The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  He said, “What do you think we pay lawyers for?” He got the words right, but the tone wasn’t nearly as smooth.

  “Jeff. Listen,” said Lucy, spacing her words as to a child. “She’s going to go before Justice Horatio Margov.” Jeff almost choked on his drink. “That’s right! The Hanging Judge of Harlem. She’s going to jail, Jeff, and you’d better cut loose from her before you get caught in her mess.” Lucy wasn’t gloating. She wasn’t the kind of person to do that, but Bratislaw’s hackles rose.

  “Get off my case, Lucy. Ella’s doing a great job for the union.”

  “The hell she is! She’s scum, Jeff. They’ve got—hell, it’s in the record anyway: they’ve got her on six counts of extortion alone, not to mention two assaults with deadly intent by her old goon, Tiny Martineau. You want to get involved in that? Heidi! Make him listen!”

  Heidi shrugged, but her gaze on her husband was steady.

  He protested, “She doesn’t do anything everybody else doesn’t do!”

  “And that’s exactly what’s wrong with the city! Too many crooks in positions of trust, and nobody does anything about it. Evil,” she said sententiously, “requires no more to triumph than that good men should do nothing. That’s a quotation.”

  “That’s a crock! Ella’s got friends with muscle. Do you have any idea how many politicians owe her?”

  “They’re all going down the tube with her,” Lucy predicted. “Horatio Margov will take care of that. Sure, there’s plenty that owe her. She can get to the Mayor, and the Commissioner and three-quarters of the cops in my precinct. No problem! But it only takes one honest judge and one prosecutor who really wants to make a case, and she’s blown away. Jeffy,” she said pleadingly, “use your head. The mob’s in trouble. They’ve got nothing going for them in drugs since legalization, there’s no prostitution worth bothering with, they can’t even steal unless they can crack a computer code and they’re mostly not smart enough for that. So what’ve the mob got left? Extortion and crooked unions! Once we get them cleaned up, they’re out of business! So when we nail your girl friend that’s the last step—I mean,” she finished quickly, glancing at her sister, “I mean, I didn’t mean anything when I called her your girl friend.” But Heidi didn’t respond. She just gazed at the wall, and her lips were tight.

  It wasn’t true, anyway. Ella wasn’t his girl friend. True, Bratislaw couldn’t help thinking that if a man wanted to make a move it could easily turn out that way, because Jennalec didn’t ever seem to mind appearing before him in her underwear, or slacks without a top, or that towel; and didn’t worry so you could notice it if the towel slipped a little. But he didn’t make the move, and she didn’t seem to give it a thought. She was probably getting plenty anyway, he thought, just her in that big apartment with her kid, and who knew who came in the door after he left her at night?

  Which was, definitely, none of his business. His business was doing what she told him to do. When he tried to tell her what his sister-in-law had said, what she told him to do was forget it. “You like the job? Then just do it. Leave the law part to the lawyers.” And he did like the job—not only was it interesting, but the draft deferment had whistled right through as promised, and the pay was a surprise. Nice surprise. Not only was it half again what he’d got on the winch gang, but half of it was in, of all things, cash. Cash! Off the books, and no tax to pay! “Just be careful how you spend it,” she instructed. “Clothes, booze, parties, anything like that, fine. Or stick it in a safe-deposit box. But don’t go paying off any bank loans, because once you get a transaction into the audit file they’ve got you. Now get the car, we’re going up to a place in the South Bronx and you can come in with me. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

  The name of the place was the Bellamy Wind Tunnel Test Facility, and the first and worst thing you noticed about it was the noise. What noise! Roaring like ten jets taking off at once, all of them in your bedroom. Bratislaw hesitated and Jennalec punched his shoulder. “Go,” she yelled in his ear, pointing at a woman in a pale green smock, inside a glass cage. “Her. She’ll explain it.” And she disappeared into a door marked Manager—No Admittance.

  Considering that Bratislaw had actually worked on the foundations of the dome, he knew astonishingly little about it. The wind tunnel itself was huge. It had to be, because the model dome inside it was nearly forty feet long. It was rotating slowly and irregularly on a turntable. The tunnel, Bratislaw realized, could not change wind direction, so the test table turned the model. The model didn’t show Manhattan itself, only the dome that would cover it. It looked like two scoops of melting vanilla ice cream on an immense banana split—no—it looked like a wax model of a vanilla banana split that had been too long in a store window, with pockmarks and flyspecks all over its surface.

  A voice over a PA system called, “Come on in here, why don’t you?” and he looked to see the technician waving at him. Gratefully he joined her in the cage. The noise was still loud, but it no longer hurt his ears.

  Before the technician was a smaller model of the dome, this one brightly lit in reds and blues that flickered and waxed and waned as he watched. “Hi,” said the woman in the green smock. “I’m Marilyn Borg. How do you like it?”

  Bratislaw admitted he didn’t know enough to have an opinion. The woman smiled. “Ugly thing,” she commented. “It would’ve been nicer to be doming Phoenix or even Los Angeles—so you could have a nice round dome, you know? New York’s long and skinny, and it’s got all those bridges, and it’s got deep water all around it. Bad structurally.”

  “You mean it won’t work?”

  “Oh, hell, it’ll work. But look at the pressure differentials!” The pits on the model outside, she explained, were pressure taps, with transducers that relayed their readings to the smaller model in front of her. Negative pressure showed red on the readout model, positive pressure, blue; the greater the pressure, the brighter the color. “See here, all this low pressure over the top of the dome? It’s like an airplane wing. It wants to take off and fly. Then there’s the high pressure where the wind impacts and again where the dome ends—wait a minute.” She glanced at a digital clock, then punched in some commands. As the next sequence began white smoke appeared from each of the acne pits on the dome in the tunnel, streaming across the surface of the dome. She added another set of commands and the jets became a rainbow of different colors, showing how the smoke currents merged and flowed together. “Look at the old East River bridges! I wouldn’t try going for a walk to Brooklyn on a windy day!” And indeed there was a great deal of turbulence at the base of the model, especially where the bridges came out. “They’re going to have to beef up the skirts,” Borg predicted gloomily, “’specially the Hudson. The Palisades funnel wind down the river when it’s coming the right way, but we can allow for that. Hurricanes,” she grinned, “are harder. And so’s snow, and rain if it freezes there. You get a quarter of an inch of ice on the dome, that’s maybe a hundred thousand tons over the whole surface.” She leaned back and regarded Bratislaw. “You’re a big one,” she commented.

  “And you,” said Bratislaw gallantly, glancing at the way the smock draped over her breasts, “are a pretty good size yourself.”

  She tapped the model complacently. “My boy friend says he doesn’t know whether I should study this or wear it.”

  Well, it never did any harm to jolly the girls along, thought Bratislaw, enjoying himself. Of course nothing would come of it. Well, nothing had to come of it, although the more he looked at Marilyn Borg the more he thought there would be a lot worth looking at under the green smock. It was a painless way to learn about the engineering and stress-resistance of the dome—the top, he discovered, would go right through the “boundary layer” of the atmosphere, where most of the turbulence was, but the dome shape would minimize the stresses. And about the wind tunnel, powered by three six-bladed propellers, temperature and humidity controlled, capable of modeling the stresses of a one-hundred-fifty-mile-an-hour hurrica
ne or a two-foot snow load. And about Marilyn Borg herself, until a speaker over his head said, “Come on, stud, time to get out of here.” And something about the tone suggested that Jennalec had been listening in.

  In the car, Ella surprised Bratislaw by getting in beside him instead of entering the rear seat. “Where to, boss?” he asked, but she didn’t answer at first. She was studying him, and for the life of him Bratislaw couldn’t tell what she was looking for until she asked:

  “How’s your wife?”

  “Oh, fine,” he said, and she nodded as though it had been the final answer to a complex problem of diagnosis.

  “I’ve got nothing going for the next couple of hours,” she said, “and I think I owe you a home-cooked meal. You interested?”

  He swallowed and grinned. “You bet,” he said, and turned up the juice.

  She didn’t slip into anything more comfortable or play mood music for him; she slipped into the kitchen and left him to stare at the antique furnishings. “Five minutes,” she called. “No more. I’ve got most of it made already.” To Bratislaw’s surprise the “home-cooked” meal was hardly cooked at all. It was salad and a tureen of soup, and the soup, he could tell by the smell, was fish broth. “It’ll taste better than it smells,” she promised. “I should’ve warned you, I don’t eat meat.”

  He sampled it and it was true; it was a very thin soup, almost Japanese, but it made its appeal, and the salad was crisp and crunchy, with nuts and bits of what he guessed to be crisped potato-like nuggets. “How come?” he asked.

  “You mean about the meat? Oh, I used to. Back in Bed-Stuy I ate it all the time, you know how kids are. But the first job I got was on the feedlots in Flushing Meadows. You know the place? Processing water hyacinth. They mow it on the lakes, and dry it in the exhaust from the city heat pumps, and chop it up and give it to the cows. The cows love it. Makes great steaks, too.”

  “Well, then why?”

  She looked disgusted. “I found out what else they gave them! Sterilized sewage sludge. SCP—that’s single-cell protein; they grow it on the sludge from the sewers, and it’s supposed to come out clean and pure. But I know where it comes from! And that’s not all. Rock dust, would you believe it? Paper-mill trimmings! Their own shit! You eat a hamburger, and what you’re really mostly eating is a cowflop brick mixed with confetti and weeds—no, thanks!”

  “It was the same in Wisconsin,” Bratislaw offered, “except they had all this whey left over from cheese-making. You don’t know stink till you smell that stuff.”

  “And you still put it in your mouth?” She finished the last of her salad and sat back, lighting a joint and looking at him speculatively. “What all kind of stuff do you put in your mouth, Brat?” she inquired.

  The best thing to do, Bratislaw thought, was to take it as a joke. So he laughed, around a forkful of carrot slices and raw cauliflower, and changed the subject. “Where’s your boy?” he asked.

  Ella nodded, as though it weren’t a change of subject at all. “He’s in school. Won’t be home for three hours. Take a hit,” she added, passing the joint over to Bratislaw and sitting up in her chair. “Help me put the dishes in the machine and then I’ve got something for you to do. See, Brat, Tiny had some special duties, besides driving me around. I haven’t needed them much lately—but a couple of friends are out of town, and a couple of friends aren’t friends any more. So, the thing is,” she finished, getting up and taking his hand, “I think it’s about time you found out what the special duties are.”

  If Heidi suspected that the nature of the relationship had changed she didn’t show it. There was a tug captain’s strike, and so her job was harder and longer than ever. When she got home at night she was tired. If Jeff Bratislaw wasn’t home by the time she was ready to go to bed she went to bed anyway. It was just as well. Bratislaw was a reasonably horny man, but Ella Jennalec used him up pretty well—no long stretched-out orgies, but now it was first thing in the morning before they set out for the day, and usually again at night before he went home, and now and then an occasional joust somewhere during the day. Apart from that their relationship stayed about the same; she kept all the same engagements, did all the same work, spent all the same hours on the car phone between stops. But she talked to him more. About herself. About him. About the world. She even talked about her upcoming trial before Judge Margov, and the kind of courage she showed on the high steel was still there when she talked about the proceeding. “You’re some woman,” said Bratislaw, and the admiration in his voice wasn’t feigned.

  She was in the seat beside him, riding uptown. “Yeah,” she said thoughtfully, looking at him. When she left him at the curb in front of a sleazy-looking loft building she was still thoughtful and when, half an hour later, she came back out she was grinning. He started to engage the electric motor but she stopped him. “Wait a second,” she said, her hand on his; and he paused, perplexed…And then he saw what she was waiting for. Out of the same doorway came a tall, white-haired figure, looking cautiously around before ducking into a subway station. It was Horatio Margov, the Hanging Judge of Harlem himself. He turned, startled, to Ella, whose grin was triumphant. “Just keep your mouth shut,” she advised. “And next time listen to me when I tell you not to worry.”

  But he worried all the same, worried mostly about whether he would have the willpower not to tell his wife, and whether she would then be able to keep from telling her crusading sister…it was not a worry he needed to have. When he got home that night Heidi wasn’t asleep. She wasn’t even there. All the lights were on, and there was a flashing red message on the CRT: Jeff, Lucy’s been hurt. Meet me at Bellevue.

  It took him twenty minutes to get to the hospital and half an hour to find his wife, up in a sixth-floor waiting room that smelled of disinfectant and unwashed clothing. “Her head’s crushed in,” she sobbed. “Somebody mugged her. She’s in intensive care, and they don’t know if she’s going to live.”

  “Oh, honey,” he said, his arms around her.

  “They let me see her,” Heidi sobbed. “You couldn’t even see her face, Jeff! What kind of animal would do something like that? The decentest, best human being I ever knew…” She pushed herself a few inches away from him and looked up into his face. “And one other thing,” she added. “I went to the doctor today myself, and I’m pregnant.”

  IV

  The police report was stark and skimpy. Police Officer Lucille R. Sempler had been on regular patrol duty on South Water Street, checked in by radio at seventeen hundred thirty hours, was overdue for her eighteen hundred hours report. In the interim she had made no calls nor were any transmitted to her. On failure to report a search was instituted and Police Officers William Gutmacher and Alicia Mack found her suffering blunt-instrument wounds to the head and several lacerations, apparently the result of a struggle, in an entryway. No witnesses. No known motive. Police lab was investigating physical evidence. The investigation would continue.

  The police themselves were not much more informative, not out of policy but because they knew nothing. “Lucy was always looking for something wrong,” said her precinct captain. “Probably it was somebody she busted. We’re checking everything—and she was one hell of a fine lady,” he added.

  Bratislaw, too, thought Lucy was a fine lady. He knew that his wife felt more strongly than that; but he was not prepared for just how much Heidi cared.

  Bratislaw knew about pregnant women; he had a sister sixteen years younger than himself, and he remembered the months before she had been born. Morning sickness he was ready for, and it came. A failing interest in making love he suspected, and that came, too. But his mother had not had a dear sister nearly murdered in her first month, and so there was nothing to prepare him for Heidi’s unending, dry-eyed sorrow. She had given up gaiety. When he came home late at night she was almost always already in bed—and almost never asleep, though she pretended to be. He tested her to be sure. After a week of it, he rolled over in bed, changed position a time or
two and then let his breathing become slow and nasal. Sure enough. A few minutes later Heidi slipped out of bed and retreated silently to the living room, where he found her sitting unmoving and unoccupied by the window. When he spoke she didn’t answer.

  Every day Heidi hurried from her work to the hospital to spend an hour at Lucy’s bedside. She didn’t ask Bratislaw to go with her, but worry made him volunteer. It was astonishing. In her sister’s presence Heidi was Heidi again, sparkles and smiles and gossip and plans for what they would all do when Lucy “got better.” And, of course, Lucy’s mummy-wrapped head did not respond. Could not respond. Could only gurgle past the tubes in her mouth, or twitch the restless fingers on the sheet. When they were outside, Bratislaw said, “Honey? It’s not much good making plans for when she gets better. She isn’t going to get better. She doesn’t even really hear you.”

  Heidi did not either flare up or cry. The mask was on her face again. “They’re going to send her to a skinner,” she observed detachedly.

  “That’s good,” said Bratislaw, meaning, That’s the same as being dead, anyway, isn’t it? A lot could be done with the veggies by means of behavior modification, but what could not be done was to turn them into responsive, active, companionable human beings again.

  Heidi understood his meaning. She said: “I’m tired, Jeff, and I don’t want to talk. Let’s go home.”

  The other thing Heidi did with her free time was nag the police. There were no arrests in the case and, Bratislaw believed, there was no real expectation that there ever would be. The average New Yorker’s chance of suffering some sort of violent crime in any given year was one in sixty, and when it was a witnessless mugging, like Lucy’s, the crime was rarely solved. Heidi didn’t share his opinion, and so once a day she was on the phone with Lieutenant Finder at the precinct, demanding action. After three weeks of it Bratislaw tried firmness. “Heidi, honey,” he began, “why don’t you get off the lieutenant’s back? He’s doing the best he can.”