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The new state had suppressed the- spindizzy-it was too good an escape
route-and the- thought police had never been told that the oripinal equation
was one of those in the "sensitive area." The Soviets did not dare let even
that much be known about it.
Thus, despite all of the minority groups purged or "reeducated" by the
Bureaucratic State, the pure mathematicians went unsuspected about the
destruction of that state, innocent even in their own minds of revolutionary
motives.- The spindizzy was rediscovered, quite inadvertently, in the nuclear
physics laboratories of the Thorium
Trust. - --
The discovery spelled the doom of the flat culture, as the leveling menace of
the nuclear reactor and the Solar Phoenix had cut down the soaring West. Space
flight returned. For a while, cautiously, the spindizzy was installed only in
new spaceships, and there was another period-comically brief-of interplanetary
exploration. The tottering edifice fought to retain its traditional balance.
But the center of gravity had shifted. The waste inherent in using the
spindizzy only in a ship could not be disguised: There was no longer any
reason why a mancarrying vehicle to cross space needed to be small, cramped,
organized fore-and-aft, penurious of weight. Once antigravity was an
engineering reality, it was no longer . necessary to - design ships specially
for space travel, - for neither mass nor aerodynamic lines meant anything any
more. The most massive and awkward object could be lifted and hurled off the
Earth, and carried almost any distance. Whole cities, if necessary, could be
moved. - -Many were. The factories went first; they toured Earth,
from one valuable mineral lie to another, and then went farther aloft. The
exodus began. Nothing could be done to prevent it, for by that time the whole
trend was obviously in the best interests of the State. The mobile factories
changed Mars into the Pittsburgh of the solar system; the spindizzy had lifted
the mining equipment and the refining plants - bodily to bring life back to
that lichen-scabbed ball of rust. The blank where Pittsburgh itself had been
was a valley of slag and ashes. The great plants of the Steel
Trust gulped meteors and chewed - into the vitals of satellites. - The
Aluminum Trust, the Germanium Trust, and the Thorium Trust put their
plantsaloft to mine the planets.
But the Thorium Trust's Plant No. 8 never came back. The revolution against
the planar culture began with that simple fact. The first of the Okie cities
soared away from the solar system, looking for work among the colonists left
stranded by the ebb tide of Western civilization. The new culture began- among
these nomad cities; and when it was all over, the Bureaucratic State, against
its own will, had done what it had long promised to do "when the people were
ready"-it had withered away. The Earth that it once bad owned, right down to
the last grain of sand, was almost deserted. Earth's nomad cities-migratory
workers, hobos, Okies-had become her inheritors.
Primarily the spindizzy had made this possible; but it could not have
maintained it- without heavy contributions from two other social factors. One
of these was longevity. The conquest of so-called "natural" death had been
virtually complete by the time the technicians on the Jovian Bridge had
confirmed the spindizzy principle, and the two went together like hand in
spacemitt. Despite the fact that the spindizzy would drive a ship-or a city-at
speeds enormously faster than that of light, interstellar flight still
consumed finite time. The vastness of the galaxy was sufficient to make long
flights consume lifetimes, even at top spindizzy speed. -i
But when death yielded to the anti-agathic drugs, there was no longer any such
thing as a "lifetime" in the old sense. , -
The other factor was economic: The rise of the metal germanium as the jinn of
solid-state physics. Long before flight into deep space became a fact, the
metal had assumed a fantastic value on Earth,, The opening of the interstellar [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]