The Star-Spangled Future

by Norman Spinrad

  And we were flying inside the Fuller Dome. It was an incredible sensation—the world inside the Dome existed in blue crystal. Our helicopter seemed like a buzzing fly that had intruded into an enormous room. The room was a mile high and ten miles wide. The facets of the Fuller Dome had been designed to admit natural sunlight and thus preserve the sense of being outdoors, but they had been weathered to a bluish hue by the saturation smog. As a result, the interior of the Dome was a room on a superhuman scale, a room filled with a pale blue light—and a room containing a major portion of a giant city.

  Towering before us were the famous skyscrapers of Old New York, a forest of rectangular monoliths hundreds of feet high, in some cases well over a thousand feet tall. Some of them stood almost intact, empty concrete boxes transformed into giant somber tombstones by the eerie blue light that permeated everything. Others had been ripped apart by explosions and were jagged piles of girders and concrete. Some had bad walls almost entirely of glass; most of these were now airy mazes of framework and concrete platforms, where the blue light here and there flashed off intact patches of glass. And far above the tops of the tallest buildings was the blue stained-glass faceted sky of the Fuller Dome.

  Ryan took the helicopter up to the five-hundred-foot level and headed for the giant necropolis, a city of monuments built on a scale that would have caused the pharaohs to whimper, packed casually together like family houses in an African residential village. And all of it Was bathed in a sparkly blue-gray light which seemed to enclose a universe—here in the very core of the East Coast smog bank, where everything seemed to twinkle and shimmer.

  We all gasped as Ryan headed at one hundred miles per hour for a thin canyon that was the gap between two rows of buildings which faced each other across a not-very-wide street hundreds of feet below.

  For a moment, we seemed to be a stone dropping toward a narrow shaft between two immense cliffs—then, suddenly, the copter’s engines screamed, and the copter seemed to somehow skid and slide through the air to a dead hover no more than a hundred feet from the sheer face of a huge gray skyscraper.

  Ryan’s laugh sounded unreal, partially drowned out by the descending whine of the copter’s relaxing engines. “Don’t worry, folks,” he said over the public address system, “I’m in control of this aircraft at all times. I just thought I’d give you a little thrill. Kind of wake up those of you who might be sleeping, because you wouldn’t want to’ miss what comes next: a helicopter tour of what the Space-Agers called ‘The Sidewalks of New York.’ ”

  And we inched forward at the pace of a running man; we seemed to drift into a canyon between two parallel lines of huge buildings that went on for miles.

  Man, no matter how many times I come here, I still feel weird inside the Fuller Dome. It’s another world in there. New York seems like it’s built for people fifty feet tall; it makes you feel so small, like you’re inside a giant’s room. But when you look up at the inside of the Dome, the buildings that seemed so big seem so small; you can’t get a grasp on the scale of anything. And everything is all blue. And the smog is so heavy you think you could eat it with a fork.

  And you know that the whole thing is completely dead. Nothing lives in New York between the Fuller Dome and the subways, where several thousand subway dwellers stew in their own muck. Nothing can. The air inside the Fuller Dome is some of the worst in the country, almost as bad as that stuff they say you can barely see through that fills the Los Angeles basin. The Space-Agers didn’t put up the Dome to atmosphere-seal a piece of the city; they did it to make the city warmer and keep the snow off the ground. The smog was still breathable then. So the inside of the Dome is open to the naked atmosphere, and it actually seems to suck in the worst of the smog, maybe because it’s about twenty degrees hotter inside the Dome than it is outside; something about convection currents, the Africans say, but I dunno.

  It’s creepy, that’s what it is. Flying slowly between two lines of skyscrapers, I had the feeling I was tiptoeing very carefully around some giant graveyard in the middle of the night. Not any of that crap about ghosts that I’ll bet some of these Africans still believe deep down; this whole city really was a graveyard. During the Space Age, millions of people lived in New York; now there was nothing alive here but a couple thousand stinking subway dwellers slowly strangling themselves in their stinking sealed subways.

  So I kind of drifted the copter in among the skyscrapers for a while, at about a hundred feet, real slow, almost on hover, and just let the customers suck in the feel of the place, keeping my mouth shut.

  After a while, we came to a really wide street, jammed to overflowing with wrecked and rusted cars that even filled the sidewalks, as if the Space-Agers had built one of their crazy car-pyramids right here in the middle of Manhattan, and it had just sort of run like hot wax. I hovered the copter over it for a while.

  “Folks,” I told the customers, “below you, you see some of the wreckage from the Panic of the Century which fills the sidewalks of New York. The Panic of the Century started right here in New York. Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, at the height of the Space Age, there were more than one hundred million cars, trucks, buses, and other motor vehicles operating on the freeways and streets of the United States. A car for every two adults! Look below you and try to imagine the magnificence of the sight of all of them on the road all at once!”

  Yeah, that would’ve been something to see, all right! From a helicopter, that is. Man, those Space-Age is sure had guts, driving around down there jammed together on the freeways at copter speeds with only a few feet between them. They must’ve had fantastic reflexes to be able to handle it. Not for me, pal, I couldn’t do it, and I wouldn’t want to.

  But, God, what this place must’ve been like, all lit up at night in bright colored lights, millions of people tearing around in their cars all at once! Hell, what’s the population of the United States today, thirty, forty million, not a city with five hundred thousand people, and nothing in all the world on the scale of this. Damn it, those were the days for a man to have lived!

  Now look at it! The power all gone except for whatever keeps the subway electricity going, so the only light above ground is that blue stuff that makes everything seem so still and quiet and weird, like the city’s embalmed or something. The buildings are all empty crumbling wrecks, burned out, smashed up by explosions, and the cars are ail rusted garbage, and the people are dead, dead, dead.

  It’s enough to make you cry—if you let it get to you.

  We drifted among the ruins of Old New York like some secretive night insect. By now it was afternoon, and the canyons formed by the skyscrapers were filled with deep purple shadows and intermittent avenues of pale blue light. The world under the Fuller Dome was composed of relative darknesses of blue, much as the world under the canopy of a heavy rain forest is a world of varying greens.

  We dipped low and drifted for a few moments over a large square where the top of a low building had been removed by an explosion to reveal a series of huge cuts and canyons extending deep into the bowels of the earth, perhaps some kind of underground train terminal, perhaps even a ruined part of the famous New York subways.

  “This is a burial ground of magics,” Kulongo said. “The air is very heavy here.”

  “They sure knew how to build,” Koyinka said.

  Beside me, Michael Lumumba seemed subdued, perhaps even nervous. “You know, I never knew it was all so big,” he muttered to me. “So big, and so strange, and so… so…”

  “Space Age, Mr. Lumumba?” Ryan suggested over the intercom.

  Lumumba’s jaw twitched. He was obviously furious at having Ryan supply the precise words he was looking for. “Inhuman, honkie, inhuman was what I was going to say,” he lied transparently. “Wasn’t there an ancient saying, ‘New York is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there?’ ”

  “Never heard that one, pal,” Ryan said. “But I can see how your ancestors might’ve felt that way. New York was
always too much for anyone but a real Space-Ager.”

  There was considerable truth in what they both said, though of course neither was interested in true insight. Here in the blue crystal world under the Fuller Dome, in a helicopter buzzing about noisily in the graveyard silence, reduced by the scale of the buildings to the relative size of an insect, I felt the immensity of what had been Space-Age America all around me. I felt as if I were trespassing in the mansions of my betters. I felt like a bug, an insect. I remembered from history, not from instinct, how totally America had dominated the world during the Space Age—not by armed conquest, but by the sheer overwhelming weight of its very existence. I had never before been quite able to grasp that concept.

  I understood it perfectly now.

  I gave them the standard helicopter tour of the sidewalks of New York. We floated up Broadway, the street that had been called The Great White Way, at about fifty feet, past crazy rotten networks of light steel girders, crumbled signs, and wiring on a monstrous scale. At a thousand feet, we circled the Empire State Building, one of the oldest of the great skyscrapers, and now one of (ho best-preserved, a thousand-foot slab of solid concrete, probably just the kind of tombstone the Space-Agers would’ve put up for themselves if they had thought about it.

  Yeah, I gave them all the usual stuff. The ruins of Rockefeller Center. The U.N. Plaza Crater.

  Of course, they were all sucking it up, even Lumumba, though of course the slime wouldn’t admit it. After this, they’d be ripe for a nasty peek at the subway dwellers, and after they got through gaping at the animals, they’d be ready for dinner back in Milford, feeling they had got their money’s worth.

  Yeah, I can get the same money for a five-hour tour that most guides get for six, because I’ve got the stomach to take them into a subway station. As usual, it had just the right effect when I told them we were going to end the tour with a visit on foot to an inhabited subway station. Instead of bitching and moaning that the tour was too short, that they weren’t getting their money’s worth, they were all eager—and maybe a little scared—at actually walking among the really primitive natives. Once they’d had their fill of the subway dwellers, a ride home across the Hudson into the sunset would be enough to convince them they’d had a great day.

  So we were going to see the subway dwellers! Most of the native guides avoided the subways, and the American government for some reason seemed to discourage research by foreigners. A subtle discouragement, perhaps, but discouragement nevertheless. In a paper he published a few years ago, Omgazi had theorized that the modern Americans in the vicinity of New York had a loathing of the subway dwellers that amounted to virtually a superstitious dread. According to him, the subway dwellers, because they were direct descendants of diehard Space-Agers who had atmosphere-sealed the subways and set up a closed ecology inside rather than abandon New York, were identified with their ancestors in the minds of the modern Americans. Hence, the modern Americans shunned the subway dwellers because they considered them shamans on a deep subconscious level.

  It had always seemed to me that Omgazi was being rather ethnocentric. He was dealing, after all, with modern Americans, not nineteenth-century Africans. Now I would have a chance to observe some subway dwellers myself. The prospect was most exciting. For, although the subway dwellers were apparently degenerating toward extinction at a rapid rate, in one respect they were unique in all the world—they still lived in an artificial environment that had been constructed during the Space Age. True, it had been a hurried, makeshift environment in the first place, and it and its inhabitants had deteriorated tremendously in two centuries, but, whatever else they were or weren’t, the subway dwellers were the only enclave of Space-Age Americans left on the face of the earth.

  If it were possible at all for a modern African to truly come to understand the reality of Space-Age America, surely confrontation with the lineal descendants of the Space Age would provide the key.

  Ryan set the helicopter down in what seemed to be some kind of large open terrace behind a massive, low, concrete building. The terrace was a patchwork of cracked concrete walkways and expanses of bare gray earth. Once, apparently, it had been a small park, before the smog had become lethal to vegetation. As a denuded ruin in the pale blue light, it seemed like some strange cold corpse as the helicopter kicked up dry clouds of dust from the surface of the dead parkland.

  As I stepped out with the others into the blue world of the Fuller Dome, I gasped: I had a momentary impression that I had stepped back to Africa, to Accra or Brazzaville. The air was rich and warm and humid on my skin. An instant later, the visual effect—everything a cool pale blue—jarred me with its arctic-vista contrast. Then I noticed the air itself and I shuddered, and was suddenly hyperconscious of the filters up my nostrils and the goggles over my eyes, for here the air was so heavy With smog that it seemed to sparkle electrically in the crazy blue light. What incredible, beautiful, foul poison!

  Except for Ryan, all of us were clearly overcome, each in his own way. Kulongo blinked and stared solemnly for a moment like a great bear; his wife and son seemed to lean into the security of his calm aura. Koyinka seemed to fear that he might strangle; his wife twittered about excitedly, tugging at his hand. The two young men from Luthuliville seemed to be self-consciously making an effort to avoid clutching at each other. Michael Lumumba mumbled something unintelligible under his breath.

  “What was that you said, Mr. Lumumba?” Ryan said a shade gratingly as he led us out of the park down a crumbling set of stone-and-concrete stairs. Something seemed to snap inside Lumumba; he broke stride for a moment, frozen by some inner event while Ryan led the rest of us onto a walkway between a line of huge silent buildings and a street choked with the rusted wreckage of ancient cars, timelessly locked in their death-agony in the sparkly blue light.

  “What do you want from me, you damned honkie?” Lumumba shouted shrilly. “Haven’t you done enough to us?”

  Ryan broke stride for a moment, smiled back at Lumumba rather cruelly, and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, pal. I’ve got your money already. What the hell else could I want from you?”

  He began to move off down the walkway again, threading his way past and over bits of wrecked cars, fallen masonry, and amorphous rubble. Over his shoulder, he noticed that Lumumba was following along haltingly, staring up at the buildings, nibbling at his lower lip.

  “What’s the matter, Lumumba?” Ryan shouted back at him. “Aren’t these ruins good enough for you to gloat over? You wouldn’t be just a little bit afraid, would you?”

  “Afraid? Why should I be afraid?”

  Ryan continued on for a few more meters; then he stopped and leaned up against the wall of one of the more badly damaged skyscrapers, near a jagged cavelike opening that led into the dark interior. He looked directly at Lumumba. “Don’t get me wrong, pal,” he said, “I wouldn’t blame you if you were a little scared of the subway dwellers. After all, they’re the direct descendants of the people that kicked your ancestors out of this country. Maybe you got a right to be nervous.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Ryan, Why should a civilized African be afraid of a pack of degenerate savages?” Koyinka said as we all caught up to Ryan.

  Ryan shrugged. “How should I know?” he said. “Maybe you ought to ask Mr. Lumumba.”

  And with that, he turned his back on us and stepped through the jagged opening into the ruined skyscraper. Somewhat uneasily, we followed him into what proved to be a large antechamber that seemed to lead back into some even larger cavernous space that could be sensed rather than seen looming in the darkness. But Ryan did not lead us toward this large, open space; instead, he stopped before he had gone more than a dozen steps and waited for us near a crumbling metal-pipe fence that guarded two edges of what looked like a deep pit. One long edge of the pit was flush with the right wall of the antechamber; at the far short edge, a flight of stone stairs began which seemed to go all the way to the shadow-obscured bottom.


  Ryan led us along the railing to the top of the stairs, and from this angle I could see that the pit had once been the entrance to the mouth of a large tunnel whose floor had been the floor of the pit at the foot of the stairs. Now an immense and ancient solid slab of steel blocked the tunnel mouth and formed the fourth wall of the pit. But in the center of this rusted steel slab was a relatively new airlock that seemed of modern design.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Ryan said, “we’re standing by a sealed entrance to the subways of Old New York, During the Space Age, the subways were the major transportation system of the city and there were hundreds of entrances like this one. Below the ground was a giant network of stations and tunnels through which the Space-Agers could go from any point in the city to any other point. Many of the stations were huge and contained shops and restaurants. Every station had automatic vending machines which sold food and drinks and a lot of other things, too. Even during the Space Age, the subways were a kind of little world.”

  He started down the stairs, still talking. “During the Panic of the Century, some of the New Yorkers chose not to leave the city. Instead, they retreated to the subways, sealed all the entrances, installed space-station life-support machinery—everything from a fusion reactor to hydroponics—and cut themselves off from the outside world. Today, the subway dwellers, direct descendants of those Space-Agers, still inhabit several of the subway stations. And most of the Space-Age life-support machinery is still running. There are probably Space-Age artifacts down here that no modern man has ever seen.”

  At the bottom of the pit, Ryan led us to the airlock and opened the outer door. The airlock proved to be surprisingly large. “This airlock was installed by the government about fifty years ago, soon after the subway dwellers were discovered,” he told us as he jammed us inside and began the cycle. “It was part of a program to recivilize the subway dwellers. The idea was to let scientists get inside without contaminating the subway atmosphere with smog. Of course, the whole program was a flop. Nobody’s ever going to get through to the subway dwellers, and there are less of ’em every year. They don’t breed much, and in a generation or so they’ll be extinct. So you’re all in for a really unique experience. Not everyone will be able to tell their grandchildren that they actually saw a live subway dweller!”