PLATINUM POHL (25 page)
Authors: Frederik Pohl
“Yes, sir. He here because he broke the law. But he still my daddy.”
“That’s right, Marcus,” sighed the duty officer, and stamped the pass. He handed it to Marcus’s father. “This is for the boy, not you. You can escort the boy as far as the visiting section, but you can’t go in. You’ll be able to see through the windows, though,” he added, but did not add that so would everybody else, most especially the guards.
The pass let them into the elevator, and the elevator took them down and down, eight floors below the surface of the ground, with an obligatory stop at the fourth level while an armed guard checked the passes again. Nathanael Greene Institute did not call itself escape-proof, because there is no such thing; but it had designed in a great many safeguards to make escape unlikely. Every prisoner wore a magnetically coded ankle band, so his location was known to the central computers at every minute of the day; visitors like Marcus and his father were given, and obliged to wear, badges with a quite different magnetic imprint; the visiting area was nowhere near the doors to the outside world, and in fact even the elevators that served it were isolated from the main body of the prison. And as Marcus left his father in a sealed waiting room, two guards surrounded him and led him away to a private room. A rather friendly, but thorough, matron helped undress him and went through everything he possessed, looking for a message, an illicit gift, anything. Then he was conducted to the bare room with the wooden chairs and the steel screen dividing them.
Marcus had been well rehearsed in what to say and do, and he had no trouble picking out Inmate 838-10647 from his photograph. “Hello, da,” he said, with just enough quaver in his voice to be plausible for the watching guards.
“Hello, Marcus,” said his putative father, leaning toward the steel screen as a father might on seeing his long-lost son. The lines for the interview had also been well rehearsed, and Marcus was prepared to be asked how his mother was, how he was doing in
school, whether he had a job to help his ma out. None of that was any trouble to respond to, and Marcus was able to study this heavyset, stern-looking white man who was playing the part of his father as he told him about Nillie’s arthritis and her part-time job as companion to old Mr. Feigerman’s dying wife; about how well he had done on the test on William Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
and his B+ grade in history; about his own job that his ma had got him with Mr. Feigerman himself, the blind man with the funny machinery that let him see, sort of, and even work as a consulting engineer on the Bed-Stuy project … all the same he was glad when it was over, and he could get out of that place. Toward the end he got to thinking about the eighty feet of rock and steel and convicts and guards over his head, and it had seemed to be closing in on him. The guards at Nathanael Greene had an average of ten years on the job, and they had had experience before of kids running errands that adults could not do, so they searched him again on the way out. Marcus submitted peacefully. They didn’t find anything, of course, because there hadn’t been anything to find. On that visit.
school, whether he had a job to help his ma out. None of that was any trouble to respond to, and Marcus was able to study this heavyset, stern-looking white man who was playing the part of his father as he told him about Nillie’s arthritis and her part-time job as companion to old Mr. Feigerman’s dying wife; about how well he had done on the test on William Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
and his B+ grade in history; about his own job that his ma had got him with Mr. Feigerman himself, the blind man with the funny machinery that let him see, sort of, and even work as a consulting engineer on the Bed-Stuy project … all the same he was glad when it was over, and he could get out of that place. Toward the end he got to thinking about the eighty feet of rock and steel and convicts and guards over his head, and it had seemed to be closing in on him. The guards at Nathanael Greene had an average of ten years on the job, and they had had experience before of kids running errands that adults could not do, so they searched him again on the way out. Marcus submitted peacefully. They didn’t find anything, of course, because there hadn’t been anything to find. On that visit.
Marcus’s after-school job was waiting impatiently for him. The name of the job was de Rintelen Feigerman, and he was a very old man as well as quite a strange-looking one. Mr. Feigerman was in a wheelchair. This was not so much because his legs were worn out—they were not, quite—as because of the amount of machinery he had to carry with him. He wore a spangled sweatband around his thin, long hair, supporting a lacy metallic structure. His eyes were closed. Closed permanently. There were no eyeballs in the sockets anymore, just plastic marbles that kept them from looking sunken, and behind where the eyeballs had been there was a surgical wasteland where his entire visual system had been cut out and thrown away. The operation saved his life when it was done, but it removed Feigerman permanently from the class of people who could ever hope to see again. Transplants worked for some. The only transplant that could change things for Feigerman was a whole new head.
And yet, as Marcus came up the hill, the white old head turned toward him and Feigerman called him by name. “You’re late, Marcus,” he complained in his shrill old-man’s voice.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Feigerman. They made me stay after school.”
“Who’s that ‘they’ you keep talking about, Marcus? Never mind. I was thinking of some falafel. What do you say to that?”
Actually Marcus had been thinking of a Big Mac for himself, but that would mean making two stops, in different directions. “Falafel sounds good enough to me, Mr. Feigerman,” he said, and took the bills the old man expertly shuffled out of his wallet, the singles unfolded, the fives creased at one corner for identification, the tens at two. “I’ll tell Julius I’m here,” he promised, and started down the long hill toward the limousine that waited on Myrtle Avenue.
The old man touched the buttons that swung his chair around. He could not really see down the hill, toward where the project was being born. The machinery that replaced his eyes was not too bad at short range, but beyond the edge of the paved area atop Fort Greene Park it was of no use at all. But he didn’t need eyes to know what was going on—to know that not much was. Half the project was silent. By turning up his
hearing aid and switching to the parabolic microphone he could hear the distant scream of the turbines at the breeder reactor and the chomp and roar of the power shovels where excavation was still happening, underlain with the fainter sounds of intervening traffic. But the bulldozers weren’t moving. Their crews were spending the week at home, waiting to be told when payroll money would be available again. Bad. Worse than it seemed, because if they didn’t get the word soon the best of them would be drifting off to other jobs where the funds were already in the bank, not waiting for a bunch of politicians to get their shit together and pass the bill—if, indeed, the politicians were going to. That was the worst part of all; because Feigerman admitted to himself that that part was not sure at all. It was a nice, sunny day in Fort Greene Park, but there were too many worries in it for it to be enjoyed—including the one special troubling thing, in a quite different area, that Feigerman was trying not to think about.
hearing aid and switching to the parabolic microphone he could hear the distant scream of the turbines at the breeder reactor and the chomp and roar of the power shovels where excavation was still happening, underlain with the fainter sounds of intervening traffic. But the bulldozers weren’t moving. Their crews were spending the week at home, waiting to be told when payroll money would be available again. Bad. Worse than it seemed, because if they didn’t get the word soon the best of them would be drifting off to other jobs where the funds were already in the bank, not waiting for a bunch of politicians to get their shit together and pass the bill—if, indeed, the politicians were going to. That was the worst part of all; because Feigerman admitted to himself that that part was not sure at all. It was a nice, sunny day in Fort Greene Park, but there were too many worries in it for it to be enjoyed—including the one special troubling thing, in a quite different area, that Feigerman was trying not to think about.
While they ate their late lunch, or early dinner, or whatever the meal was that they had formed the habit of sharing after Marcus’s school got out, the boy did his job. “They’ve got one wall of the pumphouse poured,” he reported, squinting out over the distant, scarred landscape that had once been a normal, scarred Brooklyn neighborhood. Silently the old man handed him the field glasses and Marcus confirmed what he had said. “Yeah, the pumphouse is coming along, and—and—they’re digging for the shit pit, all right. But no bulldozers. Just sitting there, Mr. Feigerman; I guess they didn’t turn loose your money yet. I don’t see why they want to do that, anyway.”
“Do what?”
“Make another hill there. They got this one right here already.”
“This one’s the wrong shape,” Feigerman said, not impatiently—he liked the boy, welcomed his questions, wished he had had a real son of his own sometimes—since the semi-real stepson he had had no detectable love for his adopted father. “Besides, this one is historic, so they don’t want to build windmills on top of it. George Washington held the British off right here—read the inscription on the monument sometime.” He licked some of the falafel juice off his lip and Marcus, unbidden, unfolded a paper napkin and dabbed the missed spatters off the old man’s bristly chin. Feigerman clicked in his long-range optical scanners in place of the sonar and gazed out over the city, but of course he could see only vague shapes without detail. “It’s a big thing,” he said—as much to the unheeding city as to Marcus.
“I know it is, Mr. Feigerman. Gonna make things real nice for Bed-Stuy.”
“I hope so.” But it was more than a hope. In Feigerman’s mind it was certain: the energy-sufficient, self-contained urban area that he had lobbied for for more than twenty years. It was wonderful that it was going in in Brooklyn, so close to his home. Of course, that was just luck—and a few influential friends. The project could have been built anywhere—which is to say, in any thoroughly blighted urban neighborhood, where landlords were walking away from their tenements. And those were the good landlords; the bad ones were torching their buildings for the insurance. South Bronx wanted it. So did three neighborhoods in Chicago, three in Detroit, almost all of Newark, half of Philadelphia—yes, it could have been almost anywhere. Brooklyn won the prize for two reasons. One was the clout of the influential political friends. The other was its soft alluvial soil. What Brooklyn was made of, basically, was the rubble the glaciers had pushed ahead of them in the last Ice Age, filled in with silt from the rivers. It cut like cheese.
When Bed-Stuy was done it would not have to import one kilowatt-hour of energy
from anywhere else—not from Ontario Hydro, not from Appalachia, not from the chancy and riot-torn oil fields of the Arab states. Not from anywhere. Winter heating would come from the thermal aquifer storage, in the natural brine reservoirs under the city, nine hundred feet down. Summer cooling would help to warm the aquifers up again, topped off with extra chill from the ice-ponds. By using ice and water to store heat and cold the summer air-conditioning and winter heating peaks wouldn’t happen, which meant that maximum capacity could be less. Low enough to be well within the design parameters of the windmills, the methane generators from the shit pit and all the other renewable-resource sources; and the ghetto would bloom. Bedford-Stuyvesant was a demonstration project. If it worked there would be more, all over the country, and Watts and Libertyville and the Ironbound and the Northside would get their chances—and it would work!
from anywhere else—not from Ontario Hydro, not from Appalachia, not from the chancy and riot-torn oil fields of the Arab states. Not from anywhere. Winter heating would come from the thermal aquifer storage, in the natural brine reservoirs under the city, nine hundred feet down. Summer cooling would help to warm the aquifers up again, topped off with extra chill from the ice-ponds. By using ice and water to store heat and cold the summer air-conditioning and winter heating peaks wouldn’t happen, which meant that maximum capacity could be less. Low enough to be well within the design parameters of the windmills, the methane generators from the shit pit and all the other renewable-resource sources; and the ghetto would bloom. Bedford-Stuyvesant was a demonstration project. If it worked there would be more, all over the country, and Watts and Libertyville and the Ironbound and the Northside would get their chances—and it would work!
But it was not, of course, likely that de Rintelen Feigerman would be around to see those second-generation heavens.
Reminded of mortality, Feigerman raised his wrist to his ear and his watch beeped the time. “I have to get going now,” he said. “My wife’s going to die this evening.”
“She made up her mind to do it, Mr. Feigerman?”
“It looks that way. I’m sorry about that; I guess your mother will be out of a job. Has she got any plans, outside of helping out in the store?”
“Friend of my daddy’s, he says he can get her work as a bag lady.”
Feigerman sighed; but it was not, after all, his problem. “Take us on down the hill, Marcus,” he said. “The car ought to be back by now.”
“All right, Mr. Feigerman.” Marcus disengaged the electric motor and turned the wheelchair toward the steep path. “Seems funny, though.”
“What seems funny, Marcus?”
“Picking the time you’re going to die.”
“I suppose it is,” Feigerman said thoughtfully, listening to the chatter of teenagers on a park bench and the distant grumble of traffic. Marcus was a careful wheelchair handler, but Feigerman kept his hand near the brake anyway. “The time to die,” he said, “is the day when you’ve put off root-canal work as long as possible, and you’re running out of clean clothes, and you’re beginning to need a haircut.” And he was getting close enough to that time, he thought, as he heard his driver, Julius, call a greeting.
There was a confusion at Mercy General Hospital, because they seemed to have misplaced his wife. Feigerman waited in his wheelchair, watching the orderlies steer the gurneys from room to room, the nurses punching in data and queries to their monitors as they walked the halls, the paramedics making their rounds with pharmaceuticals and enema tubes, while Marcus raced off to find out what had happened. He came back, puffing. “They moved her,” he reported. “Fifth floor. Room 583.”
Jocelyn Feigerman had been taken out of the intensive-care section, because the care she needed now was too intensive for that. In fact, in any significant sense of the word, her body was dead. Her brainwaves were still just dandy. But of the body itself, with its myriad factories for processing materials and its machines for keeping itself going, there was left only a shell. External machines pumped her blood and filtered it, and moved what was left of her lungs. None of that was new, and not even particularly serious. Fatal, yes. Sooner or later the systems would fail. But that time could be put off for days,
weeks, months—there were people in hospices all around the country who had been maintained for actual years—as long as the bills were paid—as long as they, or their relatives, did not call a halt. Jocelyn Feigerman’s case was worse than theirs. It could be tolerated that she could never leave the bed, could remain awake only for an hour or so at a time, could eat only through IVs and could talk only through a machine; but when she could no longer
think
there was no more reason to live. And that time was approaching. The minute trace materials like acetylcholine and noradrenaline that governed the functioning of the brain cells themselves were dwindling within her, as tiny groups of cells in places buried deep in the brain, places with names like the locus coeruleus and the nucleus basalis of Meynert, began to die. Memory was weakening. Habits of thought and behavior were deserting her. The missing chemicals could be restored, for a time, from pharmaceuticals; but that postponement was sharply limited by side effects as bad as the disease.
weeks, months—there were people in hospices all around the country who had been maintained for actual years—as long as the bills were paid—as long as they, or their relatives, did not call a halt. Jocelyn Feigerman’s case was worse than theirs. It could be tolerated that she could never leave the bed, could remain awake only for an hour or so at a time, could eat only through IVs and could talk only through a machine; but when she could no longer
think
there was no more reason to live. And that time was approaching. The minute trace materials like acetylcholine and noradrenaline that governed the functioning of the brain cells themselves were dwindling within her, as tiny groups of cells in places buried deep in the brain, places with names like the locus coeruleus and the nucleus basalis of Meynert, began to die. Memory was weakening. Habits of thought and behavior were deserting her. The missing chemicals could be restored, for a time, from pharmaceuticals; but that postponement was sharply limited by side effects as bad as the disease.
It was time for her to die.
So the hospital had moved her to a sunny large room in a corner, gaily painted, filled with flowers, with chairs for visitors and 3-D landscape photographs on the walls, all surrounding the engineering marvel that was the bed she lay in. The room was terribly expensive—an unimportant fact, because it was never occupied except by the most terminal of cases, and rarely for more than a few hours.
As Feigerman rolled in the room was filled with people—half a dozen of them, not counting Marcus or himself. Or the still figure on the bed, almost hidden in its life-support systems. There was his daughter-in-law Gloria, tiny and fast-talking, engaged in an argument with a solid, bearded dark-skinned man Feigerman recognized as the borough president of Brooklyn. There was his stepson, now an elderly man, smoking a cigarette by the window and gazing contemplatively at the shrouded form of his mother. There was a doctor, stethoscope around his neck, tube looped through his lapel, all the emblems of his office visibly ready, though there was not in fact much for him to do but listen to the argument between Gloria and Borough President Haisal—a nurse—a notary public, with his computer terminal already out and ready on a desk by the wall. It was a noisy room. You could not hear the hiss of Jocelyn Feigerman’s artificial lung or the purr of her dialysis machine under the conversation, and she was not speaking. Asleep, Feigerman thought—or hoped so. Everybody had to die, but to set one’s own time for it seemed horribly coldblooded … . He raised his chin and addressed the room at large: “What are we waiting for?”
His stepson, David, stabbed his cigarette out in a fern pot and answered. “Mother wanted Nillie here for some reason.”
“She’s got a right,” Gloria flashed, interrupted her argument with Haisal to start one with her husband. Haisal was of Arab stock, from the Palestinian neighborhoods along Atlantic Avenue; Gloria was Vietnamese, brought to the United States when she was a scared and sick three-year-old; it was queer to hear the New York—American voices come out of the exotic faces.
“Father! Haisal says they’re going to go to referendum.”
Feigerman felt a sudden surge of anger. He wheeled his chair closer toward the arguing couple. “What the hell, Haisal? You’ve got the votes in Albany!”
“Now, Rinty,” the Arab protested. “You know how these things work. There’s a lot of pressure—”
“You’ve got plenty of pressure yourself!”
“Please, Rinty,” he boomed. “You know what Bed-Stuy means to me, don’t you think I’m doing everything I can?”
“I do not.”
Haisal made a hissing sound of annoyance. “What is this, Rinty? Gloria asked me to come here because you need a magistrate for your wife’s testamentation, not to fight about money for the project! This is a deathbed gathering. Where’s your respect?”
“Where’s your sense of honor?” Gloria demanded. “You promised, Haisal!”
“I do what I can,” the borough president growled. “It’s going to have to go to referendum, and that’s all there is to it—now let’s get going on this goddamn testamentation, can we?”
“We have to wait for Vanilla de Harcourt,” Feigerman snapped, “and anyway, Haisal—what is it?”
From the doorway, the nurse said, “She’s here, Mr. Feigerman. Just came in.”
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