The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  One forty-five by the clock on the top of the Williamsburgh Bank Building, and time to move along. He trotted and swaggered along the open cut of the Long Island Rail Road yards. Down below were the concrete railguides with their silent, silver seams of metal. Marcus kicked hubcaps until he found a loose one. He pried it off, one eye open for cops, and then scaled it down onto the tracks. Its momentum carried it down to crash against the concrete guide strip, but the magnetic levitation had it already. It was beginning to move sidewise before it struck. It picked up speed, wobbling up and down in the field, showering sparks as it struck against the rail, until the maglev steadied it. It was out of sight into the Atlantic Avenue tunnel in a moment and Marcus, pleased, looked up again at the bank clock. One fifty-five; he was already late, but not late enough for a taste of the cat if he hurried. So he hurried.

  Marcus Garvey de Harcourt’s neighborhood did not look bleak to him. It looked like the place where he had always lived, although of course all the big construction machines were new. Marcus understood that the project was going to change the neighborhood drastically—they said for the better. He had seen the model of the way Bedford-Stuyvesant was going to look, had listened to politicians brag about it on television, had been told about it over and over in school. It would be really nice, he accepted, but it wasn’t nice yet. Between the burned-out tenements and the vacant lots of the year before and the current bare excavations and half-finished structures there was not much to choose, except that now the rats had been disturbed in their dwellings and were more often seen creeping across the sidewalks and digging into the trash heaps. Marcus ran the last six blocks to his father’s candy store, past the big breeder powerplant that fed a quarter of Brooklyn with electricity, cutting across the scarred open spaces, ducking through the barbed wire and trotting between the rows of tall towers that one day would be windmills. He paused at the corner to survey the situation. The big black car wasn’t there, which was good. His mother wasn’t waiting for him outside the store, either; but as he reached the door, panting a little harder than necessary to show how fast he’d been running, she opened it for him. His father was there, too, with his coat on already. He didn’t speak, but looked up at the clock behind the soda fountain. “Damn, Marcus,” his mother said crossly, “you know your daddy don’t like to be kept waiting, what’s the matter with you?”

  “Wouldn’t let me out no sooner, Nillie.”

  His father glanced at him, then at the storeroom door. Behind it, Marcus knew, the cat-o’-nine-tails was hanging. Marcus’s mother said, “You want trouble, Marcus, you know damn well he’s gone give it to you.”

  “No trouble, Nillie. Couldn’t help it, could I?” There wasn’t any sense in arguing the question, because the old man either would get the cat out or wouldn’t. Most likely he wouldn’t, because this thing at the prison was important to him and he wouldn’t want to waste any more time, but either way it was out of Marcus’s hands.

  The old man jerked his head at Marcus and limped out of the store. He didn’t speak. He never did talk much, because it hurt him to try. At the curb he lifted an imperious hand. A cruising gypsy cab pulled up, surprising Marcus. His father did not walk very well on the kneecaps that had once been methodically crushed, but the place they were going was only about a dozen blocks away. You had to sell a lot of Sunday newspapers to make the price of a cab fare. Marcus didn’t comment. He spoke to his father almost as seldom as his father spoke to him. He hopped in, scrunched himself against the opposite side of the seat, and gazed out of the window as his father ordered, “Nathanael Greene Institute, fast.”

  Because the Nathanael Greene Institute for Men was built underground, the approach to it looked like the entrance to a park. Nathanael Greene wasn’t a park. It had forty-eight hundred residents and a staff of fifty-three hundred to attend them. Each resident had a nearly private room with a television set, toilet facilities and air-conditioning, and its construction cost, more than eighty-five thousand dollars per room, slightly exceeded the cost of building a first-class hotel. Nathanael Greene was not a hotel, either, and most of its luxuries were also utilitarian: the air-conditioning ducts were partly so that tear gas or sternutants could be administered to any part of the structure; the limit of two persons per cell was to prevent rioting. Nathanael Greene was a place to work, with a production line of microelectronic components; a place to learn, with optional classes in everything from remedial English to table tennis; a place to improve oneself, with non-optional programs designed to correct even the most severe character flaws. Such as murder, robbery and rape. Nathanael Greene had very little turnover among its occupants. The average resident remained there eleven years, eight months and some days. If he left earlier, he usually found himself in a far less attractive place—an Alaskan stockade, for example, or a gas chamber. Nathanael Greene was not a place where just anyone could go. You had to earn it, with at least four felonies of average grade, or one or two really good ones, murder two and up. Major General Nathanael Greene of Potowomut, Rhode Island, the Quaker commander whose only experience of penology had been to preside over the court-martial of John André, might not have approved the use of his name for New York City’s most maximal of maximum-security prisons. But as he had been dead for more than two centuries his opinion was not registered.

  Of course there was a line of prison visitors, nearly a hundred people waiting to reach the kiosk that looked like a movie theater’s box office. Most were poorly dressed, more than half black, all of them surly at being kept waiting. Marcus’s father nudged him toward the big Bed-Stuy model as he limped to take his place in the queue. The boy did what was expected of him. He skipped over to study the model. It was a huger, more detailed copy of the one in the public library. Marcus tried to locate the place where his father’s candy store was, but would not be any longer once the project was completed. He circled it carefully, according to orders, but when he had done that he had run out of orders and his father was still far down the waiting line.

  Marcus took a chance and let himself drift along the graveled path, farther and farther away from the line of visitors. What the top of Nathanael Greene looked like was a rather eccentric farm; you had no feeling, strolling between the railings that fenced off soybeans on one side and tomato vines on the other, that you were walking over the heads of ten thousand convicts and guards. It looked as much like Marcus’s concept of the South African plains as anything else, and he imagined himself a black warrior infiltrating from one of the black republics toward Cape Town—except that the concrete igloos really were machine-gun posts, not termite nests, and the guard who yelled at him to go back carried a real rifle. A group of convicts, he saw, was busy hand-setting pinetree seedlings into plowed rows. Christmas trees for sale in a year or two, probably. They would not be allowed to grow very tall, because nothing on this parklike roof of the prison was allowed to grow high enough to interfere with the guards’ field of fire. A squint at the bank clock told him that if he didn’t get inside the prison pretty soon he was going to be late for his after-hours job with old Mr. Feigerman and his whee-clickety-beep machinery; a glance at his father told him it was time to hurry back into line.

  But his father hadn’t noticed. His father was staring straight ahead, and when they moved up a few steps his limp was very bad. Marcus felt a warning stab of worry, and turned just in time to see a long, black car disappearing around the corner and out of sight.

  There were a lot of long, black cars in the world, but not very many that could make his father limp more painfully. For Marcus there was no doubt that the car was the one that the scar-faced man used, the one who came around to the candy store now and then to make sure the numbers and the handbook that kept them eating were being attended to; the one who always gave him candy, and always made his father’s limp worse and his gravelly voice harder to understand; and it was not good news at all for Marcus to know that this man had interested himself in Marcus’s visit to the prison.


  When they got to the head of the line the woman gave them an argument. She wore old-fashioned tinted glasses, concealing her eyes. Her voice was shrill, and made worse by the speaker system that let them talk through the bulletproof glass. “You any relative of the inmate?” she demanded, the glasses disagreeably aimed toward Marcus’s father.

  “No, ma’am.” The voice was hoarse and gravelly, but understandable—Nillie had told the boy that his father was lucky to be able to talk at all, after what they did to his throat. “Not relative, exactly. But kind of family,” he explained, his expression apologetic, his tone deferential, “’cause little Marcus here’s his kid, and my wife’s sister’s his mother. But no, ma’am, no blood relation.”

  “Then you can’t see him,” she said positively, glasses flashing. “The only visitors permitted are immediate family, no exceptions.”

  Marcus’s father was very good at wheedling, and very good at knowing when other tactics were better. “See him?” he cried in his gravelly voice, expression outraged. “What would I want to see the son of a bitch for? Why, he ruined my wife’s sister’s life! But the man’s got a right to see his own kid, don’t he?”

  The woman pursed her lips, and the glasses shone first on Marcus’s father, then on the boy. “You’ll have to get permission from the chief duty officer,” she declared. “Window Eight.”

  The chief duty officer was young, black, bald and male, and he opened the door of his tiny cubicle and allowed them in, studying Marcus carefully. “Who is it you want to see here, Marc?”

  “My father,” the boy said promptly, according to script. “I ain’t seen him since I was little. Name’s Marcus, not Marc,” he added.

  “Marcus, then.” The officer touched buttons on his console, and the file photograph of Inmate Booking Number 838-10647 sprang up. HARVEY John T., sentenced to three consecutive terms of twelve to twenty years each for murder one, all three homicides committed during the commission of a major felony—in this case, the robbery of a liquor store. There was not much resemblance between the inmate and the boy. The inmate was stout, middle-aged, bearded—and white. The boy was none of those things. Still, his skin color was light enough to permit one white parent. “This your daddy, Marcus?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s him,” said Marcus, peering at the stranger on the screen.

  “Do you know what he’s here for?”

  “Yes, sir. He here because he broke the law. But he still my daddy.”

  “That’s right, Marcus,” sighed the duty officer, and stamped the pass. He handed it to Marcus’s father. “This is for the boy, not you. You can escort the boy as far as the visiting section, but you can’t go in. You’ll be able to see through the windows, though,” he added, but did not add that so would everybody else, most especially the guards.

  The pass let them into the elevator, and the elevator took them down and down, eight floors below the surface of the ground, with an obligatory stop at the fourth level while an armed guard checked the passes again. Nathanael Greene Institute did not call itself escape-proof, because there is no such thing; but it had designed in a great many safeguards to make escape unlikely. Every prisoner wore a magnetically coded ankle band, so his location was known to the central computers at every minute of the day; visitors like Marcus and his father were given, and obliged to wear, badges with a quite different magnetic imprint; the visiting area was nowhere near the doors to the outside world, and in fact even the elevators that served it were isolated from the main body of the prison. And as Marcus left his father in a sealed waiting room, two guards surrounded him and led him away to a private room. A rather friendly, but thorough, matron helped undress him and went through everything he possessed, looking for a message, an illicit gift, anything. Then he was conducted to the bare room with the wooden chairs and the steel screen dividing them.

  Marcus had been well rehearsed in what to say and do, and he had no trouble picking out Inmate 838-10647 from his photograph. “Hello, da,” he said, with just enough quaver in his voice to be plausible for the watching guards.

  “Hello, Marcus,” said his putative father, leaning toward the steel screen as a father might on seeing his long-lost son. The lines for the interview had also been well rehearsed, and Marcus was prepared to be asked how his mother was, how he was doing in school, whether he had a job to help his ma out. None of that was any trouble to respond to, and Marcus was able to study this heavy-set, stern-looking white man who was playing the part of his father as he told him about Nillie’s arthritis and her part-time job as companion to old Mr. Feigerman’s dying wife; about how well he had done on the test on William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and his B + grade in history; about his own job that his ma had got him with Mr. Feigerman himself, the blind man with the funny machinery that let him see, sort of, and even work as a consulting engineer on the Bed-Stuy project…all the same he was glad when it was over, and he could get out of that place. Toward the end he got to thinking about the eighty feet of rock and steel and convicts and guards over his head, and it had seemed to be closing in on him. The guards at Nathanael Greene had an average of ten years on the job, and they had had experience before of kids running errands that adults could not do, so they searched him again on the way out. Marcus submitted peacefully. They didn’t find anything, of course, because there hadn’t been anything to find. On that visit.

  II

  Marcus’s after-school job was waiting impatiently for him. The name of the job was de Rintelen Feigerman, and he was a very old man as well as quite a strange-looking one. Mr. Feigerman was in a wheelchair. This was not so much because his legs were worn out—they were not, quite—as because of the amount of machinery he had to carry with him. He wore a spangled sweatband around his thin, long hair, supporting a lacy metallic structure. His eyes were closed. Closed permanently. There were no eyeballs in the sockets any more, just plastic marbles that kept them from looking sunken, and behind where the eyeballs had been there was a surgical wasteland where his entire visual system had been cut out and thrown away. The operation saved his life when it was done, but it removed Feigerman permanently from the class of people who could ever hope to see again. Transplants worked for some. The only transplant that could change things for Feigerman was a whole new head.

  And yet, as Marcus came up the hill, the white old head turned toward him and Feigerman called him by name. “You’re late, Marcus,” he complained in his shrill old-man’s voice.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Feigerman. They made me stay after school.”

  “Who’s that ‘they’ you keep talking about, Marcus? Never mind. I was thinking of some falafel. What do you say to that?”

  Actually Marcus had been thinking of a Big Mac for himself, but that would mean making two stops, in different directions. “Falafel sounds good enough to me, Mr. Feigerman,” he said, and took the bills the old man expertly shuffled out of his wallet, the singles unfolded, the fives creased at one corner for identification, the tens at two. “I’ll tell Julius I’m here,” he promised, and started down the long hill toward the limousine that waited on Myrtle Avenue.

  The old man touched the buttons that swung his chair around. He could not really see down the hill, toward where the project was being born. The machinery that replaced his eyes was not too bad at short range, but beyond the edge of the paved area atop Fort Greene Park it was of no use at all. But he didn’t need eyes to know what was going on—to know that not much was. Half the project was silent. By turning up his hearing aid and switching to the parabolic microphone he could hear the distant scream of the turbines at the breeder reactor and the chomp and roar of the power shovels where excavation was still happening, underlain with the fainter sounds of intervening traffic. But the bulldozers weren’t moving. Their crews were spending the week at home, waiting to be told when payroll money would be available again. Bad. Worse than it seemed, because if they didn’t get the word soon the best of them would be drifting off to other jobs where the funds were alre
ady in the bank, not waiting for a bunch of politicians to get their shit together and pass the bill—If, indeed, the politicians were going to. That was the worst of all; because Feigerman admitted to himself that that part was not sure at all. It was a nice, sunny day in Fort Greene Park, but there were too many worries in it for it to be enjoyed—including the one special troubling thing, in a quite different area, that Feigerman was trying not to think about.

  While they ate their late lunch, or early dinner, or whatever the meal was that they had formed the habit of sharing after Marcus’s school got out, the boy did his job. “They’ve got one wall of the pumphouse poured,” he reported, squinting out over the distant, scarred landscape that had once been a normal, scarred Brooklyn neighborhood. Silently the old man handed him the field glasses and Marcus confirmed what he had said. “Yeah, the pumphouse is coming along, and—and—they’re digging for the shit pit, all right. But no bulldozers. Just sitting there, Mr. Feigerman; I guess they didn’t turn loose your money yet. I don’t see why they want to do that, anyway.”

  “Do what?”

  “Make another hill there. They got this one right here already.”

  “This one’s the wrong shape,” Feigerman said, not impatiently—he liked the boy, welcomed his questions, wished he had had a real son of his own sometimes—since the semi-real stepson he had had no detectable love for his adopted father. “Besides, this one is historic, so they don’t want to build windmills on top of it. George Washington held the British off right here—read the inscription on the monument sometime.” He licked some of the falafel juice off his lip and Marcus, unbidden, unfolded a paper napkin and dabbed the missed spatters off the old man’s bristly chin. Feigerman clicked in his long-range optical scanners in place of the sonar and gazed out over the city, but of course he could see only vague shapes without detail. “It’s a big thing,” he said—as much to the unheeding city as to Marcus.