The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  “Thank you,” said Jimper, drugged by lack of sleep, and sat over the light-board for another half hour, altering sketches without much improving them, until it occurred to him that crabmeat salad should not be left indefinitely without refrigeration. He began to eat, too fatigued to notice whether or not it was good. Almost too fatigued to notice that there was something in the crabmeat salad too tough to be meat and too flexible to be shell, and when he took it out it was a sort of Band-Aid, and when he pulled it open there was a folded slip of paper inside:

  Tonight, 1730 hours, New Gotham Tower East, 83d floor, DOOR.

  New Gotham Tower was one of the ethnic neighborhoods, in the ethnic’s usual battle with the free-thinkers, counterculturists, arts-hopefuls and soi-disant Bohemians who liked cheap rents and enough grime to prove superiority to material values. The 83d floor was an express stop, with the usual sprinkling of shops, fast-food stores and sidewalk vendors. It took Jimper only a moment to find the place he was looking for. The sign on the door said

  DOOR

  all right, but it wasn’t really a door, it was a cloud-curtain. That is to say, it was a flow of air containing large, light organic molecules, pumped out of slots at the top of the frame and sucked into slots in the floor. Some projector somewhere laid the cloud over with a curious dark-hued scene, a bare turf with a standing figure whose shadowy back was to Jimper as he approached. It was vague. But it looked real. Jimper almost braced himself for contact as he entered, but all he felt was a warm draft raising the hair at the nape of his neck.

  When he glanced back it was the face of the shadowy figure he saw, female, with tufted hair that looked almost like horns, wearing a tee-shirt that said:

  We Sell Magic

  Not Tricks

  Magic

  What a strange place, Jimper mused. The lighting was dim, but all his other senses were being assailed. Musk and pine, garlic and stranger, more easterly scents; sitar music in the background; and, suddenly, a flare of angry red flame as a clerk at the back of the store demonstrated a pinch of something tossed into a brazier. There was only one other salesperson, talking to a customer. Jimper approached her.

  “Excuse me.”

  She glanced irritably at him and went on talking. “I’m so glad you came in tonight! We just got some graveyard dirt.”

  The customer was a teen-aged boy with acne. “How much for a quarter kilo?”

  “Twelve-fifty,” she said apologetically.

  “My God!”

  “But it’s the real thing,” she cajoled. “From—” she lowered her voice “—you know the old Portuguese cemetery on Eleventh, street level? From there. And legal. And certificated.”

  The boy pursed his lips and tapped them gently with two fingers. “I’ll have to think about it,” he said, and drifted away. The clerk sighed and turned toward Jimper, her eyebrows raised.

  “I’m looking for Doll,” he said.

  “Oh, sure. Wax? Male or female? Or, if you have something of the affected, hair clippings, whatever, we do a custom for forty dollars up—”

  “Not a doll. Doll. Fatima Mawzi,” he said.

  The salesperson lost interest. “In the back room,” she said, with so little concern that Jimper wondered just how many times that particular transaction had taken place. And then he was at the end of the long, narrow store, and in the back room—with a real door this time, with a real lock—and there was Doll, inhaling deeply on a water pipe, and looking up at him through the hashish fumes, and wearing no clothes at all.

  The business of magic, real magic, no tricks, must not have been all that profitable; the back room was set up for exactly what Doll had chosen it for, and how she had come to know about it Jimper never asked. The technology of the room fascinated him. Handheld TV cameras that let you watch on a large screen what was going on in parts of your bodies inaccessible to the eyes. Gadgets that shuddered and gadgets that pulsed. Electronic gadgets that overrode the flagging hormones when the body was ready to quit but the brain wanted more. Beds that moved, and harnesses that made a bed unnecessary. Liqueurs. Scents. Tapes of herculean performances, even of your own if you chose to save them. The first four times Jimper and Doll visited the room he was kept so occupied they never had a chance to talk at all; and even afterward Doll was not conversational. Her stolen moments for Jimper were scant and scarce, and she did not want to waste them on blab. Her time in New York was limited, she told him. Quite soon she would be sent back to Edinburgh to marry the boy next door. “What kind of a man is he?” Jimper asked, lying on the bed that still quivered from their exercises. Doll pulled the robes over her head and looked at him.

  “A man. Very strict. Very religious. Very likely to refuse to marry me if he finds out what I do in New York. And also very, very rich.”

  The veil was the hardest to put on, but it completed the ensemble and made Doll just one more strictly religious Moslem woman in a Moslem neighborhood. “Doll?” he asked. “Won’t he expect you to be a virgin, like?”

  “Not in front,” she said, studying herself in the mirror, and moving toward the door. “And the room rent runs out in ten minutes, Jimper, so get your ass in gear, will you? I’m off to the Fair.”

  Doll was never in the drafting offices any more, so Jimper went against the good advice of the parole clerk and volunteered for guarding the Fair site. It was nearing the time to open. The great Rainbow Bridge stretched clear across the park now and teams of engineers making stress tests were crawling along it every day. The main pavilions were completed now, Iceland with its foamed lava structures and artificial geysers, the Saudis with their fake Red Sea beach in miniature, and tiny icebergs being towed to it across the Fair’s central lake. The fast-food stands and novelty booths were hauled in and set up, and the concessionaires squabbled about their locations and complained about the weather. The dome took most of the risk out of rain, shine or gloom, but it was not any help at all when dust clouds filled the skies and at noon the sky was dark. “Dark day, no pay,” a taco seller informed Jimper despairingly, as he hesitated over how much corn flour to order. “If it doan get bright, we doan get no sales.”

  “It’s bound to get better,” Jimper reassured him, out of no knowledge at all, because Atlanta was not usually in the dust storm track. He smiled benignly, adjusted the angle of his red beret and moved on to admire his costumes at the British pavilion.

  As the staff began to practice their tasks in dress rehearsals, Jimper watched when he could be there, and smugly acknowledged that the designs were good. The kilts hung smartly and moved well with the wearer; the Union Jack blouses made the most of whatever the women inside them had. He had picked up what might almost be called a clientele. When his sentence was served, when the Fair was over, when these temporary interruptions in his career had run their course, then, he was quite sure, he would become one of the reliable, successful designers of the city, and he was already shopping around for a good location for his boutique. Things were going well enough, he realized complacently.

  With one exception.

  As he caught sight of Doll’s back and moved toward her he discovered she was staring up at the sky, and observed the exception. High over the park a dragonfly skimmed and soared. A hanger. Hard to make out in the dusky afternoon, but clearly an expert who was taking advantage of every thermal and every breeze. “Go it, old soul,” Jimper muttered, yearning toward the glider above, and Doll gave him a quick glance.

  “I wish I were there,” she announced.

  He took his eyes off the glider for a moment, caught by surprise. “I didn’t know you were a jumper.”

  She shrugged, and didn’t answer. From behind Jimper her father answered for her. “Fatima has done such things, yes,” he rumbled heavily. “But now that she is of age to marry it is no longer suitable.” Jimper smiled, excused himself and drifted away, watching the hang-glider as long as he could and praying for the safety of his landing when the figure was out of sight.

  He had an idea.r />
  There was very little that could be done between two consenting persons that he and Doll had not already done, in that little room behind DOOR; but there was one experience they had never shared. It was silly. It was dangerous.

  It was wholly and completely desired.

  From his tiny apartment in the East Village to the New Gotham Tower East was only a short ride on a hydrovan, and all the way Jimper was staring at the dome. It was dark, though the time was high noon. When he got to the little room behind DOOR Doll was there before him, already undressed, the hookah going and the smell of hash powerful in the tiny room. “What’s the matter with you, Jimper?” she asked, passing him the mouthpiece. He took a deep drag before replying.

  “The Mid-Day Dark,” he said.

  “Brings you down, does it? Take another hit,” she commanded, “and we’ll see if we can bring you up again.”

  And of course they could, at least physically they could. But while Jimper’s body was active in one area, his head was turning over the Mid-Day Dark. If the Earth was warming up, as they said it was, why were the farmers constantly nagging with their petty complaints of cold? Look at the lousy stuff in the super-suq. Lettuce brown around the edges, potatoes that you damn well knew were going to be all black or holey inside, limp carrots. And if you complained to the checkout clerk all she said was it’s the weather.

  And the weather was supposed to be getting warmer!

  Jimper had followed the documentaries about it well enough. The atmosphere was a heat engine. The more heat you poured into it, the more violence it produced. Heat engines do not work on temperature but on differences between temperatures; that was what they called “Carnot’s laws.” If you piled seventy-five multimegawatt powerplants and fifteen million gas-burning vehicles into one slice of a state in the west, such as California, and left two or three states a few hundred miles away pretty much alone, such as Nevada and Utah, a temperature differential was built up. Air would not accept that. Air wanted to be the perfect democracy, every molecule bounding around at the same velocity as every other. That was entropy. Air scooped up heat from Malibu and transported it to Salt Lake, and on the way it blew the roof off your house, if you happened to live in the way. Then it roared across the plains, and lifted the topsoil into the sky to float over Kansas and Connecticut. Or New York. Or else it muscled its way through Canada, where it dropped its water and dried out as cold as a Platonic hell, and slid down into Arkansas and Mississippi and froze the revelers at the Mardi Gras. Meanwhile Fairbanks thawed and Honolulu sweat, but that didn’t help the farmers in the Midwest. The food-growing states were chilled and windy. The growing season was short. And tens of millions of tons of their topsoil came east to visit, and made the Mid-Day Dark. It floated over their heads, borne on the breezes, rising with the thermals.

  “We can do it if you want to,” said Doll.

  Jimper came back to the room with a start. He gazed up at her. “What?” he managed to say.

  She was standing, rubbing her spine and looking at him. “You were talking about flying,” she said.

  Jimper nodded, trying to fasten himself to the moments that were fleeting past. It was not easy. He had had quite a lot to smoke, he realized.

  “I think my back will take it,” she said.

  He nodded agreeably, although he did not have the faintest idea what she was talking about. Or what he had been talking about, either. Something about her back? Doll was short, vivacious, tiny, but her breast development was impressive and she was already complaining about back aches. Had they been trying something particularly hard on her back? He couldn’t remember.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I’ve got wings stashed away, and my friend told me where there’s a good window. Only thing wrong, you’ve got to jump out blind. But it’s a sheer fall, and good winds.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, nodding as though he understood.

  “So get dressed,” said Doll, “because the old man’s away all afternoon, and we’ll never get another chance like this.”

  It occurred to Jimper that he was doing a lot of nodding but, as he could think of no more cogent contribution to make to the dialogue, he continued to do so, all the while Doll was getting into her own clothes and driving him into his.

  It had been a lot of hash. Jimper was in that biddable state where everything looked like a good idea, especially if all he had to do was say yes to it. Unfortunately Doll wanted more than a yes. She wanted him to move. She was in that other stage where everything that looked like a good idea had to be done right away, and right away was when they did it all: clothes on, out of the room, down an elevator, across a flying bridge, up another elevator—Jimper might have stayed in that second elevator forever, gazing at the pretty patterns the floor buttons made, if Doll had not dashed back in to collect him just as the doors were about to close. It wasn’t until he was actually belting into the rented hang-glider that he began to break through the hashish fog. “I don’t know if this is a good idea, Doll,” he said; but his fingers were checking the buckles, touching the wings, looking for frays and loose fittings—old wings but well kept; there were none.

  “Come on,” she said, tugging him toward a great wide window. Strange that so obvious a jumpoff had not been spiked long since, he reflected, and said, “It seems kind of dangerous to me—”

  About that he was right. He knew it at once, as soon as hand in hand they leaped, and he heard the funny slithering rattle and saw something spring up before them, and felt the buffered jar, and realized they were in a net. They hung there for ten minutes, bagged like bunnies in a trap, before three grinning regular-force policemen hauled them in.

  “You, young lady,” said the judge, “are paroled in custody of your father, and if I see you here again it will go hard with you. And as to you—”

  He looked down over the bench at Jimper, and you could almost hear the workings of the judicial brain as it clanked toward a sentence. “Recidivist,” he said. “Second offense. No extenuation. Ninety days or fifteen thousand dollars, next case.”

  V

  Recidivists didn’t have it as easy as first offenders. Their opportunities to volunteer for easy jobs were limited; they went where they were sent, and they had other penalties first offenders were spared. One of them was in the building marked Municipal Hospital—Emergency Clinic & Rehabilitation. And there Jimper waited more than two hours for his turn.

  It was the man ahead of him who took up most of the time, because he wanted to talk, and, Jimper thought, appalled, had certainly a lot to talk about. “After I put my, you know, my hand on her,” the man was saying, “she told me, she like told me she was scared.”

  “Scared of you?” the counselor asked, looking down to make notes to show that he was following the story.

  “She was scared her mother would find out. But I didn’t stop.” But he did stop there, for a moment; he stopped and wet his lips and looked out toward Jimper, on the far side of the file cabinets that were all the counselor’s office had for a wall. Jimper tried to look as though he hadn’t been listening, though every convict in the waiting room was obviously intent.

  The little man made eye contact with every one of them before turning back to the counselor. “I didn’t stop,” he repeated, wiping his lips against the back of his wrist. “Then, when I had her panties off, I—Like, I—Like I took the, uh, the thing—”

  “The butcher knife, yes,” the counselor prompted.

  “Yes, I took the butcher knife, and I stuck it in—I like, stuck it into her—”

  “You penetrated her sexual area with it,” the counselor finished for him. “I see, but there’s one thing that puzzles me, Willy.”

  “What’s that?” the little man asked eagerly.

  “Weren’t you aware that that would hurt her? Maybe even kill her?”

  “Oh, sure,” the little man agreed.

  “But you said you loved her, this five-year-old girl.”

  “Well, I couldn’t do the oth
er thing. She was only five,” Willy explained virtuously.

  “I see.” The counselor made a note on his memo plate. He thought for a moment, then leaned forward benignly. “You do know this is all a fantasy, don’t you, Willy?” he asked.

  Willy’s expression clouded. “Oh, hell, sure I know that,” he mumbled.

  “Because before your interview I called her mother to make sure. Sally is quite all right.”

  “I know that! It’s just that the judge told me I had to come and talk to you when I—When I get these kind of ideas—”

  “Of course,” the counselor beamed. “You’ve been very good about that, Willy, and I appreciate it. Is there anything else on your mind?”

  The little man hitched around in the chair for a moment as though he were about to get up, but didn’t.

  “Yes, Willy?” the counselor encouraged.

  “Well—Don’t I have to get punished?” Willy pleaded.

  “Ah!” The counselor shook his head in self-reproof. “I almost forgot! Thank you for reminding me, Willy. Let’s see, I would say that calls for a fine—say, twenty-five cents. Now, you’d better pay that up right away!”

  The man reached gratefully into his pocket, and on his way out he beamed at Jimper, the next in line. “That’s one great doctor,” he confided.

  The one great doctor was mournfully dropping the quarter into a large jar. By the sound of the falling coin, it had a good deal of company inside. “Name?” he said without looking up, and when Jimper responded he sighed and tapped out the name on his memo plate. “What’s your problem?” he asked, waiting for the data file to come up.

  “I don’t have a problem. All I have is two convictions for hang-gliding inside the dome.”