Cities in Flight by James Blish Read Free Book Online

cathedral.
    "Somewhere along in there, I got married and we had one son;-he was born the same day I entered space school. Two years later, the marriage was annulled. That sounds funny, I know, but the circumstances were-unusual.
    "When Pfitzner approached me and asked me to pick up soil samples for them, I suppose I saw another church with which I could identify myself-something humanitarian, long-range, impersonal. And when I found this afternoon that the new church wasn't going to welcome the convert with glad cries-well, the result is that I'm now weeping on your shoulder." He smiled. "That's hardly flattering, I know. But you've already helped me to talk myself into a spot where the only next step is to apologize, which I hereby do. I hope you'll accept it."
    "I think I will," she said, and then, tentatively, she smiled back. The result made him tingle as though the air-pressure had dropped suddenly by five pounds per square inch. Anne Abbott was one of those exceedingly rare plain girls whose smiles completely transform them, as abruptly as the bursting of a star-shell. When she wore her normal, rather sullen expression, no one would ever notice her-but a man who had seen her smile might well be willing to kill himself working to make her smile again, as often as possible. A woman who was beautiful all the time, Paige thought, probably never could know the devotion Anne Abbott would be given when she found that man.
    "Thank you," Paige said, rather inadequately. "Let's order, and then I'd like to hear you talk. I dumped The Story of My Life into your lap rather early in the game, I'm afraid."
    "You order," she said. "You talked about flounder this afternoon, so you must know the menu here-and you handed me out of the Caddy so nicely that I'd like to preserve the illusion."
    "Illusion?"
    "Don't make me explain," she said, coloring faintly "But. . . . Well, the illusion of there being one or two cavaliers in the world still. Since you haven't been a surplus woman on a planet full of lazy males, you wouldn't understand the value of a small courtesy or two. Most men I meet want to be shown my mole before they'll bother to learn my last name."
    Paige's surprised shout of laughter made heads turn all over the restaurant. He throttled it hurriedly, afraid that it would embarrass the girl, but she was smiling again, making him feel instead as though he had just had three whiskies in quick succession.
    "That's a quick transformation for me," he said, "This afternoon I was a blackmailer, and by my own intention,, too. Very well, then, let's have the flounder; it's a specialty of the house. I had visions of it while I was on Ganymede munching my concentrates."
    "I think you had the right idea about Pfitzner," Anne said slowly when the waiter had gone. "I can't tell you any secrets about it, but maybe I can tell you some bits of common knowledge that you evidently don't know. The project the plant is working on now seems to me to fit your description exactly: it's humanitarian, impersonal, and just about as long-range as any project I can imagine. I feel rather religious about it, in your sense. It's something to tie to, and it's better for me than being a Believer or a WAC. And I think you could understand why I feel that way-better than either Hal Gunn or I thought you could."
    It was his turn to be embarrassed. He covered by dosing his Blue Points with Worcestershire until they flinched visibly. "I'd like to know."
    "It goes like this," she said. "In between 1940 and 1960, a big change took place in Western medicine. Before 1940-in the early part of the century-the infectious diseases were major killers. By 1960 they were all but knocked out of the running. The change started with the sulfa drugs; then came Fleming and Florey and mass production of penicillin during World War II. After that war we found a whole arsenal of new drugs against tuberculosis, which had really never been treated successfully before-streptomycin, PAS,