Part 12 (1/2)

Young lovers had come sweeping up a water lane in a powered float. They moored, stepped ash.o.r.e, and walked arm-in-arm across a mosaic walk to the nearest cafe. They chatted animatedly as they found a table. Background music changed tempo; the focus of attention slid from the lovers to the waiters. Their smoothness of manner while serving (”Certainly, madam, I will bring you a finger-bowl at once”) was contrasted with their indifference when they were behind scenes, in the squalor and confusion of the kitchens (”Joe, some old cow wants a finger-bowl; where the h.e.l.l are they?”) A close-up showed two elderly waiters pa.s.sing through the inter-communicating doors between dining-room and kitchen. One was going into the kitchen, one out. The one going in uttered with a wink this cryptic and sinister sentence: ”He's eaten it!” A man at a nearby table, over-hearing the words, dropped his feeders and turned pale.

”Get the idea?” Harsch asked his audience. ”Art is digging down. He's peeling off strata after strata of this, the mightiest city of all time. Before we're through, you're going to see some of the filth he found' at the bottom.”

Hardly for a moment had he taken his lynx eyes off Mr. Smile P. Wreyermeyer, whose dead-pan counten-ance was partially hidden by wreaths of aphrohale smoke. The big chief now crossed his legs; that could be bad, a sign perhaps of impatience. Harsch, who had learnt to be sensitive about such things, thought it time to try a direct sounding. Coming to the edge of the stage, he leant forward and said ingratiatingly, ”Can you see it building up yet, Smile?”

”I'm still sitting here,” Mr. Wreyermeyer said. You could call it an enthusiastic response.

”Good!” Harsch said, turning briskly, 'gangling' to his yes men, raising a hand to Cluet. The image died behind him, and he stood fists on hips, legs apart, looking down at the occupants of the padded seats, making his facial lines soften. It was a triumph of deception.

”Those of you who never had the privilege of meeting Art,” he said, ”will already be asking, 'What sort of a man could reveal a city with such genius?' Not to keep you in suspense any longer, I'll tell you.

When Art was on this last consignment, I was just a fresh cub kid in the solid business, working under Art I guess I learnt a whole lot from him, in the matter of plain, solid humanity as well as technique. We're going to show you a bit of film now that a cameraman of Unit Two took of Art without him knowing. I believe you'll find it- kind of moving. O.K., Gluet, let her roll.”

The solid was suddenly there, seeming to fill all the audience's vision. In a corner of one of Nunion's many s.p.a.ceports, Art Stayker and several of his doc.u.mentary team sat against junked oxygenatkm equipment, taking lunch. Art was perhaps forty-eight, a little over Harsch's present age. Hair blown over his eyes, he was devouring a gigantic kyfeff sandwich and talking to a pudding-faced youth with crew cut and putty nose. Looking round at the solid, Harsch identified his younger self with some embarra.s.sment and said, ”You got to remem-ber this was shot all of twenty years back.”

”You sure weren't so gangling in those days, boss,” one of his rooters in the audience called.

Art was speaking. ”Now Wreyermeyer has given us the chance to go through with this consignment,” he was saying, ”let's not botch it up by being glib. Anyone in a city this size can pick up interesting faces, or build up a. few snappy .architectural angles into a pattern with the help of background noise. Let's try to aim for some-thing deeper. What I want to find is what really lies at the heart of this metropolis.”

”Supposing it hasn't got a heart, Mr. Stayker?” the youthful Harsch asked. ”I mean-you hear of heartlesss men and women; could be this is a heartless city, huh?”

”That's just a semantic quibble,” Art said. ”All men and women have hearts, even the cruel ones. Same with cities-and I'm not denying Nunion isn't a cruel city in many ways. People who live in it have to fight all the while; you can see it in our line of business. The good in them gradually gets overlaid and lost.

You start good, you end bad just because you-oh, h.e.l.l, you forget, I suppose. You forget you're human.”

”That must be terrible, Mr. Stayker,” young Harsch said. ”I'll take care never to get that way myself. I won't let Nunion beat me.”

Art finished his sandwich, looking searchingly at the blank young face blinking into his, ”Never mind watching out for Nunion,” he said, almost curtly. ”Watch out for yourself.”

He stood up, wiping his big hands on his slacks. One of his lighting crew offered him an antaphrohale and said, ”Well, that's about tucked up the s.p.a.ceport angle, Art; we've jelled all we need to jell here.

What sector do we tackle next?”

Art looked round smilingly, the set of his jaw notice-able. ”We take on the politicians next,” he said.

The youthful Harsch. scrambled to his feet. Evidently he had noticed the camera turned on them, for his manner was noticeably more aggressive.

”Say, Mr. Stayker, if we could clear up the legal rackets of Nunion,” he said, ”at the same time as we get our solids-why, we'd be doing everyone a favour. We'd get famous, all of us!”

”I was just a crazy, idealistic kid back in those days,” the mature Harsch, at once abashed and delighted, pro-tested to the audience. ”I'd still to learn life is nothing but a kind of co-ordination of rackets.” He smiled widely to indicate that he might be kidding, saw that Mr. Wreyermeyer was not smiling, and lapsed into silence again.

On the screen, Unit Two was picking up its traps. The c.u.mbersome polyhedron of a trans-Burst freighter from far Papraca sank into the landing pits behind them and blew off steam piercingly.

”I'll tell you the sort of thing we want to try and capture,” Art told his team as he shouldered a pack of equipment. ”When I first came to this city to join Super-nova eight years ago, I was standing in the lobby of the Federal Justice building before an important industrial case was being tried. A group of local politicians about to give evidence pa.s.sed me, and I heard one say as they went in-I've never forgotten it-'Have your hatreds ready, gentlemen.' For me, it will always embody the way that prejudice can engulf a man. Touches like that we must have.”

Art and his fellows trudged out of the picture, shabby, determined. The solid faded, and there before the screen stood Harsch Benlin, spruce, determined.

”It still doesn't begin to stack up, Harsch,” Ruddigori said from his armchair. He was Mr.

Wreyermeyer's Personnel Manager, and a big shot in his own right. You had to be careful with a louse like that.

”Perhaps you don't get the subtleties, Ruddy, eh?” Harsch suggested sweetly. ”The thing's stacking fine.

That little cameo has just demonstrated to you why Art never made the grade. He talked too much. He theorized. He shot off his mouth to kids like I was then. He wasn't hard enough in the head. He was nothing more nor less than just an artist, Ruddy. Right?”

”If you say so, Harsch, boy,” Ruddy said levelly, but he turned at once to say something inaudible to Mr.

Wreyermeyer. The familiarity of it! Caught for a second off guard, Harsch glared stilettos at the studio chief; Mr. Wreyermeyer sat immobile as if made of stone, although now and again his throat bobbed like a frog's as he swallowed.

Harsch made a brusque signal to Cluet in the projec-tion box. He would swing this deal on Supernova if he had to stay here all afternoon and evening plugging it. He blew his nose and slipped a slimming tablet into his mouth under cover of the noserpula.

”Right,” he said sharply. ”You should have seen enough to grasp the general picture. Now we're going in for the kill. Are you story girls taking notes, down there?”

A babble of female a.s.sent rea.s.sured him.

”Right,” he repeated automatically.

Behind him, Art Stayker's Nunion was recreated once more, a city which administered the might of Yinnisfar's growing dominance and swam in the wealth of a gigantic interplanetary sweepstake: a.s.sembled here as the mind of Art Stayker had visualized it two decades ago, a city acting at once as liberator and conqueror to its mult.i.tudinous inhabitants.

Now evening was falling over its concrete maze of canyons. The sun set, the great globes of atomic light tethered in the sky poured their radiance over thorough-fares moving with a new awareness. Cluet had dimmed down the original commentary, giving Harsch the oppor-tunity to provide his own.

”Here it is, night coming over our fabulous city, just as we've all seen it lots of times,” he said briskly.

”Art caught it all as it's never been caught before or since. He used to tell me, I remember, that night was the time a city really showed its claws, so the boys spent a fortnight padding around looking for sharp, broken shadows that suggested claws. The craze for significant detail again. Some of their pickings are coming up now.”

The clawed shadows moved in, fangs of light bit into the dark flanks of side alleys. An almost tangible restless-ness, like the noisy silence of a jungle, chittered across the ramps and squares of Nunion; even the present on-lookers could feel it. They sat more alertly in their places and despatched an underdog to inquire why the air-conditioning was not working better. Mr. Wreyermeyer stirred in his seat; that must mean something.

Behind a facade of civilization, the night life of Nunion had a primitive ferocity; the Jura.s.sic wore even-ing dress. In Art Stayker's interpretation of it, it was essentially a dreary world, the amalgam of the home-sicknesses and l.u.s.ts of the many thousand nations who had drifted to Yinnisfar. The individual was lost in this atom-lit wilderness where sixty million people could be alone together within a few square miles.

Art made it quite clear that the thronging mult.i.tude, queuing for leg shows and jikey joints were harmless.

Living in flocks, they had developed the flock mentality. They were too harmless to tear anything of value out of the flux of Nunion; all they asked for was a nice time. You could only really enjoy yourself by stepping hard on a thousand faces.

Art showed the hard-steppers. They were the ones who could afford to buy solitude and a woman to go with it. They drifted above the sparkling avenues in bubbles, they ate in undersea restaurants, nodding in brotherly fas.h.i.+on to the sharks watching them through the gla.s.s walls, they wined in a hundred little dives, they sat tensely over the gaming tables: and at the imperious signal of their eyes, there was always a serf to come running, a serf who sweated and trembled as he ran. That is how a galactic city runs; power must always remember it is powerful.

Now the scene changed again. The camera swept over the Old Jandanagger and began to investigate Bosphorus Concourse.

The Concourse lay at the heart of Nunion. Here the search for pleasure was tensest, intensest. Barkers cried their rival attractions, polyhermaphros beckoned, liquor flowed like a high tide, cinema vied with sinema, the women of the night were spiderishly busy, a thousand sensations-the perversions of a galaxy-were available at a price. Man, conscious as never before of consisting of cells, had invented a different thrill for each cell.

Harsch Benlin could not resist putting a word in.

”Have you ever seen such realism, gentlemen?” he demanded. ”Here are ordinary folks-folks like you, like me-just getting down to having a whale of a good time. Think what wonderful propaganda these shots are for our little old capital! And where've they been these last twenty years? Why, lying down in our vaults, neglected, almost lost. n.o.body would ever have seen them if I hadn't hunted them up!”

Mr. Wreyermeyer spoke, ”I've seen them, Harsch,” he said throatily. ”For my money, they're too sordid to have any popular appeal.”

Harsch stood absolutely still. A dark stain rose in his face. Those few words told him-and everyone else present-exactly where he stood. He stood out on a limb. If he persisted as he wanted to persist, he would rouse the big chief's anger; if he backed down, he would lose face, and there was not a man here who, for their various reasons, would not like to see that. He was spiked.

In the solid behind Harsch, men and women queued tightly for admission to a horror show, ”Death in Death Cell Six”. Above them, dwarfing them, was a gigantic quasi-live jell of a man being choked, head down, eyes popping, mouth gaping. You could watch his epiglottis bob, it was a masterpiece of realism.

That show had actually been produced by Mr. Wreyermeyer himself in his younger days; Harsch had intended a pretty compli-ment about it, but now in his hesitation he let the moment slip.