The winding private road led him to the highway. He pulled up to a stop sign and waited for a break in traffic on route 66. Across the highway, an officer in a parked state patrol car eyed his license plate and then glanced up to inspect his face. Chaney waved, and pulled into traffic. The state car did not leave its position to follow him.
A second patrol car was parked at the outskirts of town, and Chaney noted with surprise that two men in the back seat appeared to be uniformed national guardsmen. The bayonet-tipped rifles were visible. His face and his license were given the same scrutiny and their attention moved on to the car behind him.
He said aloud (but to himself): “Honest, fellas, I’m not going to start a revolution.”
The city seemed almost normal.
Chaney found a municipal parking lot near the middle of town and had to search for the rare empty space. He was outraged to learn it cost twenty-five cents an hour to park, and grudgingly put two of Seabrooke’s quarters into the meter. A clerk sweeping the sidewalk before a shuttered store front directed him to the public library.
He stood on the steps and waited until nine o’clock for the doors to open. Two city squad cars passed him while he waited and each of them carried a guardsman riding shotgun beside the., driver. They stared at him and the clerk with the broom and every other pedestrian.
An attendant in the reading room said: “Good morning. The newspapers aren’t ready.”
She hadn’t finished the chore of rubber-stamping the library name on each of the front pages, or of placing the steel rods through the newspaper centerfolds. A hanging rack stood empty, awaiting the dailies. An upside-down headline read: JCS DENIED BAIL.
Chaney said: “No hurry. I would like the Commerce and Agriculture yearbooks for the past two years, and the Congressional Record for six or eight weeks.” He knew that Saltus and the Major would buy newspapers as soon as they reached town.
“All the governmental publications are in aisle two, on your left. Will you need assistance?”
“No, thanks. I know my way through them.”
He found what he wanted and settled down to read.
The lower house of Congress was debating a tax reform bill. Chaney laughed to himself and noted the date of the Record was just three weeks before election. In some few respects the debate seemed a filibuster, with a handful of representatives from the oil and mineral states engaging in a running argument against certain of the proposals on the pious grounds that the so-called reforms would only penalize those pioneers who risk capital in the search for new resources. The gentleman from Texas reminded his colleagues that many of the southwestern fields had run dry — the oil reserves exhausted — and the Alaskan fields were yet ten years from anticipated capacity. He said the American consumer was facing a serious oil and gasoline shortage in the near future; and he got in a blow at the utility people by reminding that the hoped-for cheap power from nuclear reactors was never delivered.
The gentleman from Oregon once injected a plea to repeal the prohibition on cutting timber, claiming that not only were outlaw lumberjacks doing it, but that foreign opportunists were flooding the market with cheap wood. The presiding officer ruled that the gentleman’s remarks were not germane to the discussion at hand.
The Senate appeared to be operating at the customary hectic pace.
The gentleman from Delaware was discussing the intent of a resolution to improve the lot of the American Indian, by explaining that his resolution would direct the Bureau of Indian Affairs to act on a previous resolution passed in 1954, directing them to terminate government control of the Indians and return their resources to them. The gentleman complained that no worthwhile action had been taken on the 1954 resolution and the plight of the Indian was as sorry as ever; he urged his fellows to give every consideration to the new resolution, and hoped for a speedy passage.
The sergeant-at-arms removed several people from the balcony who were disturbing the chamber.
The gentleman from South Carolina inveighed against a phenomenon he called “an alarming tide of ignorants” now flowing from the nation’s colleges into government and industry. He blamed the shameful tide on “the radical-left revamping and reduction of standard English courses by misguided professors in our institutions of higher learning,” and urged a return to the more rigorous disciplines of yesteryear when every student could “read, write, and talk good American English in the tradition of their fathers.”
The gentleman from Oklahoma caused to be inserted in the Record a complete news item circulated by a press wire service, complaining that the nation’s editors had either ignored it or relegated it to the back pages, which was a disservice to the war effort.
GRINNELL ASSESSES ARMS
Saigon (AP): General David W. Grinnell arrived in Saigon Saturday to assess what progress South Asian Special Forces have made in assuming a bigger share of the fighting chores.
Grinnell, making his third visit to the war zone in two years, said he was keenly interested in the course of the so-called Asian Citizen Program, and planned to talk to the fighting men in the countryside to find out first-hand how things were going.
With additional American troop commitments pegged in part on the effectiveness of South Asian Special Forces (SASF), Grinnell’s visit sparked rumors of a fresh troop build-up in the hard hit northern sectors. Unofficial estimates set a figure of two million Americans now in combat in the Asian Theater, which the military command refuses to confirm or deny.
Asked about new arrivals, Grinnell said: “That is something the President will have to decide at the proper time.” General Grinnell will confer with American military and civilian officials on all fighting fronts before returning to Washington next week.
Chaney closed the record with a sense of despair and pushed the stack aside. Wanting to lose himself in less depressing but more familiar matters, he opened a copy of the current Commerce yearbook and sought out the statistical tables that were his stock in trade.
The human lemmings hadn’t changed their habits. A bellwether indicating the migration patterns from one area to another was the annual ton-miles study of interstate shipments of household goods; the family that removed together grooved together. The flow continued into California and Florida, as he had forecast, and the adjoining tables revealed corresponding increases in tonnage for consumer durabics and foodstuffs not indigenous to those states. The shipment of automobiles (assembled, new) into California had sharply decreased, and that surprised him. He had supposed that the proposal to ban automobiles in the state by 1985 would only result in an accelerated flow — a kind of hoarding — but the current figures suggested that state officials had found a way to discourage hoarding and depress the market at the same time. Prohibitive taxation, most likely. New York City should note the success of the program.
Chaney began filling his notebook.
The measured tolling of a bell somewhere outside the library brought him up from the book with surprise, and a flurry of aged men from the newspaper racks toward the door underscored the passage of time. It was the noon hour.
Chaney put away the government publications and cast a speculative eye on the attendant. A girl had replaced the older woman on duty earlier. He studied her for a space and decided on an approach least likely to arouse suspicion.
“Excuse me.”
“Yes?” The girl looked up from a copy of Teen Spin. Chaney consulted his notebook. “Do you remember the date of the Chicago wall? The first date — the earliest beginning? I can’t pin it down.”
The girl stared into the air above his head and said: “I think it was in August… no, no, it was the last week of July. I’m pretty sure it was the last of July.” Her gaze came down to his. “We have the news magazines on file if you want me to get it for you.”
Chaney caught the hint. “Don’t bother; I’ll look. Where are those files?”
She pointed behind him. “Fourth aisle, next to the windows. They may not be in chronological order
.”
“I’ll find them. Thank you.” Her head was already bending over the magazine as he turned away.
The Chicago wall ran down the middle of Cermak Road.
It stretched from Burnham Park on the lakefront (where it consisted only of barbed wire), westward to Austin Avenue in Cicero (where it finally ended in another loose skein of barbed wire in a white residential neighborhood). The wall was built of cement and cinder blocks; of wrecked or stolen automobiles, burnedout shells of city buses, sabotaged police cars, looted and stripped semi-trailer trucks; of upended furniture, broken concrete, bricks, debris, garbage, excretion. Two corpses were a part of it between Ashland and Paulina Street. The barrier began going up on the night of July twenty-ninth, the third night of widespread rioting along Cermak Road; it was lengthened and reinforced every night thereafter as the idea spread until it was a fifteen-mile barricade cutting a city in two.
The black community south of Cermak Road had begun the wall at the height of the rioting, as a means of preventing the passage of police and fire vehicles. Both blacks and belligerent whites completed it. The corpses near Paulina Street had been foolish men who attempted to cross it.
There was no traffic over the wall, nor through it, nor along the north-south arteries intersecting Cermak Road. The Dan Ryan Expressway had been dynamited at 35th Street and again at 63rd Street; the Stevenson Expressway was breached at Pulaski Road. Aerial reconnaissance reported that nearly every major street in the sector was blocked or otherwise unfit for vehicular traffic; fires raged unchecked on South Halsted, and cattle had been loosed from their pens in the stockyards. Police and Army troops patrolled the city above the wall, while black militants patrolled below it. The government made no effort to penetrate the barrier, but instead appeared to be playing a waiting game. Rail and highway traffic from the east and south was routed in a wide swing around the zone, entering the city above the wall to the west; civilian air traffic was restricted to higher elevations. Road blocks were thrown up at the Indiana line, and along Interstate 80.
Chicago above the wall counted three hundred dead and two thousand-plus injured during the rioting and the building of the barricade. No one knew the count below the wall.
By the second week of August, troops had encircled the affected area and had dug in for a siege; none but authorized personnel were permitted to enter and none but white refugees were permitted to leave. Incomplete figures placed the number of emerging refugees at about six hundred thousand, although that figure was well below the known white population living in the rebellious zone. Attempts were being made daily — with small success — to rescue white families believed to be still alive in the area. Penetration was not possible from the north but search parties from the western and southern boundaries made several sallies into the area, sometimes working as far north as Midway Airport. Refugees were being relocated to downstate cities in Illinois and Indiana.
North Chicago was under martial law, with a strict dusk-to-dawn curfew. Violaters moving on the streets at night were shot on sight and identified the following day, when the bodies could be removed. South Chicago had no curfew but shootings continued day and night.
At the end of October with the election only a week away, the northern half of the city was relatively quiet; firing across the wall under cover of darkness had fallen off to nuisance shooting, but the police and troops had been issued new orders not to fire unless fired upon. City water service into the zone continued but electricity was curtailed.
On the Sunday morning before election, a party of about two hundred unarmed blacks had approached Army lines at Cicero Avenue and asked for sanctuary. They were turned back. Washington announced the siege was effective and was already putting an end to the rebellion. Hunger and pestilence would destroy the wall.
Chaney strode across the room to the newspaper rack.
Thursday morning editions confirmed their projections published the day before: President Mecks had carried all but three states and won re-election by a landslide. A local editorial applauded the victory and claimed it was earned by “the President’s masterful handling of the Chicago Confrontation.”
Brian Chaney emerged from the library to stand on the steps under a cold November sun. He knew a sense of fear, of confusion — an uncertainty of where to turn. A city police cruiser passed the building, with an armed guardsman riding beside the driver.
Chaney knew why they both stared at him.
TEN
He wandered aimlessly along the street looking in store windows which were not boarded over, and at parked automobiles along the curb. None of the obviously newer cars were much changed from the older models parked ahead and behind; it was a personal satisfaction to see Detroit edging away from the annual model change and back to the more sensible balance of three decades ago.
Chaney stopped by the post office to mail a postcard to an old friend at the Indiana Corporation, and found the cost had climbed to ten cents. (He also made a mental note not to tell Katrina. She would probably claim he had fouled up the future.)
A grocery store window was entirely plastered over with enormous posters proclaiming deep price cuts on every item: ten thousand and one cut-rate bargains from wall to wall. Being a curious futurist, he walked in to inspect the bargains. Apples were selling at two for a quarter, bread at forty-five cents a pound loaf, milk at ninety-nine cents a half gallon, eggs at one dollar a dozen, ground beef at a dollar and twenty-nine cents a pound. The beef was well larded with fat. He bent over the meat counter to check the price of his favorite steak and discovered it was two dollars and forty-nine cents a pound. On an impulse, he paid ninety cents for an eight-ounce box of something called Moon Capsules and found them to be vitamin-enriched candies in three flavors. The advertising copy on the back panel claimed that NASA fed the capsules to the astronauts living on the moon, for extra jump-jump-jumping power.
The store boasted an innovation that was new to him.
A customers’ lounge was fitted out with soft chairs and a large television, and Chaney dropped into a chair to look at the colored glass eye, curious about the programming. He was quickly disappointed. The television offered him nothing but an endless series of commercials featuring the products available in the store; there was no entertainment to break their monotony. He timed the series: twenty-two commercials in forty-four minutes, before an endless tape began repeating itself.
Only one made a lasting impression.
A splendidly beautiful girl with glowing golden skin was stretched out nude on a pink-white cloud; a sensuous cloud of smoke or wisp formed and changed and reformed itself to caress her saffron body with loving tongues of vapor. The girl was smoking a golden cigarette. She lay in dreamy indolence, eyes closed, her thighs sometimes moving with euphoric languor in response to a kiss of cloud. There was no spoken message. At spaced intervals during the two minutes, five words were flashed across the screen beneath the nude: Go aloft with Golden Marijane.
Chaney decided the girl’s breasts were rather small and flat for his tastes.
He quit the store and returned to his car, finding an overtime parking ticket fastened to the windshield. The fine was two dollars, if paid that same day. Chaney scribbled a note on a page torn from his notebook and put it inside the envelope in lieu of two dollars; the ticket was then dropped into a receptacle fastened to a nearby meter post. He thought the local police would appreciate his thought.
That done, he wheeled out of the lot and retraced his route toward the distant station. The sunset curfew was yet some hours away but he was done with Joliet — nearly done with 1980. It seemed much colder and inhospitable than the temperature would suggest.
A state patrol car parked on the outskirts watched him out of town.
The gatehouse was lighted on the inside and occupied by an officer and two military policemen; they were not the same men who had checked him out earlier in the day but the routine was the same.
“Are you coming on station, sir?�
�
Chaney looked across the hood of his car at the gate just beyond the bumper. “Yes, I thought I would.”
“May I see your pass and identification?”
Chaney gave up the necessary papers. The officer read them twice and studied the photograph affixed to one, then raised his eyes to compare the photograph to the face.
“You have been visiting in Joliet?”
“Yes.”
“But not Chicago?”
“No.”
“Did you acquire weapons while you were off-station?”
“No.”
“Very well, sir.” He waved to the guard and the gate was opened for him. “Please drive through.”
Brian Chaney drove through and steered the car to the parking lot behind the laboratory building. The other two automobiles were absent, as was the shiny quarter marker.
He unloaded the paraphernalia from his pockets and from under his coat, only to realize with dismay that he hadn’t taken a single photograph: not one fuzzy picture of a scowling policeman or an industrious sidewalk sweeper. That omission was apt to be received with something less than enthusiasm. Chaney fitted a tape cartridge into the recorder and flipped open his notebook; he thought he could easily fill two or three tapes with an oral report for Katrina and Gilbert Seabrooke. His personal shorthand was brief to the extreme — and unreadable by anyone else — but long experience in the tank enabled him to flesh out a report that was a reasonable summary of the Commerce and Agriculture yearbooks. Facts were freely interspersed with opinions, and figures with educated guesses, until the whole resembled a statistical and footnoted survey of that which Seabrooke wanted: a solid glimpse forward.
On the last tape he repeated all that he remembered from the pages of the Congressional Record, and after a pause asked Katrina if she knew what General Grinnell was doing now? The old boy got around a lot.
The Year of the Quiet Sun Page 11
