The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  “—these huge canoes were hollowed out by fire—”

  He became aware that, outside the Native American pavilion, Jeff Bratislaw was standing and watching him. Now, what was that all about? Jimper searched his memory to see if he had been doing anything wrong, without success.

  “—spread wet clay all around the top of the log to keep the fire contained, then place burning coals all down the trunk—”

  Bratislaw was coming over to him. “You through here?” he asked. Actually, Jimper realized, he was; the last of the preview crowd had already gone through the pavilion. “Good, then we’ll get you a shovel. I’ve got another job for you. Aren’t you the one that wanted to fly?”

  Jimper’s heart leaped as he followed the supervisor. “Yes! You mean you’re going to let me—”

  “Not right now,” said Bratislaw over his shoulder, “but maybe there’s going to be something for you. See, on opening day they’re going to release a thousand balloons. The dome people have complained about that—say they’ll clog the vents, interfere with circulation. Do you think if we got you your wings and something like a light spear—oh, hell!” he interrupted himself. “Somebody’s tapped in the P.A. system again!” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and began barking orders—over the noise of the squeaks and squawks and outlaw tape snatches of music that were coming over the speakers. “Hate those bastards,” he growled, putting away the phone. “Well? What about it?”

  “Oh, sure!” said Jimper, happier than he’d been in weeks. “You want me to pop the balloons that cause trouble, right? No problem! Glad to do it!”

  “I thought you would be,” smiled Bratislaw. “You’ll get double time for flying, too—and maybe I can get you some overtime if you want to clear up your work-off fast.”

  “That’d be fine,” said Jimper enthusiastically—better and better. “Only—you said a spear, didn’t you? You don’t want me to pop the balloons with this shovel?”

  Bratislaw looked perplexed, then grinned. “Oh, I see what you’re thinking. No, those are two different things. You don’t have to worry about the balloons till opening day. What you need the shovel for,” he said, opening the gate to the elephant pen, “is here.”

  VI

  Opening day! The Fair was coming alive! Overhead the hatches in the dome released a glittering snowfall of dry ice, and laser beams struck brilliant patterns of color through the haze. Under the old fountain at the corner of the park the New York Philharmonic was doing the 1812, a polka band rocked its floating platform in the lake, marching groups blatted Sousa and Dixieland as they circled the exposition area. A million and a half New Yorkers and tourists surged outside the admission booths, waiting for the signal to open. The air was thick with smells—funnel cakes frying and barbecue sauce boiling, caramel and curry; animal whiff from where the parade was lining up, old city underground smells from where the refuse pits were being dug. Noise and sights, smells and the good-humored tension of the waiting crowd—if there was a graph of excitement in the city it was rising to a peak. Jimper collected his superlight wings from the enclosure where the pent-up balloons were waiting under their nets for release and found himself caught up in the excitement. It was going to be a great day! Way up on the Rainbow Bridge where he would launch he could see Jo-Ellen and her son waiting for him. Tiny dolls, they were waving in his general direction. He waved back, picking up his gear—

  “Hello there, James Percy,” said a smiling voice from behind him.

  “Oh, my God,” said Jimper. Even before he turned he knew who he would see. “Now, look, Dennis!” he began. “I don’t want any trouble, and what you’re doing is a criminal offense—”

  “What am I doing, then?” Dennis Redfan said reasonably. He gestured with the gas-hose he was holding. “We’re all work-offs together, right? I fill the balloons, you pop them, if we’ve got any personal business we take care of it some other time. Right?”

  Jimper retreated a step, holding the flimsy powdered wing right in front of him like a shield. A fight he could have handled—one way or another; this sudden reasonableness from his dating friend’s ex-husband was harder to deal with. “Right,” he said at last. “I didn’t know you were working here.”

  “I knew you were,” Dinny observed pleasantly. “You know these balloons go up in, let’s see, twenty minutes? So you better get on up to launch, right?”

  Jimper tarried. He wasn’t sure why. Considering how little he had wanted to see Dinny Redfan, he surprised himself by not vanishing as swiftly as he could. But Redfan was already turning away, spreading another balloon over the hose and knotting it full with a shriek of compressed gas. He didn’t look at Jimper again, but over his shoulder he said, “Nutlark? Why are you pushing your luck?”

  “Right,” said Jimper, backing away. He didn’t turn until he was at a five-meter distance, and even then his shoulderblades twitched nervously until he was in the lift to the Rainbow Bridge. All the way up to the 50th-floor level he was debating with himself whether he should say anything to Jo-Ellen in front of the boy.

  It was an unnecessary worry. “Damn, Jimper,” young Will cried breathlessly, “I thought sure Dinny was going to cream you down there!” He looked more pleased and excited than dismayed, Jimper thought, but Jo-Ellen supplied enough dismay for both.

  “What did he say to you?” she demanded, and listened worriedly while Jimper relayed the highlights of the conversation. She shook her head and took the monocular away from her son, pointing it down into the park where Dinny Redfan was cheerfully popping one filled balloon after another into the net. “He doesn’t look mad,” she reported. “But then he never does. He just starts punching with a smile on his face.”

  “That’s nice,” said Jimper dismally, shrugging his arms into the harness.

  “I don’t think he’ll do anything to you, Jimper,” the boy advised sagaciously. “He’s already got about a million hours to work off. Last time it was aggravated assault, they said, because the guy could have died.”

  “Just get that buckle for me, will you?” Jimper begged.

  “Yes, but the thing you have to remember is he just can’t afford another conviction. He wouldn’t just get a work-off, they’d transport him.”

  Jimper backed away, as Jo-Ellen and the boy locked his extended wings in place and tested them. “You think so?” he asked hopefully.

  “No doubt in the world!” Will assured him. “He won’t touch you here, and that’s for sure!” And then, as Jimper touched his starter button and the hydrogen turbine began to shrill and he leaned forward to his take-off jump, the boy added: “Of course, if he catches you alone when nobody’s looking, that’s something else.”

  He had taken too much time getting in position; the balloons were already drifting up out of the nets before he was airborne. They didn’t rise very fast. They weren’t meant to. Some inert gas had been mixed with the helium so that they were only marginally lighter than the air they floated in. All the same, they were a good distance away from the end of the bridge. So Jimper twisted his body to incline the wings, and soared clumsily toward the tall buildings he had just left. What he needed was an updraft. The ultra-lights could climb, but not very rapidly; a good thermal would get him out over the flock of balloons, where he could pick them off at his leisure…

  No. There would be nothing leisurely about it, he realized. There were hundreds of them, and they were not staying in a neat cluster. They were less than a hundred meters up when he turned back to meet them, but they were already all over the sky. They simply didn’t rise fast enough to remain a unit. Each vagrant puff of air, each rising bubble from a taco stand or a tempura kettle fluttered them this way and that.

  The one common motion for all of them, though, was up. There was no point in trying to attack them at the hundred-meter level. They did no harm there. It was only up at the vents on the dome itself, half a kilometer overhead, that they were an annoyance; the thing to do was go up there and wait for them to arrive. Some o
f them would pop by themselves from the altitude. Many would have lost themselves in trees, buildings, bridges, walkways—on the stony chins of old carved gargoyles, on the stubs of outworn TV antennae, on the metal fittings of the dome panels themselves. He only had to worry about the survivors, and of those only the ones who arrived near a vent in great enough numbers to be a problem. The thing to do was to go up there and wait for them.

  It was also, of course, a thing that Jimper Nutlark was happy to do. He figure-eighted over the Fair grounds, seeking thermals, exulting in the freedom of the air, rising faster than the untidy sprawl of balloons, as happy as he had ever remembered to be. The whole midtown city was beneath him now. There was the old dome of the Planetarium, and across the greenery the chunky shape of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with Cleopatra’s Needle unrecognizably foreshortened beside it. There was the parade already halfway across the Rainbow Bridge, with elephants plodding behind horses prancing and bands playing—already the sound thinned and blurred by the distance. He was above the wall of old hotels at the edges of the Park, almost above the newer openwork skyscrapers built after the dome was finished. There was the old Waldorf Tower, with its twelve-room suites where ancient presidents and generals had waited to die; there the face of the Citicorp’s solar panels, turned away from him and now forever blind; there the needle of Chrysler and the bland oval of Pan Am. The crowds surging into the Fair had blended into a slow trickle of polka-dot color, creeping between the rides and the pavilions. Farther up the Park were the flowering ginger and banana trees of the botanic garden, beyond them the wilderness created by Olmsted long before. Take it all in all, Jimper was having the best ride of his life—and it was legal.

  A quick flash of green and blue nearby reminded him that it was also just a little bit dangerous. He was up in the haze area now, where the condensation from the CO2 crystals still left a smudge of mist, and the laser show was playing through it. It would be no fun at all to catch one of those beams in his eye. He slipped the quick-dark glasses into place, and checked the cable that lashed his spear to his belt—what a missile it would have made if dropped into the crowd!

  The first couple of surviving balloons were soaring toward him, not more than a hundred meters below. Jimper grinned up at the TV cameras on the dome, two or three of them turning to keep an eye on him, and yelled: “Tally-ho!” He leaned forward, extended the spear and dove into the cluster, pop-pop-pop, three in a row.

  If there was a better way of working off punishment time, he had never heard of it. It wasn’t punishment. It wasn’t even work. It was the thing he liked best to do, with trappings of the medieval tourney. He imagined he could hear faint cheering from the crowds far below as he turned and climbed slowly again to catch the balloons he had missed.

  A couple of dozen balloons later it no longer seemed quite as much fun. They were coming fast now, faster than he could easily handle; the expectation that most of them would pop with altitude hadn’t worked out. He was coming closer to the vents than was prudent; the drafts there were a lot more violent than his flimsy ultralight was built to stand, a lot stronger than the tiny hydrogen turbine could fight. And there was a queer smell that he couldn’t identify—maybe the smell of the fabric of the dome itself, maybe something from the turbine exhaust at his back; it made him dizzy.

  At that point the lasers started again.

  From the ground it must have been beautiful—red and green and violet shafts of light, cutting through the faint remaining CO2 haze, bouncing off the balloons as they bobbed upward. At close range it was scary. Each time a beam came near him, each time even one struck a balloon and the reflections came back, his glasses went black for a moment. It saved his eyes, true. But it wrecked his reflexes at the same time. He blanked out at just the wrong moment and missed a cluster of three; turned, took aim again and pierced two of them.

  He found himself spinning, caught himself, swung violently around the harness of the ultralight and straightened out.

  What was the matter with him? It couldn’t be the altitude—there wasn’t enough of it inside the dome to bother even a first-flyer. Not the exertion…not anything he had eaten, surely…not anything he could think of; but the balloons blurred in front of him, and his reflexes were definitely slowed. Flash, and the goggles blacked out; pop-pop, and two more balloons burst at the point of his lance—and somebody was calling his name. Jimper! Jimper dear—

  Now, who could be speaking to him up here? It was impossible. There was no one near, no single human being visible at all. It hardly sounded like a human voice: too loud, too distant, too blurred, as though it were coming from several places at once.

  It was. It was coming from the intercom speakers at the remote TV pickups, and it was the voice he knew. It sobbed, Oh, Jimper, come down—please! Dinny’s put stuff in the balloons—

  Why, thought Jimper with pleasure, that would explain the funny smell, wouldn’t it? But it was a silly idea, he considered. What could anyone put in the balloons that would do him any harm? It was ridiculous. It could not possibly account, for instance, for the fact that he was fluttering back down to the ground, wholly out of control, the Fair spinning before him and the tall buildings whirling around, impact only a couple of hundred meters below—

  By the time he realized it was more important to do something about the problem than to try to understand its cause, he had barely flying room enough left to straighten the frail, whipping wings, slow down the plunge, try to miss the huge trees that caught at him. His brain was still fuzzed. He didn’t know whether he had saved himself or not until he discovered that he was floating in a lake, his arms tangled in the harness, the stilled hydrojet trying to sink him. It might have done it, too, if the lake had been more than a meter deep.

  And when he had waded halfway to the shore there was Jo-Ellen splashing muddily toward him, with the boy sloshing enthusiastically after; “You were some great horror show coming down like that!” cried Will; and, reaching to pull the harness away from where he had gouged and pitted himself, “This is getting to be a habit,” said Jo-Ellen. And when he was (almost) clean and (thoroughly) bandaged and back at the Fair, there were the tanks of nitrous oxide that should have been plain nitrogen, and the Fair guard, a work-off like himself, proudly explaining: “So when the doc phoned down to say what she’d seen from the bridge I nabbed him right away; that’s about his fifth offense, and he’ll be working it off in Idaho. Maybe the Aleutians! Maybe ten years!” And when they had turned their backs on the Fair and were back in Jo-Ellen’s apartment, the boy said importantly, “I know what you’re going to want to eat, so I’ll go out and catch a bunch of big ones!” And when he returned with a colander of chirping, leaping big ones he gazed at Jimper on the couch, head in his mother’s lap, and said, “I’ve been thinking, choot. A boy needs a father, true? And it looks like I won’t have my regular one for a while. Think you might know where I can find one to fill in?” And Jimper Nutlark (farewell, Atlanta lady; good-by, daughter of Mawzi Frères) relaxed and smiled up at the woman who owned the lap and said, “Matter of fact, choot, I think I do.”

  I’M EIGHTY-FOUR YEARS OLD, THOUGH YOU

  wouldn’t think it to look at me. Over the years they’ve repaired my pipes and restored most of my senses and taken the Struldbrug look off my face. Although it’s fifty-seven years since I graduated from Columbia Law I still practice when I have to—or, to tell it more truthfully, on those very few occasions when someone who happens to need a lawyer happens to get referred to me. I’ve seen a lot of changes. I’ve seen eighty per cent of the felonies on the statute books abolished, and most of the causes for civil actions ameliorated away. I’ve seen computers replace law clerks—even replace a judge or two, now and then—and I’ve even seen contracts and wills written in language you don’t need a lawyer to understand. But I’ll tell you the truth. I never expected to see anything quite like

  Gwenanda

  and

  the

  Supremes
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br />   I

  The prosecuting attorney was a mouse, the defendant was a born brute and the whole day was turning into a cow. For one thing, the Supreme Court chamber was grossly packed. It was a day when the candidates for the next term were herded into the auditorium to see how a day’s judging went, so there were forty of them there. Plus, the usual drift-ins. Sometimes Gwenanda liked it when the house was SRO. If you got a lively bunch and a lot of cross-chatter you could really have some fun with a case. Today they were all bored petrified. Half of them weren’t looking at the witness at all. They were reading, or drowsing, or even staring at the continuous strip of glow-light mottos that circled the dome of the courtroom. Now it was spelling out:

  “Covenants without the sword are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.”—Thomas Hobbes.

  Gwenanda sighed and ducked behind her bench for a quick hit to anesthetize some of the tedium, just as Chief Justice Samelweiss passed her on the way to the toilet. She knew it was Samelweiss. None of the other justices would pinch her butt when she wasn’t looking. “The twitch is guilty as hell,” he muttered in passing, “and isn’t this day ever gonna end?”

  “Turn on your set, old man,” said Gwenanda as she straightened up. You never knew when some legal-eagle defendant was going to holler mistrial, just because a judge forgot to turn on his walk-around headphones when he went to take a leak. This particular defendant was just the type to do it.

  In fairness to Samelweiss, it was true that nothing was being said that any sensible person would want to hear. The brute of a defendant had begged for twenty minutes to make a statement, and Samelweiss, the old fool, had let her have it. Probably just wanted time to go to the can. So the statement had gone on for six or seven minutes already. Bor-ing. All she did was complain about the myriad ways in which society had so warped and brutalized her that whatever she did wasn’t really her fault. Now she was only up to the tyrannical first-grade teacher who had hung the label of thief on her—