The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  Terrorists, of course. Some terrorists. Any terrorists; and the bomb they had used this time was no fake and no toy.

  The bomb had been more than a block away, planted under the hood of a parked car in one of the theater blocks leading to Times Square. The driver and a passenger had been killed instantly, of course—had been much more than merely “killed,” because there were body bags with some of their parts all around the smoking scrapheap that had been a 1982 Volvo. It could not have been intended just for them. The overkill was immense. Forty or fifty people were taken away to hospitals, mostly cut by flying glass and debris. At least fifteen were known to be dead, five of them inside the Institute.

  If the uniformed services of the city were meditating strike, they didn’t show it. The first emergency vehicle screamed in, tires crunching on the broken glass, in less than a minute. Minutes later the street was pyrotechnic with the flashing red, white and blue lights of fire trucks, police cars and ambulances. There was not room on the block for all of them; traffic was blocked on four side streets, and on Eighth Avenue from 42d Street north.

  The damage was enormous. Theater marquees were sagging or down. Burglar alarms were ringing all up and down the street from locked doors nudged open or sometimes shattered by the blast. A post office truck with its side crunched in had rammed a cruising taxi and had come to rest nose-deep in a parked sports car. A huge, gray limousine had been half a block away, but part of the engine block from the bomb car had been hurled through its windshield; the chauffeur was dead, his passenger already in some hospital’s emergency-care unit. Hub caps, broken glass and unidentifiable rubble mingled with the dirt in the street, and much of the sludge was red with blood. There was steam and smoke from burning vehicles, and fire hoses snaking in every direction across the street. A sleazy hotel at the corner had lost its awning to the overpressure from the bomb, and a woman on a stretcher, extracted from the splintered glass of the hotel’s street-front window, was being transported to an ambulance. All that showed of her was her calm, perplexed face, eyes wide open and dismayed, as an ambulance attendant walked beside her with a bottle of plasma held high and the tube vanishing under the blanket. A youth with his head bandaged like The Invisible Man was being led to a police emergency van.

  No one was being allowed to leave the Institute. The balconies were full. The staff and visitors hung fascinated over the rails, shivering in the damp winds that came in through the naked space where the plate glass had been, watching the disaster teams at work. No one talked about the bombing itself. It was a phenomenon too huge to articulate in sentences. What they talked about was whose protest it was—the Puerto Rican Nationalists? some Black Power revolutionaries? the Palestinians, the Irish, the Croats? It could have been almost anyone, for there did not seem to be a cause so quixotic or a hope so forlorn that some band of assassins was not prepared to set off a bomb for it. They had to wait half an hour before the emergency crews had everything in hand—well, not in hand, really, but as near as you could hope for in a city block where some of the rubble was still being picked apart, like deadly-sharp jackstraws, to look for more victims underneath. Then at last the Institute’s people were allowed out, the stronger and haler first, the secretaries and the frailer among the visitors held back. When Brandon got past the still functioning door, averting his eyes from the pink glass where the doorkeeper had been unfortunate enough to stand, he discovered it was raining. He stood for a moment, waiting to be told when it was safe to cross the street, and Jocelyn Tisdale Feigerman picked her way toward him, her face creased with fury. “Now you see what animals they are!” she cried. “They should be treated like the vermin they are! Looking at this, how can anyone deny that we need the death penalty back?” She wrinkled her nose at the stench of a smoldering seat cushion, thrown from perhaps the original bomb car itself, swerved to avoid a chained bicycle bent by a car that had gone up on the sidewalk. “When I see the Mayor,” she continued, as much to Brandon as to anyone—actually, to an invisible audience at some not-yet-convened women’s-club meeting—“I’m going to tell him once and for all that we need more police and a lot tougher laws for terrorists!”

  Brandon moved away, but departing the sound of Jocelyn Feigerman’s voice brought him into the range of a black man who was bemoaning the gash the chained bicycle had left on the side of his chalk-white Mercedes. “Would you look at it?” he appealed, as much to Brandon as to anyone. “How’m I going to get that fucker out? And I can’t even open my damn door.” It was a day for addressing unseen audiences. The man looked vaguely familiar to Brandon, but no more than vaguely familiar, for both of them had long since forgotten the previous bomb scare that had brought them together. Brandon moved a step farther along the sidewalk. There was a tour bus at the corner, undamaged but trapped in the traffic, with Japanese tourists standing engrossed at its door, snapping pictures of the carnage and the bank on the corner with its windows blown out and workmen already beginning to fit sheets of plywood into the vacant spaces. No doubt they kept the plywood on hand all the time, Brandon mused—

  And heard a crash and screams from behind him, and turned. A remaining chunk of glass from the great glass wall of the Institute had swung itself loose from the upper stories and crashed to the ground, tearing with it a strip of metal framing. The glass had miraculously missed all the people there. The metal framing did not. It struck down an elderly man just coming out of the door.

  It was Jocelyn Feigerman who was screaming the loudest, and her husband who had been smitten by the falling metal. “Oh, God!” she cried, “get a doctor!”

  And suddenly the scene was no longer a spectacle to Brandon but something much closer to his own fragile self. The victims were not impersonal objects, after all. One was old Sullivan, the door-guard at the Institute, another de Rintelen Feigerman. It was people he knew who were among the dead, the shattered, the very nearly dying…

  It could even have been himself.

  And across the street the owner of the gashed Mercedes was jumping over bits of rubble as he raged toward a young woman who was staring fascinated at the scene. She wore a fake-fur coat over hot pants; her name was Gwenna, but everyone in her area of employment called her Vanilla Fudge. Her employment consisted of patrolling that block of Eighth Avenue until some cruising john rented her for a quick trick, and her area was not at the moment productive because of the bombing. “Now, Nillie,” cried the black man as he reached her, “why the fuck you just standin there? How the fuck you gonna make a dollar that way?” His voice sounded like crushed rock; it wasn’t so much his temperament as the fact that a competitor had once cut into his larynx with a switchblade knife. But it was also partly his temperament, and Vanilla Fudge replied only cautiously.

  “But, Dandy, honey, there isn’t anybody looking for a date right now.”

  “Aw, shee-it,” he groaned. “Don’t you understand nothin? What you do now, you get you ass over to Lexington Avenue, hear? I come after you in one hour, and you better have some good news!”

  “Sure, Dandy,” the girl said obediently, but hesitated. “Dandy? Is it all right if I go over to the hospital to see how Lucy Box is? She got really cut up in the hotel…”

  “If you want to see really cut up,” snarled Dan de Harcourt, “you just stand there one more minute.” And scowled after Vanilla Fudge as she click-clacked away in her high heels. He shook his head. A big scratch on the Mercedes, one of his best bitches in the hospital, the other three gaping at the sideshow instead of turning tricks—what a shit of a day it was!

  And not only for Dan de Harcourt. The shockwave of the explosion sent ripples all over the city. Those who had theater tickets for that block had to make other plans for the evening. Three young girls from Milwaukee, on the way to the ice show at the Radio City Music Hall, found themselves in hospital beds instead. A playwright coming out of a bar had just had the epiphany of a perfect comedy scene for his second act when the bomb went off; he was wholly unharmed by the explosion, bu
t he never could remember those comic lines again. Appointments were missed, relatives jumped on planes or buses or into cars to attend victims in the hospital or the morgue—for the ripples did not stop at the city; one of the dead was a city councilman from Chicago, and his absence precipitated a terrible fight for leadership of his ward; some of the Japanese tourists sent postcards home that caused fifty other prospective Japanese tourists to head for Australia instead of the U.S.A.

  But by and by the ripples faded away. The shows reopened, the debris was cleared away, the widows remarried. Over the next few weeks the great glass window of the Institute was slowly replaced. De Rintelen Feigerman was slowly patched together again and released from the hospital, though that took longer and the repair was less complete. New shocks dulled the memory of the old. There were other bombs—not as big, but much more recent, so the perspective of time enlarged them. There were other wild-card catastrophes and crises. The Friday Firebug appeared in Brooklyn, setting blazes in apartment buildings in Bensonhurst and Brownsville and East New York while the occupants were davening at Friday evening services in their temples. A nut murderer took prostitutes to the best hotels in the city and left their dismembered bodies for the maid to find—terrifying Vanilla Fudge, causing Dan de Harcourt to fulminate against the quality of police protection; a nut rapist chose only female police officers for his victims; a nut basketball fan waited patiently outside Madison Square Garden for weeks for the opportunity to shoot a visiting team’s star center, and only managed at the last to wing another fan before being arrested. The garbagemen hadn’t really ended their strike, only recessed it for ninety days, and as the deadline got closer and the negotiators got entrenched in positions far apart, the city began to smell again as collections slowed. The transit workers wanted hazard pay, as the old system began to develop more and more faults; but the city couldn’t settle with the transit workers because every other group of city employees was waiting to see what came of their effort. If one group of city workers got one more dollar in their paychecks, everybody else on the city payroll took that dollar as guaranteed and was willing to strike to collect it, and the city was running low on dollars. A water main burst, and for three weeks a hundred and fifty thousand people were boiling rusty sludge to get something to drink until it was fixed; the police began to suffer from blue flu as the firemen seemed to be getting close to attaining pay parity; a whale washed up on Brighton Beach and its decay smote ten thousand nearby apartment dwellers for two weeks, while the sanitmen and the Coast Guard argued over who was to take it away; a hotel fire killed three, Legionnaire’s disease struck a dozen in a Capuchin monastery in Queens; a Cuban refugee set himself on fire in front of the UN; two rival tongs settling drug territories decimated a dim sum joint in Chinatown, Terrorist Hijacks LaGuardia Shuttle, Mystery Sniper Shocks Midtown, Gay Love Nest Murderer Confesses, Ex-Hubby Slays Three, Power Brownout Probable, Welfare Funds Run Out, Schools Close as Arsonist Strikes. You don’t really need a bomb to destroy a city. You only need to take your hands off the controls for a minute, and the city will destroy itself.

  As the weather got colder the Pins retreated inside their house. The handball court down the block didn’t get used very often. Now and then, on a Sunday, a big bus with a Charter sign over its windshield would come and take them away for a while. Otherwise they seemed to stay in their rooms. At least during the summer, with their music boxes playing and their constant sparring and yelling on the stoop, they had seemed high-spirited. As the weather cooled, so did their spirits. So did Brandon’s. So, for reasons she did not seem to want to discuss, did his daughter’s; for that matter, so did the city’s. Righteous indignation ebbed into sullen rage.

  It was the despondency of the city that Brandon was paid to study, but it was his daughter’s that disturbed him most. She served his breakfast every morning. She took her turn with him in cooking the evening meal and doing the dishes. She kept her room cleaner than she ever had, and on Saturday mornings he often woke to hear the buzz of the vacuum cleaner as she did the living room. But she wouldn’t talk. There had been twenty-four hours of sobbing and fright when she realized how close her father had been to the bombing, and then she closed up again. Brandon worried. The people he worked with noticed it, and on their regular Thursday morning, eating brioche and drinking coffee on his lanai, the Director said so directly—as directly as the Director ever said anything. “You look,” he said, staring dreamily out at the new glass window, “as though you’re not getting enough sleep, Shire. Really you should be quite encouraged.”

  Brandon searched his memory to find what it was he should be encouraged about without success. “Mrs. Feigerman,” beamed the Director. “She’s very interested in the UTM.”

  Brandon paused with the coffee cup halfway to the saucer. “But she misunderstands completely!” he protested. “The Universal Town Meeting is a forum for bargaining and horse-trading! It would be ideal for the present situation in New York, so that all the parties at interest could talk out their differences and work out areas of agreement—but she thinks of it as a publicity device.” The Director shrugged, nodded, raised an eyebrow humorously and buttered a roll, all at the same time; he did not, however, put his thoughts into words. “I mean,” Brandon went on, trying again to fill the gaps that the Director left in any conversation, “it’s the wrong tool for the job—even assuming that job should be done. And I should tell you, Director, that I am not in sympathy with the anti-abortion movement. I realize that she has very good connections in City Hall, and that her sponsorship would be very helpful—” The Director nodded enthusiastically, approving the fact that Brandon had taken his meaning at last. “But I would hate to see UTM employed for a purpose it wasn’t meant for, and probably would fail at.”

  He stopped there, because the Director had put down his roll and was gazing dreamily out over the gardens at the traffic outside. It seemed he was about to speak.

  And so he was. “Do you see,” he meditated, “how the streets of the city resemble the circulatory system of an animal?” He waited for an answer.

  “I suppose they do,” Brandon acknowledged.

  “It’s such a help,” the Director sighed, “to think of it that way, don’t you think? Not a few million individuals organized into pressure groups, but an organism. Well,” he beamed, rising, “I’m glad we’ve had this chance to clarify our positions, Shire. Wasn’t that Jessie Grai coming in down there a minute ago? What a wonderful person she is, my boy, and so helpful in dealing with the problems of young people.” And, with a pat and a smile, he was gone.

  Up to a point, Brandon had acquired the skill of deciphering the Director’s ellipses. The one about Jessie Grai was easy enough to figure out; it was only the way the Director said it that made it a little tricky. So Brandon sought her out. “You’re a psychologist, Jessie,” he said, “and I’ve got a little psychological problem with my daughter.”

  She heard him out patiently, then nodded. “You have to distinguish between healthy reactions and bad ones, Shire. Jo-Anne has had a couple of pretty bad traumas—the bombing here, the burglary of your apartment, above all her mother’s death. Of course she’s reacting. That doesn’t make her sick. She’d be sick if she didn’t.”

  “So I should—”

  “Go on being her father,” Grai nodded. “Love her, and let her know that you do, and when she wants to talk let her. Of course, you could get professional help if you wanted to. It’s easier for a child to talk to a professional stranger than to a parent, at least when the parent is part of the problem—I don’t mean you are doing anything wrong, Shire, only that to Jo-Anne her parents are not so much individuals as part of a package deal. It’s hard for her to separate her feelings about you from her feelings about her mother. But that’s up to you.”

  Brandon thanked her gloomily—of course it was up to him, that was the problem; it was up to him, and he didn’t know what to do. Still…to go on being her father, to love her and let her know that he
loved her, those weren’t too hard to do, even if unoriginal. It did not occur to Brandon that Grai’s advice might have been quite different if he had given her a little more information.

  The other part of the Director’s fuzzy directive was harder. Think of the city as an organism?

  Well, sure. Cities metabolized, like organisms. They breathe, they eat, they sweat, they excrete. Given a chance, they grow and, if somehow they are prevented from doing any of these vital things, they are very likely to die.

  It was not an original thought. It was certainly not a new one. City planners—and the common run of human beings, for that matter—had thought of cities in that way for years. They hadn’t always realized the implications of that thought, of course; that was why so many cityscapes from about 1920 showed tall, skinny skyscrapers dominating the scene—that was so everyone could have an outside window, or something like it, and so the city could breathe. But that was before air-conditioning. That was before Buckminster Fuller, reasoning from energy considerations, declared the skyscraper a disaster. If you wanted, said Fuller, to design a nearly perfect radiator—which was to say, a system that would waste as much energy as it possibly could—you would come up with something very like the skyline of almost any city in the world. Especially New York, for it had started the fashion; but everywhere else, too, as rapidly as the others could catch up. With a maximum of surface area to a minimum of contained volume, so that heat soaked in as fast as possible in summer and fled with chilling speed in winter, the skyscraper was the embodiment of ultimate energy waste.

  So—think of city as organism, Brandon instructed himself. Think of it as a living creature, say a bear. What does a bear do to keep from being frozen or boiled?