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flight. What he missed, after all, was not space, but instability itself, the
feeling of being on the way to an^unknown destination, unable to predict what
outlandish surprises might be awaiting him at the next planetfall.
The fact of the matter was that longevity now hung on him like a curse. An
indefinitely prolonged life span had been a prerequisite for an Okie
society-indeed, until the discovery of the anti-agathic drugs early in the
21st Century, interstellar flight even with the spindizzy had been a physical
impossibility; the distances involved were simply too great for a short-lived
man to compass at any finite speed-but to be a virtually immortal man in a
stable society was to be as uninteresting to one's self, for Amalfi at least,
as an everlasting light bulb; he felt that he had simply been screwed into his
socket and forgotten.
It was true that most of the other former Okies had seemed able to make the
change-over-the youngsters in partxular, whose experience of star wandering
had been limited, were now putting their long life expectancies to
the obvious use: launching vast research or development projects the fruition
"of which could not be expected in under five centuries or more. There was,
for example, an entire research team now hard at work in New Manhattan on the
overall prolflem of anti-matter. The theoretical brains of the project were
being supplied largely by Dr. Schloss, an ex-Hruntan physicist who had-boarded
the city back in 3602 as a refugee during the reduction of the Duchy of Gort,
a last surviving polyp of the extinct Hruntan Empire; administration of the
project was in the hands of a comparative youngster named Carrel, .who not so
long ago had been the city's co-pilot and ranking understudy to the City
Manager. The immediate objective of the project, according to Carrel, was the
elucidation of the theoretical molecular structures possible to anti-material
atoms, but it was no secret that most of the young men in the group, with the
active support of Schloss himself, were hoping in a few centuries to achieve
the actual construction, not only of simple chemical compounds-that might come
about in a matter of decades- of this radical type, but a visible, macroscopic
artifact composed entirely of anti-matter. Upon the unthinkably explosive
object they would no doubt paint, Amalfi surmised, had they by that time also
composed an anti-material paint and something to keep it in, the warning Noli
me tangere.
That was all very well; but it was equally impossible for Amalfi, who was not
a scientist, to participate. It was, of course, perfectly possible for him to
end his life; he was not invulnerable, nor even truly immortal; immortality is
a meaningless word in a universe where the fundamental laws, being stochastic
in nature, allow no one to bar accidents, and where life no matter how
prolonged is at bottom only a local and temporary discontinuity in the ,
Second Law of Thermodynamics. The thought, however, did not occur to Amalfl;
he was not the suicidal type. He had never felt less tired, less used-up, less
despairing than he felt today; he was simply snarlingly bored, and too
confirmed in his millennia-old patterns of thought and emotion to be able to
settle for a single planet and a single social order, no matter how Utopian;
his thousand years of continuous translation from one culture to another had
built up in him an enormous momentum which now seemed to be bearing him
irresistibly toward an immovable inertial wall labeled, No PLACE To Go.
"Amalfi! So it's you. I might have guessed."
Amalfi shot the "hold" switch closed convulsively and swung around on his
stool. He had, however, recognized the voice at once from centuries of
familiarity. He had heafd it often since somewhere around 3500, when the city
had taken its owner on board as chief of the astronomy section: a testy and
difficult little man with a deceptively mild manner who had never been
precisely the chief astronomer that the city needed, but who had come through [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]