The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  As Bratislaw slipped out of the shoe he missed his grip and the wind caught it. It sailed away, down through the open metalwork where the plastic had yet to go. Some citizen far below was likely to have a nasty surprise. “Tiny?” he offered. “I think we better talk to Ella.”

  Tiny shook his head regretfully. “She don’t want to talk to you any more, Jeffer,” he said, uncoiling a cable from his waist. Bratislaw was surprised; it was a safety line, and for a minute he thought Martineau was about to offer it to him. Wrong guess. The big man clipped one end to the lifeline and the other to his belt.

  “You can’t do this!” Bratislaw yelled, retreating a step along the catwalk.

  “Sure I can,” grinned Tiny. “I got my orders from Ella, that’s how I know it’s okay. Now, you just hold still a minute—”

  And Bratislaw might have done it, monkey caught in the python’s glare, but the wind was whistling around him and the chill steel was slippery; he moved away and stumbled. He fell flat on the catwalk, hugging it as he’d never hugged a woman, scared as he had never been in his life.

  And there was Tiny Martineau galloping toward him. The knife was back in his sleeve, no longer needed to do the job he had come to do. The expression on his face was serious and thoughtful as he drew back a foot to kick Bratislaw loose from the catwalk.

  It wasn’t skill. It was terrified reflex. Bratislaw kicked first. He caught Martineau on the ankle that had been in a cast; the slippery steel slipped; the giant yelled in sudden rage and fright; he fell across Bratislaw, missed a grab for the steel. And was gone.

  When Bratislaw looked over the edge of the catwalk he could see Martineau dangling helplessly from his lifeline, fifty feet below, bobbing up and down and yelling, and wholly, completely unable to do anything to prevent it as Bratislaw, gasping, got to his feet, retrieved the one remaining snowshoe and slowly, carefully, slipped and clung his way back down the dome.

  VII

  When the baby was two weeks old Heidi declared herself ready to travel and the child to be shown off to his aunt. They took the train to Peekskill and a taxi to the B-mod farm, and Lucy was waiting for them at the gate. She wasn’t alone. She was pushing a wheelchair that contained a middle-aged woman who lacked arms and legs. “I’m Dorothy,” said the woman, “and I’m a kind of counselor here.” The halt leading the dumb? thought Bratislaw, but said not a word. He didn’t have to. Lucy’s scrambled brains had not forgotten how to greet a new child, and she was stroking the sweet, soft cheek and burbling over the little snorts and sighs that were all John Fitzgerald Kennedy Bratislaw the Fourth’s vocabulary so far. “Nice kid,” commented the woman in the wheelchair. She looked Bratislaw over carefully. She wasn’t really without arms or legs, he saw, but they were no more than flippers at the shoulder, and what they were at the hips he could not see for the lap robe that covered her. But they surely were not full-scale legs. “Congratulations,” she added.

  “It was my wife’s doing,” he grinned.

  “I don’t mean the baby. I mean the trial.”

  “Oh. Yeah,” said Bratislaw, but the time had passed when he preened himself at that kind of remark. Ella Jennalec’s lawyer had been the old-fashioned kind. He didn’t cross-examine. He pulverized. He tried every tactic a fertile imagination and a lenient court allowed him to demolish Bratislaw’s credibility as a witness, and not the least of his weapons was the testimony, irrefutable, because it was true, that Bratislaw had spent a lot of time in Jennalec’s bed while his poor, pregnant wife worked overtime to pay their debts and save money for the child. Of course, it didn’t change the outcome of the case. The amulet in Bratislaw’s pocket had still been running, and Tiny Martineau’s admission on tape that Jennalec had ordered the killing pushed the last reasonable doubt out of every juror’s mind—not to mention all the other tapes, and all the other evidence from a dozen sources that had been building up the pattern of extortion and conspiracy and crime, which had made the verdict easy.

  Heidi Bratislaw was not an unusually jealous woman, but it had taken a lot of the easy trust out of the marriage. Not to mention what it had done to Lucy. “Yeah,” said Bratislaw again, looking down at the sisters bent over his new son, “but to tell you the truth, I kind of wish none of it had happened, for all the trouble it caused.” And Lucy looked up at him. The pleasure went out of her pretty, empty face. She bit her lip and contorted her cheeks. Her eyes squinted with the effort and her jaw trembled, but at last she got it out:

  “Was worth it,” she said.

  I WAS A DEPRESSION KID. I WAS BORN

  during the War to End Wars—the 1914 one. I started prep school the autumn of the 1929 stock-market crash, and transferred to the public high school in 1930 because Dad didn’t have tuition money any more. By 1933 I was out of school entirely. I had to work for a living, when I could find it. Bad times! There were the breadlines, Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl, veterans on the Bonus March, poverty, fear—I hated the gritty, grimy world I lived in. You know what kept me going? Movies. Especially movies about the future. When I was in the theater sitting through two or three showings of Just Imagine or Things to Come I could shut the real world right out. I could imagine I was actually living in one of those great sparkly cities of the future where everybody was happy and healthy and rich and you lived like a king under a

  Second-hand

  sky

  I

  And when the dome was complete it made a new world. A magnificent one, with magnificent new temptations. It was a magnet, and Jamespercy Nutlark one of the filings it drew. “Stay in Atlanta, Jimper,” his friends in the club begged him. “You don’t want to go to New York! They catch you hanging in New York, they hang you!”

  But he emigrated anyway. You had to go where the work was, and anyway New York was the Big Blister and what hanger didn’t want to try his wings on that? So he brought the old works with him when he moved and, as soon as he had a locker and a bed and a job, in that order, he was off to try the air. So he found the right high-rise and took the express to 75, with his Macy’s shopping bag casually in his hand and his heart pounding. There was a wait for the local, and he walked over to the skywindow.

  It was the right place, all right. There was Central Park spread out below them, with the construction crews busy getting ready for the Fair and, Jesus!, easily two hundred meters and better of clear open air! He couldn’t wait. So he made himself wait—stretched and yawned, and glanced irritably at his watch and scowled and generally made himself look like a hard-working citizen with too much on his mind to be thinking of breaking the law. The policeman in 75’s transfer lounge was a draftee, no real threat, a lot more interested in trying to chew the wad of tet gum in his mouth without moving his jaws than in anything Jimper might do, but all the same the cop was gazing at him. Jimper decided not to linger. He moved to the back of the local as soon as the doors were open. The cop lost interest. The car filled quickly, the doors closed and Jimper was the only one to leave the car at the 79th floor.

  “Suite 7900,” the fellow in the bar had told him. “It’ll cost you twenty dollars and he’s a real prick. But he’s got the right window.”

  Suite 7900 was a solid metal door that said T. J. Hallen and Co.—Imports, and it was locked. Jimper shifted the Macy’s bag to his left hand and knocked hard. When he heard the spyhole click he smiled at the invisible person behind the little glass eye and said, “The Baron sent me.”

  Silence. Then, hard to hear, a man’s voice through the door: “Baron who?”

  Jimper scowled. “How would I know Baron who? I was just told to say the Baron sent me. And twenty bucks.”

  More silence. Then the successive snicks of three locks being turned—did this choot think he was living in the Dark Ages?—and the door opened about twenty per cent of the way and Jimper squeezed through. The man inside took his arm, pulled him out of the way of the door, peered outside and then closed it. This time he didn’t lock it. He looked at Jimper consideringly for a moment, as though he
certainly knew a wolf from a bedridden grandmother and was just deciding how to expose his masquerade, then snatched the Macy’s bag. He rummaged under the empty cigarette cartons on top. When he saw Jimper’s works he relaxed enough to say, “Fifty dollars.”

  Jimper, who had already been reaching for his change purse, arrested his hand. “What do you mean, fifty? I was told the price was twenty.”

  “Good-by, friend,” the man said softly, his hand on the door-knob again. But when Jimper didn’t move he didn’t open it. He said, almost apologetically, “I don’t know you, do I? And, listen, you don’t know the steam I’ve been taking. Twenty bucks don’t cook it. Fifty don’t cook it, either, but I got to live. So hand over the fifty and suit up, and the minute you go out the window I go out the door, and if there’s any questions I never saw you before.”

  He counted the coins Jimper handed him quickly, and nodded. “All right, now make it rapid. And jump straight out when you go.”

  What did it matter, after all? Jimper left the man standing and made for the window, or anyway the place where the window had to be behind thick drapes. Jesus! You take an office on the 79th floor and you cover it up with drapes! And ratty old polyester-velvet at that, stuff you’d never use for clothing. Maybe for trim, a collar, bands around the wrist—

  He realized he was stalling, and pulled the drapes aside. The window was a delight, three meters across at least, plenty of room for the works. It didn’t look as though it would open, but it did. Jimper eased himself through, twisting to get the works out a corner at a time without bumping them against anything, and knelt on the edge of the void, breathing hard with pure delight and that lovely little scatter of goosebumpy fear that always got you just before you went. Shoulder straps tight, belt cinched. He adjusted the tarbush around his face so that he could see but, with luck, not be seen by the police spotters, or at least not well enough for a conviction. And he was ready.

  He heard the door thud closed at the other end of the room even before he brought his feet up, released his grip on the upper window and launched himself out into a quarter of a kilometer of beautiful, heart-stopping, empty air.

  Now, this was the part that made it all worthwhile! A quarter of a kilometer of clear air above him, to where he could see the maintenance crews working on the panels of the dome, a quarter of a kilometer below, with the bikes and vodkars creeping around the construction sites in the park, and the wind whistling in your ears and the wings snapping out and locking just right! He fell fluttering for half a dozen stories. The step-back on the sixtieth floor was beginning to look worrying—then the wings began to feel the air. He had an updraft.

  He soared out over the cool greens and blues of Central Park and its lakes. He was absolutely alone in the sky! It was true that out of the corner of his eye he could see two or three other illegal hang-gliders, off toward the west side of the Park or up north; but they were alone too! That was why you did it, that sting of solitary adventuring, just you and your gear and the dome far above and the ground far below.

  There was a startling, ear-slitting whistle from the Fair grounds site. Jimper tumbled for a moment, coordination gone; but then he straightened. It was just a noise-polluter invading the Fair’s sound system, not some supercop. But he had dropped nearly a hundred meters. He turned back toward 59th Street to catch an updraft from the tall old hotels. The draft was there to be found, although there was also a flash of strobe light from the roof of the Plaza—some cop with a long-range camera. No matter. The tar-bush hid all of his face but his eyes, and he had long since removed the numbers from his wings. They’d never ID him that way. The only real danger would be when he landed, and for that he had plans. First-flight dummies might aim for the middle of the park, where the park cops could see you from a kilometer away and get to you before you could stow your wings. You could lose your works that way, even if you didn’t get tagged yourself. Jimper Nutlark was smarter than that. He’d cased the whole midtown area for the perfect landing place on his first day in New York. Any choot could hang—it was the wise ones that kept their wings to fly another day! And he spiraled slowly up toward the dome roof in the vertical, and looked down on the city below, and peace entered his soul. Coming out of the top of the updraft at three hundred and eighty meters by the altimeter on his wrist, he gazed longingly south over Times Square and the midtown high-rises. You could see where the uptown dome curved down to meet the lower connecting bubble that joined it to the other big one south of Houston Street; one day, he vowed, he would take off from somewhere around here, glide through the connection and not land till he was at Bowling Green! But not this day. He didn’t know his air yet. So he turned north and west, with the pretty colors of the park beneath. Some part of Jimper’s mind was noting the colors and automatically translating them into fabrics that would become blouses and slit-slacks and bellybands. But most of his mind was simply empty, accepting the tranquil delights of the sky. Atlanta dome had never been like this!

  The temperature under the Big Blister averaged twenty-five degrees Celsius, a balmy May afternoon. (The fact that it was a balmy May afternoon outside the dome just then was, of course, irrelevant.) There were heat waves when it got to twenty-seven degrees or twenty-eight degrees, and in the depths of winter it sometimes plummeted as low as fifteen degrees. Then the New Yorkers put on their long-sleeved shirts or even light jackets, and chattered excitedly to each other about the chill. At sundown, sometimes the moisture in the air condensed at the plastic undersurface of the dome, and what didn’t trickle away into the conduits as it was supposed to occasionally fell as fat, gentle raindrops. Snow fell never. Not inside, at least, although anyone with field glasses could see all he liked, any winter, scudding fiercely over the transparent sections of the dome.

  Across the park—picking up an updraft from the big apartments along Central Park West—a quick turn over toward the dome edge itself, disappearing into the river past Riverside Drive. So many marvels to explore! And so pretty! Many of the newest buildings were very tall, right up to the curving dome itself, helping to keep it rigid against wind-stress. Because they were so tall fewer of them were needed, and so open spaces grew. From above, more than half the area of New York’s West Side was in parklets—though some of them, of a dozen acres apiece and more, were thirty stories above the ground. Jimper marked out blocks and neighborhoods to explore on foot. Maybe on Joan-Mary’s next day off—

  But he had forgotten that Joan-Mary had decided to stay in Atlanta; such tricks the mind plays on the unaware. And it dampened Jimper’s mood.

  In any case, there was no sense pushing your luck the first day up in a new dome. The longest Jimper had ever stayed in flight was three hours and fifty minutes in Atlanta—all the way up to almost touching distance of the Atlanta dome itself. But that was a baking August day with a radon flush going on, the upper vents pouring out the old air while new came in around the skirts, and the updrafts so strong that he had almost feared being sucked into the vents themselves. This day was glorious, but not up to that standard. So Jimper picked up enough altitude over West End Avenue to soar back across the park, circling the huge pylon going up to support the Rainbow Bridge (what a place to launch from!—but the police would never let you get away with it). He reached Grand Army Plaza down to a hundred meters, and just barely in range of the place where he had planned to land.

  Jimper made a quick turn over the fountain, between tall buildings, and there was the roofed tenth-floor pedestrian bridge over Fifth Avenue. The rest was tricky: glide close to the buildings on the West Side, a steep left bank, and he would be down on the roof of the bridge, running to lose momentum…But the turn was steeper than he had expected. Twisting and straining, the folded tarbush came out of his collar and whipped across his face. He lost grace. He flung himself to the right to correct, bumped his head against the wing strut and knew he was in trouble. The tarbush nearly blinded him for a critical moment. He misjudged his height, and the bridge was there before he w
as ready for it.

  It was not a serious accident. He tripped, fell and slid, but did not go over the edge. But his right wing was crumpled and the frame bent, and blood ran down his leg where he had scraped the knee raw.

  Jimper shucked the quick-release harness and gazed at the wreckage of nine hundred dollars’ worth of rig. He caught a glimpse of someone watching disapprovingly out of one of the wide windows on the east side of the avenue. The window opened; the person leaned out toward him. He glared at her, half stunned. “Leave the rig,” she ordered. “Come on into my office. I’m a doctor.”

  So she was. She was a hundred and sixty centimeters of a doctor at the most, so that even as he was sitting on her examining table she had to look up at him to bawl him out. Dark mousy hair, brown gentle eyes—but angry ones. Her touch was not angry, though. She carefully cleaned away the ragged scrape, sprayed it with something that stung, touched it with two seconds of ultraviolet, then, immediately, sprayed it again but this time with something else that took the sting away. And all the time she was telling him what a choot he was. “All you did this time was skin your knee. The luck of drunks and fools, I guess.”

  “You think losing your gear’s lucky?” They were almost brand-new, nine hundred dollars and twenty hours of his own modifications.

  “You lost your gear before you touched down, dummy. There was a cop team on the thirtieth-floor deck watching you. If you had stayed there one more minute you’d be telling it to the desk sergeant right now.” She was wrapping neat spirals of bandage around his knee as she talked. “Do you know that’s a confinement offense? Plus confiscation of your works. Plus license revocation if the judge is in a bad mood, so you can’t glide even outside the dome—where was it worth it?”