Except for Ryan, all of us were clearly overcome, each in his own way. Kulongo blinked and stared solemnly for a moment like a great bear; his wife and son seemed to lean into the security of his calm aura. Koyinka seemed to fear that he might strangle; his wife twittered about excitedly, tugging at his hand. The two young men from Luthuliville seemed to be self-consciously making an effort to avoid clutching at each other. Michael Lumumba mumbled something unintelligible under his breath.
“What was that you said, Mr. Lumumba?” Ryan said a shade gratingly as he led us out of the park down a crumbling set of stone-and-concrete stairs. Something seemed to snap inside Lumumba; he broke stride for a moment, frozen by some inner event while Ryan led the rest of us onto a walkway between a line of huge silent buildings and a street choked with the rusted wreckage of ancient cars, timelessly locked in their death-agony in the sparkly blue light.
“What do you want from me, you damned honkie?” Lumumba shouted shrilly. “Haven’t you done enough to us?”
Ryan broke stride for a moment, smiled back at Lumumba rather cruelly, and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, pal. I’ve got your money already. What the hell else could I want from you?”
He began to move off down the walkway again, threading his way past and over bits of wrecked cars, fallen masonry, and amorphous rubble. Over his shoulder, he noticed that Lumumba was following along haltingly, staring up at the buildings, nibbling at his lower lip.
“What’s the matter, Lumumba?” Ryan shouted back at him. “Aren’t these ruins good enough for you to gloat over? You wouldn’t be just a little bit afraid, would you?”
“Afraid? Why should I be afraid?”
Ryan continued on for a few more meters; then he stopped and leaned up against the wall of one of the more badly damaged skyscrapers, near a jagged cavelike opening that led into the dark interior. He looked directly at Lumumba. “Don’t get me wrong, pal,” he said, “I wouldn’t blame you if you were a little scared of the subway dwellers. After all, they’re the direct descendants of the people that kicked your ancestors out of this country. Maybe you got a right to be nervous.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Ryan, Why should a civilized African be afraid of a pack of degenerate savages?” Koyinka said as we all caught up to Ryan.
Ryan shrugged. “How should I know?” he said. “Maybe you ought to ask Mr. Lumumba.”
And with that, he turned his back on us and stepped through the jagged opening into the ruined skyscraper. Somewhat uneasily, we followed him into what proved to be a large antechamber that seemed to lead back into some even larger cavernous space that could be sensed rather than seen looming in the darkness. But Ryan did not lead us toward this large, open space; instead, he stopped before he had gone more than a dozen steps and waited for us near a crumbling metal-pipe fence that guarded two edges of what looked like a deep pit. One long edge of the pit was flush with the right wall of the antechamber; at the far short edge, a flight of stone stairs began which seemed to go all the way to the shadow-obscured bottom.
Ryan led us along the railing to the top of the stairs, and from this angle I could see that the pit had once been the entrance to the mouth of a large tunnel whose floor had been the floor of the pit at the foot of the stairs. Now an immense and ancient solid slab of steel blocked the tunnel mouth and formed the fourth wall of the pit. But in the center of this rusted steel slab was a relatively new airlock that seemed of modern design.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Ryan said, “we’re standing by a sealed entrance to the subways of Old New York, During the Space Age, the subways were the major transportation system of the city and there were hundreds of entrances like this one. Below the ground was a giant network of stations and tunnels through which the Space-Agers could go from any point in the city to any other point. Many of the stations were huge and contained shops and restaurants. Every station had automatic vending machines which sold food and drinks and a lot of other things, too. Even during the Space Age, the subways were a kind of little world.”
He started down the stairs, still talking. “During the Panic of the Century, some of the New Yorkers chose not to leave the city. Instead, they retreated to the subways, sealed all the entrances, installed space-station life-support machinery—everything from a fusion reactor to hydroponics—and cut themselves off from the outside world. Today, the subway dwellers, direct descendants of those Space-Agers, still inhabit several of the subway stations. And most of the Space-Age life-support machinery is still running. There are probably Space-Age artifacts down here that no modern man has ever seen.”
At the bottom of the pit, Ryan led us to the airlock and opened the outer door. The airlock proved to be surprisingly large. “This airlock was installed by the government about fifty years ago, soon after the subway dwellers were discovered,” he told us as he jammed us inside and began the cycle. “It was part of a program to recivilize the subway dwellers. The idea was to let scientists get inside without contaminating the subway atmosphere with smog. Of course, the whole program was a flop. Nobody’s ever going to get through to the subway dwellers, and there are less of ’em every year. They don’t breed much, and in a generation or so they’ll be extinct. So you’re all in for a really unique experience. Not everyone will be able to tell their grandchildren that they actually saw a live subway dweller!”
The inner airlock door opened into an ancient square-cross-sectioned tunnel made of rotting gray concrete. The air, even through filters, tasted horrible: very thin, somehow crisp without being at all bracing, with a chemical undertone, yet reeking with organic decay odors. Breathing was very difficult; it felt like we were at the fifteen-thousand-foot level.
“I’m not telling you all this for my health,” Ryan said as he moved us out of the airlock. “I’m telling it to you for your health: don’t mess with these people. Look and don’t touch. Listen, but keep your mouths shut. They may seem harmless, they may be harmless, but no one can he sure. That’s why not many guides will take people down here. I hope you all have that straight.”
The last remark had obviously been meant for Lumumba, but he didn’t seem to react to it; he seemed subdued, drawn up inside himself. Perhaps Ryan was right—perhaps in some unguessable way, Lumumba was afraid. It’s impossible to really understand these Amero-Africans.
We moved off down the corridor. The overhead lights—at least in this area—were clearly modern, probably installed when the airlock had been installed, but it was possible that the power was actually provided by the fusion reactor that had been installed centuries ago by the Space-Agers themselves. The air we were breathing was produced by a Space-Age atmosphere plant that had been designed for actual space stations! It was a frightening, and at the same time, a thrilling feeling: our lives were dependent on actual functioning Space-Age equipment. It was almost like stepping back in time.
The corridor made a right-angle turn and became a downward-sloping ramp. The ramp leveled off after a few dozen feet, passed some crumbling rums, inset into one of the walls—apparently a ruined shop of some strange sort with massive chairs bolted to the floor and pieces of mirror still clinging to patches of its walls—and suddenly opened out into a wide, low, cavelike space lit dimly and erratically by ancient Space-Age perma-bulbs which still functioned in many places along the grime-encrusted ceiling.
It was the strangest room—if you could call it that—that I had ever been in. The ceiling seemed horribly low, lower even than it actually was, because the room seemed to go on under it indefinitely, in all sorts of seemingly random directions. Its boundaries faded off into shadows and dim lights and gloom; I couldn’t see any of the far walls. It was impossible to feel exactly claustrophobic in a place like that, but it gave me an analogous sensation without a name, as if the ceiling and the floor might somehow come together and squash me.
Strange figures shuffled around in the gloom, moving, about slowly and aimlessly. Other figures sat singly or in small groups on the ba
re filthy floor. Most of the subway dwellers were well under five feet tall. Their shoulders were deeply hunched, making them seem even shorter, and their bodies were thin, rickety, and emaciated under the tattered and filthy scraps of multicolored rags which they wore. I was deeply shocked. I don’t really know what I had expected, but I certainly had not been prepared for the unmistakable aura of diminished humanity which these pitiful creatures exuded even at a distant first glance.
Immediately before us was a kind of concrete hut. It was pitted with what looked like bullet scars, and parts of it were burned black. It had tiny windows, one of which still held some rotten metal grillwork. Apparently it had been a kind of sentry-box, perhaps during the Panic of the Century itself. A complex barrier cut off the section where we stood from the main area of the subway station. It consisted of a ceiling-to-floor metal grillwork fence on either side of a line of turnstiles. On either side of the line of turnstiles, gates in the fence clearly marked exit in peeling white-and-black enamel had been crudely welded shut; by the look of the weld, perhaps more than a century ago.
On the other side of the barrier stood a male subway dweller wearing a kind of long shirt patched together out of every conceivable type and color of cloth and rotting away at the edges and in random patches. He stood staring at us, or at least with his deeply squinted expressionless eyes turned in our direction, rocking back and forth slightly from the waist, but otherwise not moving. His face was unusually pallid even for an American, and every inch of his skin and clothing was caked with an incredible layer of filth.
Ignoring the subway dweller as thoroughly as that stooped figure was ignoring us, Ryan led us to the line of turnstiles and extracted a handful of small greenish yellow coins from a pocket.
“These are subway tokens,” he told us, dropping ten of the coins into a small slot atop one of the turnstiles. “Space-Age money that was only used down here. It’s good in all the vending machines, and in these turnstiles. The subway dwellers still use the tokens to get food and water from the machines. When I want more of these things, all I have to do is break open a vending machine, so don’t worry, admission isn’t costing us anything. Just push your way through the turnstiles like this…”
He demonstrated by walking straight through the turnstile. The turnstile barrier rotated a notch to let him through when he applied his body against it.
One by one we passed through the turnstile. Michael Lumumba passed through immediately ahead of me, then paused at the other side to study the subway dweller, who had drifted up to the barrier, Lumumba looked down at the subway dweller’s face for a long moment; then a sardonic smile grew slowly on his face, and he said, “Hello, honkie, how are things in the subway?”
The subway dweller turned his eyes in Lumumba’s direction. He did nothing else.
“Hey, just what are you, some kind of cretin?” Lumumba said as Ryan, his face flushed red behind his pallor, turned in his tracks and started back toward Lumumba. The subway dweller’s face did not change expression; in fact, it could hardly have been said to have had an expression in the first place. “I think you’re a brain-damage case, honkie.”
“I told you not to talk to the subway dwellers!” Ryan said, shoving his way between Lumumba and the subway dweller.
“So you did,” Lumumba said coolly. “And I’m beginning to wonder why.”
“They can be dangerous.”
“Dangerous? These little moronic slugs? The only thing these brainless white worms can be dangerous to is your pride. Isn’t that it, Ryan? Behold the remnants of the great Space-Age honkies! See how they haven’t tile brains left to wipe the drool off their chins—”
“Be silent!” Kulongo suddenly bellowed with the authority of a chief in his voice. Lumumba was indeed silenced, and even Ryan backed off as Kulongo moved near them. But the self-satisfied look that Lumumba continued to give Ryan was a weapon that he was wielding, a weapon that the American obviously felt keenly.
Through it all, the subway dweller continued to rock back and forth, gently and silently, without a sign of human sentience.
Goddamn that black brother Lumumba and goddamn the stinking subway dwellers! Oh, how I hate taking these Africans down there. Sometimes I wonder why the hell I do it. Sometimes I feel there’s something unclean about it all, something rotten. Not just the subway dwellers, though those horrible animals are rotten enough, but taking a bunch of stinking African tourists in there to look at them, and me making money off of it. It’s a great selling point for the day-tour. Those black brothers eat it up, especially the cruds like Lumumba, but if I didn’t need the money so bad, I wouldn’t do it. Call it patriotism, maybe. I’m not patriotic enough not to take my tours to see the subway dwellers, but I’m patriotic enough not to feel too happy with myself about it.
Of course, I know what it is that gets to me. The subway dwellers are the last direct descendants of the Space-Agers, in a way the only piece of the Space Age still alive, and what they are is what Lumumba said they are: slugs, morons, and cretins. And physical wrecks on top of it. Lousy eyesight, rubbery bones, rotten, teeth, and if you find one more than five feet tall, it’s a giant. They’re lucky to live to thirty. There’s no smog in the recirculated chemical crap they breathe, but there’s not enough oxygen in the long run, either, and after two centuries of sucking in its own gunk, God only knows exactly what’s missing and what there’s too much of in the air that the subway life-support system puts out. The subway dwellers have just about enough brains left to keep the air plant and the hydroponics and stuff going without really knowing what the hell they’re doing. Every one of them is a born brain-damage case, and year by year the air keeps getting crummier and crummier and the crap they eat gets lousier and lousier, and there are fewer and fewer subway dwellers, and they’re getting stupider and stupider. They say in another fifty years they’ll be extinct. They’re all that’s left of the Space-Agers, and they’re slowly strangling their brains in their own crap.
Like I keep telling Karen, the tourist business is a rotten way to earn a living. Every time I come down into this stinking hole in the ground, I have to keep reminding myself that I’m a day closer to owning a piece of that Amazon swampland. It helps settle my stomach.
I led my collection of Africans further out into the upper level of the station. It’s hard to figure out just what this level was during the Space Age—there’s nothing up here but a lot of old vending machines and ruined stalls and garbage. This level goes on and on in all directions; there are more old subway entrances leading into it than I’ve counted. I’ve been told that during the Space Age thousands of people crowded in here just on their way to the trains below, but that doesn’t make sense. Why would they want to hang around in a hole in the ground any longer than they had to?
The subway dwellers, of course, just mostly hung around doing what subway dwellers do—stand and stare into space, or sit on their butts and chew their algae-cake, or maybe even stand and stare and chew at the same time, if they’re real enterprising. Beats me why the Africans are so fascinated by them…
Then, a few yards ahead of us, I saw a vending machine servicer approaching a water machine. Now, there was a piece of luck! I sure didn’t get to show every tour what passed for a “Genuine Subway Dweller Ceremony.” I decided to really play it up. I held the tourists off about ten feet from the water machine so they wouldn’t mess things up, and I started to give them a fancy pitch.
“You’re about to witness an authentic water machine servicing by a subway dweller vending machine servicer,” I told them as a crummy subway dweller slowly inched up to a peeling red-and-white water machine dragging a small cart which held four metal kegs and a bunch of other old crap. “During the Space Age, this machine dispensed the traditional Space-Age beverage, Coca-Cola—still enjoyed in some parts of the world—as you can see from some of the lettering still on the machine. Of course, the subway dwellers have no Coca-Cola to fill it with now.”
The subway dweller t
ook a ring of keys out of the cart, fitted one of them into a keyhole on the face of the machine after a few tries, and opened a plate on the front of the machine. Tokens came tumbling out onto the floor. The subway dweller got down on its hands and knees, picked up the tokens one by one, and dropped them into a moldy looking rubber sack from the cart.
“The servicer has now removed the tokens from the water machine. In order to get a drink of water, a subway dweller drops a token into the slot in the face of the machine, pulls the lever, and cups his hands inside the little opening.”
The subway dweller opened the back of the water machine with another key, struggled with one of the metal kegs, then finally lifted it and poured some pretty green-looking water into the machine’s tank.
“The servicers buy the water from the reclamation tenders with the tokens they get from the machines. They also service the food machines with algae-cake they get from the hydroponic tenders the same way.”
The vending machine servicer replaced the back plate of the water machine and dragged its cart slowly off further on into the shadows of the station toward the next water machine.
“How do they make the tokens?” Koyinka asked.
“Nobody makes tokens,” I told him. “They’re all left over from the Space Age.”
“That doesn’t make sense. How can they run an economy without a supply of new money? Profits always bring new money into circulation. Even a socialist economy has to print new money each year.”
Huh? What the hell was he talking about? These damned Africans!
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