Astounding Science Fiction, February 1952 (British Edition) — page 48: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

46 him a feeling that was afterwards to be forever renewed when he heard Madeleine singing—that each note was a ray of pure and different color. The phrase “coloratura soprano” would have made sense to him then, if he had ever heard it. He rose to his feet and shouted: “Do any of you know French?” Then, into the amazed silence: “You don’t even know what you’re laughing at!” And to Made- leine: “Let’s get out of here.” He remembered later, how Madeleine, soft and trusting for being defended, cried and cried as he held her. And her words: “IT can’t stand it here, Dan. I dns can’t stand it any more.’ . A week later she was gone, joining one of a company of traveling entertainers that occasionally made the rounds of the small centers of population. He was not to see her again for years. Her absence decided him. Without her, it seemed to Daniel that all the glow had disappeared from the haunts of his boy- hood. He had completed what passed for schooling at Amber Grove and his parents did not oppose him when he asked to go on with his education. A vague dissatisfac- tion and yearning decided him against one of the many small school towns. He selected New York City and Columbia University. New York was a dying giant whose throes had been prolonged for a longer time than those of the other great cities. The glamour clinging to the man-made cliffs and canyons still drew a few tourists of means and permitted some facilities to operate. A degenerate industry clung to the opposite Jersey shore and some commerce continued to enter its vast basin. The seat of government had also at last returned, fleeing from dead Washington. The present scanty population of the city hardly sufficed to fill the most gracious of its former great hotels and these, being virtually without facilities, offered a spartan existence as compared with the air-conditioned wombs of the great Trees. With completely un- conscious irony the inhabitants of the Waldorf Towers thought of themselves as voluntary primitives, leading the more natural life of an older and harder pattern, while everywhere about them loomed the fading magnificence of dying glory. Except for Columbia, New York’s great universities had disintegrated, their inherit- ance passing to California because of the latter’s tremendous climactic superiority for ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION flora-chemistry, the mew queen of the sciences. Columbia alone offered competent training in the poorly regarded physical sciences and maintained herself in the proximity of surviving industry. 3 Daniel, undecided and maileable, soon succumbed to the influence of the Manhat- tan Clique, which was not the name of a group so much as an attitude shared by everyone in the city; if you disliked the Trees and the status quo, you were a member of the Manhattan Clique. There were a myriad of schemes, Utopian or ata- vistic, for a newer or older order of things, and the University was naturally the center of feeling. It was this influence and his friendship with Robin Wark that led him to the extreme step of undertaking the study of physics and mathematics with atomic physics as his goal. Robin Wark was the acknowleged head of the mythical Manhattan Clique. Descend- ant of Peter Wark, the founder of flora- chemistry, he was burdened like every Wark before him, with a great ancestral tradition. His reaction took the form of damning the Warks and their work. Nevertheless, he was a florachemist teaching a course of his own devising called Planetary Ecology and con- ducted research in plant biochemistry. He, too, was engaged in the production of a new and perfected flora, but his plants were liter- ally not of this world. They were, in fact, designed for Venus, and could he have planted them there, they would in the course of a few centuries have so altered the atmo- spheric and climactic environment of the evening star as to transform it into a fertile and comfortable home for mankind. His notions for the transportation of these pro- ductions to their intended home were as hopeless as they were ingenious. He was sure, however, that if he could succeed in this venture men would again respond to the challenge of a new world to win, especially in the face of future overpopulation, which he freely and cheerfully predicted. Meanwhile Daniel was spending the hap- piest years of his life. To him, as to so many before him, a new world unfolded. It was a world revealed in mathematical equations -and inhabited by ultimate physical particles, and his enthusiasm and ability were such that his teachers had every reason to be satisfied. Moreover, in his graduate years and later.as instructor at Columbia he be- came a great proponent of the Manhattan Clique and its unofficial expert in all discus- sions dealing with physical energy. The EOMmiIGcsoOo CS (S@) Se