The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  The subway got him as far as 23d Street, but the buses were hopeless and there was, of course, no such thing as a visible taxi. So Brandon slogged through the deepening snow all the way across town, wondering how he had got himself into promising to work out Jocelyn Feigerman’s UTM.

  There wasn’t really a question. He had got himself into it in the same way that Albert Einstein had found himself urging the construction of an atomic bomb, that Werner Von Braun’s aim at the stars had missed and hit London, that scientists all over the world found themselves going along with causes not their own. When you have invented something truly remarkable, you want to see if it will work.

  The conversation could easily have gone a different way, Brandon told himself. He could have temporized, stalled, got out with his research program intact but no specific commitment to help the right-to-lifers…if he had been deft enough. He could have honeyed the old girl along. She was the real muscle behind F & T now, with her husband still recuperating from the severe damage of the bomb blast.

  But he hadn’t.

  The going was really bad now. With the sanitmen’s strike he had not expected to see any snowplows—and indeed there were almost none; but somebody had made at least a pass or two on the main north-south avenues. Not enough to make travel easy for the cars, which were just inching along when they moved at all. Enough to throw up drifts along the curbs, entombing parked cars and making pedestrians like Brandon into alpinists. He was glad enough to turn into his own block.

  It was full dark, and the streetlights had a bluish aura—the snow, Brandon thought, without quite being able to figure out cause and effect. Certainly the snow was intensifying every hour. There were no pedestrians in sight, and on this quiet side street no cars moving either. The house of the Pins was mostly dark—as it always was; what they did with themselves in there Brandon could not guess. His own building was brighter, though there was no one in the lobby.

  There was no one in his apartment, either. Jo-Anne was not at home.

  That was impossible! Jo-Anne was always at home when he got back from the office! She would stay at school for her after-hours classes, the piano, the ballet, the swimming club; there was one every day, and every one of them had the kindness to end at five, just in time for Jo-Anne to get her regular lift back to the apartment and be there when Brandon came in the door. She never failed. It was impossible that she should not be there!

  But it was true.

  Name is Malcolm White. They bust me twice for possession and the third time for selling, so the damn judge says he tired of seeing my face in his courtroom and he puts me away. Wasn’t bad. Came out, and they stick me in this turkey house way damn downtown, don’t know a soul, got nothing to do, I’d rather be back at the place. They’re going to learn me some skills and get me a slave. They say. Don’t do it, though. They don’t ever do what they say they’re going to do, except bust my ass. They do that fine.

  Jo-Anne wasn’t in the apartment, and Brandon was becoming very nearly frantic. She hadn’t left any note, but there was a message. It was spread on his bed. After the apartment was robbed and Brandon’s locked file was broken open, he had replaced it with a new strongbox. The new strongbox came equipped with two keys. Jo-Anne had found one of them where he had hidden it, Scotch-taped to the bottom of his desk drawer. It was not the copy of Penthouse that interested her, nor his financial records, nor the handful of stock and savings certificates. There were two things that had taken her attention, and she had left them on his bed. One was her birth certificate. The other was Brandon’s Army discharge, with his service record.

  Jo-Anne had paid close attention in her Sex Education classes. She knew that the gestation period for human babies was nine months. She knew what that implied.

  So Brandon sat in the apartment, with all the lights on, still wearing his coat, with the slush melting down into his socks, cradling the telephone and listening to the endless ringing of the 911 emergency number. It was a good day for emergencies in New York City. He counted more than forty rings, and still no human voice answering, while his eyes were fixed firmly on the doorknob in the hope that he could will it to turn, and his mind was rebelliously refusing his orders to be calm. In the other room the radio he had automatically turned on was furnishing not music but bulletins of disaster: A tractor-trailer had jackknifed on the Jersey exit ramp of the Lincoln Tunnel, and all lanes were blocked. The LIRR had annulled half its trains, and the remaining ones were subject to two-hour delays. All the airports were closed. No cars were allowed on the George Washington, Tappan Zee or Verrazano bridges, and the East River bridges were just crawling. As was the slow ring of the 911 phone; and Brandon couldn’t stand waiting any longer. He couldn’t stand waiting for the elevator, either, and took the fire stairs two at a time down to the superintendent’s apartment.

  The super had his TV going instead of a radio, but the words were not any more pleasing. Not just the weather. A bomb had been reported in Grand Central, with twenty thousand stuck commuters evacuated into the snow; a fire on the West Side was burning out of control because the few working firemen couldn’t get through the snow and abandoned cars to reach it. “Oh, sure, I saw Joie,” said the super, but he didn’t sound reassuring. “She was, uh, crying.” He hesitated. “I think that black guy this morning got her kind of upset.” Brandon listened as Rozak told him about the Pin in the window with his—threatened? pretended?—with his almost-jump, and cursed himself for not understanding, for not asking Jo-Anne what the matter was, for—for everything that had happened in the past year, a catalogue too long for him to rehearse. “Then when her school was closed—”

  “What’s that about her school?”

  “They sent the kids right home, didn’t you know? Because of the storm, I guess—anyway, she came back about nine-thirty, and then right after lunch I saw her go out. That’s when she was crying, Mr. Brandon. Listen,” he said helpfully, “it’s probably nothing, but maybe you should call the cops.”

  “Call them! I tried the 911 number, they’re always busy!”

  “Don’t fool with that 911, call the precinct. Use my phone. The number’s on the wall right over it—there, go ahead.”

  Numbly, Brandon did as he was told. The wait for the local precinct was interminable too, but he hung on doggedly because he had no better idea, while the superintendent and his wife conversed in low tones, in whatever the language was that they had been born to.

  He was absolutely certain that, in this day with the city destroying itself, the police would take very little interest in one more missing little girl. He was right. When at last he got the desk sergeant it was only the mention of Mr. Rozak’s name that got him even the cursory attention of taking a description for the missing persons report. At least that was something! Something to laugh over when she came home, he thought, maybe even something to use to instruct her with, when she understood from that act how frightened he had been.

  “Mr. Brandon?”

  He realized he was still holding the phone, although the desk sergeant had long since rung off. “What?”

  The superintendent was wearing a curious expression, halfway between a funeral mourner’s and the intended reassurance of a visitor to a patient in intensive care. “My wife says one of the tenants told her something.”

  He seemed reluctant to get it out. “What?” barked Brandon.

  “Well, maybe it’s nothing, but—anyway, the woman in 2-H said she saw a girl in the Pins’ house across the street.” He hesitated. “It didn’t look like there was anything wrong with her exactly,” he added, “but she was a white girl, and it was kind of funny. The tenant said she sort of just lay in the open window for a while, and then this black guy grabbed her and pulled her in.”

  The fat old Pin-pusher listened for a moment, one foot blocking the door, then he opened it wide. “Your daughter ain’t here, Mister,” he said, “but you come on upstairs. Ask the boys if they seen anything. Then I’ll show you something.”
/>   Brandon had often wondered what the inside of that bleak four-story building with the bare flagpole was like. It was spartan-neat. The halls were sterile white, linoleum tile on the floors, nothing on the walls but a lettered placard at each bedroom door—occupants’ names and what looked like a duty roster—nothing in the way of furniture anywhere. At each door black faces peered out at Brandon and Mr. Rozak and the fat keeper. They weren’t hostile, or even curious. They just looked. In the fourth-floor front the keeper led them into a room with three metal beds, a bureau, a couple of old chests of drawers, pictures of Mean Joe Green and Herschel Walker taped to the walls. The Pin-pusher nodded to the young men in the room and reached under the bed. What he pulled out was what looked at first like a crumpled Macy’s Parade balloon, small size. It seemed to have yellow hair.

  “This what the lady saw?” asked the pusher, shaking it out to show what it was. A rubber doll, life size. One of those sex things that you saw in the 42d Street porn shops.

  The Pins, at least, were enjoying themselves. When they saw the faces of Brandon and the super their laughter was considerable, and they relayed a blow-by-blow description of everything that was happening, at the top of their voices, to the other inhabitants of the Pins house. Brandon stood there listening; how terribly the tragedies of life turned into farce! One of the Pins had hidden the doll belonging to another; the robbed Pin had threatened to jump out the window until he got it back; then the robber had threatened to throw the doll out—it was all sordid and—and, yes, funny.

  But the super stopped listening. He was standing by the window, gazing across the street into his own apartment building. He said, “For the love of God.”

  It took Brandon a moment to figure out which apartment Rozak was looking at but, after all, there wasn’t much doubt. One was far brighter than any of the others. It seemed to have at least a dozen lights going in each room—desk lights, high-intensity tensors, floor lights in several different designs. It was the corner apartment on the fourth floor—the one belonging to Mr. Becquerel, Brandon realized, the nice man who worked at the United Nations or something—and it was radiant. From across the street Brandon could see into the living room, as far as the kitchenette and the hall foyer, into the bedroom with its unmade queen-sized bed and chests burdened with appliances.

  In the middle of urgent woes, Brandon paused to look. It was almost prurience. There was a sly, sneaky pleasure in peering into the private life of a casual acquaintance. Mr. Becquerel had to be quite a television fan, for there were three sets in the living room alone, plus two whole tape video decks and a couple of cameras; you’d never have guessed that about Mr. Becquerel! But that evanescent thought was swallowed up in a swift realization. His own apartment was almost as open to inspection. The window drapes, that looked opaque from inside the room, were not much more than theatrical scrim when the light was inside. All those times he had thought himself alone and unobserved, doing private things and personal—for how many of those times had he amused an audience of Pins? The view into his own apartment was no more obscured than into Becquerel’s, with its bright lights scattered all over, among the TV sets, and the stereos, and the word processors, and the Cuisinarts and the electric typewriters—

  And suddenly Brandon realized that that bright pink clock-radio had been his daughter’s. It had not, after all, been the Pins who had burglarized his apartment.

  Mr. Rozak was thrilled—almost thrilled enough to forget about Brandon’s missing child—thrilled enough to insist on calling the information in to his friend on the precinct desk, and then to urge Brandon to have dinner with him and his family, to stop worrying, to take it easy because nine times out of ten missing kids just turned up all by themselves a couple of hours late, why, he remembered himself when he was a little kid just in America he took the wrong subway and found himself at Main Street, Flushing, without a dime in his pocket to get back on the subway or make a phone call…it was all well intentioned, and all wholly repugnant to Brandon. The last thing he wanted was to be looked at by people who didn’t share his worry.

  And there was always the chance that Jo-Anne indeed might call. Which presented him with a whole new set of problems. Inspiration: To call the parents of all of her classmates, one after another, on the chance that Jo-Anne had sheltered with one of them. Drawback: What if she tried to call him when the phone was busy? Would a ten-year-old have the tenacity to keep trying until she got an answer? Would she be in a position where that was possible? Brandon felt a sudden explosion of furious rage at Becquerel, who had stolen his telephone-answering machine; why, maybe Jo-Anne had tried to call a hundred times and not been able to leave a message!

  He resisted the impulse to dash there and make Becquerel disgorge his loot—even with the added attraction of punching the man’s face in.

  By midnight he had gone as far with the list of possible refuges as he could—the last two parents he had called had been got out of bed to answer the phone and, while they were sympathetic, they were also annoyed. And no word. All night the radio by his bed and the TV in the living room had been broadcasting tidings of disaster—a twenty-three-car pileup on the Long Island Expressway (but since no car could go more than ten miles an hour in the storm, no lives lost), subways still operating where they were underground but irregular or absent entirely where they were in the open, people stuck in railroad stations (trains annulled or indefinitely delayed), stuck in bus stations, stuck in airports, every hotel jammed and people stuck in lobbies…stuck. The whole city was stuck. Nothing moved. He was barely aware of the change when he heard a plow in his own block, but he was too sunk in despair to go to the window and look.

  When the policeman knocked on the door he felt a surge of terror. “Is it—have you found my daughter?” he choked out.

  The officer was wiping snow off his glasses, an elderly man with gold braid on his cap. He looked puzzled. “Are you Shire Brandon?” And at the nod, “I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about your daughter. You’re a hard man to reach, Mr. Brandon. We’ve been trying to call you all night.”

  “I see.” Energy poured out of Brandon. He felt himself slump. “Well, if it’s the burglary loot, it’s in the apartment next door. I don’t know if he’s still at home, but—”

  “Not burglary either, Mr. Brandon. It’s the Mayor. He wants you downtown right away, and he sent me to get you.”

  Brandon hadn’t ridden in a truck since the Nam and never in one that had a snowplow rigging—there was not much plowing of snow going on in Vietnam. There was not much going on this time, either. The truck’s principal job was to get Brandon and the police captain down to City Hall. It only plowed where plowing might help it to make better time, usually because abandoned cars blocked the center of the avenues. Huddled in the noise, between the driver and the police captain, Brandon shouted into the captain’s ear, sentence by sentence, his worries about his daughter. In exchange he got the same statistic his superintendent had offered him, finding it no more reassuring.

  The space just in front of City Hall had been plowed, and two plows were still there, along with fifteen or twenty other vehicles, most of them with chauffeurs inside keeping the motors running and moving the limousines out of the way of the plows from time to time. The captain climbed down first and, as he held the door for Brandon, he said, “One thing I didn’t understand. You said your daughter had some special reason to be upset—do you mind telling me what it was?”

  Brandon stopped with the snow beating against his face. Did he mind? It was the statement that had never crossed his lips to anyone in this city—to anyone anywhere. But was there any reason to keep it secret now?

  He licked snow from his mouth and said, “She’s not my child. She found that out this morning.”

  “Um.” The policeman nodded, his face showing that reservation of judgment which displays a judgment already made. People who kept secrets from their kids! “I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Adopted children learn to deal with i
t—”

  “She’s not adopted. She…” He hesitated, then plunged into it. “My wife got pregnant when I was in Nam. Jo-Anne never knew. I didn’t know what to tell her.”

  What the policemen said in return Brandon didn’t know—something reassuring, maybe something sympathetic. Maybe he said nothing at all, not even good-by, because Brandon was hardly aware of what anyone said to him, or where he was. He was thinking not even of Jo-Anne, not even of his wife; he was remembering those hours in the waiting room of the hospital, trying to read Time while all the time he was wondering who the baby’s father was…whether the baby would resemble him…yes, more than anything else, what color the baby would be. It wasn’t race prejudice that obsessed him with that question. It was the difficulty, no, the impossibility, of pretending that the child was his own if it were conspicuously of a different color—a practical matter, not a question of bigotry.

  He told himself that.

  The Hall was busier this late night of a blizzard, when all sensible people were in their homes, than usually of a weekday afternoon. No one seemed to know exactly why Shire Brandon was here. He was ushered to a seat by a woman wearing a right-to-life button, given a cup of instant coffee by a man from Gay Lib and a newspaper to look at by a woman from the Haitian-American Friendship Society. The big waiting room was full of people, all of them talking to each other, none of them known to Brandon. Brandon didn’t want to talk to any of them. The only person he wanted to talk to was not here. He approached the woman who had told him to wait, leaning across her desk to be heard as he asked to use the telephone. You could always tell when you were on the losing end. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s taxpayers’ money that’s involved and I’m responsible for it.”

  “I’ll pay!”

  “It’s not that easy. I’ll have to make out a miscellaneous-funds-received slip and channel it through Non-Tax Accounts and—” But ultimately he was allowed to make his call. Of course, there was no answer at his apartment; that had been too much to hope for. When he was explaining to the super about the note he would like Mr. Rozak to leave on his door and how to reach him if he heard something, anything at all, about Jo-Anne, somebody tapped him on his shoulder.