Element 79 (8 page)

Thereafter both girls giggled and laughed as they walked the plane. Time came for lunch. Now, if there is one thing your airline stewardess comes to hate with a furious intensity, it is the serving of appalling trays of appalling food. The operation has a certain similarity to the stuffing of turkeys, except turkeys demand more or less decent food, not the precooked, overcooked slush that passes for the usual airline meal. Your stewardess comes to hate all those little packages, packages for salt, pepper, butter, packages for package people on a package flight.

The girls were having none of it this time. The whole lot was thrown in together. No cocktails were served. Instead, all the alcohol went in, along with the meat, the potatoes, the dessert, and the cheese. They served the mixture in big pudding bowls.

Nobody noticed the difference, except a man traveling in solitary splendor in the first-class section. He angrily demanded to know what the white stuff was on top. The stewardess gave a deep, bell-like laugh. “Crabmeat garnish, sir.” The man became still more furiously angry. He revealed his exalted identity—president, he was, of the airline itself. Instantly, the wrath of Dionysus descended without pity. Struck dumb in midsentence, the fellow collapsed into his seat, his eyes riveted forever on individual T.V. Never again would this particular monster be permitted to manipulate people.

Dionysus started to sing again. This time he was joined by the two girls and by five of the passengers. Such was the measure of his success, seven from a total of one hundred or more. These seven were now rescued from a kind of living death. The rest were too far gone, too far below the surface, they had become bond-slaves to the god of Inanition. They sat there congealed, ears stuffed up, eyes stuffed up, brains stuffed up, all semblance of intellect completely dissolved away.

The plane landed. The stewardesses busied themselves. There were none of the usual glassy smiles, just genuine laughter. One of them chuckled as she announced, “On behalf of the crew, I’d like to say how very much we’ve enjoyed having you with us today, and with what pleasure we look forward to having you with us again, in the nearest future.”

The girls smiled with intense warmth as the man with the golden beard strode away into the airline building. Once the passengers were all gone, both girls raced down the plane, back to the cubicle. It really was very small, really
too
small, they both thought rather sadly.

Dionysus reached the main concourse. He heard a voice saying, “Will Mrs. Finkelstein and Mr. Fink please report…” Then the terrible music started again. It was the same abomination as before. It made him sick in the same way, churning his stomach over. With a tremendous concentration of will, he conquered the nausea. The music stopped. Everybody in the concourse braced themselves for a further announcement concerning Mrs. Finkelstein and Mr. Fink. But no further sound seemed to come from the speakers.

It wasn’t that Dionysus had interfered with the electrical feeder lines to the speakers. He was absorbing all the sound. The music was still really coming through, but Dionysus was taking it all for himself, leaving nothing to be heard by the milling throng of people in the concourse. He took the music, every note of it, for a long time, all deep into his belly. As one glutinous note after another went inside him, it seemed to Dionysus as if he were being pumped up and up to the size of an enormous gasbag. There was a limit to what even he could do, to what any god could do. At last the limit was reached, not another single note could he manage to pack inside himself. Dionysus let the whole lot go, in a colossal burp that shook the concourse like a thunderclap. Windows were shattered, cracks appearing everywhere in walls and ceiling. People raced for the exits, convinced that planes were exploding to the left and to the right on the runways outside.

Dionysus surveyed the wreckage and smiled to himself as he stepped through a gap in the outer wall. The evening air was warm and clear, just right for a return to Olympus. He knew what he was going to do when he got home—sleep. He also knew something else. Very definitely, he was flying the rest of his journey on foot.

It’s amazing how many people have a good idea and then foul it up. Take the theologians. When they thought up the Devil they were dead-set on the right track, but then they go off with a ridiculous notion. Imagine the Devil bothering with souls one by one, dealing with you or me on an individual basis, like a common tinker. The critical thing to remember is that the Devil thinks big, reaping his harvests by the million, like he did in the case of Slippage City.

Suppose you wanted to start up a hell of a city. You’d probably put it in a lousy climate. Well, the Devil didn’t make that mistake. He put his City in a beautiful place, a place with a wonderful climate. There was a plain about fifty miles wide between a chain of mountains and the sea. It was a place of nearly perpetual sunshine. Yet it was no desert, quite the reverse. What happened was that every day the air moved in and out over the sea. It came in saturated with moisture during the early morning. There was always a heavy dew with a light mist. The water soaked into the fertile ground before the sun climbed high in the sky. Then, in the heat of the day, the air began to move seaward. It was now so warmed by the sun that it took a big charge of water vapor from the sea, ready to be delivered again to the land on the morrow. Because the air was always dry in the evening, the land cooled off rapidly during the night. The nights were never hot or clammy—in fact, it was mostly necessary to sleep under a couple of blankets.

The City itself became established near the sea, toward the northern end of the plain. Here was a multitude of little hills and valleys, verdant and bird-filled. The houses of the first settlers fitted tastefully into the landscape. Ample water for the first modest needs could be piped from the mountains, or even pumped from simple wells. Crops grew abundantly in the plain, aided by the beginnings of irrigation. Because the people had no thought of profit, the food they grew was real food. The vegetables tasted like real vegetables, the fruit like real fruit, not the flashy, spray-soaked rubbish that would come a hundred years later with the ultimate transmogrification of the City. The children grew up brown and strong. There seemed an infinity of hills and valleys to be explored on horseback. At that early time, the simplest folk possessed horses, just as naturally as they possessed clothing and shelter. Later, with the march of “progress,” only the children of the very rich would be able to afford horses. Later, not even the children of the very rich would have space to play in, the apparent infinity would turn out to be no infinity at all.

But the City grew only slowly in the beginning, because a great desert on the far side of the mountains separated it from all large centers of population. It was a long, hazardous journey to reach the City, so immigrants came at first only in a tiny trickle. The immigrants brought labor, craftsmanship, and knowledge. In most ways they gave as much to the City as they took from it. The fields became trimmer, the buildings more substantial, the initial crudities of life were smoothed away. The City became widely known for its beauty, yet because of the remoteness it grew only slowly.

At last came transportation, first the railroad. Yet the immediate effects of making access to the City much less arduous than before were more preparatory than dramatic. It was the same thing as before, but
a poco a poco
. More immigrants, more development, more prosperity. The railway permitted exports, at first mostly fruit, which at this stage was still of excellent quality. Orange groves were now to be found everywhere throughout the fertile strip of land, stretching back from the sea by the full fifty miles in some places. Prosperity and the amenities of life became added to the natural beauty of the City. Everybody who lived there was entirely convinced of the City’s preeminence as a desirable place to live. This conviction they passed on to their children, so a mystique concerning the City became firmly established. Wealthy folk came from great distances to live there. Spacious homes were built. The way of life was leisurely, almost casual, at this stage.

Great, far-off industrial centers took note of the City’s “potential.” It was a most pleasant place for successful executives to live in. It would be possible for well-paid executives to live cheek by jowl with the wealthy, for them to build similar homes, for them to share in the social life of the City, even for them to marry into the families of the truly wealthy. Industrial buildings could be erected more cheaply than elsewhere, in spite of the remoteness of the City, because the equable, all round the year, climate demanded very little in the way of tough, solid construction. Some industrial activities could indeed be carried on with advantage in the open air, without any buildings at all. So industry began to move in, at first in a small way of course, then
poco più mosso
. It was while industrial development was thus in its early acceleration that extensive oil deposits were discovered in the vicinity of the City. Here was the first one of the Devil’s jokers slipped into the pack.

A forest of derricks soon appeared on what used to be a beautiful beach. For the first time an amenity of the City had been destroyed.

Great riches fell suddenly and unexpectedly into the lap of those who happened to own the oil-bearing land. These riches became the envy of other members of the community. The concept of the desirability of “wealth” had now become firmly established. The concept had first been imported with the rich people from outside, then emphasized by the industrialists from outside. Among the new seekers after wealth were the “real estate men.” So far, dealings in property had consisted in the straightforward buying and selling of houses of quality. It was realized now by the real estate men that an ever-increasing flow of immigrants would eventually yield great profits to those with the cunning to buy more and more of the extensive open areas around the City. These could be “developed,” as the term had it.

Water was an obvious problem. The natural daily air movement back and forth between land and sea was quite insufficient to provide for a vast increase in the population of the City. Water was therefore taken from the surrounding mountains, water was pumped across the desert from distant rivers. Outlying communities lost their water and their lands became scrub. Once-green mountain valleys became sand-blown.

There is an old story of a man who chanced to save the life of a king. The king invited his rescuer to demand any reward he should please, expecting, no doubt, that one of his many daughters would be asked for. But no, the man took a chessboard with its sixty-four squares, saying he wanted a single grain of wheat for the first square, two grains for the second square, four for the third and so on until the sixty-fourth square was reached. The king, somewhat disappointed, begged that some other, some worthier, gift be considered. But his savior would have no other. Reluctantly, the king ordered the keeper of his household to make the necessary computation and to provide what was asked for. To his astonishment, it was reported back to him that the royal granary did not contain the appropriate quantity of wheat nor, in the view of the keeper of the household, was so much wheat to be found in the whole world.

There’s nothing more here than the Devil’s hoariest old trick, this simple two-by-two multiplication. Humans fall for it every time. Get humans started on something they like, then bring in the two-by-two business, that’s the standard formula. The result must always be disaster because the multiplication can’t go on indefinitely, it must blow up in your face. Give a kid a piece of candy to suck to keep him quiet. The kid naturally becomes conditioned to liking candy. He buys two pieces of it as soon as he receives his Saturday penny. Then he buys four when he lands his first job, then eight with the first pay increase, and so on. Result, teeth drop out. Or one drink, two drinks, four drinks.…

In just this simple way all really big human disasters are engineered. So it was with the City. The flow of immigrants had increased like the wheat grains on the chessboard, two by two,
a poco a poco,
for a century or more. At first it was just the ones and twos and fours. Nobody minded the immigrants then, they were good for the City, it was said. Quite suddenly, with the development of the automobile and the airplane, the thing blew up, the flow burst into a raging torrent. Human kind came to the City at a rate of one thousand a day. They came in automobiles across the desert. They came in airplanes from the far corners of the Earth. Like the keeper of the household, compute it out, and you will find it amounts to one third of a million throbbing souls a year, three million or more to a decade.

The real estate developers made their clean-up. They carved the land into tiny lots. On each tiny lot they put a shoddy little home built from lath and chicken wire. Everywhere the developers delved and rooted, pushing their snouts further and further into the remote nooks and crannies of the City’s hilly environment. They became very wealthy, these developers. They bought massive earth-moving machinery and they bulldozed the terrain to whatever shape or pattern suited their swelling purses. Gone now were homes set tastefully into natural surroundings. This was the era of ugly little boxes, set apart at microscopic distances, scarring the countryside, everywhere, in every available open space.

There was a big vocal group in the City, representing newspaper interests, interests in radio and T.V. The group existed with the aim of creating “needs.” With an utterly wearying insistence, they dinned it into people’s minds that everybody “needed” this particular article or that particular article. The less an article was really required, the more insistent was the vocal group. Their motto consisted of a single word, “progress.” They looked with cooperative disfavor on the few persons they deemed to be obstructors of progress. There were still a few of these in the City, there were farmers who had the simple desire to go on doing what their fathers and grandfathers had done, to grow oranges and lemons. These farmers owned blocks of land which offered the prospect of further “clean-ups” to the developers. So the farmers were frozen out, like this. Now the City had become so prosperous, it was necessary to raise enormous taxes. A land tax was introduced, a tax which it was utterly beyond the farmer’s competence to pay—the whole return on his crop did not come near to equaling these savage taxes. So, perforce, the farmer had to sell, there was no alternative. Like a spreading plague, “development” bulldozed the orchards everywhere over the City. The urbanization was at last complete. The sprawling complex measured some fifty miles across, some two thousand square miles, mainly covered with rabbit hutches. Some of the older, pleasant houses remained, it is true, and it was in these the oil men, the industrialists, the developers, and those who had become wealthy through merely being vocal, lived.