The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  Saul Wassermann was out of the Talleyrand-Rasputin taxon. He wore conspicuously the trappings of power. His office was as large as the Mayor’s, and when the two met it was Saul who set the time.

  He set the time for Shire Brandon, too, by keeping Brandon waiting for an hour and twenty minutes in a room without a window or a decent chair.

  When Brandon at last got into the room the waiting wasn’t over, because Wassermann was talking on the telephone, turned around in his chair, looking out across City Hall Park at the hot afternoon city. Even inside the building you could smell the garbage strike, because City Hall Park had its ten feet of stacked garbage. There was no chair near the desk. Having no choice, Brandon simply stood uncomfortably until Wassermann turned, slammed the phone into its cradle and looked at him. “Thanks for coming, Brandon,” he said agreeably. “What have you got for me?”

  It was the moment. Brandon had rehearsed his speech, and he began it well. “This is the basic prospectus,” he said, dropping two hundred odd Xeroxed pages on Wassermann’s desk. “I don’t expect you to read it all—we academics get wordy. It makes several main points. First, it is people’s perception of facts, more than the facts themselves, that govern their behavior. Second, behind most of the strikes and unrest in the city, in fact in the world, lies a perception of unfairness and helplessness—people believe that they are not getting a fair share of the world’s goods, and at the same time that they have no good way to change that. Third, there is a reality behind most of the perceptions. The good things are not distributed evenly, and most people do not have any good way of affecting events. All this is prefatory, and it’s all covered in the first five pages—but you probably are aware of all this already.”

  Wassermann nodded: get along with it. “So what we propose,” Brandon lectured, a little faster, “is to cure this helplessness—this anomie, as it is called—by giving the average man some opportunity to exercise real control over the world he lives in. In a community as large as this no individual’s share of control can be large. But each one can be made to feel, because he can be allowed to have, some actual authority. This is accomplished by giving him an opportunity to determine to some extent how his own tax payments are spent—this is called ‘The Five Per Cent Solution’—and to select which government functions other than the absolute essentials he wishes to make use of—the ‘Cafeteria Budget’—and to take part in large decision making through the Universal Town Meeting.”

  He was saying it all quite well, Brandon told himself, but at the same time he could not help observing that Wassermann was not growing in enthusiasm. The charm level was dropping inch by inch; the impatience index rising, bit by bit. “There are,” Brandon went on, summarizing now, “a number of other proposals. The Selective Service Legislature. The Citizens’ Grand Jury. The—”

  “Excuse me,” said Wassermann, and although he was still polite Brandon recognized he had lost him. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. All these things you’re recommending, they’re about different ways of running the government?”

  “Basically, yes,” Brandon admitted.

  “Uh-huh,” said Wassermann. He pawed through papers on his desk for a moment until he found what he wanted. He thought for a second, then lifted his eyes to Brandon. “The reason I agreed to see you was I got a call from Feigerman & Tisdale. They’re pretty important in this city. Their construction projects are all over the place, and they’re well built and well run. They’ve got some pretty far-reaching ideas for projects the city should get into, so when Mr. Feigerman’s people said I should talk to you I jumped at the chance.”

  “And I appreciate it,” said Brandon.

  “But this isn’t what I expected,” Wassermann said kindly. “What I was hoping for from you was tangible things. We average losing thirteen thousand jobs in manufacturing a year. Give me something that makes jobs. We’ve priced apartments out of all reason and we still can’t house all the people that want to live here. Give me some housing plans. Political theories don’t give me. I can’t collect taxes on political theories.” He pulled open a drawer and lifted out a thick red folder. “Here’s something Mr. Feigerman had drawn up for us a few months ago. Why don’t you take it back to the Foundation? Let your people look it over. See if there are ways to make any of it happen. Then come back and see me again,” he said, rising to shake Brandon’s hand, “if there’s any point to it.”

  The Director was not angry, because the Director never allowed himself to get angry. He was just very, very disappointed. “I had hoped,” he said faintly, “that this would be a breakthrough for us. What were these proposals that Mr. Feigerman’s office gave the Mayor?”

  “Hardware,” said Brandon bitterly, “hardware and construction.” He stirred the folder, in its handsome plastic cover held on with a silken cord, with the embossed words Feigerman & Tisdale, Engineering.

  “Like Mr. Feigerman’s East River project?” the Director inquired. “Because I’m bound to say that the idea of putting a whole apartment city on the Queens bank strikes me as maximum use of amenities for everyone.”

  “Everything!” said Brandon, and it pretty nearly was. Half of them were things you were accustomed to see only on the cover of Popular Mechanics. A project for rebuilding the subways as maglevs. A project for constructing new prisons in depressed areas of the cities—new industry for the unemployed, good use of worthless land, easy access for the families of the prisoners (who very likely, though the proposal did not explicitly point it out, were already living in those same depressed areas—and a supplementary notion of putting them underground for the multiple purposes of saving energy, reducing the chances of escape and sparing the law-abiding neighbors, if any, the necessity of looking at them). There were proposals for building a dome over the island of Manhattan, harnessing the tides of the Lower Bay for electrical energy, damming Long Island Sound to turn it into a freshwater lake, cooling the city’s buildings in summer heat by pumping deep-aquifer cold water through its air-conditioners and double-decking the city’s main avenues with pedestrian malls. Every one of them was far out. But every one was buttressed with pages of feasibility studies and cost-benefit accounting.

  “I’m bound to say,” said the Director, “that some of these are quite ingenious.” He was looking at a page on the Princeton Ice Pond, suggesting the use of snow-blowers in winter to create and store ice for summer cooling.

  “The one I like,” Brandon said gloomily, “is the car-use meter. Every car has one, and it’s radio-controlled by zone—the closer you are to the center of town, the more it costs you to have your car there. It’s an English idea.”

  The Director nodded sagely. “But they need it as much in London as we do here, and if they’re not using it there must be terrible bugs in it. I imagine we’d find that true of most of these studies, eh, Shire? Impractical dreams, filled with conceptual faults?”

  Brandon shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s a work of genius,” he declared.

  And so it was, if not so much for what it proposed, then for what it left unsuggested. There was not a word in it about any of the sort of social inventions that Brandon had included. There was no suggestion of political change at all. As far as F & T’s recommendations were concerned, the City of New York would for its entire future life go on having a Mayor, a City Council, five Borough Presidents and a political club on every block. The pressure-cooker of special-interest lobbying and political muscle would steam right on forever. So most of the decision making would be in the hands of professionals…and the true genius of writing the report as F & T had done, Brandon perceived, was that the Saul Wassermanns were an integral part of the F & T future, while in the sort of world he strove to create they would have no place. “You know what we did?” Brandon asked. “We offered Saul Wassermann a plan for his own elimination. No wonder he didn’t like it!”

  I’m Maude Brandon, and I know it was damn foolishness for me to get myself pregnant while my husband was still in Vietna
m. But I thought he was dead. He was good about it, when he came back. He said if it hadn’t been for the war we’d be having a child about now, so this would be the child. He said if we moved to another city there wouldn’t be any friends or neighbors to start adding up dates, and with his veterans’ benefits he could go back to graduate school and we’d start a new life and no one would ever know the difference. But it turned out there was one person who could know the difference, by adding up dates, as soon as she was old enough.

  And the city went on doing its thing. The subways were slow, because the repercussions of the accident had not yet been cleared away, and the garbage continued to mount and stink. In a loft on Worth Street a raddled junkie (she had been Class of ’79 at Barnard) stuffed firecracker powder into a Band-Aid box and dreamed of plutonium. A pimp with a gravel voice looked incredulously at the diamond ring his girl had brought him as a peace offering, and knocked her down. It was his way of telling her to take it back and bring money instead. Fifteen Italian boys in Brooklyn surrounded a black mailman, sliding their heavy belts out of the loops. He was allowed to deliver mail in the white neighborhood, but he had made the mistake of drinking a Coke in their favorite candy store, and that was not allowed. And at the same time on East 58th Street a writer was tapping the last lines of his finest novel into a word processor, a delegate to the United Nations was about to propose a viable nuclear arms control and, in dirty, rickety old Bellevue Hospital, a surgeon with eight hundred thousand dollars’ worth of lasers and instrumentation and a ten-person team of highly skilled colleagues, was removing a tumor from the spinal cord of a Bowery derelict. For nothing.

  So it was in New York. So it was in all cities everywhere, but New York was the schwerpunkt. It is not only etymology that makes “city” = “civilization.” A village can support a store, a policeman and a post office. A town, more stores, a fire department and perhaps a movie theater. But these are only the beach froth of the great wave of civilization. To support specialized hospitals and specialized schools, an opera company or two, a symphony orchestra, night clubs, museums, great libraries, a choice of churches, sports teams, convention centers, an infinitely varied labor force, an access to instant capital, quick public transportation, shops that hold anything you might want, shops that offer what you need at any hour of any day, hookers, heroes, homosexuals, psychoanalysts, circuses, forensic pathologists and foreign diplomats—to support all these things and people, to provide a means and an outlet for all the manifold “civilized” activities of human beings what is necessary is critical mass. When enough of all these things come together we have civilization, and the place where we find it is called a “city.”

  The cost is steep, in every coin, but the city is an indispensable expense.

  To the task of solving Brandon’s burglary the city applied its forces. They were impressive, even if inadequate.

  The first suspects, of course, were the Pins. It was Brandon’s first guess, and his daughter’s, and the building superintendent’s, and that of the police. You could not say the police weren’t painstaking. They dusted every flat surface for prints. They knocked on every door to see if neighbors in the building had seen or heard anything. They made Brandon search out sales receipts and warranties, and copied down the numbers of every appliance they could.

  You could not say, either, that they were encouraging. When the burglary detective came back to report that he had no report he volunteered that not one stolen article in a hundred was ever recovered. “Most of the ones we do get when we bust a burglar never get back to their rightful owners anyway,” he added. “Can’t identify them. So they get auctioned off by the Police Property Custodian.”

  They were standing by the window where the main television set had once been. Across the street the Pins were engaging in their usual pursuits of an August afternoon. Two of them were squared off, a good ten feet apart. One was in a John L. Sullivan boxing pose, the other with his feet spread and pointed outward, like an Oriental frieze of a temple dancer. No blood seemed likely to be spilled. The detective looked at them with the technical appraisal of a tank officer observing a hill which, at that moment, be does not have to take. “If they’re the ones that took our things,” said Jo-Anne thoughtfully, “can’t you just go over there and look for them?”

  “Not without a warrant, honey, and we don’t have probable cause. Anyway, they’ve probably moved it all out by now.” But he didn’t want to discuss the Pins, except in generalities. They were Persons in Need of Supervision, all right, but he wouldn’t commit himself on what they needed to be supervised for. Yes, they had been institutionalized. A proper concern for the Pins’ civil rights didn’t allow him to say for what—but just what the hell, Mr. Brandon, do you think young black kids get institutionalized for? Mugging? Rape? Drugs? Yes. All of the above. Most of the Pins had begun accumulating a green sheet before they were twelve. The fact that they were now in a halfway house didn’t mean that they had reformed. It only meant at most that somebody, somewhere, thought there was some hope they would.

  But as the detective left it was clear that he was not that person.

  If you added up the replacement value of everything that was taken it came to nearly two thousand dollars. But that was an insurance-type figure, not a real one. The living-room TV set had been expensive when Brandon bought it for the tenth wedding anniversary, but its picture tube was about to go and the tuning strips had worn so that you could hardly get some channels at all. Jo-Anne’s pink clock-radio with the Donald Duck stencils had been with her since she was five, and frequently dropped. The most serious damage was internal. Particularly to Jo-Anne. Children grow up by meeting challenges, but if the challenges are too severe they can’t be met. She no longer asked difficult questions about her mother. She had given up writing those long, chatty letters that there was no way to mail. She spent more and more time in her room with the door closed and when Brandon, worried, coaxed her out to talk out her feelings she simply stared him down. I’m all right, Daddy, for the heaven’s sake! But she wasn’t.

  So what was Brandon to do? It was not through his own decision that he was a single parent, without ever having learned how to be one. He humbled himself to ask Jessie Grai for advice—after all, she had a doctorate in psychology—but the Director of Life Style Analysis had never had a family. Brandon got better advice out of Ann Landers, whom he read religiously. The best advice he got was all to the same effect: Spend time with the child. Encourage her to talk. Try to be cheerful around her, but don’t give her special consideration—make her do her chores and study her homework. And, again and above all, spend time with her. But the obstacle to that was Jo-Anne herself. For the heaven’s sake, Daddy, no, I don’t want you to take your vacation now so that we can go to Disney World! Thank you, Daddy, but I’ve been to all the museums on class trips. No, thank you, Daddy, there isn’t any movie I want to see right now. On the last hot, muggy Saturday before school started he persuaded her at least to take a walk by the river with him, and unprotestingly she made tuna-fish salad sandwiches and filled a thermos with orange juice. Down at the far end of the block two of the Pins were having one of their long-range arguments, one on one curb, the other one across the street. What the argument was about was impossible to tell. Even in the echoing canyon of the block’s high-rise concrete walls you could not quite make out the words, or at least never more than one of them, so what Brandon heard was only, “Mumble FUCKIN mumble mumble FUCKIN mumble FUCK mumble mumble FUCK.” Jo-Anne gave no sign of hearing. She took her father’s hand when they crossed the avenue and politely refused to let him carry her shoulder-bag with their lunch, and when they were seated on a fairly clean concrete block at the edge of a more or less abandoned pier she listened attentively as he pointed out the seaplane coming in for a landing, the pleasure boats, the Circle Line excursion vessel, the tugs prodding along their strings of barges, the bridges north and south across the river.

  The advantage of a meal, when you are w
ith a ten-year-old daughter who doesn’t want to talk about the things that are bothering her, is that it gives you something to do for many minutes. The disadvantage is that when it is over you are out of programming. “The last time we were here,” Brandon offered as they were finishing the sandwiches, “remember, Mommy wanted to go up in a seaplane.”

  “I remember,” said Jo-Anne in a neutral voice, and then, brightly, “Look, Daddy, it’s beginning to rain.”

  Brandon was equal to the occasion. They retreated under the shelter of the East River Drive, where more of the great square concrete blocks had been left to keep cars from driving into the parking spaces without paying for them. The blocks were dusty here. They didn’t get the usual blessing of being rinsed off in rains, so all the airborne solid matter that settled on everything in the city not only settled there, it stayed. Brandon wiped off a block as best he could with their paper napkins. Even so, Jo-Anne’s shorts would have to go in the wash.

  It wasn’t quite as nice as by the water in the sunshine. The smell of tar and wetness was diluted by smells of gas and burned-off tires and old, undisturbed dirt; weeks before the space had been one of the city’s best hidey-holes for uncollected garbage, and there were still traces of that in the air. But Jo-Anne was as happy as she ever was, these days. Being out in a thunderstorm was an adventure. Across the East River they could see, through sheets of rain, a newspaper printing plant, the tower of a radio transmitter, the blot that had once been the Navy Yard—and even a stretch of green, somehow overlooked in the industrial building of the past centuries. If de Rintelen Feigerman’s plans went through, all that would be wiped out by the pastel towers of East River East. Eighteen hundred apartments to a unit. Twelve units projected. Allowing for the standard two point two persons per unit, nearly fifty thousand people would be living there in the next five years, swimming in their five great pools, playing on their racket-ball courts, shopping in their self-contained supermarkets and drugstores and boutiques, skimming (if the money held out) by hovercraft across the East River to Wall Street or 42d Street to their jobs, and providing an interesting spectator sport for the welfare families in the Jacob Riis houses on the Manhattan side of the river. It was possible, Brandon acknowledged to himself, that Feigerman and Tisdale and Saul Wassermann had the right of it. There would be a lot of jobs in East River East. Given the choice between fifteen hundred well paying jobs and some airy-fairy fantasy about making civic decisions justly and with the participation of all, which would strike him as most valuable—assuming he were Feigerman, Tisdale or Wassermann, with the responsibilities they bore for making money either by building the city or providing funds to run it?