The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  Jimper swallowed. Then he swallowed again, words this time, because all the things that occurred to him to say were things he didn’t want to say.

  “I know,” said Jo-Ellen grimly. “That’s why I tried to warn you. He’s put two men in the hospital already.”

  Two men! So (Jimper calculated swiftly) those were two he caught; and tried to estimate (a) Jo-Ellen’s total score and (b) his own prospects of getting put away. “The best part of our relationship,” said Jo-Ellen—“I mean, the safest part, is I don’t think he’s ever seen you with me. So if I’m really careful—and you’re, anyway, a little bit careful—”

  “Yeah,” said Jimper. He remembered to drag on the hookah, but the hash had burned itself out and all he got was a stale, sour taste—no staler or more sour than his mouth had registered already. Two men in the hospital. A wacko ex-husband. He riffled through the bound couplets. “It’s lousy poetry, too,” he complained grimly, and only then realized that next to him on the waterbed Jo-Ellen was crying.

  Well, that put a whole different face on the matter. Jimper was of that class of males who melt. There were surely wrongs that could not be forgiven for tears, and impediments that tears would not wash away—but not many of either. The only thing he could possibly do at that moment was comfort her; and then, of course, one thing led to another. When they were at rest again he said earnestly—having thought the matter out with one part of his mind, while the rest of him was fully engaged elsewhere—“You ought to go to the police, love-love.”

  “You saw what he said! Anyway,” she said, “I already talked it over with a lawyer. I can’t prove he wrote this—it isn’t his handwriting, he had somebody else letter it for him, he didn’t give it to me. I just found it on my desk one day.”

  “But still—”

  “But still, he’s Will’s father. Oh, I’m stuck, Jimper. I wouldn’t blame you if you cut out right now and never saw me again!”

  And of course, when she said that it made what had until then seemed a reasonable option quite impossible. “Not a chance!” he said staunchly. “But I just can’t imagine what sort of man would do this.”

  She hesitated, then sprang from the bed, slim bare back a pretty arm’s-length away while she rummaged again in her bag. When she turned around it was to hand him a framed picture. “I borrowed this from Will’s room,” she said, “because I thought you might want to see what he looked like. But he’s bigger than he looks in the picture.”

  “I know,” groaned Jimper, looking at the face of the man who had bought him a beer around the corner from Jo-Ellen’s home.

  That night, as Jimper crossed a street open to the dome on his way to bed, a startling flicker of ruddy light made him look up. The great overhead dome was flashing dull red. It was a warning. The next day there would be a radon flush. So when he reported in the morning for his work assignment, he was not surprised to be sent to the Fair grounds to batten down all that was loose in the construction sites.

  There was plenty to do, and hard work doing it. Jimper was glad enough to do it—roping down unsecured roofs, chasing flyaway bits of lightweight plastic, shoring up temporary walls. With no hang-gliding allowed he wasn’t getting enough physical exercise, and he welcomed the sweat. There was plenty of it, for the dome controllers picked warm, still days to open the vents and replace all the air inside the structure, so that the slow accumulation of radon gas could be vented. In half an hour he was drenched, and so was the rest of the work crew. They took a break and lay back, muscles sore, between his two favorite exhibits. The lavish affair of cement troughs on one side was for Saudi Arabia; when it was done the troughs would be filled with water, and one-tenth-size icebergs would glide along them, towed by toy tugs, to supply cooling water for air-conditioning and drinking and irrigation water for everyone. The Iceland pavilion, on the other side, was foamed lava structures, showing how they built windbreakers to create microclimates, warmed by hot springs, and so Reykjavik now called itself “the Waikiki of the Atlantic.”

  Overhead the cables of the new Rainbow Bridge were singing slowly in the gentle updraft toward the vents. When it was done the cables would be invisible within the balloon-like fabric that people would walk on—that great floats would roll along, and vehicles would use for a hundred years after the Fair was over. The key to the bridge’s stability was dynamic strengtheners—“turgidifiers,” the individual cells were called; when the sensors detected too much sway or an off-balance load, fluid under pressure would stiffen the cells where they were needed. Around the cables three ultralight flyers were buzzing, stopping their motors to glide when they could, starting them again when they needed to change direction or gain altitude. Jimper gazed at them with what he intended to be humorous disdain but that turned into, he realized, longing. Stinkpots of the air, sure—but they were in the air! If only he could get a job doing what they were doing—

  The construction foreman was a huge man, middle-aged, who looked at Jimper as though he were out of his mind. “What do you want to fly around in one of those things for?” he demanded; and then, discovering that Jimper’s sentence was for hang-gliding, merely shook his head in incomprehension. “It’s not my department anyway. I stick close to the ground.”

  “Well, Mr. Bratislaw, is there any chance of another job around the Fair? I’m a good designer—”

  “Not while you’re a work-off,” Bratislaw said, kindly enough. “Why should we put you on the payroll when we can get you for minimum wage?”

  But he promised to keep Jimper in mind if anything turned up, and that was the closest Jimper had come to a friendly reception since getting in the bad graces of the influential Mr. Mawzi.

  So when, over the next weeks, he could get himself assigned to the rapidly completing Fair, Jimper seized the chance. Twice he was set to pied-pipering, since the Fair administration was determined to keep the grounds a rat-free zone. Once he managed to get himself put to work in the motor pool. He knew too little to work on the engines of the smaller cars—electric for the buggies, low-temperature Stirling engines, burning only alcohol, for the small trucks. But the big tour buses were momentum propelled, with wide, dense flywheels, and needed little work except to be washed and swamped out after every trip.

  And, of course, there was Jo-Ellen. She agreed, reluctantly, to one more visit to DOOR—after that she positively refused. It was too risky—especially now that Jimper had admitted the Jealous Ex-Husband did in fact know who he was. That removed one impediment, anyway. There was no longer any reason why they could not be seen together in public—in the most aseptic and generally temptation-free public places there were. So sometimes they rode together on the vans, or lunched in a busy terrace restaurant, or walked, in broad daylight, down by the waterside or along one of the open skywalks. But they always, and conspicuously, departed in quite different directions after these meetings. More intimate dates required great care and forethought. Now and then there was a lucky break, as when Jo-Ellen was sent to check out radiation levels in the Nathanael Greene Mushroom Farms across the river, and they had more than an hour to themselves, alone and in the dark, in the soft ammoniac air of the caverns.

  And then there was a whisper of a possible job in a fabric plant in New Jersey, and at that same time Dinny elected to take the boy overnight. A whole night together! So Jo-Ellen made an excuse to take the bullet-train to Philadelphia, to come back less openly by way of Atlantic City and the coastal hydrofoils; and Jimper took the more conventional hovercraft to Sandy Hook.

  As the nineteenth century Germans learned to make the most colorful dyes out of stinking coal tar, so some of New York’s most beautiful fabrics came out of the city’s sewage. So did some of their food.

  All that was used was the liquid effluent, and the problem was halved at the outset by keeping industrial pollutants out. No crankcase oil poured into a gas-station sump. No PCBs or acid wastes; no heavy metals, no dyes, no pesticides. The liquids that came out of New York’s sewers were ninety-
nine point nine per cent pure shit, piss and corruption. In the recycling tanks it bubbled and stank, and the algae loved it. It made them fat. Each citizen’s bowels reliably manufactured several hundred grams of fecal solid each day, which equaled almost as much algal protein in the settling tanks, which equaled the daily ration of Spirulina algae for a chicken, a small rabbit or about one-twentieth of a hog. It wasn’t the lack of fecal solids that kept the Sandy Hook plant from producing more food. It was the lack of space to keep its flocks.

  So not all the effluent went to food; and that was why Jimper was there. “They’re just starting to make fabrics,” he explained to Jo-Ellen when he met her at the hydrofoil dock. “It’s a brand-new field, and I can get in at the bottom of it.” He noticed that she was turning her head from side to side, and made a guess at what was the matter. “There’s no chance Dinny could have followed us here,” he reassured her.

  “Oh, never say that, Jimper,” she protested. “But that’s not it. I was wondering why I don’t smell anything.”

  “Because it’s a nice clean plant,” he said with pride. “Here, up this road they’ve got some tourist cabins. I’ve already checked us in. My appointment’s in half an hour so there’s no time for, uh—”

  She didn’t respond, only looked around the cabin curiously, excused herself to use the bathroom for a moment and came out looking rather glum. Well, they weren’t the grandest accommodations in the world—but a lot better than, say, the aisles in the mushroom farm! “Come with me,” he suggested, to cheer her up. “It’s interesting.”

  “I don’t want to mess up your interview—”

  “It’ll be all right. Mr. Bermutter seemed like a nice guy over the phone—here, you take the scanner while I sort out my samples—”

  Bermutter was a nice guy—young, fair-haired, full of confidence about the future of sewage fabrics, enthusiastic about the quality of Jimper’s designs. “Nice colors,” he said, switching from one shot to another quickly enough to keep it from being tedious, slowly enough to convince the creator of the designs that he was really looking at them. “What do you think of my shirt?”

  He extended one arm so they could feel the sleeve. “It looks like what I wear in the operating room,” said Jo-Ellen.

  “Very acute! This is one of the first batch we were able to sell—nurses’ uniforms. Are you a nurse?”

  “A doctor, actually,” smiled Jo-Ellen. “Can you make the fabric in different colors?”

  “Well, that’s what we’ve got you here for,” he said, nodding affably to Jimper. “The only thing is, it’s a little early for us to be designing actual garments; we were thinking more of meter goods. Still—Let me show you how we do it!”

  And he led the way out of the office section into a long, low shed. There was a sound of moving liquids, but all concealed inside pipes, most of them opaque. The smell was not bad, only surprising, rather like a hotel room you’ve stayed in too long. Bermutter lifted a hatch and plunged his arm into the pipe, pulling out what looked like a string of gelatinous seaweed. “This is the stuff. We dry it and spin it, and it comes out like my shirt. It’ll wear forever. Very light. Very strong. The weave we’re using is a little too fine, I think, so you can’t sweat through it and it feels a little clammy in hot weather.”

  “We never have hot weather under the dome,” Jo-Ellen pointed out. He grinned a little apologetically.

  “Even in fairly warm weather, I’m afraid. Still—that’s something we can fix.” They let him explain the process. Bacteria, he said, wore sort of little suits of armor to protect them against phage viruses. The “armor” substances were called polysaccharides; they appeared in envelopes of what he called hydrated gel. You could get the bacteria to grow any sort of polysaccharides you wanted—insect-shell chitin, collagen, whatever. Some bacteria were better at doing the trick than others. They had started with what he called klebsiella, switched to something called Acetobacter mylinum—they still used some of those, which were what made the rotten-fruit smell Jimper had noticed. “Here,” he said, pulling the shirt over his head. “Feel it.”

  Nice texture, nice drape, nice “hand”—“I’d love to work with this stuff,” said Jimper enthusiastically.

  “Well,” said Bermutter, leading the way back to his office, “I hope you’ll get the chance. Not right away, I’m afraid. We’ve got to straighten out the weave and a few other things—”

  “When do you think there might be an opening, then?” asked Jimper.

  “It’s hard to say. I do like your work, though—on the other hand, Dr. Redfan, we’re going to need a house medic when we get into full production, and probably we should hire the medic soon to help with planning. So if you’re interested—”

  So all in all it was not the best tryst Jimper had ever heard of. He didn’t get the job, though Jo-Ellen got a firm offer. When they got back to the cabin she explained to him that, unfortunately, she seemed to have started her period that morning. And as they checked out the next morning, Jimper’s card in the machine produced not only the printout of a bill but a message on the screen. “Funny,” said the clerk, reading it. “Looks like you got a call from somebody named Dennis Redfan, but he didn’t want to be put through to your cabin, just to leave a message.”

  “Oh, my God,” said Jo-Ellen; and Jimper said:

  “What was the message?”

  “Well, that’s funny, too. All he said was, ‘Hi.’”

  For the next couple of days Jimper worried uninterruptedly because Dinny might at any minute show up and bash his brains out.

  Dinny did not appear; so for the next few days Jimper worried even more, in a quite different way, because Dinny did not. Now that All appeared to be Known, there was no particular reason why they should not be seen together even quite often—in public places. In Jimper’s opinion, there wasn’t much reason to avoid being seen quite privately, for that matter, but he was unable to convince Jo-Ellen of that. “It just isn’t worth it,” she said, stabbing Jimper to the heart, “and I don’t want to take the consequences”—stabbing him again, in a different place.

  “If he wants to take it out on me, let him try,” he growled. Jo-Ellen shrugged. “As to the other thing, I certainly don’t want you to be—”

  “Now, hold it right there,” she commanded. She was wet and irritable, having been drafted to give emergency medical services in a 55th-floor apartment fire. The fire had been put out easily enough—every structure had its built-in sprinkler systems, with plenty of water in the rooftop swimming pools—but she had had to give resuscitation to three smoke victims, sloshing around a swampy apartment. “You don’t have any rights in me, Jimper!”

  “Of course I don’t,” he acknowledged sulkily. “But I would think that as a matter of keeping your self-respect—”

  “Jimper.”

  “I was only trying to say—”

  “Soak it, Jimper!” She waved the fork one more time at the almost untouched salad, then put it down. “This was a mistake. I’m tired, I’m dirty, I don’t want to argue—I’m going home,” she finished. Stood up. Came around the table. Hesitated, then brushed her cheek against the prickly top of his head before striding off through the restaurant.

  Fiercely Jimper returned the stare of other diners, who averted their eyes. He looked glumly at his plate, but the water-chestnut quiche was no longer attractive. It was an unfair day. Jo-Ellen wouldn’t listen to reason about their relationship. She had told him in detail about the penny-ante fire and he had listened tolerantly. But when he tried to tell her about the funny thing that had happened to him on his job the day before—and it was funny; he’d been on compliance inspection, smelled what he thought was a health violation and called the cops and it turned out only to be some kind of Vietnamese fish sauce—she wasn’t listening. And she had forgotten to pay her check.

  Jimper was far downtown, and perilously close to overstaying his lunch hour. Glumly he settled the bill, descended two floors to catch the uptown express tram
and stared wistfully at the buildings he passed. There were no tall ones to speak of between the lower-city bubble and the rise of the big one at midtown, but once he was past Madison Square they began to get impressive again. Just right for launching…

  But that was out of reach, too. He dropped to ground level at Grand Army Plaza and hurried out into the park. Under the distant second-hand sky of the dome the Fair was beginning to take shape. Opening day was near, the tempo had picked up, the pavilions and stands were almost ready…his punishment job, in fact, was about the brightest spot in his life. Which said unkind things about his life, but that was hardly necessary. Jimper himself was saying unkind things about his life.

  And yet—

  To Jimper’s surprise, his spirits were beginning to lift. A Fair was, after all, a Fair—by definition, a place to have fun. And people were having fun, as some of the attractions gave previews to specially fortunate people, or even specially unfortunate ones—a whole caravan of handicapped adults, each in his own little electric go-cart was rolling through the plastic pyramids of the Mexican pavilion, oohing and ahing as the elephants were brought in to their private island, ready for the opening-day parade, and gorging themselves on gaucho pies, soft ice cream, funnel cakes, steaming corn on the cob, baklava, appleade, stuffed potatoes—or at least on such of the available feasts as their diets or prostheses allowed them to handle. Jimper was drafted to help the dollies in and out of the Native American pavilion, where a young man, wearing a loosely tied scarlet sash, a scarf and long, black hair, said over and over, “I am your guide for today. I am a member of the Lenni-Lenape nation, and my name is Alexander.” Between times, Jimper gazed enviously at the fluttering flyers still hovering around the Rainbow Bridge, while Alexander repeated his spiel—

  “—when my people lived here, before the Dutch and the English came—”

  —and reassured himself that, badly off as he was, he had nothing to complain about, in comparison to these unfortunates. Some were limbless. Some were tied to artificial hearts or lungs or kidneys. Some were blind, with sonar dishes on their heads.