A Torrent of Faces Read online

  “Hello, Jo,” Biond Smith said on the vidphone. He sounded distracted; indeed, almost desperate. “I’ve been chasing you for days. I’m afraid I’m going to have to order you home.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “What’s the matter?” Biond said with a bark of mirthless laughter. “What would be the matter when I need you? We’re going to have a disaster, what else?”

  “But what is it, Biond? Can’t you say?”

  “It’s the end of the goddamn world. Will you kindly stop arguing and come home?”

  The year was 2794, and the greatest civilization in Man’s history faced almost certain destruction. A handful of men and women struggled desperately to avert the holocaust, but they seemed doomed to failure. And even if they succeeded, Earth would never be the same again. .…

  JAMES BUSH is the author of many science fiction novels and short stories, including the famous “Cities in Flight” series and A CASE OF CONSCIENCE, which won a Hugo award as the best science fiction novel of 1958. Mr. Blish, a public relations counsel, is married and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  NORMAN L. KNIGHT’S first published story appeared in Astounding in 1937 and his name will be familiar to long-time science fiction readers. Mr. Knight, a retired pesticide chemist, was born in St. Joseph, Missouri.

  A TORRENT OF FACES

  JAMES BLISH & NORMAN L. KNIGHT

  ACE BOOKS, INC.

  1120 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, N.Y. 10036

  a torrent of faces

  Copyright ©, 1967, by James Blish and Norman L. Knight

  An Ace Book, by arrangement with Doubleday & Co., Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  A greatly abridged version of chapters Four and Five appeared in Galaxy Magazine under the title

  The Shipwrecked Hotel; that version ©, 1965, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

  A somewhat modified and abridged version of chapters

  Seven, Eight and Ten appeared in the same magazine under the title The Piper of Dis; that version ©,

  1966, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

  An abridged version of chapters Six, Nine and Eleven appeared in Analog Science Fact-Science Fiction under the title To Love Another; that version ©, 1967, by The

  Condé Nast Publications Inc.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  Contents:-

  PREFACE

  Cast of characters

  BOOK ONE 1 Biond on Edge

  2 To Run a World

  3 A Red Message

  4 Jothen Aloft

  5 The Shipwrecked Hotel

  BOOK TWO 6 Wreck Reef

  7 A Torrent of Joneses

  8 The Wooing of Flavia

  9 People Reef

  10 The Piper of Dis

  11 Hybrid Vigor

  BOOK THREE 12 A Strafing Scene

  13 Biond goes Under

  14 The Dove Descending

  15 A Walk in the Paradise Garden

  16 “…but we shall all be changed.”

  “For that man cannot exhaust or lessen the powers

  of nature follows from the indestructibility of matter

  and the persistence of force…That the Earth

  could maintain a thousand billions as easily as a

  thousand millions is a necessary deduction from the

  manifest truth that, at least as far as our agency is

  concerned, matter is eternal and force must forever

  continue to act…

  Henry George: Progress and Poverty

  PREFACE

  This novel makes the assumption—suggested by the epigraph from Henry George—that the world will support a population of about one trillion (one thousand billions, or 1,000,000,000,000) by the year 2794. The part of the assumption contained in the word “support” is admittedly the wildest sort of fantasy.

  It is of course likely that world population will continue to double itself each century, though the rate may flatten out toward the end of the second millennium. It is also likely that by that time most of these people will be starving to death, and the rest will be scraping desperately.

  We chose to examine an alternative. Physically, George is right; given a huge cooperative endeavor, the Earth could support such a population. But a human society of this magnitude will never develop if the race does not organize itself into some uniform political and economic unit before the population has expanded much beyond its present numbers.

  What sort of unit? We concluded that nothing less than a Utopia would do. We realize that Utopias are out of fashion lately; on the other hand, the picture of the future as a universal Asiatic despotism atop the starving masses has been painted to death by all the modem dystopians from Huxley on—and we could not believe that a population of this size could be a slave society. For one thing, a tyranny is too indifferent to individual human lives to undertake the colossal engineering effort involved; for another, the existence of so enormous a population even under very mean circumstances would require a citizenry capable of intelligent cooperation—it could not be run as a multibillion horde of sullen yes-men.

  It will surprise some readers, and perhaps horrify a few, that the economic system we settled upon for our Utopia is a form of the corporate state, or what was once called fascism. We were interested in the fact that this kind of economic system has actually never been tried (Mussolini’s version was a clumsy and indifferent fake, and that of Jerry Voorhis, though eminently sensible, suffered the usual fate of any political notion bom in California). We thought it might be workable, and perhaps even inevitable, in a high-energy economy; and while we would agree that the notion of an even quasi-democratic fascism is unlikely, we don’t view the possibility of a democratic socialism as likely either.

  Our future world requires one hundred thousand cities in an area as small as Puerto Rico, about twelve to sixteen miles apart, if the cities are spaced evenly all over the globe in a checker-board pattern. Yet even these close-set megalopoli could not contain an uncontrolled population for long. By the time the population reached 4.56 trillion, the cities would be shoulder to shoulder, covering the whole Earth and reaching well under the seas; so our solution of George’s challenge is strictly transitional.

  Our World of One Trillion did not spring full-blown from Henry George and the present-day population explosion, however. In many important ways it is a logical outgrowth of two previous novels by one of us (NLK): Frontier of the Unknown (Astounding Stories, 1937) and Crisis in Utopia (Astounding Stories, 1940; Five

  Science Fiction Novels, Gnome Press, 1952), to which this book is a sort of sequel. We began speculating about the population side of the problem in 1948; the intervening time was consumed mostly by endless pages of calculations, several dozen drawings and diagrams, about thirty thousand words of notes, and many fat letters almost completely covered with stamps—during which time the essence of the problem has not changed a bit, but has come to seem a great deal more immediate.

  We are indebted to Frederik Pohl, editor of Galaxy Magazine, for much valuable criticism.

  James Blish

  Norman L. Knight

  Alexandria, Va.

  Silver Spring, Md.

  1948-1967

  Cast of characters

  in order of their appearance

  Biond Smith, chief, Disaster Plans Board Jothen Kent, senior water engineer, Gitler, Missouri (Unistam)

  Deban Tod, chairman, Communications Corporation

  Chen U, chairman, World Resources Corporation

  Dorthy Sumter, chairwoman, Submarine Products Corporation

  Marg’t Splain, chairwoman, Transportation Corporation

  Storm, chief of Tritons, and
executive chairman, SPC

  Kim Wernicke, ecological surgeon, Starved Rock Biological Preserve

  Umiak, an aircraft steward

  Ruvani, a Triton girl, Storm’s daughter

  Defabio, a Barrier-hilthon monitor

  Tioru, a Triton, and deputy chairman, SPC

  Dr. Kemal Matouf, an entomologist

  Squid, a Triton-Drylander hybrid boy

  Limpet, a Triton girl

  Neratino, a Triton technician

  Alva McGee, assistant chief, Disaster Plans Board

  Fongaváro Jones, technician, Tananarive, Madagascar

  Thaniel Brewster, chief of Tenants’ Services, Philadelphia (Unistam)

  Piscetti, chief of operations to Jothen Kent

  Guivrec Krantz, a corpse

  Dr. Helga Auer, a physicist for Transcorp

  Willy Naujack, an amateur biophysicist

  Flavia, an asteroid

  Computers, Preserve visitors, Barrier-hilthon staff, dolphins, Joneses, spacemen, Philadelphians, World Forest rangers, precinct guards, Gitler staff, Prime Center staff, and the unemployed.

  The dove descending breaks the air

  With tongues of incandescent terror…

  T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets

  BOOK ONE

  1 Biond on Edge

  The city inside the picture frame in Biond Smith’s office was standing on edge.

  Biond, of course, couldn’t see it, since he had his back to it. Only a tiny mirror set into the banked, horseshoeshaped console before him hinted at what was in the frame. But that didn’t matter. The perpendicular city was for his visitor to look at; Biond had seen it often before.

  While Biond read his way through the last few projected frames of a filmstrip, Jothen Kent, his visitor, studied the city with obvious interest. It was, after all, Jothen’s city: Gitler, Missouri, of which he was senior water engineer. Its peculiar name, Jothen even knew, derived from its founding by a group of Ukrainian refugees after World War III, in honor of an obscure politician who had led an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Soviet state.

  Biond knew this equally well, but it had no significance for him. To Biond, and to the Disaster Plans Board in general, Gitler was just City 2,103, World Zone 6 (Union of Occupied Classes).

 

  “Looks funny, seen all at once that way,” Jothen said. “I’m used to thinking of it from the inside—in terms of the sluices and penstocks and so on. Where’s the view coming from?”

  “VIGIL Eighteen, part of the Relay satellite net,” Biond said, flipping the viewer to the last frame of Jothen’s protocol. “The focal plane is about three miles up.”

  He turned in his chair to look directly at the picture. At once he could feel himself falling sidewise out of his seat, his feet being plucked out of the treadles of the console, his ears singing. Biond’s orientation was heavily biased toward the visual end of the sense triad; he sometimes felt a moment’s vertigo even while looking down at a map. Had it not been for the presence of Marg’t Splain on Prime Center, he would have reported himself for therapy long ago. Now he simply clung unobtrusively to the smooth, motherly forearms of his chair.

  The process was reversible: he could look at the picture as a map, hung on the wall. The whole area in the frame was uniformly green, except for the dead square of the flyport exactly in the center of the city. A muted black tracery made another square around the flyport, just one and a half miles out from the margins of the paved area. There was another such square surrounding that, at the same distance farther out; and finally—five miles from the mathematical center—the city came to an end, a pyramid with ten miles to a side. That final square had four immense, interrupted ellipses cut into each side, like bites out of a monstrous wafer. A closer look at the bites would even reveal tooth marks: eighty-story tiers of apartments arranged in ten one-hundred-foot-high setbacks.

  The Chinese walls that wove back and forth sinuously over the surface of every level of the city showed the same setback system, as did the margins of the individual levels. The thirty-two ziggurat-like towers reared above their levels at the comers of each square, as well as along each side in the ratio 1/2/1/0. The towers were conspicuous because, like the flyport, they were gray-white against the general background of the greenery; otherwise the small concentric circles that they made in the picture would have been invisible from a height of three miles.

  Except for its regularity and its comparatively small size, Gitler, Missouri, could have been any city in the world—any one of 100,000 such cities. And only its regularity, its perfectly rational shape, marked it out to the trained eye as a Disaster City.

  After a moment, Biond had to turn away from it, with a slight involuntary lurch as his muscles tried to react to the illusory shift in the gravity plane. He had set the scene up for Jothen, and it was downright foolish to become involved with it himself. It was too good a mirror of his own perturbations. Even in this year of rationality 2794, most people had some small insecurity that might be called forth by exposing them to something very familiar in an unfamiliar context. The city standing on edge was one move—far below the level of conscious argument, and by no means the most unfair in Biond’s armamentarium—in Biond’s campaign to persuade Jo-then Kent to stay home.

  Jothen did not seem to be at all disturbed. He was smiling faintly. He was a tall, heavy-boned man with red hair cropped close to his head in conventional style. His craggy but mobile face showed marked traces of some emergent Caucasoid strain and was decorated with rather thick red-gold eyebrows. One rarely saw body hair these days, but Biond had to admit that the streaks of rich light over the blue eyes had a startling and not unpleasant cosmetic effect. The contrast of red-gold and blue was picked up in an irregular pattern in

  Jothen’s dress half-cloak, which, however, he wore without the popular exaggerated shoulders. With them, Biond thought, he would have looked like a delta-winged air infantryman out of the pages of the Third War. The rest of Jothen’s costume was flatly utilitarian: sandals and white boxer’s shorts.

  “You’ve got a case for a vacation, Jo,” Biond said finally, turning off the film projection. “Admittedly Gitler’s never been occupied since it was built, and you’ve been on duty there the whole time. But now you know the other half of the story. We may need to occupy the town at any moment.”

  “The chances,” Jothen said slowly, “look pretty low to me, Biond. Otherwise I wouldn’t have asked permission to leave. None of the cities Gitler is set up to serve is in or even near the Zone of Fire. As for an epidemic, that’s even more unlikely than an earthquake—your own plague section admits that it hasn’t had so much as a sneeze reported to it, from anywhere in the world, since the winter of 2742. The storm season is over for my zone, and anyhow it’s my theory that modem cities, even the oldest, are one hundred percent weatherproof. And I’ve got a vacation coming to me.”

  “I know you have,” Biond said. “But I still think you ought to spend it in your own city.”

  Jothen shrugged. “I’ve had my fill of that for a while,” he said. “There’s not much to do in Gitler. It’s different if you live in an occupied’ town. A Disaster City is a damned dull place to be, Biond.”

  There was certainly no countering that proposition. Biond wondered whether it would be worth trying to persuade Jothen that Novoe Washingtongrad and even York Basin were also damned dull places to be. He shelved the notion as too last-ditch to bother with. “Where do you want to go, then?”

  “It’s all in the protocol. I thought one of the planetary resorts—”

  “Out,” Biond said flatly. “Suppose your city did have to be occupied on short notice—and you were in the twilight zone of Mercury, watching the sun come up and go back down again over the Antonaidi Range? That’d be a nice mess. Why don’t you go to one of the Preserves? There’s one near you, as I recall.”

  “Sure,” Jothen said. “Starved Rock Preserve. Kim’s an ecological surgeon there. I don’t think she’d wa
rm to spending her vacation at home either.”

  Something cold ran quickly down Biond’s back and vanished. There should have been no need for Jothen to remind him of that; it was in the film dossier Biond had just finished reading. The fact that he had set up a block on it was fresh warning, should another be needed, of how deeply the thought of Marg’t Splain was disturbing his judgment, even in apparently unrelated matters, The crass directness with which his unconscious had operated was unpleasantly fascinating: Jothen has Kim Wernicke. Kim Wernicke equals Marg’t Splain. I cannot have Marg’t Splain. Therefore: Kim Wernicke does not exist.

  “Well, there’s still the seaside, the floating hotels, the highlands, the poles,” he said. “But I don’t think you’ll have much of a chance at any of them. They’re booked up solidly for years in advance. Got a reservation anywhere?”

  “No,” Jothen said. “I was waiting until you—”

  “Good grief, Jo. You’re wasting your time, then.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jothen said. “If the planets are out, I’d like next best to go on a sort of busman’s holiday. I’m not interested in sightseeing or swimming, per se. Suppose I go to one of the big coastal cities, or even undersea, to study their water supply plants? I hear that something special in the way of new techniques had to be evolved for Triton Reef, for instance.”