The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  They were very near to the base of the dome, and stinking black smoke was pouring out of an excavation. Jimper wondered if the heat from the fire could damage the plastic of the dome and, looking up, was surprised to feel warm spray in his face and see that the emergency flaps in the vents were open. Rainy spring air was coming in. But everyone knew you only opened the vents a few times a year, to flush out the accumulations of radon gas, when the weather conditions were just right. If the hope was that the smoke would pour out through the vents, the hope was misplaced; it flowed at ground level, oily and choking, and when the fireman in charge of their contingent bawled “Masks on! Move your asses!” Jimper was glad enough to comply. Slipping and swearing, they descended a muddy earthen ramp toward the fire.

  They were not, of course, allowed to do any real firefighting. There were professionals for that, manning the stiff, writhing hoses, pouring dense CO2 blankets on the rubble nearest the face of the fire, spraying quick-dry thermosetting concrete across the glowing face itself. What the convicts had to do was stoop labor, and of the meanest kind. The first regular crews had been in there with their water hoses and inert gases, and most of the visible fire was long subdued. But not out. Even this side of the face, almost concealed now in its smoky, hot wall of cement, there were pockets where the coals were still live, bits of smoldering rubble concealed by the extinguished rubble. It would wait patiently until it dried out the wet and let the anoxic vapors blow away, and then, if allowed, it would start up again. What the convicts had to do was keep it from starting up again.

  So they had to remove all the stuff it fed on. Bulldozers could have cleaned out the cut in minutes. But bulldozers could not recognize the difference between ashes and coals, and it would have meant only removing the fire to another place—not to mention the fact that they were so near the dome’s edge that Jimper could see the shoulders of the vast supporting concrete structures, and no one wanted to run heavy bulldozers where they might bring a whole edge of the dome down! So they had shovels. A few of the more proficient had air-hammers to loosen the rock-hard dried mud and stone and trash. Most of all they had their hands, stiff in the heavy gloves. The firefighters from the regular force kept shouting their orders: “Pick up everything that’s loose! Break off anything that’s hanging! Tote it out of here—and if you hit a hot spot don’t fool with it, yell for a pro!”

  The problem, or one of the problems, was that Jimper couldn’t really see very well in the face mask. The other problems were fatigue, and unaccustomed muscles, and clumsiness, and most of all the smoggy, smelly, sauna heat, with the air about them clouded with smoke and steam and stink. The air packs gave them oxygen, but they couldn’t give them coolth. Even the air was only enough for half an hour at a time, but that wasn’t so bad, because a half an hour at a time was about all that Jimper could stand. He measured his life by the breaks to recharge the pack, and stalled around adjusting the face mask and the valves as long as he possibly could before the fire-pusher’s yells began to get really nasty. At that, he was better off than most of the convicts. After the first hour the contingents in the air packs began to dwindle, as more and more of the older and weaker were put to running the dumpsters that lifted the excavated trash into portable bins for disposal. After his third or fourth change of air packs Jimper glanced up and saw that the dome vents were closed again: some kind of progress, anyway! After the sixth, or it could have been the tenth, he noticed that the outside of the dome was getting dark, and tardily remembered that the man from Mawzi Frères had been expecting to see his sketches before the close of business that day.

  If he had been less bone-deep exhausted he would have been terribly upset…as it was, he sighed and snapped the mask and went back to scavenge some more of the rubble.

  When the fireman slapped his shoulder and pointed to the waiting inertial-drive van, Jimper did not at first understand that the ordeal was over. When at last that penetrated, he was too weary for exultation.

  Back in the station house, with the other auxiliaries, Jimper stripped off the firefighting gear, got a receipt for every piece and took his turn in the showers. He was a mass of muscle aches, and the water stung as it hit parts of his back and rump—he dimly remembered taking a fall. Or had it been two different falls? But his mind was on other things.

  Specifically, the firefighting gear. Did it have to be so extremely uncomfortable? Not to mention ugly? Couldn’t there be something lighter, less abrasive, maybe, my God, even with some attempt at design, that would work just as well? Something with one of the newer semi-syn fabrics from the sea plants, maybe, more flexible so the sizes wouldn’t be so critical?

  Of course, he thought, gingerly touching his right buttock where it smarted worst, the most important quality for these garments was toughness. So there couldn’t be too much give, or at least not in all directions—but a polymerizing fabric that would stretch as much as you liked in one dimension, but maintain its dimensions in the other, might work just fine…

  He looked at his fingers and discovered them smeared with watery blood, rinsing away under the spray from the shower.

  “Oh, hell,” he groaned, peering under his lifted arm and twisting his torso to see that he was abraded and bleeding from rib cage down across the buttock out of sight. He had hardly felt it, but as he did not want to bleed all over his own clothes he wrapped a towel around himself, took his place in the first-aid station and flopped on the first free cot.

  Lying on his belly, he felt someone dab at his wound, spray it and then gently tap his shoulder. “This is getting to be a habit,” the voice said.

  He squirmed around. Dr. Jo-Ellen Redfan, the woman who had taped him up after the hang-glider fall. And she was wearing the brassard of an auxiliary—another felon working off a sentence, just like himself! “What did they get you for?” he asked.

  “None of your business.” But her tone was pleasant enough. She bandaged him and slapped his rump to tell him he was all through—but as he was leaving the first-aid room she winked good-by.

  He took his time dressing, and as he was leaving he was handed a printout by the duty officer. It had his name, his ID number and a notation of credit: “5 hrs. 41 mins. served. 124 hrs. 19 mins. still due.”

  He was far too tired to walk. He jumped on a flat-bottom bus and leaned against the rail, staring sightless at Tribeca, Soho and Chelsea as the inertial-drive vehicle moved placidly up Hudson toward the 23d Street transfer. 124 hrs. 19 mins. Maybe it would have been better to serve his time. Still, it was the law in New York City that employers had to give work-off convicts time to do what they were commanded to do, although whether or not Mawzi Frères would be willing to consider themselves “employers” in that sense was a whole other question. At 21st Street the vehicle slowed to let someone jump off, and Jimper’s eyes focused for the first time.

  It was the woman doctor. He didn’t stop to think, he swung over the rail after her. “Jo-Ellen!” he called, and, as she turned, amended it to, “Hello, Dr. Redfan. Do you live around here?”

  The expression on her face did not match the friendly good-by wink she had offered. It wasn’t hostile. It wasn’t interested, either. She nodded absently—remotely, a nod wholly detached from any recognition of his presence as a living human being. It was a little chilling, but Jimper pressed on. “Tough day today,” he said, shaking his head. “I think I’m about due for a nice cold beer—how about you?”

  Jimpercy Nutlark was of at least normally good looks and personality, and knew it well enough to possess some self-confidence in dealing with young women. They might not respond, but they were almost never repelled. So he smiled and waited while Jo-Ellen Redfan frowned and glanced at her watch, and was not really surprised when, after that, she shrugged. “A beer is all it’s going to be, champ,” she said, but amiably enough, “but you’re right, it has been one hell of a day.”

  It was her own neighborhood, and Jimper was content to let her lead the way. This far over to the Hudson side of
the island, the dome was not very high, therefore neither were the buildings. Chelsea still had many of its ancient row houses, with little gardeny parks in the middle of some blocks, and along Eighth Avenue the buildings were low and the storefronts ethnic. All kinds of ethnic; between a Lebanese grocery store and a Moslem religious-objects outlet was what was called the Bank of Ireland Bar, and there was real sawdust on the floor and a real old jukebox against the wall. “So what were you in for?” asked Jimper, grinning.

  She shrugged. “No reason not to tell you. It was creating a disturbance.”

  “Ah.” He nodded as he took a sip of the beer, letting her infer the question.

  She grinned. “I wasn’t drunk and disorderly. Actually, there were two men fighting over me, if you want to know.”

  “I can understand that,” he said gallantly.

  “Sure you can, champ.” But she didn’t expand on the remark, only listened, politely and interestedly enough, while he told her the traditional singles-bar story, namely his autobiography. She was attentive enough to ask the right questions: “Well, what made you go into clothes designing?” “Were you serious about this girl in Atlanta?” “Do you think there’ll be a lot of tourists for the Fair?” But she was working her way down to the bottom of the beer, and when she reached it she looked at her watch again. “Jimper,” she said, “I’m sorry, but one beer’s all the time I’ve got. There’s somebody going to be getting home about now and I need to be there.”

  “Ah,” said Jimper philosophically, accepting destiny when it forced itself on him, but she shook her head.

  “It’s not my husband,” she said. “I’m not married or attached, but I don’t date, either.”

  “Ah,” he repeated, and she shook her head again.

  “I’m not gay or frigid, either.” She grinned. “You can’t win ’em all, champ. No, don’t get up—I live just around the corner, and I can make it by myself really well.”

  He watched her go out of the door, admiring the way her body moved under the scarlet, translucent sun-dress, and thought that it was a terrible pity that she was whatever she was that had men fighting over her but didn’t want to see more of one of them.

  Or at least of himself; but Jimper was philosophical about that, too. He was cheerful enough as he left the bar and collided with a huge, smiling man who seemed to have been standing right there. “Oh, sorry, sir!” cried the man, beaming down on Jimper. “It’s all my fault. I apologize.”

  Jimper was quite pleased to find this immense person so genteel. “No harm done,” he said, moving to get out of the way, but the man put a bearpaw hand on his shoulder.

  “I think I ought to buy you a drink,” he said. “Just to show I’m sorry.”

  Jimper was surprised and a little touched. But then he remembered the aches in his bones and the stiffness in his butt. “I’d just as soon take a raincheck,” he said politely. “I was on duty putting out that fire downtown all day, and I’m pretty beat—I just stopped off to have a drink with somebody from the first-aid station there. I don’t think I could handle another one.”

  “I see,” said the man jovially, and stood aside to let Jimper pass on the way to his bus. Jimper turned and saw the man still standing outside the bar, beaming at him. Now, thought Jimper in pleasure, that’s a nice man. Who says New Yorkers are standoffish? He probably was going to like this town, he decided. At least it began pretty well.

  IV

  And, as a matter of fact, as the days passed he began to feel more and more at home. Twice he was called up for auxiliary duty, but both times it was easily done—an hour of helping to hand out parking tickets way up in East Harlem, four hours of standing around to direct fans in and out of Shea Stadium for a double-header. And Mawzi Frères were quite decent about his failure to show up on time with the designs. Better than that. They liked the designs. Better still, they recommended him to a couple of other contractors; best of all, old Rasfah Mawzi turned out to have a daughter. Her name, according to her father, was Fatima, but she said, “Please, call me Doll,” and though she neither leered nor winked she gave off the impression that the doll liked to be played with. Unfortunately she gave her father the same impression, and whenever Jimper managed to get within a meter of Doll the old man’s eyes made exactly the same sensation as an ice cube applied to the back of his neck. Doll was tall for an Egyptian, or Iraqi, or whatever she was—Jimper couldn’t quite figure out which was which—but still tiny enough to have to look up at him. She was not in veils and robes, but she wasn’t wearing hip-huggers, either: a well behaved skirt almost to the knee, a buttoned blouse of material far heavier than anyone needed under the dome. “Daddy dresses me for home,” she explained, leaning over him to watch his light-pen sketch out lingerie. “Home’s Edinburgh.”

  “You don’t sound Scottish.” Or Arab either, Jimper thought.

  “Daddy wanted me to get my degree at Columbia, so how should I sound but American? Speaking of Daddy,” she added, “he’s coming over here, so you’d better make some fast adjustments in that lady.”

  It had come to look a lot like Fatima; Jimper lengthened it and fattened it and changed the hair color to blonde just in time. It had stopped looking like Fatima only to begin looking like Jo-Ellen what-was-her-name, the doctor with the hangups. Jimper sighed. Life had been a lot easier in Atlanta. What was wrong with all these New York women, anyway?

  The best thing that happened to him was that the classifications clerk at the parole board had come to recognize him as a regular. “Volunteer, choot,” he advised Jimper. “Volunteer for everything easy, don’t wait to be called up.”

  “I don’t even know which jobs are easy,” Jimper admitted humbly. The clerk sighed and told him that farmers gave him a pain, but then relented enough to tick off the best bets available. Rat patrol was bad, but laying out the pipes before the drives was good. Patrolling in the entertainment areas around Times Square and 14th Street was bad. Patrolling around the docks was good. The best thing available, as long as he could get days off, was lifeguarding; and so Jimper found himself sitting on a tall chair at the Municipal Baths on Asser Levy Place for eight hours at a stretch. The only thing he had to bother about was calling a cop if someone made a disturbance, and as it was under the dome he didn’t even have to worry about getting a sunburn. He could even catch up on his sleep, twenty minutes at a time or so now and then; which meant that he could also volunteer for night duty patrolling the docks at the toe of the island.

  Atlanta wasn’t a seaport. The volume of traffic that went through the bays and rivers of this city amazed him. From the inner catwalks of the dome he could look down and see squat, square submarines slipping under the surface, traveling the calm sandwich layer to resupply oil rigs in the Baltimore Canyon. Outside the dome were the barges up from the Delaware Bay and the Jersey Shore, freezers of meat and produce for the ship’s bellies, and the fuel, and the raw materials the city’s industries fed on, and the videospecs and the music plugs and the game disks and the typewriters and the washing machines and the shoes and shorts and sealing wax that went into the city’s stores. Upstream, under the chopped-off skeleton of the World Trade Center, the huge submersible garbage scows came in at night. They pumped their holds dry of ballast, surfacing like great bloated dead whales until the coupling crews pumped another twenty-five hundred metric tons of foul-smelling tarry waste into each of them, and submerged them; then they too slipped away, silent as sharks, bound out for the dumping grounds at the edge of the continental shelf. When seeing the sights got boring, there was always a chance to find a comfortable doorway and take a little nap, until the noise of the crabbers woke him up as the tide went out and the crabs came in.

  They were the big business there, first thing in the morning. They swarmed along the river’s edge, inside the dome or out, wherever the water was shallow enough to drop their traps. There seemed no limit to the crabs they could haul in, great eighteen-centimeter brutes that moved like whippets and pinched like a vis
e if they got the chance. When Jimper saw one of the crabbers dumping a bucket on the sidewalk to sort out his catch, he learned not to volunteer to help.

  The only time his official presence was needed was when two of the crabbers dumped their loads together, and the crustaceans scattered in all directions. It took Jimper half an hour to settle the arguments about which was which. Then the old men turned friendly and invited him into the shadow of the dome pylon to share a joint. When Jimper praised the size of the crabs, one of the old men exhaled deeply, coughed and said, “They like the sewage.”

  “Sludge,” said the other, holding his hand out for the roach.

  “Starts out as sewage. Piss and shit and God knows what. The sludge barges dump here.”

  Jimper took his turn, and puffed out a thin blue curl of smoke. “I thought they were supposed to clean the holds out at sea.”

  “Sure they are. Supposed to open the hatches fore and aft and steam for twenty minutes in a straight line. All they are inside is like a great big sewer pipe, you know. The sea’ll come right in and scour them clean. But they don’t do it. If they go five minutes it’s a lot, because they get paid by the load, and naturally they don’t get all the way clean. But that’s all right. The little bit of sewage they dump here you’d never notice, unless you were some little sea creature that’s glad to have it. Then along comes the crab, and he’s glad to have him, and Marty and me’re glad to have the crab.” He peered into the bucket, watched his chance, then dived in with both hands and pulled out a pair of claw-waving monsters. “Here. Take ’em along. Your lady’ll know how to cook them.”

  The trouble was, Jimper didn’t have a lady. The girl from Atlanta didn’t answer his letters. The doctor woman was not in her office when he called her, and didn’t call back. And Fatima-Doll was busy at graduate school. The crabs were definitely losing vigor by the time Jimper made up his mind to offer them to her father, who was grateful enough, the next day, to offer Jimper a package. “Sandwich,” he said. “Crabmeat salad. Your crabs, made by Fatima. Very good.”