taken from the stores on the outskirts of the city — Halloway was certain that they had come from one of the pastoral settlements. On their Garden City faces was a childlike expectation, an innocent but clear determination to seize the life of the metropolis.
Switching on the loudspeaker system so that he could talk to them, Halloway picked up the microphone. The first of his people had arrived to take their places in his city.
It had been another successful day. On the television monitor in the police commissioner’s office Halloway watched the activity in the avenue below. It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and the rush-hour traffic was beginning to build up. The sidewalks were thronged by more than a dozen pedestrians, leaving their offices and workshops on their way to the neighbourhood bars and supermarkets. A hundred yards from the station, six cars were blocking an intersection where the lights had failed. Their horns sounded impatiently above the street noise.
Halloway spoke to the desk sergeant in the orderly room. ‘Get a man over to the Seventh Avenue intersection. There’s a faulty green light holding up the traffic.’
‘He’s already left, Mr Halloway.’
‘Good — if we don’t watch it now there’ll be chaos in an hour or two.’
These minor breakdowns were a pleasant challenge to Halloway. Even now, as one of Stillman’s young men ignored the stuttering red light and the outstretched arm of the police constable, Halloway was in no way annoyed. In a sense, these displays of aggression pleased him, confirming everything he had hoped about the reclamation scheme. The pedestrians in the street below strode along purposefully, pushing past each other with scant courtesy. There was no trace here of good humour and pastoral docility.
In an alleyway facing the station a diesel generator was pumping out dense clouds of sooty smoke. A three-man repair gang recently trained by Olds had emptied the sump oil across the sidewalk, in clear contravention of the local ordinances. But, again, Halloway made no attempt to reprimand them. If anything, he had done what he could to frustrate any efforts to bring in stricter clear-air regulations. Pollution was part of the city, a measure of its health. All the so-called ills that had beset this huge metropolis in its prime had visited themselves with flattering haste on Halloway’s small enclave. Pollution, traffic congestion, inadequate municipal services, inflation and deficit public financing had all promptly reappeared.
Halloway had even been pleased when the first crime was committed. During the previous night several clothing stores had been broken into, and pilfering from the supermarkets went on continuously. Halloway had spoken to Stillman about the light-fingered behaviour of his entourage. Lounging back with his young cronies in his 1920s gangster limousine, Stillman had merely flicked the sharp lapels of his dove-grey suit and pointed out that petty crime helped to keep the economy running.
‘Relax, Halloway, it’s all part of the problem of urban renewal. Do I complain that some of your boys are on the take? You’ve got to increase turnover. You’re working these poor devils so hard they haven’t time to spend their pay. If they’ve got anything left by the end of the week, that is. This is a real high-rent area you’ve set up for them. Any time now you’ll have a housing crisis on your hands, social problems, urban unrest. Remember, Halloway, you don’t want to start a flight from the cities.’
Halloway had taken this friendly ribbing in his stride, though the rapid increase in the size of Stillman’s gang had begun to make him uneasy. Clearly Stiliman relished lording it over this entourage of wide-eyed teenagers and farm-bred youths, fitting them up with their gangster suits and weapons like a corrupt stage-director playing ironic games with a chorus of young actors. At times Halloway felt that he too was part of this sardonic man’s devious entertainment.
However, apart from the stealing, Stillman’s continued ravaging of department store windows in the surrounding districts of the city had turned Halloway’s neighbourhood into an island of light and activity in an ever- larger sea of devastation. Halloway’s plans for expansion had been effectively shelved by this deliberate vandalism, the wholesale destruction of complete city blocks.
In addition, Stillman’s entourage had come into collision with Olds, and Halloway now depended more than ever on the mute. Two of Stiliman’s men had tried to break into Olds’ automobile plant, complaining that the models they had ordered from him had not been delivered. For several days Olds had retreated to his rooftop eyrie above the garage at the airport. Without him everything soon began to run down. Halloway drove out to pacify him, and found Olds sitting below the wing of the glider tethered to the roof, calculators flicking in his hands as he brooded to himself. His eyes were gazing at the flights of birds taking off from the reservoirs around the airport, thousands of wild geese moving westwards across the city. Uneasily, Halloway noticed that the cars in his museum were still dusty and untended. One of them, the black Duesenberg, had been savagely attacked, its windows knocked in and upholstery slashed, controls pounded out of recognition by a heavy mallet.
But for a brilliant stroke of Halloway’s, Olds would long since have left. Two months beforehand, he had shown his first irritation with the throngs of youths and teenage girls who were entering the reclamation area. Many of them were idealists like Halloway, repressed by the passivity of the garden communities and eager to help re- start the city. However, an equal number were drifters and misfits, who resented taking orders from Olds and began to mimic him, flashing obscenities on the read-out panels of the pocket calculators they had taken from a business-machines store.
Searching for some way of retaining his hold over Olds, Halloway came up with the suggestion that the mute could own and manage his own automobile plant. The idea had immediately appealed to Olds. In an underground garage near the police-station he and his workforce soon constructed a crude but functioning production line, on which the dozens of cars being re-equipped and re-engined moved along a section of railway line. They entered as little more than wrecks picked up off the street by their prospective owners, and emerged at the far end of the line as fully functioning vehicles. Delighted by this, Olds had agreed to stay on in the city.
In fact, Halloway’s idea worked better than he hoped. The motor-car was the chief commodity of the city, and demand for it was insatiable. Almost every one of the new inhabitants now owned three or four cars, and their chief recreation was driving around the streets of the reclamation area dressed in the latest finery. Parking problems had become acute, and a special task force under Olds was renovating the kerbside meters, an unpopular measure grudgingly accepted only because of the special status of the automobile and the important position it occupied, economically and otherwise, in people’s lives.
Despite these problems, Halloway was satisfied with his achievement. In the four months since the first of the new arrivals had turned up, a genuine microcosm of the former metropolis had come into existence. The population of the city was now two hundred, girls and youths in their late teens and early twenties, emigrants from Garden City and Parkville, Laurel Heights and Heliopolis, drawn from these dozy pastoral settlements to the harsh neon glare that each evening lit up the night sky like a beacon.
By now any new immigrants — some of them, worryingly, little more than children — were rapidly inducted into urban life. On arrival they were interviewed by Halloway, issued with a list of possible jobs, either on Olds’ production line, in the clothing stores and supermarkets, or in any one of a dozen reclamation gangs. The last group, who foraged through the city at large for cars, fuel, food supplies, tools and electrical equipment, in effect represented the productive capacity of the new settlement, but in time Halloway hoped that they would embark on the original manufacture of an ever-wider range of consumer goods. Cash credits (banknote6 franked with Halloway’s name) were advanced to the new recruits against their first week’s pay, with which they could buy the garish clothing, records and cigarettes they seemed to need above all else. Most of the two hundred inhabitants were now heavily in debt, but rather than evict them from their apartments and close the discotheques, bars and amusement arcades where they spent their evenings, Halloway had astutely lengthened the working day from eight to ten hours, enticing them with generous though uneconomic overtime payments. Already, he happily realized, he was literally printing money. Within only a few months inflation would be rampant, but like the crime and pollution this was a real sign of his success, a confirmation of all he had dreamed about.
There was a flicker of interference on the monitor screen, indicating a fault in the camera mounted outside the station. Muttering with mock-annoyance, ‘Nothing works any more,’ Halloway switched to the camera in the square. The open plaza with its memorial of cars was deserted at this hour. The monument had never been completed. Stiliman had long since lost interest in the hard work of construction, and no one else had volunteered, particularly as no payment was involved. Besides, these memorials of cars and radiator grilles, tyres and kitchen appliances created an atmosphere of defeat and fatality, presiding like funeral pyres over the outskirts of the city as the new arrivals pressed on to their promised land.
A few attempts had been made to dismantle the pyramids, but each time Buckmaster and his daughter had
