“Did the oxygen keep flowing to you the whole time?” Vlade asked Roberto.
Roberto shook his head, then with difficulty said, “The bell edge squished it. I lifted the bell. Tried to.”
“Good man. I think you’re going to be all right here.” No sense in bawling the kid out now; fear was probably chilling his extremities along with everything else. “Let’s get some of this hot water Mr. Garr has here onto your chest.”
Garr stepped over the gunwales into the zodiac’s cockpit with minimal spillage from the bowl in his hands, and Vlade took the bowl and scooped water out with his hand, scalding his fingers more with the contrast of temperatures than the water’s actual heat, and dripped some of it onto Roberto’s chest. Heat would diffuse through the wetsuit, a good thing. Vlade was past the moment of his flashback now, back in the present moment with this kid, who was going to be all right.
“Slowly,” Vlade said, and had Stefan continue to dry Roberto’s hair with the towel. Quickly the water cooled to a point where he could put the boy’s hands in the bowl. Roberto kept shivering, with occasional spasms of extra shuddering, but shivering was good; there was a point where you got too cold to shiver, very hard to come back from. But the kid wasn’t there; he was shivering like mad. Stefan finished drying his head off. They got him out of the wetsuit, then toweled down, then dressed: pants, shirt, and baggy coat on, and another dry towel wrapped around his head like a turban.
“Okay,” Vlade said after a while. To Garr he said, “How about you tow us back home.”
Franklin nodded once. “I can’t believe I’m towing you guys home again,” he said to Stefan and Roberto.
“Thanks,” the boys said weakly.
“What should we do with their diving bell?” Franklin asked Vlade.
“Cut it loose. We can get it later.”
As Garr was in his cockpit piloting them, Vlade sat back and got himself between Roberto and the wind.
“All right,” he said. “What the fuck was that about?”
Roberto gulped. “We were just out looking for some treasure.”
Vlade shook his head. “Come on. No bullshit.”
“It’s true!” both boys exclaimed.
They looked at each other for a second.
“It’s the Hussar,” Roberto said. “It’s the HMS Hussar.”
“Ah come on,” Vlade said. “That old chestnut?”
The boys were amazed. “You know about it?”
“Everyone knows about it. British treasure ship, hit a rock and went down in Hell Gate. Every water rat in the history of New York has gone diving for it. Now it’s you guys’s turn.”
“But we found it! We really did!”
“Right.”
Stefan said, “We did because Mr. Hexter knows. He studied the maps and the records.”
“I’m sure. And what did you boys find down there?”
“We borrowed a metal detector that can specify for gold thirty feet down, and we took it to where Mr. Hexter said the ship had to be, and we got a big signal.”
“A really big signal!”
“I’m sure. And then you started digging underwater?”
“That’s right.”
“Under your diving bell?”
“That’s right.”
“But how is that supposed to work? That’s landfill there, right? Part of the Bronx.”
“Yeah that’s right. That’s where it was.”
“So the Hussar sank in the river and then the south Bronx got extended over it, is that what you’re saying?”
“Exactly.”
“So how were you going to dig through that landfill under a tiny diving bell? Where were you going to put the dirt you dug up?”
“That’s what I said,” Stefan said after a silence.
“I had a plan,” Roberto muttered miserably.
“I’m sure,” Vlade said. He tousled Roberto’s turban. “Tell you what, I’ll keep this news to myself, and we’ll have a little conference with your old man of the maps when we get back and you get properly dried and warmed and fed. Sound good?”
“Thanks, Vlade.”
Private money and public (or state) money work together and to the same end. Their actions have been absolutely complementary during the crisis, aimed at safeguarding the markets for which they are ready to sacrifice society, social cohesion, and democracy.
The author of this book is to be commended for her zeal in tracking down much behind-the-scenes material never before published… Not that the Pushcart War was a small war. However, it was confined to the streets of one city, and it lasted only four months. During those four months, of course, the fate of one of the great cities of the world hung in the balance.
Fungibility, n. The tendency of everything to be completely interchangeable with money. Health, for instance.
i) that citizen
Recall, if your powers of retention will allow it, that after the Second Pulse, as the twenty-second century began its surreal and majestic existence, sea level had risen to about fifty feet higher than it had been early in the twentieth century. This remarkable rise had been bad for people—most of them. But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet’s wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world’s wealth. For them it wasn’t so bad.
This remarkable wealth distribution was just a result of the logical progression of the ordinary workings of capitalism, following its overarching operating principle of capital accumulation at the highest rate of return. Capturing that highest rate of return was an interesting process, which became directly relevant to what happened in the postpulse years. Because the areas where the highest rate of return can be obtained move around the world as time passes, following differences in development and currency exchange rates. The highest rate of return comes during periods of rapid development, but not just any area can be rapidly developed; there needs to be a preliminary infrastructure, and hot money, and a fairly stable and somewhat educated populace, ambitious for themselves and willing to sacrifice for their children by working hard for low wages. With these conditions in place, investment capital can descend like a skyvillage on an orchard, and that region then experiences rapid growth, and the rate of return for global investors is high. But as with everything, the logistic curve rules; rates of profit drop as workers expect higher wages and benefits, and the local market saturates as everyone gets the basic necessities. So at that point capital moves on to the next geocultural opportunity, flying somewhere else. The people in that newly abandoned region are left to cope with their new rust belt status, abandoned as they are to fates ranging from touristic simulacrum to Chernobylic calm. Local intellectuals discover bioregionalism and proclaim the virtues of getting by with what can be made in that watershed, which turns out to be not much, especially when all the young people move somewhere else, following the skyvillages of liquid capital.
So it goes, region to region, opportunity to opportunity. The march of progress! Sustainable development! Always there is an encouraging motto to mark the remorseless migration of capital from an ex–highest rate of return to the next primed site. And indeed, development of capital gets sustained.