, stasis, dry rot."
    "Then what's left?' Wagoner said. "What are we going to do now? I know you well enough to suspect that you're not going to give up all hope."
    "No," Corsi said, "I haven't given up, but I'm quite helpless to change the situation you're complaining about After all, I'm on the outside. Which is probably good for me." He paused, and then said suddenly: "There's no hope of getting the government to drop the security system completely?"
    "Completely?'
    "Nothing else would do."
    "No," Wagoner said. "Not even partially, I'm afraid. Not any longer."
    Corsi sat down and leaned forward, his elbows on his knobby knees, staring into the dying coals. "Then I have two pieces of advice to give you, Bliss. Actually they're two sides of the same coin. First of all, begin by abandoning these multi-million-dollar, Manhattan-District approaches. We don't need a newer, still finer measurement of electron resonance one-tenth so badly as we need new pathways, new categories of knowledge. The colossal research project is defunct; what we need now is pure skullwork."
    "From my staff?'
    "From wherever you can get it. That's the other half of my recommendation. If I were you, I would go to the crackpots."
    Wagoner waited. Corsi said these things for effect; he liked drama in small doses. He would explain in a moment.
    "Of course I don't mean total crackpots," Corsi said. "But you'll have to draw the line yourself. You need marginal contributors, scientists of good reputation generally whose obsessions don't strike fire with other members of their profession. Like the Crehore atom, or old Ehrenhaft's theory of magnetic currents, or the Milne cosmology-you'll have to find the fruitful one yourself. Look for discards, and then find out whether or not the idea deserved to be totally discarded. And-don't accept the first 'expert' opinion that you get."
    "Winnow chaff, in other words."
    "What else is there to winnow?" Corsi said. "Of course it's a long chance, but you can't turn to scientists of real stature now; it's too late for that. Now you'll have to use sports, freaks, near-misses."
    "Starting where?"
    "Oh," said Corsi, "how about gravity? I don't know any other subject that's attracted a greater quota of idiot speculations. Yet the acceptable theories of what gravity is are of no practical use to us. They can't be put to work to help lift a spaceship. We can't manipulate gravity as a field; we don't even have a set of equations for it that we can agree upon. No more will we find such a set by spending fortunes and decades on the project. The law of diminishing returns has washed that approach out."
    Wagoner got up. "You don't leave me much," he said glumly.
    "No," Corsi agreed. "I leave you only what you- started with. That's more than most of us are left with, Bliss."
    Wagoner grinned tightly at him and the two men shook hands. As Wagoner left, he saw Corsi silhouetted against the fire, his back to the door, his shoulders bent. While he stood there, a shot blatted not far away, and the echoes bounded back from the face of the embassy across the street. It was not a common sound in Washington, but neither was it unusual: it was almost surely one of the city's thousands of anonymous snoopers firing at a counter-agent, a cop, or a shadow.
    Corsi made no responding movement. The senator closed the door quietly.
    He was shadowed all the way back to his own apartment, but this time he hardly noticed. He was thinking about an immortal man who flew from star to Star faster than light.
     

 
    CHAPTER ONE: New York
     
    In the newer media of communication ... the popularization of science is- confounded by rituals of mass entertainment. One standard routine dramatizes science through the biography of a hero scientist: at the denouement, lie is discovered in a lonely laboratory crying 'Eureka' at a murky test tube held up to a bare light bulb.
    -GERARD PIEL
     
    THE PARADE of celebrities, notorieties,