In fact, this sort of existence is advertised as a blessing, as something all of us should desire.
For instance:
Crime, the realtors point out, is all but nonexistent within the confines of the apartment area. All corridors are monitored by a full-time staff of police from central scanning depots within the structure. Anyone bent on illegal activity against the residents would find that it is utterly impossible to get into the complex without a plastic identicard full of computer nodes which activate the automatically locked doors. And only residents are carefully screened guests may have the use of such cards. Since everyone with a card has his fingerprints, retinal pattern, blood type, odor index, hair type, and encephalographic readouts on file with the structure's police bureau, it is difficult, if not impossible, to commit a crime from within and escape detection and retribution. Compared to the outside world, with its juvenile gangs, organized rackets, and political dissidents, such a style of crime-free living is quietly attractive.
Pollution, the same realtors say, is a serious problem outside the complexes. Man never really seriously stopped fouling his air and his water until the early 1980s. Then, some of the European and Asian countries had still not seen the light. Pollution had not totally ceased until the mid 1990s, after the complexes were being built. Outside, the air had still not been purified. The death rate for lung cancer, beyond the complex walls, among those unfortunate enough not to have seen the wisdom of such compact mini-cities, was three times that for complex dwellers. The same for all respiratory diseases. The realtors could go on and on. And they often did. The complexes had elaborate filtration systems, and this selling point was never overlooked.
Inflation, the salesmen will tell you, is far less noticeable in a complex apartment, for the companies who own the mammoth structures also do the buying from the smaller stores within. A company owning a hundred complexes, buying for a thousand grocery stores and hundreds of thousands of citizens can obtain lower wholesale rates and pass the savings on to the residents.
A community sense of togetherness, the realtors insist, has all but died in the regular life style, in the cities and the suburbs. There, they say with great sincerity, there is a dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself attitude. In the great complexes, this is not so. There is a camaraderie, a sense of group achievement, a community pride and identity that makes life more like it used to be: 'Back When.' No man need be an island, but a part of a great continent.
Trumpets. Drums. End of the ad.
Why don't I live in one, then? Why build a house by the sea, set in its own isolation of pine trees? Well, there are lots of reasons.
For instance:
Crime, it seems to me, is nothing more than a necessary evil, an offshoot of freedom and liberty. When you give a man a list of rights, things that he should expect to be able to do according to his standing as a member in the human community, you are providing the unscrupulous man with a list to stretch to his own ends. You are giving the clever man something to look over in search of loopholes. And, in the end, you have criminals making the free- enterprise system work for them, their way, as they understand it. So you arrest them and you punish them, but you learn to live with them. Unless you would prefer restricting those liberties everyone enjoys. You could shorten the list of rights or do away with it altogether, thus giving the unscrupulous ones less to stretch, less things to find loopholes in. Everyone suffers, of course, when the list is destroyed. And the cleverest and most intelligent of the unscrupulous manage to end up at the top of the pile anyway-or maybe they were the ones who eliminated the list of rights to begin with, in order to cut down on competition from amateurish punks. They call themselves 'city government' and steal legally. And with their surveillance of the corridors, their bugging of elevators and escalators and pedways and stairs, their files on every resident, which grow thicker with data each year, the apartment complexes do not foster liberty, but slowly absorb it from their residents.
Pollution? Well, maybe I'll die of lung cancer sooner than a complex dweller. But I can breathe the smell of the sea, the smell of wet earth after a rain, the ozone produced by lightning. My air has not been so filtered and cleaned as to become flat and unexciting.
Inflation? Perhaps things are cheaper in the complexes, and perhaps that's because the companies really want to give their residents a fair shake in every way possible. But there is something frightening, to me at least, about depending on one conglomerate entity for your food, your drink, your entertainment, your clothing, your necessities, and your luxuries. I stopped being dependent on Harry, my father image, by the time I was halfway through adolescence. I don't yearn to be fathered or mothered to death by some team of accountants and cost- projecting computers.
A community sense of togetherness, they say, makes life much more fun in the giant apartment structures. But I don't want to have to be friends with anyone merely because I happen to live near them. I don't enjoy the high school rah-rah, go-team unison of small minds or the brittle-fingered canasta desperation of old people seeking companionship in their last days. Besides, last night, I saw an example of that community togetherness which banded the 'innocent' citizens of that complex.across the street into a spying, ruthless creature which could report neighbors to the police to have them slaughtered. Community togetherness can lead to a consensus outlook that seeks and destroys any dissident element, no matter how small and really harmless.
Thanks but no thanks.
I'll take my sea.
And my pine trees.
And even my damned polluted air.
Her apartment was as it had been. It did not look as if it had even been searched-a strange fact if they truly had thought her involved with revolutionary elements. I got some food in a plaza supermarket and returned to her place, fixed myself a solid meal, and ate until my shriveled stomach was somewhat back to normal size.
After that, I turned on the television and was instantly glad I had taken so many precautions getting here. I had driven to the airport, abandoned my hovercar, and had brought my luggage back here on a bus. If I had not been so quick and careful, I might now be jailed, for I was a television star it seemed, my face a portrait on the wideangle tube.
On the news, they showed coppers at my house, looking busy as they attended complex machinery. They found signs of traitorous activities-signs which they had planted since my escape. They had uncovered a 'secret room' and such nefarious things as a photo-printer and stacks of antiAlliance, anti-military booklets I was alleged to have written with-they pointed out-the aid of Melinda Thauser, who had already been taken into custody. There were even weapons caches and a small bomb assembly bench. I was wanted on a warrant for sedition. Very neat indeed.
But there was another warrant as well.
The second one was for murder.
They exhibited, in ludicrous detail, the demolished howler at the foot of the cliff, the charred corpses of the men who had been riding in the back of it. They had fished the detached cab from the sea, and the drivers were laid side by side, horribly mutilated by the broken windscreen and the crumpled roof of their vehicle. According to the news, I had run the howler off the narrow cliff road. I had charged it directly, and when it was obvious I was going to hit them, the drivers of the mammoth rig had swerved off the road to avoid killing me. Quite gallant of them.
I waited for the reporter to say how I had managed to make my escape with still another cop car ahead of me, but he talked around it without letting the home audience in on the way I had dived over the cliff myself.
KELLY KILLER, COPS SAY! That was the headline the papers would carry, surely. Those boys always went for alliteration.
I spent most of the evening working over a plan in my head. Just remaining on the loose did not seem enough, any longer, not while Melinda was in the women's quarters of the Tombs, down there in dark, cold stones without me.
Somewhere around nine in the evening, my thinking was interrupted by the whine of sirens and the sinister rattle of gunfire.
I stood, listening intently, wondering if they were now surrounding the building, now getting wise to my sudden disappearance. But they would hardly be firing out in the streets. And there would be no need for sirens. Indeed, sirens would warn me, and such a building as this provided a great many hiding places.
Turning to the broad picture window, I looked down into the street eight floors below. Three howlers curbed in front of the building across the street, and uniformed coppers poured out of them like insects from a broken hive.
