“What? Oh—no, I’m all right.”
“Then stop acting like you’re off your gyros! Look where you’re going!”
The angry man he’d collided with pushed past. Mechanically, Donald put one foot in front of the other, still rather dazed. After a few moments, he concluded that the advice was worth taking. Perhaps part of his trouble was that he’d fallen into such an automatic routine he had lost the alertness and interest in the world around which had attracted Dr. Foden to him ten years back, in which case he was unlikely to get the option of resigning his job. More probable was what he’d half-feared when with a flourish of trumpets and a ruffle of drums they declassified Shalmaneser, and he’d foreseen automation making even synthesists obsolete.
And if he was going to give up his job, he wanted it to be on his own terms, not because he’d been fired for incompetence.
With a slight shudder he surveyed the avenue. Buildings tall as canyon walls closed it in, channelling the human traffic under the diffusely bright cover of the Fuller Dome. Of course, that didn’t protect the whole of Greater New York, only Manhattan, which it had re-endowed with its former attraction and enabled to win back more inhabitants than it had lost in the late-twentieth-century rush to the suburbs. Doming the entire city would have been out of the question on grounds of cost alone, though engineering studies had shown the feasibility of the project.
New York with its thirteen million people, however, was falling further and further back from the status it had once enjoyed as the world’s largest city. It could not be compared with the monstrous conurbations stretching from Frisco to Ellay or from Tokyo to Osaka, let alone the true giants among modern megalopoli, Delhi and Calcutta with fifty million starving inhabitants apiece: not cities in the old sense of grouped buildings occupied by families, but swarming antheaps collapsing into ruin beneath the sledgehammer blows of riot, armed robbery and pure directionless vandalism.
Nonetheless, though it had shrunk to medium size by contemporary standards, this was still as large a city as Donald felt he could stand, and it still possessed a certain magnetism. The biggest employer of them all, State, dominated the West Coast; here were the next biggest, the super-corporations that were countries within a country. Ahead loomed the colossal ziggurat of the General Technics tower bridging three complete blocks, and it filled him with a sense of gloom. If he did quit—if it were possible for him to quit when they had pumped going on three-quarters of a million dollars of public money into him—his only future would lie in just such a mausoleum as that.
And look what it’s done to Norman House!
Across the hugely enlarged sidewalks the people thronged like insects, milling at the access points to underpasses and the subway. On the central, official-business-only emergency lane prowl cars cruised or paused, occasionally pulling over to make way for ambulances and fire trucks. Either side of the centre, the huge humming buses without engines—drawing their power from flywheels spun up to maximum revolutions when they turned around at the end-points of their journey—hauled their loads of up to two hundred passengers, sliding at two-block intervals into pickup bays and allowing the electric cabs to overtake. No internal combustion engine had been legal in the city since they put up the dome; the disposal of CO2 and anthropotoxins from the people themselves was as much as the ventilation system could handle, and on warm days their exuded moisture sometimes overloaded the conditioners, precipitating a kind of drizzle underneath the dome.
How do we stand it?
He had chosen to live in New York because he had been born here, and because it headed the short list of suitable residences they gave him to choose from—cities possessing the kind of library facilities needed in his job. But this was the first time he had looked at it, really looked with both eyes and full attention, in perhaps as long as seven years, and everywhere he turned he found that another straw had been piled on the camelback of the city. He had noticed the street-sleepers when he came back from college, but he hadn’t noticed that there were hundreds of them now, pushing their belongings on little makeshift trolleys and being moved on, moved on by the police. He hadn’t noticed the way people, when they were jostled, sometimes spun around and shot their hands to bulging pockets before they realized it wasn’t a mucker on their heels. And speaking of muckers: he hadn’t really connected with the world he knew when the news reports described one who’d taken out seven victims in Times Square on a busy Saturday night …
Panic clawed at him, the same kind of panic he’d experienced on the only occasion when he ventured to try Skulbustium, the sense that there was no such person as Donald Hogan but only one among millions of manikins, all of whom were versions of a Self without beginning or end. Then, he had screamed, and the man who had given him the drug advised against a repetition, saying he was his persona and without it would dissolve.
In other words: there was nothing inside.
Just ahead of him, two girls paused to examine a display in the window of a store. They were both in the height of fashion, one wearing a radio-dresslet whose surface pattern formed a printed circuit so that by shifting her buckled belt to right or left she could have her choice of broadcasts fed into the earpiece nestling under her purple hair, the other in a skintight fabric as harshly metallic as the case of a scientific instrument. Both had chromed nails, like the power terminals of a machine.
The display that had caught their attention was of genetically moulded pets. Processes that already worked well with viruses and bacteria had been applied to their germ-plasm, but on this more complex level the side-effects were excessively random; each pet on show probably stood proxy for five hundred that never left the lab. Even so, the solemn, over-sized bushbaby in the window looked miserably unhappy for all the splendour of its purple pelt, and the litter of bright-red Chihuahua pups below staggered continually as though on the verge of epilepsy.
All that seemed to concern the girls, however, was that the bushbaby’s colour almost exactly matched the hair of the one in the radio-dresslet.
First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then …
Shaking all over, Donald changed his mind about a restaurant and turned blindly into a bar to drink instead of eat his lunch.
In the afternoon he called on an out-of-work poetess he knew. She was sympathetic, asked no questions, and allowed him to sleep off his drunk in her bed. The world looked a little better when he woke.
But he wished desperately that there could be someone—not this girl necessarily, not even a girl at all, just a person—to whom he could explain why it was he had been moaning in his sleep.
the happening world (3)
DOMESTICA
Straight well-pos’ned Afram seeks roomie view long Ise luxy 5-rm apt Box NZL4
“Yes I do have three rooms but no you can’t even if you have been evicted. Whatinole would I do with that gang of sheeting lizzies you tail behind you? I don’t care if you are equipoised! I don’t share with anyone who’s not flying my strictly straight-type orbit!”
In Delhi, Calcutta, Tokyo, New York, London, Berlin, Los Angeles; in Paris, Rome, Milan, Cairo, Chicago … they can’t jail you any longer for sleeping rough, so it’s no use hoping.
There just isn’t that much room in the jails.