The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  With the garbage strike her job was a little easier. The scows weren’t being towed out, fourteen or fifteen long strings a day, to the dumping ground two hundred kilometers into the Baltimore Canyon offshore. Day shifts were better than night, too. It was easier to keep visual contact with the little vessels that didn’t own transponders or didn’t keep them maintained. But wet, windy weather canceled all the advantages out. It made some of the vessels harder to control; and above all it reinforced the known fact that the west tower of the Verrazano Bridge was the coldest place in the City of New York. The tower was heated, of course. But when freezing rain was sleeting in and visibility was patchy there was no substitute for taking the glasses out on the platform, into the wild, freezing winds; and it was in and out a hundred times a day. So Heidi always came home exhausted when the weather was bad. Jeff put out forty times as much physical energy as she did; but Jeff only needed a shower and a shave to be ready for anything, until any hour of the night. Heidi was a big woman, but she didn’t have her husband’s physical strength.

  The shower sounds had stopped, and now there was a rattling of medicine chest doors and face-cream jars. Jeff stubbed out his joint, and reached to turn down the lights.

  In the dimness he saw a pulsing green flicker by the door. Hell, he’d forgotten the mail! There wouldn’t be anything worth getting except bills, anyway—

  But Heidi would notice it, and she would want to see if there was anything from her mother. So Jeff walked over to the comm. desk and pressed the mail combination. The first three items on the screen were bills all right—and automatically paid by deductions from their bank account, so they didn’t need any attention except to be sorted into the right stores for their tax returns. The fourth—

  The fourth began with the heading:

  FROM SELECTIVE SERVICE BOARD NO. 143

  “Oh, shit,” said Jeff.

  When Heidi got out of the shower the lights were full up, Jeff was mixing himself another drink and the text of the letter was still on hold, displayed on the screen:

  From the President of the United States, Greetings.

  You have been selected for universal military service and are required to report for your final physical examination on Tuesday, the 3d of April, to the Armed Forces Induction Center at Number 1 Penn Plaza…

  “Oh, shit,” Heidi said, taking the drink Jeff held out to her. She was wearing a robe, but Jeff could see that under it she had only a pajama top and a lot of warm, damp, pink skin.

  “Of course we knew it was going to come someday,” he said.

  “But why now, damn it!”

  Jeff put more ice in his drink and said, “I’ve been thinking. Of course, what I could do is sign up for the City Corps. So I’d be right here for three years, and after basic training I’d probably only be giving out parking tickets and like that for the first year or so—”

  “At nine dollars an hour,” Heidi said.

  “Well, yeah. Maybe your sister could help me pass the sergeant’s examination after the first year.”

  “Or you could take the eighteen-month field service hitch—”

  “And maybe get my ass shot off in Puerto Rico or Miami Beach.”

  “But at least you’d have it over with. Oh, shit.”

  “Or I might fail the physical.”

  She looked at him, then pulled his robe open and punched him in his hard, flat stomach. “Fail for what? You should’ve got it over with in college, like me.”

  “I didn’t go to college,” he reminded her. “Oh, shit.”

  The evening that had looked so promising was suddenly down the chutes for good; and that was the moment when the doorbell announced Lucy’s return for the petition. Realization smote Bratislaw; as he opened the door he said, under his breath, for about the twentieth time, “Oh, shit.”

  The sisters were kissing sisters, but while they kissed Lucy was peering past her sister’s ear at Bratislaw. “What is it?” she demanded; then, guessing, “You forgot to tell Heidi about the petition.”

  Bratislaw was glad for the way out. “Yeah, that’s right. I’m really sorry, Loose.”

  She shook her head. “But there’s more to it than that,” she went on, looking from him to her sister. “Come on. What?”

  So Bratislaw told her about the draft notice, and told his wife about the petition, and by the time they had it all sorted out he was halfway through the second bottle of wine and it did not, after all, seem like a very good night to start a baby. But Lucy responded with righteousness. She was the do-gooder in the family, the one who had decided to become a police officer in the first place, against all wisdom, and to stay honest in the second—against all custom. “It’s a good thing for you, Jeff,” she said wisely, “and I’ll help you get along, I promise. Now if you two will just sign—”

  “Hold it,” said her sister. “We can’t do that, hon.”

  “Of course you—”

  “No,” said Heidi, “we can’t, and if you stop and think about it you’ll know it. You don’t mind taking your chances; well, that’s all right, you’re past probation and your job’s safe. Pretty safe. But what happens to Jeff if he signs that and then comes on the force? A draftee? With no rank? They’ll have his ass, Lucy, and you know it.”

  Lucy looked at her sister, then at Bratislaw, anger growing in her eyes. “You two! Don’t you care? Do you want the goddamn mob to own the city?”

  “It already does, Lucy, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And I’m sorry, but that’s the way she goes. Good night, Lucy. Come and see us again real soon.”

  What was wrong was that she was right; Bratislaw knew it, Heidi knew it, even Lucy knew it. Bratislaw wandered over to the window, gazing out at the city, then shrugged, reached for the light remotes and punched out a five-minute dim-down. The lights began to dwindle toward darkness and, yawning, he moved toward the bedroom, until his wife’s voice stopped him. “Jeff, you forgot about the bills.”

  “What?” He turned, and the console was displaying the bills that had come in in that day’s mail. “Oh, God,” he groaned, “damn machine’s on the blink again. They’re all automatic pay, they should have just displayed and gone into memory…Oh,” he said then, staring at the CRT, “Oh, shit.”

  That was time number twenty-one and the biggest of all, for under the lines of characters that represented the statements from the utilities, the installment purchases and the insurance company was a glowing red line that said:

  BALANCE INADEQUATE

  “Damn it! Heidi? Have you been drawing money out of the account without telling me?”

  “Of course I haven’t, Jeff.” But even before the words were out of her mouth he knew that, for he was punching their banking codes for a statement, and the figures were already appearing for him.

  17 MAY 1123 HRS ** WITHDRAWAL ** $1710.50

  ***BALANCE $8.26

  “We’ve been robbed,” he cried. “Somebody broke into our code and cleaned us out! Jesus, this town is really going to the dogs!”

  “I’ve been telling you,” said his wife furiously, “we should’ve invested in a private cipher system.”

  There were not very many things that Bratislaw really wanted to hear from his wife at that moment. A reminder that she had told him so was about at the bottom of the list. Of course, all the other people they knew had double-locked their telebank systems with private ciphers, but they cost money, you had to remember code words—it was extra trouble. Everybody knew that computer crime was going skyhigh in the city—but some everybodies, or at least Jeff Bratislaw, went through life with the confident belief that it would be some other somebody who would be robbed. What an end to a promising day! The draft notice, the disagreement with Lucy, the robbery of the bank account; it was too much. And the dim-down had finished its cycle and he stumbled in darkness toward the bedroom where his wife lay staring at the ceiling.

  Unaccountably, she was smiling.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded
, a long way from amiable.

  She said to the ceiling, “I figured it out. Draft deferred. Essential industry.”

  He sat down beside her, puzzled. “What are you talking about, a draft deferment for me? Well, sure, but I’m not in essential industry—”

  “You are,” crooned his wife happily, “if that bitch you work for says you are. First thing tomorrow, Jeff, you put it to her—I mean,” she corrected hastily, “you ask her to work that out for you. Now get in this bed, why don’t you?” And actually, as it turned out, it wasn’t such a bad night for starting a baby after all.

  III

  Ella Jennalec met him at the ground-floor level and a car was waiting. “You drive,” she said, and climbed into the back seat after giving him instructions, and there wasn’t much chance to talk the whole time until they arrived at the old penitentiary in Bed-Stuy. “You wait,” she said, and disappeared up the walk to the entrance. A minute later she came back. “Fucker’s in a police lineup,” she said disgustedly. “I got to wait till they’re through.”

  Obviously the “fucker” was a prisoner. “Friend of yours, Ella?” Bratislaw asked. She gave him a look.

  “Anybody can do me some good is a friend of mine,” she said obliquely, and then: “What about you? Can you do me some good?”

  “I hope so, Ella.” He explained about the draft notice and the fact that he and Heidi really wanted to have a baby. He didn’t get a chance to go very far, because she understood what he was asking long before he got to that point.

  “Hold it a second, ace,” she said, and thought, gazing over at the Bed-Stuy City development with its black solar roof panels and its queer spiral windmills. She took her own sweet time, Bratislaw thought. It wasn’t as if it was anything hard he was asking for! New York’s police, like most city forces, had been federalized long since. When Selective Service got you, it was a choice between three years in the City and taking your eighteen-month draftee jolt with no guarantees about assignment, or rank—or even survival, if you got sent to one of the trouble spots. It was really no different from any other job. After basic you only worked forty hours a week. You started out with parking tickets, graduated to walking a beat with a regular cop—you could even live at home and maybe even moonlight. “Ace,” she said seriously, “there’s some good deals on the cops, you know. Smart fellow can make a bundle.”

  “I’d rather work with you, Ella,” he said humbly. Not to mention that his wife’s sister would crucify him if he turned out to be the kind of a cop that made a bundle. She smiled radiantly.

  “No big deal, friend,” she said cheerfully. “I’ll put the word in today.”

  “What’ll I do about the draft notice?”

  “Tear it up. Now you just hang in here while I see my friend.”

  Bratislaw’s job was not so much assistant as bodyguard; if he had wondered why Ella Jennalec had picked him, he realized soon enough that his size was at least one of the reasons. Where she went he went, and she went everywhere. To Brooklyn, where Local 2432 of the Renewable Resource Energy Workers of America was threatening a strike because the dome was going to change the wind patterns in Bedford-Stuyvesant and endanger their jobs. To City Hall, where the Mayor’s Commission on City Renewal was meeting. To 125th Street to inspect the northern hold-downs; to Jersey City to negotiate with the local across the river; to the top of the World Trade Center and to the great arch over Central Park, where the dome would reach its greatest height.

  Sometimes Ella Jennalec’s kid would tag along. It was a surprise to Bratislaw to find out that the union leader had a kid; he had not even known she had a husband, and indeed if there ever had been one he did not seem to be on the premises any more.

  After the first day he formed the habit of picking her up at her apartment. It was a pretty nice apartment. Like every other apartment building in the city the sidewalk before it was piled shoulder high with ribbed-paper bags of garbage, waiting for the remote day when someone would come to remove it, and twice Bratislaw saw dirty brown rats scuttle slowly away as he approached. But there was a doorman, and closed-circuit television at every angle, and the first day Bratislaw had to stand around in the lobby for twenty minutes because Jennalec wasn’t answering her phone just then.

  When at last she was available she told the doorman to pass him right up. She met him at her door, hair wrapped in one turbaned towel and dripping, another towel wrapped around her damp body. “Wait in the living room, Jeff. There’s coffee if you want it.”

  The living room was twice the size of Bratislaw’s entire apartment. The carpet was wall-to-wall, thick, white. There was a video corner, and surround-sound acoustic cones in the molding overhead. He sat on a couch longer than he was tall—big enough to open into a king-sized bed but, he was willing to bet, not a convertible. Just a couch. He got up again restlessly, peering out the window—the Hudson River was gray between buildings—made himself a cup of coffee from the machine in the kitchen, sat down again. And waited. Bratislaw was not at all sure what he was waiting for, because that flash of golden thigh under the towel as Jennalec turned had started him thinking. But when she came out, fully dressed, jeans, boots, beret to keep her damp hair in place, she was all business. And he was not sure if he was disappointed or not.

  When he got home that night and told Heidi about Jennalec’s home, she said, “She came out bare?”

  “Ah, no, Heidi. She had a towel around her.”

  “So did I,” she said bitterly, “when you lived across the hall in Stuyvesant Town and I asked you to fix my window. But I knew what I was doing, and so does she.”

  So Jeff Bratislaw’s work was to follow Ella Jennalec wherever her work took her, and where her work took her was everywhere the dome was going to go. That was all of New York—all of the real New York, that is to say, namely, Manhattan island. That was the city that had existed long before the Bridge let it swallow Brooklyn and momentum gave it the other boroughs; it was the New York that people from New Jersey and Texas and China meant when they said “New York.” Once in a great while Jennalec went off the island, but there was plenty between the Battery and the Harlem River to keep her busy.

  Exactly what she was busy at, though, was harder to understand. Jennalec’s position in the union was fogged. “Shop steward” was her title, but steward of which shop? She was as much at home at the Fordham pylon as at the World Trade Center truss. Sometimes she volunteered a reason for one of their errands—a hazard-pay argument near the old UN Building, a seniority dispute at the 59th Street Bridge site. When she didn’t offer a reason Jeff sometimes asked. Not after the second day. “Jeffy doll,” she said, squirming around in the seat of their car to stare into his eyes, “what you need to know I’ll tell you, what I don’t tell you is none of your business. Okay?” “Okay,” said Bratislaw, and remembered it. It stood to reason. Everybody knew that there was a Grand Jury investigation about to pop, and if any of the mystery rides had anything to do with that, what would be the sense of talking about them? The TV reporters were already leaking stories from the Grand Jury every night. Let them have their fun, they’d never get anything on Ella Jennalec! Oh, sure, she’d do a favor for a union brother—maybe a favor for a boss now and then. One hand washed the other. How else were you going to get a big job done?

  But to prove anything in a put-away-in-jail way—never. The more Bratislaw saw of Ella Jennalec, the more he admired her, and not just because of the way she filled out her jeans. She had guts. She had that kind of courage that obliged him to be brave, too, when she did things like climbing a hundred meters up the catwalk to talk to a rigger—Bratislaw gamely following, clutching the wire rail—or taking the bucket up to the top of the dome pylon itself. Bratislaw came along, but when she was chattering and gesticulating cheerfully with the gang boss Bratislaw’s eyes were fixed firmly on the stately old condos across the river. He didn’t look down until they were ten meters from the ground on the return trip. Jennalec nudged him. “I could probably get you on
the high demolition now if you still want it,” she said, and then grinned. “Just kidding. You’re doing fine, sweetie. It’s always tough the first time—oh, shit, now what’s this?”

  If Bratislaw had been a little less shaky he might have reacted faster, might have got between Jennalec and the little man with the blue legal paper. But he wasn’t. The little man kept his eye nervously on Bratislaw as he tapped Ella Jennalec with the subpoena, and was watching over his shoulder as he turned and hurried away. Bratislaw opened his mouth to apologize, but Jennalec’s grin had already come back. She blew a kiss after the departing process-server and handed the paper to Bratislaw. “Drop it off at the lawyer’s on the way home,” she said, “and don’t look so shook up. What do you think we pay lawyers for?”

  Of course, the TV had the news, and of course Lucy had it before them. She was waiting at the apartment when Bratislaw got home. It was Heidi’s day off. The sisters had been baking something—good smells came from the stove—and more recently they’d been lounging around with a couple of drinks. Lucy was still in uniform, but her shoes were off, half the buttons of her blouse open and her pretty face flushed. “Jeff, dear,” she said at once, “you really ought to get away from that witch.”

  “Ah, Loose, I’ve had a hard day. Don’t make it worse.” He gestured to the glasses and ice and watched while she made him a whiskey on the rocks.

  “I know what’s worrying you,” she said, handing it over, “and it’s the draft. Right? But honest, it’s not that bad. You take city police service and I’ll be your rabbi. True, the pay’s lousy, but—”

  “It’s not the pay, Lucy.”

  “Well, it’s sure not the pride in the job! Don’t you know what’s going to happen to Ella Jennalec? She’s got a grand jury indictment for labor racketeering!”

  “Frame-up!”

  “Jeff, don’t be a jerk. They’ve got the evidence. They’ve got witnesses and—” She hesitated, then changed direction. “I know what they’ve got, and so does she; she’s looking at five to fifteen on a felony charge.”