The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  Jimper’s leg was beginning to throb now, and the fuse on his temper was getting short. “I guess I owe you a favor,” he said, “but I don’t have to take all this steam. You don’t know what it’s like up there or you wouldn’t tell me it wasn’t worth it.”

  She slapped the bandage to show she was finished—the slap hurt!—and stepped back. “If you had kids playing in the park and never knew when some choot was going to drop a shoe on their heads, you’d know why it was against the law.”

  Jimper shrugged and slid his legs over the side of the examining table. He stood up experimentally. It didn’t make his leg hurt any worse. “Well, thanks,” he said grudgingly. “You want my Medcard number?”

  “In my office,” she said, pointing. On the way he sneaked a look out the window, and his wings were gone, all right. Now he really needed to get to work—it would take him weeks, anyway, to save up for a new pair.

  When they were both standing Jimper was a good quarter-meter taller than she. Although he was lean, she was tiny. While she was processing his card through the terminal he looked at the framed objects hanging on the wall. A picture of herself with a small, not very pretty, kid next to her—the picture was queerly off center, as though there had once been a third person she had decided to remove. A diploma from New York University School of Medicine that told him she was a fully accredited internist and manual surgeon, and that her name was Jo-Ellen Redfan. A photograph next to it told him more than that. “Oh, hell,” he said, looking at a shot of Dr. Jo-Ellen Redfan hanging from a General Dynamics Thirty-Oh-Three, “why didn’t you tell me you were into hang-gliding too?”

  She handed him the light-pen for signing his bill. “Not under the dome, I’m not. Off the Palisades, sure. You can stay up longer, you don’t get steamed for it, and if you boob the only one you kill is yourself.” She stopped him as he turned to leave. “You ought to stay off that leg for the next hour, and besides if you go out now with your shorts all bloody the cops are going to notice you. Go back in the examining room and stretch out for a while.”

  “Why, thanks,” Jimper said, startled. He looked at her in a new way, readjusting his image to allow for the fact that she was human, after all. She flushed under his gaze.

  “I’ve got patients outside,” she said, turning to open the door—

  And just on the other side of it, poised to knock, were two cops, a skinny young woman in regular force blues and a brown-suited auxiliary, and they looked right at Jimper Nutlark. Jimper sighed. “Well, thanks for trying,” he said to the doctor, and sadly went out to meet his fate.

  In the elevator on the way to the station house on the top floor, the cop key in the controls to make it run express, the regular cop shook her head, studying Jimper’s ID. “Just up from the boonies,” she mused. “You farmers give me a pain. Well, you’ll find out how we do things in New York City, and I will be a very surprised person if you like it a bit.”

  II

  “Thirty days,” said the judge at the hearing, “or five thousand dollars. You farmers give me a pain. Next case.”

  Jimper hadn’t expected an acquittal, but he hadn’t expected that, either. Five thousand dollars! Thirty days would be even worse, when he needed to make a living. He backed away from the dock, lifted his wrist to his lips and talked to his lawyer. “That’s preposterous!” he hissed. “I haven’t got five thousand dollars!”

  “It’s a disjunctive, Nutlark,” his lawyer said wearily. “Thirty days or five thou. Did you bargain yet?”

  “Bargain?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said his lawyer crossly, “don’t you ever listen when I talk to you? I told you you had to make your deal after the sentence. Look for the window marked ‘Contract Negotiations,’ all right?”

  Jimper lifted his head to search the room, then crossed to the door to peer into the hall. It was right there. Three or four other defendants, now sentenced, were standing in a line before it. The first in line was immersed in a hand-waving, head-shaking argument with the person beyond the window. “I see it. What do I do now?”

  “Make your damn deal!” the attorney said. “Now, remember, the best way to figure it is, say, your time’s worth twenty dollars an hour, so don’t let them give you more than, let’s see, twenty into five thousand—”

  “Two hundred and fifty hours?”

  “That right? If you say so. If I could’ve handled math I’d be an engineer or something instead of a goddamn lawyer.”

  “I wish you’d do the talking for me,” Jimper said.

  The attorney sighed. “You pay for personal appearance in court, you get it. You don’t pay, you settle for phone consultation like this. Tell you what. If your adjuster tries to hand you anything over two-fifty hours call me back. Now I’ve got a client in the office.” And he cut the connection.

  By the time Jimper got to the head of the line he had time to study the liquid-crystal sign over the window. The numbers changed slightly from minute to minute, but not enough to signify, Jimper thought. It said:

  Current Exchange Rates

  CLASSIFICATION

  $100 EQUIVALENT

  General clerical

  13.4

  hours

  Sanitation

  7.1

  hours

  Emergency auxiliary

  5.3

  hours

  Teaching*

  8.5

  hours

  Transit, operating*

  8.0

  hours

  Park/farm

  10.5

  hours

  Ombud

  16.2

  hours

  * Available only to convicts with appropriate qualifications.

  By the time Jimper stopped quaking over that unpleasant word “convicts” he was at the head of the line, and the man behind the window was reaching for his ID. The clerk punched up the identification number and gazed at the screen. “Oh, hell,” he muttered, “what are you, cherry? You mean I got to explain the system to you?”

  “We don’t do things this way in Atlanta,” Jimper apologized.

  “That I believe. Well, so listen. You make a choice. The first choice you got to make is decide if you want to serve your time in the slammer. Allowing for good time that might get you out in eighteen days, give or take. Or you can pay the five thousand. Or if you don’t want to do one of those, the other thing you can do is work off your debt to society, and that’s what I’m here for. Work-offs,” he droned on, leaning back in his chair as though he no longer needed to listen to what he was saying, “work-offs are on call, day and night, every day until they’re paid up, and you got to work the full time—whatever the exchange rate is, as posted, times the number of one-hundred-dollar units in your fine. You got that so far? Okay, now let’s talk about what kind of job you can handle, not that I expect much. You farmers give me a pain.”

  The haggling took quite a while, especially since Jimper insisted on having every job explained to him, and then tried to get a break on the exchange rates. By the time he left the window the line was fifteen “convicts” long behind him, and the comments they were making were no longer restrained. But he was grinning. He paused at the end of the corridor to dial his lawyer one more time to gloat. “Hey, Mr. Seymour, this is Jimper Nutlark, and I think I made a good deal. Of course, now I’ve got to wear this transponder thing all the time so they can know where I am and reach me when they want me—”

  “Nutlark, I know how the system works. So what did you get?”

  “Not bad at all, Mr. Seymour. I beat them down to a hundred and thirty hours, what do you think of that? Not bad for somebody right up from crackerland!”

  Pause. Then, cautiously, the lawyer asked, “Mind telling me what kind of duty you signed up for?”

  “They call it ‘emergency auxiliary,’” Jimper said proudly.

  “Oh, my God,” moaned the lawyer. “If you’d only—Well, it’s too late now, and maybe you’ll learn something out of this. But l
isten, Nutlark—if you ever do this again, next time pay the difference so I can be there!”

  For three days the transponder was silent, and Jimper almost forgot he was sentenced. Not that they didn’t remind him. By the time he got back to his windowless, airless little room that night there was an official message on the console to confirm that he had accepted one hundred thirty hours commandable, which meant that he could be called at any time as an auxiliary cop, fireman, as a sweat laborer if they wanted him, and the long paragraphs of what would happen if he failed to respond, or failed to wear his transponder at all times or in any other way offended the majesty of the City of New York went on for three frames. But he was too busy to worry. He had come up from Atlanta because of the Fair, and he spent half his time walking around the growing exhibits, talking to supervisors and liaison persons, offering his services for design of any kind. Most didn’t want to hear, but there were so many of them that he began to be hopeful. He would peer into the ditches they were digging for the Russian pavilion—it was going to be a reproduction of part of Leningrad, canals and bridges for the Venice of the North—or study the animal cages that would be Australia’s koala and wallaby habitats. Then he would go back to the corner of an office he had rented as a studio and whip up drape and costume sketches, pull hard copies and run back to the Fair to thrust them under the noses of anyone who would look. Even when they turned him down, he was having a ball. The city was a ball. He liked the leg-powered bikes and trikes, and the vodkars with the exhaust of the alcohol-burning Stirling engines smelling like Sunday morning in a saloon; he liked the open, flat-bottomed trams, flywheel powered, that you leaped onto when you wanted a ride and leaped off again when you were there—no fares, no seats, no frills, just a chance to rest your legs when you were tired of walking. He liked poking into the queer neighborhoods of the city, ethnic or churchly or culty, though some of them scared him. What he would have liked even better was someone to share all this with, or even someone who wasn’t interested in sharing anything but a bed, but Joan-Mary was still in Atlanta. Although he had struck up a few conversations with New York women in bars, most weren’t really attractive to him; and farmers, it appeared, gave most of the others a pain. Not that Jimper Nutlark was a farmer, or anything like it. But New Yorkers seemed to think that everything that was not under the Big Blister was covered with meter-deep cowflop.

  It was not so much that New Yorkers disliked other people, he discovered. They didn’t like each other much, either, or so it appeared from the orffiti on the public-speaker systems, maniacal screechings and bird-calls interspersed with yells of “Brooklyn sucks!” and “Death to Stuyvesant Town!”…and the spray-painting on every flat surface which, if you collected a representative anthology, would denounce Jews, blacks, Irish, southerners, New Englanders, Arabs, Chinese, English, Brooklynites, midwesterners, Swedes, Californians, Italians, women, men, gays of both varieties and members of every religious denomination in the Yellow Pages. Why they were so mean to each other Jimper could not say. They certainly had a nice place here, at least to visit. The Big Blister was far better climate-controlled than Atlanta. New York had achieved optimal conditions, defined as humidity always comfortably between mildew and skin-itch, temperature at which you could sit around in your underwear and make love without getting under a blanket…

  If you had anybody to make love with, that was.

  That was denied to Jimper, but he had other solaces, and among them, yes, a real live job prospect! The name of the company was Mawzi Frères. They had the contract for the British Pavilion at the Fair, and they needed clothes for the staff. Lots of them. There would be ushers and demonstrators and lecturers; there would be waiters at the New Simpson’s and barmaids at Ye Olde Englysshe Pub; and it was important that every garment be British. Not British made, necessarily, and under no circumstances British designed. But they had to convey that unique quaint and trendy British air, somewhere between Carnaby Street and the Tower of London. So decreed fat old Rasfah Mawzi, waving his hands to explain what words could not, and so Jimper spent a whole day begging swatches of British (or British-like) fabric from every dealer he could find. He fed the specs on each into his datastore, and then sat crumpling the swatches, one by one, in his hand, visualizing the Shetland wool and the Scottish cashmere and the Midlands cottons, dyed and patterned and cut and pleated and gathered in a hundred ways. It was important to design the garment to the cloth. Each fabric had its own weight and “hand” and resistance to crease or wrinkle. You couldn’t design, say, a Household Guards uniform without knowing how supplely it would drape, or how hot it would be to wear in the steady May warmth under the dome. The fabrics were all so heavy. Jimper, frowning, drew in a couple of practice kilts with his light-pen, keyed in the specifications for the most lightweight weaves he could find, then draped them on one of his stock model programs and caused the little figure on the screen to walk and turn. The kilt moved nicely, he acknowledged. But what about the poor son of a gun who had to wear it? Was it true that you weren’t supposed to wear anything under the kilt, and wouldn’t it itch terribly?

  He looked up irritably. There was an unpleasant smell in the room. He checked his wastebaskets, and looked around at the desks of the other free-lancers. Nothing appeared to be burning, but the smell was there—a little like scorched wood, a little like asphalt, a little as though someone had set fire to a heap of automobile tires and old used condoms. He turned up the air circulator by his desk, frowning, and went back to his drawing screen. A pair of military shorts, now. Something in bright colors, but with dignity—

  “James Percy Nutlark, attention.”

  He almost dropped the light pencil as the commanding voice sounded in his ear. He had not heard it before, but at once he knew what it was. “You are activated!” it snapped. “Report at once, Water Street station, where you will receive equipment and orders. Prepare for a prolonged tour of duty.”

  III

  The tip of Manhattan Island had been growing like a tumor for more than four centuries. What had once been an island became Battery Park. What had once been deep, sweet river water, with sturgeon the size of sharks, became landfill…and the fill was whatever happened to fall into the river. There were bricks and rock. There was dumping from excavations and dumping (illicit) of trash. There were old piers and scuttled ships. There was every sort of trash one could imagine. It was the old piers that were the worst. They had been creosoted against marine worms and driven deep down to hard surfaces to support weight, and then they had been buried just as they stood to get them out of sight. When they started to burn it was like a Pennsylvania coalmine fire. They burned, and they kept on burning. Some of those old underground fires had probably been smoldering away for a hundred years, damped now and then by the seepage of river water, until they boiled the last of the water away and grew white-hot again. They did no great harm…until they reached open air.

  And open air was what the City of New York had provided them. For the thousands of expected visitors to the coming Fair the city was building new hotels. Luxury ones in Central Park West. Medium-cost ones in the East Village. And down here, a long subway ride from the Fair itself, the cheapies. The cheapest of the accommodations amounted to nothing more than a three-meter-long file drawer that a man could climb into and close off, each with its own air vent and light and luggage rack and pillow and abiotic mattress. Since there was no money in their budget for such frills as windows, there was no reason to poke these constructions up into expensive domed airspace. So they went down.

  Unfortunately, they went down into made land, where the old pier fire was still smoldering. Great gray stinking clouds of smoke began to pour into the sealed inner space of the dome.

  The Water Street station was crowded when Jimper got there, more than a hundred work-off convicts like himself. Not all very like. There were blacks and whites and Hispanics and orientals, two high-iron Mohawks from Red Hook, a pair of grave, bearded gays from Yorkville holding hands
and blushing as they averted their eyes from the nakedness of other men, plump and puffing Japanese businessmen rousted out of their Wall Street offices, hassidim kissing their phylacteries as they took them off and indignantly refusing to remove their skullcaps, women in purdah robes and women in minikinis, young ones, old ones—it was a cross-section of the city, or anyway the mildly criminal element in it, working off their various offenses and bitching most loudly. The regular force cops paid no attention. “Shuck your duds and hit the suds,” they droned, and, “Move your asses!” When the convicts had stowed their possessions in the assigned lockers and run quickly through the showers, they filed to a supply bay.

  Jimper was not surprised to be issued fire-fighting gear, but not particularly pleased, either. “I don’t know anything about being a fireman,” he commented to the convict next to him.

  She looked at him with scorn and disgust—fifty years old if she was a day, with a sagging, pear-shaped body. “Do I look like I do?” she demanded. “My God, what will they think of next? Yesterday a rat hunt and now this—and, listen, it was a bum rap, too. The thermometer was out of order, how was I supposed to know I was violating thermal guidelines?” But Jimper wasn’t listening. His attention was taken up with the garments he was supposed to be putting on. Long cotton underwear, like thick pantyhose. Stiff, scratchy work pants that fastened around the ankle. Steel-tipped boots, and by no means new—they were scarred and seared, and the zip-it fastenings were clogged with the congealed souvenirs of some previous draftee’s miserable ordeal by mud. A face mask and an air pack—“Hey,” Jimper squawked to the professional firefighter who was urging them on, “this looks dangerous!”

  “Shut your face and move your ass,” the man droned. Twenty at a time he moved them out and onto wide-bodied vans, standing room only; and the driver engaged the flywheels and they rolled down the avenues to the fire.