Highrises, Developments, chain-link fences, parking lots empty except for stripped derelicts, obscenities scrawled on the pavement in soft chalk and now blurring with the rain. Crashed-out windows, rats, wet bags of garbage splashed over the sidewalks and into the gutters. Graffiti written jaggedly on crumbling gray walls: HONKY DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU HEAR. HOME FOLKS BLOW DOKES. YOUR MOMMY ITCHES. SKIN YOUR BANANA. TOMMY’S PUSHING. HITLER WAS COOL. MARY. SID. KILL ALL KIKES. The old G.A. sodium lights put up in the 70s busted with rocks and hunks of paving. No technico was going to replace them down here; they were on the New Credit Dollar. Technicos stay uptown, baby. Uptown’s cool. Everything silent except for the rising-then-descending whoosh of the pneumo buses and the echoing clack of Richards’s footfalls. This battlefield only lights up at night. In the day it is a deserted gray silence which contains no movement but the cats and rats and fat white maggots trundling across the garbage. No smell but the decaying reek of this brave year 2025. The Free-Vee cables are safely buried under the streets and no one but an idiot or a revolutionary would want to vandalize them. Free-Vee is the stuff of dreams, the bread of life. Scag is twelve oldbucks a bag, Frisco Push goes for twenty a tab, but the Free-Vee will freak you for nothing. Farther along, on the other side of the Canal, the dream machine ions twenty-four hours a day… but it runs on New Dollars, and only employed people have any. There are four million others, almost all of them unemployed, south of the Canal in Co-Op City.
Richards walked three miles and the occasional liquor stores and smoke shops, at first heavily grilled, become more numerous. Then the X-Houses (!!24 Perversions-Count ’Em 24!!), the Hockeries, the Blood Emporiums. Greasers sitting on cycles at every corner, the gutters buried in snowdrifts of roach ends. Rich Blokes Smoke Dokes.
He could see the skyscrapers rising into the clouds now, high and clean. The highest of all was the Network Games Building, one hundred stories, the top half buried in cloud and smog cover. He fixed his eyes on it and walked another mile. Now the more expensive movie houses, and smoke shops with no grills (but Rent-A-Pigs stood outside, electric move-alongs hanging from their Sam Browne belts). A city cop on every corner. The People’s Fountain Park: Admission 75c. Well-dressed mothers watching their children as they frolicked on the astroturf behind chain-link fencing. A cop on either side of the gate. A tiny, pathetic glimpse of the fountain.
He crossed the Canal.
As he got closer to the Games Building it grew taller, more and more improbable with its impersonal tiers of rising office windows, its polished stonework. Cops watching him, ready to hustle him along or bust him if he tried to commit loitering. Uptown there was only one function for a man in baggy gray pants and a cheap bowl haircut and sunken eyes. That purpose was the Games.
The qualifying examinations began promptly at noon, and when Ben Richards stepped behind the last man in line, he was almost in the umbra of the Games Building. But the building was still nine blocks and over a mile away. The line stretched before him like an eternal snake. Soon others joined it behind him. The police watched them, hands on either gun butts or move-alongs. They smiled anonymous, contemptuous smiles.
–That one look like a half-wit to you, Frank? Looks like one to me.
–Guy down there ast me if there was a place where he could go to the bathroom. Canya magine it?
–Sons of bitches ain’t
–Kill their own mothers for a
–Smelled like he didn’t have a bath for
–Ain’t nothin like a freak show I always-
Heads down against the rain, they shuffled aimlessly, and after a while the line began to move.
MINUS 098 AND COUNTING
It was after four when Ben Richards got to the main desk and was routed to Desk 9 (Q-R). The woman sitting at the rumbling plastipunch looked tired and cruel and impersonal. She looked at him and saw no one.
“Name, last-first-middle.”
“Richards, Benjamin Stuart.”
Her fingers raced over the keys. Clitter-clitter-clitter went the machine.
“Age-height-weight.”
“Twenty-eight, six-two, one-sixty-five.”
Clitter-clitter-clitter
“Certified LQ. by Weschler test if you know it, and age tested.”
“One twenty-six. Age of fourteen.”
Clitter-clitter-clitter
The huge lobby was an echoing, rebounding tomb of sound. Questions being asked and answered. People were being led out weeping. People were being thrown out. Hoarse voices were raised in protest. A scream or two. Questions. Always questions.
“Last school attended?”
“Manual Trades.”
“Did you graduate?”
“No.”
“How many years, and at what age did you leave?”
“Two years. Sixteen years old.”
“Reasons for leaving?”
“I got married.”
Clitter-clitter-clitter
“Name and age of spouse if any.”
“Sheila Catherine Richards, twenty-six.”
“Names and ages of children, if any.”
“Catherine Sarah Richards, eighteen months.”
Clitter-clitter-clitter
“Last question, mister. Don’t bother lying; they’ll pick it up during the physical and disqualify you there. Have you ever used heroin or the synthetic-amphetamine hallucinogen called San Francisco Push?”
“No.”
Clitter
A plastic card popped out and she handed it to him. “Don’t lose this, big fella. If you do, you have to start back at go next week.” She was looking at him now, seeing his face, the angry eyes, lanky body. Not bad looking. At least some intelligence. Good stats.
She took his card back abruptly and punched off the upper right-hand corner, giving it an odd milled appearance.
“What was that for?”
“Never mind. Somebody will tell you later. Maybe.” She pointed over his shoulder at a long hall which led toward a bank of elevators. Dozens of men fresh firm the desks were being stopped, showing their plastic LD.s and moving on. As Richards watched, a trembling, sallow-faced Push freak was stopped by a cop and shown the door. The freak began to cry. But he went.
“Tough old world, big fella,” the woman behind the desk said without sympathy. “Move along.”
Richards moved along. Behind him, the litany was already beginning again.
MINUS 097 AND COUNTING
A hard, callused hand slapped his shoulder at the head of the hall beyond the desks. “Card, buddy.”
Richards showed it. The cop relaxed, his face subtle and Chinese with disappointment.
“You like turning them back, don’t you?” Richards asked. “It really gives you a charge, doesn’t it?”
“You want to go downtown, maggot?”
Richards walked past him, and the cop made no move.
He stopped halfway to the bank of elevators and looked back. “Hey. Cop.”
The cop looked at him truculently.
“Got a family? It could be you next week.”
“Move on!” the cop shouted furiously.
With a smile, Richards moved on.
There was a line of perhaps twenty applicants waiting at the elevators. Richards showed one of the cops on duty his card and the cop looked at him closely. “You a hardass, sonny?”
“Hard enough,” Richards said, and smiled.
The cop gave him back his card. “They’ll kick it soft again. How smart do you talk with holes in your head, sonny?”
“Just about as smart as you talk without that gun on your leg and your pants down around your ankles,” Richards said, still smiling. “Want to try it?”
For a moment he thought the cop was going to swing at him. “They’ll fix you,” the cop said. “You’ll do some walking on your knees before you’re done.”