City

by Clifford D. Simak

  “If you think any Chamber of Commerce, any ballyhoo, any hare-brained scheme will give you the answers, you’re crazy. There is only one answer and that is simple. The city as a human institution is dead. It may struggle on a few more years, but that is all.”

  “Mr. Webster—” said the mayor.

  But Webster paid him no attention.

  “But for what happened today,” he said, “I would have stayed on and played doll house with you. I would have gone on pretending that the city was a going concern. Would have gone on kidding myself and you. But there is, gentlemen, such a thing as human dignity.”

  The icy silence broke down in the rustling of papers, the muffled cough of some embarrassed listener.

  But Webster was not through.

  “The city failed,” he said, “and it is well it failed. Instead of sitting here in mourning above its broken body you should rise to your feet and shout your thanks it failed.

  “For if this city had not outlived its usefulness, as did every other city—if the cities of the world had not been deserted, they would have been destroyed. There would have been a war, gentlemen, an atomic war. Have you forgotten the 1950s and the 60s? Have you forgotten waking up at night and listening for the bomb to come, knowing that you would not hear it when it came, knowing that you would never hear again, if it did come?

  “But the cities were deserted and industry was dispersed and there were no targets and there was no war.

  “Some of you gentlemen,” he said, “many of you gentlemen, are alive today because the people left your city.

  “Now, for God’s sake, let it stay dead. Be happy that it’s dead. It’s the best thing that ever happened in all human history.”

  John J. Webster turned on his heel and left the room.

  Outside on the broad stone steps, he stopped and stared up at the cloudless sky, saw the pigeons wheeling above the turrets and spires of the city hall.

  He shook himself mentally, like a dog coming out of a pool.

  He had been a fool, of course. Now he’d have to hunt for a job and it might take time to find one. He was getting a bit old to be hunting for a job.

  But despite his thoughts, a little tune rose unbidden to his lips. He walked away briskly, lips pursed, whistling soundlessly.

  No more hypocrisy. No more lying awake nights wondering what to do—knowing that the city was dead, knowing that what he did was a useless task, feeling like a heel for taking a salary that he knew he wasn’t earning. Sensing the strange, nagging frustration of a worker who knows his work is nonproductive.

  He strode toward the parking lot, heading for his helicopter.

  Now, maybe he told himself, they could move out into the country the way Betty wanted to. Maybe he could spend his evenings tramping land that belonged to him. A place with a stream. Definitely it had to have a stream he could stock with trout.

  He made a mental note to go up into the attic and check his fly equipment.

  Martha Johnson was waiting at the barnyard gate when the old car chugged down the lane.

  Ole got out stiffly, face rimmed with weariness.

  “Sell anything?” asked Martha.

  Ole shook his head. “It ain’t no use. They won’t buy farm-raised stuff. Just laughed at me. Showed me ears of corn twice as big as the ones I had, just as sweet and with more even rows. Showed me melons that had almost no rind at all. Better tasting, too, they said.”

  He kicked at a clod and it exploded into dust.

  “There ain’t no getting around it,” he declared. “Tank farming sure has ruined us.”

  “Maybe we better fix to sell the farm,” suggested Martha.

  Ole said nothing.

  “You could get a job on a tank farm,” she said. “Harry did. Likes it real well.”

  Ole shook his head.

  “Or maybe a gardener,” said Martha. “You would make a right smart gardener. Ritzy folks that’s moved out to big estates like to have gardeners to take care of flowers and things. More classy than doing it with machines.”

  Ole shook his head again. “Couldn’t stand to mess around with flowers,” he declared. “Not after raising corn for more than twenty years.”

  “Maybe,” said Martha, “we could have one of them little planes. And running water in the house. And a bathtub instead of taking a bath in the old washtub by the kitchen fire.”

  “Couldn’t run a plane,” objected Ole.

  “Sure you could,” said Martha. “Simple to run, they are. Why, them Anderson kids ain’t no more than knee-high to a cricket and they fly one all over. One of them got fooling around and fell out once, but—”

  “I got to think about it,” said Ole desperately. “I got to think.”

  He swung away, vaulted a fence, headed for the fields. Martha stood beside the car and watched him go. One lone tear rolled down her dusty cheek.

  “Mr. Taylor is waiting for you,” said the girl.

  John J. Webster stammered. “But I haven’t been here before. He didn’t know I was coming.”

  “Mr. Taylor,” insisted the girl, “is waiting for you.”

  She nodded her head toward the door. It read:

  Bureau of Human Adjustment

  “But I came here to get a job,” protested Webster. “I didn’t come to be adjusted or anything. This is the World Committee’s placement service, isn’t it?”

  “That is right,” the girl declared. “Won’t you see Mr. Taylor?”

  “Since you insist,” said Webster.

  The girl clicked over a switch, spoke into the intercommunicator. “Mr. Webster is here, sir.”

  “Send him in,” said a voice.

  Hat in hand, Webster walked through the door.

  The man behind the desk had white hair but a young man’s face. He motioned toward a chair.

  “You’ve been trying to find a job,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Webster, “but—”

  “Please sit down,” said Taylor. “If you’re thinking about that sign on the door, forget it. We’ll not try to adjust you.”

  “I couldn’t find a job,” said Webster. “I’ve hunted for weeks and no one would have me. So, finally, I came here.”

  “You didn’t want to come here?”

  “No, frankly, I didn’t. A placement service. It has, well…it has an implication I do not like.”

  Taylor smiled. “The terminology may be unfortunate. You’re thinking of the employment services of the old days. The places where men went when they were desperate for work. The government operated places that tried to find work for men so they wouldn’t become public charges.”

  “I’m desperate enough,” confessed Webster. “But I still have a pride that made it hard to come. But, finally, there was nothing else to do. You see, I turned traitor—”

  “You mean,” said Taylor, “that you told the truth. Even when it cost you your job. The business world, not only here, but all over the world is not ready for that truth. The businessman still clings to the city myth to the myth of salesmanship. In time to come he will realize he doesn’t need the city, that service and honest values will bring him more substantial business than salesmanship ever did.

  “I’ve wondered, Webster, just what made you do what you did?”

  “I was sick of it,” said Webster. “Sick of watching men blundering along with their eyes tight shut. Sick of seeing an old tradition being kept alive when it should have been laid away. Sick of King’s simpering civic enthusiasm when all cause for enthusiasm had vanished.”

  Taylor nodded. “Webster, do you think you could adjust human beings?”

  Webster merely stared.

  “I mean it,” said Taylor. “The World Committee has been doing it for years, quietly, unobtrusively. Even many of the people who have been adjusted don’t know they have been adjusted.

  “Changes such as have come since the creation of the World Committee out of the old United Nations has meant much human maladjustment. The advent of workable at
omic power took jobs away from hundreds of thousands. They had to be trained and guided into new jobs, some with the new atomics, some into other lines of work. The advent of tank farming swept the farmers off their land. They, perhaps, have supplied us with our greatest problem, for other than the special knowledge needed to grow crops and handle animals, they had no skills. Most of them had no wish for acquiring skills. Most of them were bitterly resentful at having been forced from the livelihood which they inherited from their forebears. And being natural individualists, they offered the toughest psychological problems of any other class.”

  “Many of them,” declared Webster, “still are at loose ends. There’s a hundred or more of them squatting out in the houses, living from hand to mouth. Shooting a few rabbits and a few squirrels, doing some fishing, raising vegetables and picking wild fruit. Engaging in a little petty thievery now and then and doing occasional begging on the uptown streets.”

  “You know these people?” asked Taylor.

  “I know some of them,” said Webster. “One of them brings me squirrels and rabbits on occasions. To make up for it, he bums ammunition money.”

  “They’d resent being adjusted, wouldn’t they?”

  “Violently,” said Webster.

  “You know a farmer by the name of Ole Johnson? Still sticking to his farm, still unreconstructed?”

  Webster nodded.

  “What if you tried to adjust him?”

  “He’d run me off the farm,” said Webster.

  “Men like Ole and the Squatters,” said Taylor, “are our special problems now. Most of the rest of the world is fairly well-adjusted, fairly well settled into the groove of the present. Some of them are doing a lot of moaning about the past, but that’s just for effect. You couldn’t drive them back to their old ways of life.

  “Years ago, with the advent of industrial atomics in fact, the World Committee faced a hard decision. Should changes that spelled progress in the world be brought about gradually to allow the people to adjust themselves naturally, or should they be developed as quickly as possible, with the committee aiding in the necessary human adjustment? It was decided, rightly or wrongly, that progress should come first, regardless of its effect upon the people. The decision in the main has proved a wise one.

  “We knew, of course, that in many instances, this readjustment could not be made too openly. In some cases, as in large groups of workers who had been displaced, it was possible, but in most individual cases, such as our friend Ole, it was not. These people must be helped to find themselves in this new world, but they must not know that they’re being helped. To let them know would destroy confidence and dignity, and human dignity is the keystone of any civilization.”

  “I knew, of course, about the readjustments made within industry itself,” said Webster, “but I had not heard of the individual cases.”

  “We could not advertise it,” Taylor said. “It’s practically undercover.”

  “But why are you telling me all this now?”

  “Because we’d like you to come in with us. Have a hand at adjusting Ole to start with. Maybe see what could be done about the Squatters next.”

  “I don’t know—” said Webster.

  “We’d been waiting for you to come in,” said Taylor. “We knew you’d finally have to come here. Any chance you might have had at any kind of job would have been queered by King. He passed the word along. You’re blackballed by every Chamber of Commerce and every civic group in the world today.”

  “Probably I have no choice,” said Webster.

  “We don’t want you to feel that way about it,” Taylor said. “Take a while to think it over, then come back. Even if you don’t want the job we’ll find you another one—in spite of King.”

  Outside the office, Webster found a scarecrow figure waiting for him. It was Levi Lewis, snaggle-toothed grin wiped off, rifle under his arm.

  “Some of the boys said they seen you go in here,” he explained. “So I waited for you.”

  “What’s the trouble?” Webster asked, for Levi’s face spoke eloquently of trouble.

  “It’s them police,” said Levi. He spat disgustedly.

  “The police,” said Webster, and his heart sank as he said the words. For he knew what the trouble was.

  “Yeah,” said Levi. “They’re fixing to burn us out.”

  “So the council finally gave in,” said Webster.

  “I just came from police headquarters,” declared Levi. “I told them they better go easy. I told them there’d be guts strewed all over the place if they tried it. I got the boys posted all around the place with orders not to shoot till they’re sure of hitting.”

  “You can’t do that, Levi,” said Webster, sharply.

  “I can’t!” retorted Levi. “I done it already. They drove us off the farms, forced us to sell because we couldn’t make a living. And they aren’t driving us no farther. We either stay here or we die here. And the only way they’ll burn us out is when there’s no one left to stop them.”

  He shucked up his pants and spat again.

  “And we ain’t the only ones that feel that way,” he declared. “Gramp is out there with us.”

  “Gramp!”

  “Sure, Gramp. The old guy that lives with you. He’s sort of taken over as our commanding general. Says he remembers tricks from the war them police have never heard of. He sent some of the boys over to one of them Legion halls to swipe a cannon. Says he knows where we can get some shells for it from the museum. Says we’ll get it all set up and then send word that if the police make a move we’ll shell the loop.”

  “Look, Levi, will you do something for me?”

  “Sure will, Mr. Webster.”

  “Will you go in and ask for a Mr. Taylor? Insist on seeing him. Tell him I’m already on the job.”

  “Sure will, but where are you going?”

  “I’m going up to the city hall.”

  “Sure you don’t want me along?”

  “No,” declared Webster. “I’ll do better alone. And, Levi—”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell Gramp to hold up his artillery. Don’t shoot unless he has to—but if he has, to lay it on the line.”

  “The mayor is busy,” said Raymond Brown, his secretary.

  “That’s what you think,” said Webster, starting for the door.

  “You can’t go in there, Webster,” yelled Brown.

  He leaped from his chair, came charging around the desk, reaching for Webster. Webster swung broadside with his arm, caught Brown across the chest, swept him back against the desk. The desk skidded and Brown waved his arms, lost his balance, thudded to the floor.

  Webster jerked open the mayor’s door.

  The mayor’s feet thumped off his desk. “I told Brown—” he said.

  Webster nodded. “And Brown told me. What’s the matter, Carter. Afraid King might find out I was here? Afraid of being corrupted by some good ideas?”

  “What do you want?” snapped Carter.

  “I understand the police are going to burn the houses.”

  “That’s right,” declared the mayor, righteously. “They’re a menace to the community.”

  “What community?”

  “Look here, Webster—”

  “You know there’s no community. Just a few of you lousy politicians who stick around so you can claim residence, so you can be sure of being elected every year and drag down your salaries. It’s getting to the point where all you have to do is vote for one another. The people who work in the stores and shops, even those who do the meanest jobs in the factories, don’t live inside the city limits. The businessmen quit the city long ago. They do business here, but they aren’t residents.”

  “But this is still a city,” declared the mayor.

  “I didn’t come to argue that with you,” said Webster. “I came to try to make you see that you’re doing wrong by burning those houses. Even if you don’t realize it, the houses are homes to people who have no other home
s. People who have come to this city to seek sanctuary, who have found refuge with us. In a measure, they are our responsibility.”

  “They’re not our responsibility,” gritted the mayor. “Whatever happens to them is their own hard luck. We didn’t ask them here. We don’t want them here. They contribute nothing to the community. You’re going to tell me they’re misfits. Well, can I help that? You’re going to say they can’t find jobs. And I’ll tell you they could find jobs if they tried to find them. There’s work to be done, there’s always work to be done. They’ve been filled up with this new world talk and they figure it’s up to someone to find the place that suits them and the job that suits them.”

  “You sound like a rugged individualist,” said Webster.

  “You say that like you think it’s funny,” yapped the mayor.

  “I do think it’s funny,” said Webster. “Funny, and tragic, that anyone should think that way today.”

  “The world would be a lot better off with some rugged individualism,” snapped the mayor. “Look at the men who have gone places—”

  “Meaning yourself?” asked Webster.

  “You might take me, for example,” Carter agreed. “I worked hard. I took advantage of opportunity. I had some foresight. I did—”

  “You mean you licked the correct boots and stepped in the proper faces,” said Webster. “You’re the shining example of the kind of people the world doesn’t want today. You positively smell musty, your ideas are so old. You’re the last of the politicians, Carter, just as I was the last of the Chamber of Commerce secretaries. Only you don’t know it yet. I did. I got out. Even when it cost me something, I got out, because I had to save my self-respect. Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven’t got mob psychology anymore. You can’t have mob psychology when people don’t give a damn what happens to a thing that’s dead already—a political system that broke down under its own weight.”

  “Get out of here,” screamed Carter. “Get out before I have the cops come and throw you out.”

  “You forget,” said Webster, “that I came in to talk about the houses.”