End of the Dream Page 16

  Miles saw Bill Clemment shudder.

  The mayor was smiling. “Thanks, Reggie. Very vital aspect of the whole. And, I might add, understated, if anything. For—a—thirty-eight?—thirty-eight per cent loss in business at this time is based, I believe, on last year’s totals?” Lacey nodded gracefully, bowed, in fact. Tabley bowed back crisply and faced the group. “However, as the recovery has been on a splendid upswing, the business expectations for this year’s Christmas sales were some fifteen to twenty per cent higher. Hence, Reggie’s figure, applied to actual expectations and resultant inventories, would actually mean for this year, unless the remaining days permit a shift, something near a fifty per cent drop in over-all sales. Which would, of course, trigger the unthinkable disaster we cannot permit to happen. The shoppers are ready to throng—thronging, now, in spite of the—smog. They are more affluent than in any past year. Given the chance, in the remaining days for shopping, this crucial, yes, terrifying financial situation may dissipate, as we trust, and pray, the inversion will. Dr. Weisman, I see you’ve just been brought a message. Perhaps it’s good news?”

  The meteorologist and head of the Weather Bureau was a small, nervous man with large eyes, and pale, almost pink hair in a thin and total disarray. He nodded toward the mayor absently and returned his attention to a yellow sheet of electro-facsimile type which a police officer had brought in so quietly few of the strained group had noticed. Weisman finished reading and stood up. He was little more than five feet tall and mike-shy; all weather data broadcasting was done by young assistants at the Bureau. The chief looked, now, almost as if he were not sure where he was, whom he addressed, or what he was expected to say. Then his deep and assured voice came, unamplified and no need for that:

  “Mr. Mayor, members of this emergency committee—or whatever it is called. This is the latest bulletin. In general, the fronts are still motionless. A slight deepening of the low trough west of us has occurred but will probably not alter the picture much, or soon. If the deepening increases swiftly there may be a start of circulation and slight improvement in this area by midday tomorrow. On the other hand, measuring stations set at some forty points on Manhattan, and more than three hundred in the surrounding areas, show an average rise in the index of eleven points, since ten this morning. A small lift of the inversion layer immediately above us, and of the second, above that—we have a rare double inversion—has caused a constant eddy of air from northern and middle New Jersey to drift at low levels into the New York area, especially Manhattan. If this process should continue, we will get the polluted air from Jersey industry. In that case, I can only say, God help New York!”

  He looked at his yellow sheet. “Let me add a bit. Pollution is not properly shown in the index we use. The public index we are told to use. Sulphur and sulphuric acid compounds are always high here. Other toxic gases, fine-droplet compounds, poisonous, particulate matter and fly ash is always present in higher proportions, relatively, in New York than other cities, but these counts aren’t given. Most alarming of all the toxic data is the rapid rise in the nitrogen oxide levels in congested streets—meaning all streets, in Manhattan, anyhow. So the data we give the public are a snow job.”

  The mayor was frightened. His face became flinty to hide his state but his tapping pencil sounded like an insect with a fast rattling call and that tremor gave away his face-freeze. He finally said, “Damn it! With all the money—years—on weather research—you lads still can’t be sure of—a damn thing! Including all this talk about toxins. Even medicine doesn’t know they are dangerous.”

  “We’ve been ninety per cent accurate on twenty-four-hour forecasts this year, eighty-two per cent on long-range and that’s some progress! We pretty well told you about November, in October. The heavy rains. Fogs. Ice storms. And we’ve been telling you politicians about the nitrous oxide menace for years. Shall I run over that again?” Dr. Weisman was calm.

  “Please.” Miles cut in. He knew that most of those present had no scientific background for what should now be a wholly scientific discussion.

  “Simple. We got exhaust devices on every car, years ago. Then the Desert War came. Car production was halted for war production. The exhaust devices began to wear as they and cars aged. Now, with cars pouring out of Detroit, the new systems are excellent. But less than ten per cent of the automotive vehicles in use are new models. The prewar vehicles, even if they still have exhaust devices, are less than ten per cent efficient, on the average. However, their emission of nitrogen oxides has increased over its originally considerable rate to a very high incidence.

  “Finally, the city of New York had expected to spend three billion in air pollution control over the past six years. Nothing was spent. And new plans are still on paper, only.”

  Reginald Lacey interrupted. “Weisman, old chap! Give us your most dire—ahh—extrapolation—if the present increments continue for a day? Even, two days?”

  The weather man grunted. “Impossible. I’m a scientist, not a fortuneteller. You’ve read and seen TV broadcasts of the pollution disasters in Europe. Japan. The lesser one in USA. London, last year, had five days and sixty-seven thousand deaths. We could make that look trifling.”

  The heads of various departments had their turns at speaking. Health. Hospitals. Streets and Highways. All, politicians or political appointees.

  All, well aware that if the city was shut down, and if, then, business collapsed owing in any part to their actions, their politically dependent careers would be ruined.

  Other items came up.

  Someone questioned the advisability of going ahead with the “Free Bus Program” scheduled for Saturday. It happened to be an enterprise Miles hadn’t learned of, and he listened to George Willis of the Mercantile Transportation Authority describe the operation—with a feeling of stupefaction.

  “Beginning early tomorrow and continuing through the pre-Christmas shopping days, we have some two thousand buses available for travel to Manhattan’s shopping area from the suburbs. Each shopper who shows he has made purchases of twenty-five dollars or more will be returned to his town free of charge.”

  Somebody whistled softly. What an extra two thousand buses would do to midtown traffic was hard to envisage.

  In the silence that followed, the mayor turned to Miles. “I think, Miles, we should hear from you, perhaps. Though we all know what you will say.” He chuckled, not convincingly.

  What followed was one of the few occasions on which Miles publicly lost his grip on his gathering rage. He knew, when the general returned from calling his superiors, looking smug, that there was no hope of sensible action. The fourteen hundred plants with “defense” work would go on operating. The merchants and the politicians would insist on taking whatever the risk might be. Miles had held his peace thus far with the intention of making an appeal to reason, quietly but earnestly. For these people were, surely, fundamentally responsible, not madmen.

  Perhaps it was the “free bussing” news that cost him his control. Perhaps he’d never had as much self-command as he’d believed, for he had realized that if the defense plants continued to operate it would be impossible to halt others. Possibly the mayor’s patronizing tone was the ultimate straw. His mind quit, whatever the final cause.

  Miles stood, towering, tremendous, formidable, unable for a long moment to say a word. Then he said just one: “Murderers!” and stalked out. Nobody ran after him. No one dared.

  He strode down crowded streets to the place where his limousine waited. He said, “Home,” to his chauffeur, who had kept the motor running to supply power to the air conditioner. When he reached his penthouse Miles went into his “study-den” and locked the doors.

  He ate no lunch.

  He refused dinner.

  He could not be reached by phone.

  That left me in charge at the Foundation.

  I sat in my luxurious office and took the reports as they came in. And I saw the people whom I needed to see, as well as those who wante
d to see me. I had lunch on a tray from the executives’ kitchen. Around two, Nora called and told me about Miles. “He’s almost out of his mind,” she said. “He wouldn’t even answer me!”

  So I knew, perfectly well, what had happened at that secret conclave. I also knew, from the Foundation’s special monitoring systems, just how bad the contamination was, and the data grew more sinister every hour with the regular bulletins. I could scarcely believe what Miles’s condition surely meant: that the authorities had refused to act. Manhattan’s air wasn’t really air, by late afternoon. Thousands of elderly persons, many people of all ages with heart and respiratory troubles, were being taken to hospitals, but not “rushed,” as ambulances vainly tried to siren a way through traffic that did not give space because it could not. Weak children and many of the old were dying. It had happened before on a similar scale; but my mind was on what could happen the next day.

  We did our best.

  To every daily paper within two hundred miles and to every 3D-TV station reaching that same area, as well as every radio station, we sent out our advice and the supportive figures. Those releases accused nobody. They merely said that it was self-evident that the people in authority did not sufficiently understand the nature of the accumulating contaminants and their near-certain greater concentration on Saturday. Our data followed and made our advice plain enough. That was, Stay out of New York, and Manhattan especially, tomorrow.

  I tried, with zero success, to buy some time on a network or even on a major local radio station to give the facts, that evening. No one had a half hour at any price. Management doubtless knew that a spokesman for the Foundation for Human Conservancy was not going to urge the masses to come shopping in midtown on Saturday.

  Miles did not show up at his office the next morning and I had not expected him to. When his anger and the despair that follows it reach this point, it might be days before he returns to his desk—looking almost normal, hardly contrite but perhaps a little sheepish.

  Nora drove me to the Foundation in the new car with the new conditioning unit which cut down most of the haze that hung and swirled in the outside world, a compressed fume blanket, into which a cold sun dimly shone, at times carving great diagonal blocks of shimmer in the murk. People were weeping and sneezing and most held handkerchiefs to their faces but even so they suffered, and they hurried to get indoors where they worked or proposed to shop. The morning news, phoned to me at breakfast, was worse than even our very worried scientists had feared. Almost every bit of densely polluted air from around Greater New York was being pulled into the Manhattan-Brooklyn-Bronx area by a slow whirlpool like eddy.

  After seeing the ten o’clock reports I ordered everybody to start for home. By midafternoon I could no longer even see the traffic, stalled eighty floors down, in Fifth Avenue. I checked the executive suites to be sure they were all empty, spoke to the night superintendent about keeping watchmen indoors, and then took an automatic elevator down to the street level where there had been an all-day braying of horns in the usually motionless, briefly inching traffic.

  I am not ashamed of my subsequent behavior.

  From Fifty-seventh Street south to the excavation where a new library was to rise on the site of the old, the sight was usually fantastic. Colored lights bathed the facades of every towering structure on the avenue and their walls fluoresced, owing to chemical treatment which had that purpose. The concealed and high-powered light-sources bathed the canyon in every rainbow hue and the colors moved, weaving and parting, like an extra-vivid play of northern lights. Above this rainbow-walled scene came the New Music, the “Fifth Avenue Beat,” clear, ringing, almost drowning motor sounds and the babble of people who inched along in two solid masses that spilled from walks on both sides of the gaudy valley into and among cars—private cars, trucks and an ice pack of buses of every description from which and into which people poured.

  None of that, of course, occupied my attention particularly; what I concentrated on as I forcibly held my position at the side of our building against the pressure of the human river was the air over the street. For a half dozen blocks the chromatic dazzle was sharp, but it dimmed beyond that point and vanished in murk beyond. I could not see that gaudy and glaring panoply as far as I always had, to Forty-second Street. It was for once dulled out by smog, blue-brown, eddying, swirling, appalling.

  The air was chilly and it was almost dark. Clouds could not be seen but they hung low, I knew. One’s first breath of this air was painful and every ensuing inhalation added misery. People passing in their thousands were coughing, choking, eyes and noses streaming, handkerchiefs held to filter out some portion of the pollutants.

  I had almost decided to return to the office when the blow fell.

  At first, from where I was pressed against the wall, the onslaught was not definable as to cause. Above the music and the engine pulse, louder than either and overriding the human sounds of a myriad conversations, curses, warnings to watch out for cars and abjurations to hurry, came a strange susurration, a sort of whispered scream as if a chorus of hoarse banshees had cried aloud some blocks to the south.

  It was a shocking sound and people began to stop to listen. In seconds, it became a roar.

  For the first instants I had thought it the result of a massive accident in that avid multitude. But the sound swept toward us—as it did in the opposite direction—and I clambered up on a brass fire hydrant nearby to add to my considerable height for a better view.

  What I saw was almost incredible. The crowd on my side of the street at a distance of four blocks and beyond had become dwarfed. It took a moment to understand that incredible phenomenon. It was as if everybody had suddenly become two feet tall. And this strange endwarfing was spreading. The standing masses were serially shortening—and then it was plain.

  They had fallen.

  They were falling like wheat cut by an invisible reaper, one that was approaching. They were, I knew, dead.

  Then I saw the next effect. People on the crammed walks near enough to the approaching and, to them, incomprehensible scythe started trying to run away from the fallen toward the tightly compressed masses, in my direction. To know what was happening, as I did, was to be certain that a lethal concentration of nitrogen oxides, NO and NO2, mainly, would reach the area where I stood on that hydrant in a minute, or perhaps less. And the nitrogen oxides, at this kind of concentration, kill suddenly and without warning.

  In a few seconds the pressure from those trying without hope to flee would roll against the people around me. Already they were looking back with panicky eyes and then turning to rush into the lobby of the Smythe Building. The offices on the ground floor were closed, brokerages, all of them. The lobby was vast but not air-conditioned. Waiting with the inrushing crowd for an elevator and escape to safety was a bad risk as, coming down from the hydrant into the tightly packed and now terrified mob, I could see that nobody, at my distance from the banks of elevators, would live long enough to get a turn.

  The voice from the south was now terrible, a roar and scream of fear and desperation tearing from thousands of throats. There was no way to direct this ever denser multitude that would not simply augment stampede. I plowed through the jam at the building entry and on, crossing Fifty-seventh Street in a mass so dense I sometimes could not feel the pavement with my feet. It was almost as horrible going over Fifty-eighth but at the next corner the people, running at top speed, were fanning out as they leaped over walks and walls and plunged into the park, I with the rest.

  Central Park offered the only region nearby where the roads were few, the people present, until the fringes of the mob joined them, were very few, and the air, presumably, would be less contaminated owing to those circumstances. I continued to run as fast as I could till I had reached a midpoint in the park about opposite Seventieth Street. There, panting and hot, lungs scalding, eyes inflamed, I sat down on a bench and tried to recover my wind and my nerve.

  Somewhat later, as surges of horr
or and floods of humanity swept into the park, I began to make my way to Park Avenue and the apartment. I did it cautiously and with a method I tried, on the way, to explain to such others as I was able. It was a simple technique.

  Where, on any side street, no one moved, you turned back. Where, before crossing Madison Avenue, you saw fallen figures or forward-leaning figures in vehicles, you looked for a different place to make that passage. Park Avenue, though solid with traffic standing still, was not yet afflicted—and some sturdy police, aided by citizens, were getting motors killed.

  I did not join those who tried to help them. But when I had reached the lobby of the apartment where Nora and I live I brought along a small parade of mothers and nursemaids pushing prams, children with schoolbooks, couples and single adults and three youngsters of preschool age I managed to grab and carry against their frightened protests. Our lobby is air-conditioned, and though it was crowded we shoved inside and some of us began to get the hysterical calmed and the crowd distributed on halls in higher floors.

  It was what I did and all I did and I might have done more but I believe not.

  We stayed in our apartment, Nora and I, looking down at the finally dead avenue.

  But the inversion layers did not budge, and the blue-to-brown pall of death pushed turgidly and at random from the center-city concentration. Now, of course, every TV and radio station in the area was pouring forth advice. Turn off your motor was the principal command. But there were some avenues and many cross streets where motors ran till their gasoline was exhausted. Dead people cannot switch off the ignition.

  As the hours passed a torrent of information began. A mob sighted the mayor getting into his car, pulled him out and literally stomped and tore his body to shreds. Looting, of course, rose to a scale beyond accounting, the looters, with their spoil, often dying in the stores where they’d smashed in. Fires caught and engines often failed to reach them as their crews died on the way.