Element 79 Read online

  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.

  Because of the naturally uneven terrain, because of the size of the City, because of the manner of its growth, transport could not be organized in any straightforward, or even rational, way. Because of the great demand for homes, men would often live thirty miles from their place of employment, particularly if they felt themselves “lucky” in their present home. Because of the generally scattered nature of the City, it was common for close friends to live in widely separated places. These factors forced a system of transportation the like of which had not been seen on the Earth before. Wide highways were driven through the very heart of the City, not just one highway, but an intricate complex linking the sprawling communities of the whole urban area. These were highways of rapid access. They were crowded with furious, fast-moving vehicles throughout all daylight hours and through most of the night, too. Everybody in the City acquired the habit of driving everywhere by car. The leg muscles of the people atrophied, and this became a cause of the early deaths that were soon to sweep the City.

  The City, of all the cities of the Earth, was perhaps the least suited to the use of the automobile as a primary means of transport. The very air movement, in and out over the sea, which had led to the founding of the City, was now a terrible liability. The air became a stagnant pool into which the byproducts of the incomplete combustion of oil gradually accumulated. The strong sunlight induced chemical reactions, resulting in a kind of tear gas. Half a dozen times in a day the eyes of the people would burst into uncontrollable fits of weeping, as they vainly sought to wash themselves clean of the smear of chemicals that latched continuously onto the front surfaces of the eyeballs. It was difficult now for anything except humans to live in this appalling atmospheric sewer. The oranges that grew on the few remaining trees reacted sharply to changed circumstances by suddenly becoming very small and sour to the taste.

  The city at this stage was much the most restless place to be found anywhere, but instead of this being thought a disadvantage, it was extolled as a virtue. People shuffled into their cars on weekends and drove hither and thither quite aimlessly. They weren’t going anywhere, they were just going. They drove to the sea and were disappointed they couldn’t keep on, lemming-like, on and on over the ocean.

  Sensitive people began to crack up. Mental hospitals became overfull. Sometimes the crack-up took a form which reacted seriously on the City itself. There was a sprinkling of deliberate arsonists, pitiful people so desperately needing attention from their fellowmen that they were led to seek it in any way whatsoever, if necessary by lighting fires on the tinder-dry mountain slopes fringing the City. All the surrounding natural vegetation was steadily burned away. Often the fires got quite out of hand. They would extend blazing fingers into the outer boundaries of the City, destroying the homes of those who had sought to avoid the noise and racket of its central regions.

  The City was not exactly without rain. Rain fell only very occasionally, but when it did so the heavens burst apart and several inches would fall within a few hours. Three inches falling everywhere over two thousand square miles amounts to several hundred million tons of water. This vast torrent had to sweep directly through the City in order to reach the sea. It was not unknown for people to be drowned in the very streets, so great could be the flood. With the surrounding hillsides burned clear of the covering of natural vegetation, soil was carried down in huge quantities by these occasional floods. Shoots of mud poured relentlessly onto the confines of the City, often overwhelming houses that had survived the fires themselves. Where houses of lath and chicken wire had been built on the foothills, it was common for the floods to produce an actual dislodgment of the foundations, slippage, it was called.

  The imposition of physical distress is only a minor aspect of the Devil’s activities, another bad error of the medieval theologian. The Devil is much more concerned with the induction of psychological distress. This thrilling, throbbing City of three million people provided the Devil with opportunities more varied and more rich than one could ever hope to describe in close detail.

  The City was financially prosperous. It offered a rich return to anybody willing to work really hard, anybody of reasonable intelligence and competence. Acquisition of money was now the chief symbol of success among its people. The temptations were strong. In exchange for money, “services” of all kinds were offered on a scale unknown anywhere else on Earth. The people felt the “need” to acquire a never-ending stream of gadgets, so well had the vocal group done its work. Wo
men were attracted by men who succeeded in amassing fortunes. In sum, the men were impelled to seek after money throughout the major part of their waking hours. It was really just the two-by-two multiplication all over again. Work spells gain, gain spells demand, demand spells work, round and round in an amplifying cycle. The amplification blew up, of course, as it had to do. It blew up through the men working themselves into early graves. The endless overwork under artificial conditions without natural exercise killed the men in their fifties, sometimes in their forties. Even this macabre situation was converted to profitability by the gravediggers. The most successful gravediggers were among the wealthiest of the citizens and they contributed handsomely to the City’s enterprises.

  The men were so much “at work,” as the years passed, that they saw progressively less of their wives. The wives became more and more engrossed in their children. The upbringing of children was a depressing affair in itself, however, since there was no proper place in the vicinity of the home where children might get together and play. This was true even for the very wealthy, who made shift by sending their kids to expensive holiday camps, but even this was no substitute for simply being able to slip “out” and play at any moment of the day. The children grew up bored and restless, veritable pests to have around the house. On weekends they could be taken to the sea or to the mountains, but with everyone else also taking their children to the sea or to the mountains, the roads were a nightmare, and the beaches and mountains were ridiculously overcrowded.

  These weekend trips were a disguised trap. Because everybody else was doing the same thing, there was a sense of “togetherness” about it all. Because everybody else was doing it, it had to be the right way to live. These weekend trips disguised the fates now overtaking the several members of the family. For the husband, working himself to the scrap heap. For the children, leaving home in a vain attempt to escape insupportable boredom. For the wife, something still worse.

  As he grows older, the natural impulse of man is to prove to himself that he is not growing older. This he will attempt to do in a fashion depending very much on the conventions of the community in which he happens to live. In Slippage City, men did it by attempting to attract sexually some younger woman or girl. There was nothing which did more for a man—as he moved into his forties—than to find himself climbing into bed with a woman of twenty. Thereby did he prove his vigor, at any rate to his own satisfaction, if not to that of an impartial commentator. You see, there were other circumstances, quite apart from vigor, working powerfully on his side. Girls were strongly encouraged in the City to do well for themselves financially. Since men in their forties were more likely, statistically speaking, to be wealthy than those in their twenties, it was only natural for the moderately aging to prove popular with the better-favored girls. Overcome with his triumph, heady with sexual nectar, it was common for the successful middle-aged man to sever the bonds of matrimony. The phrase “until death us do part” came to have little influence or meaning. Who was going to die, anyway?

  So it was common for women in their late thirties or early forties to find themselves suddenly abandoned both by husband and children, for this was the time when the children were avid to leave home. It was too late, almost, to begin again. Life itself had blown up in their faces. To compound the tragedy, “friends” dropped away too, for married women did not welcome the divorcée into their homes, especially when divorcée and husband had known each other these many years past. Such women, then, were obliged to keep company with others in a similar plight. A few succeeded in fighting back, but the majority fell just where they were intended to fall by the Devil, who had planned it all so long ago.

  Ironically, just when it seemed as if there would be no limit to his success, the Devil overreached himself. Ironically, too, it was the intervention of a simple, innocent girl that brought about his downfall.

  Polly Warburg was one of those who crossed the desert by car, descending into Slippage City through a pass in the fringing mountains. She came with only a few possessions, only a little money, a pretty face, pitifully seeking her fortune. Another girl, some years older, from the same hometown, had done very well for herself, it was rumored. Polly could have done all right back in the hometown, but it would have been hopelessly dull. Here it was all glitter and “life.”

  The girl innocently and optimistically tried to break into one of the more glamorous, highly paid activities. She was rapidly and effectively disillusioned. Rather desperate now, Polly searched around for some humbler occupation. It soon boiled down to a choice between the life of a night-club cutie, with a big, blue butterfly on her backside, and a job in one of the new superplus hotels. The nature of the second job wasn’t specified, suspicious in itself. The man who interviewed her said it was a daytime job, so Polly in her innocence thought it must be on the level. As it happened, the job was in fact a more or less proper one. It wasn’t really a job at all, or more accurately, it shouldn’t have been a job at all. Lots of things go wrong in superplus hotels. The plumbing doesn’t quite work. Noise somehow gets piped up from the street, presumably through the steel structure, so the nineteenth floor is noisier than the street itself. Your room gets stuffy and you can’t find any heating control and the windows won’t open. There is no end to your troubles in such places. Most people accept the all-pervasive inconvenience as a part of the deal, because it is not usual for most people to stay in superplus hotels. Not so your experienced traveler, your up-and-on-top executive. They holler like hell for the manager. Something has to be done about it, make no mistake. Now the simplest thing to do, so say the psychologists, is to let the manager be out of town and to substitute a pretty face in his stead. Let the girl smile, let her hear the complaint, let her note it down, and let absolutely nothing to be done about it. To the delight of the rogues who run these abominable places, the method works, particularly when the pretty face can be combined with a sweet temperament. Polly had both these assets and that was why she walked immediately into a job which many girls would have been glad to have.

  Of course, it never occurred to Polly that she was a mere face, a front-woman sheltering an inefficient, greedy organization. She hadn’t been in the City long enough for its influence to have penetrated very far. She was living in its superficialities, like the bright lights at night and the sea and the mountains on weekends. She was adequately paid and she was always meeting important people, admittedly under rather trying circumstances, but one day it might lead to something, she persuaded herself. In short, Polly was happy. This in itself was an asset, since even happiness had commercial value in Slippage City.

  One morning Polly was walking through the reception lobby when she saw two chubby men coming down from the mezzanine floor. They were wearing gay straw hats and there were big, fire-brick-red rosettes in the buttonholes of their light linen coats. Polly supposed they were from the big convention which was holding its meetings on the mezzanine floor. She gave the two chubby men one of her warmest smiles and passed on. She left them still talking. Not in her wildest dreams could she have guessed about what.

  Not only Polly, but the whole management believed the hotel to be “entertaining” the annual convention of broom-handle manufacturers. Actually, the hotel was doing nothing of the sort. It was entertaining a convention of Devils from outer space. They came from all the planets on which suffering and turmoil existed. They came to compare notes and to discuss ways and means. Their number was large, far more than would ever have gone into a convention hall, even a political convention, if—being Devils—they hadn’t possessed mastery over space and time. Of the two on whom Polly had smiled, one was our own, workaday, terrestrial Devil. The other was the Devil from α Serpentis, none other than the Dean of all Devils.

  The convention had been called by the terrestrial Devil precisely to demonstrate his new city, for Slippage City had originality, it had facets of devilry which he felt sure would be instructive to his interstellar colleagues. On the whole, the co
nvention gave him a good hearing, but the Devil from α Serpentis was not convinced, and it was Serpens himself whom our terrestrial Devil wanted most to convince. The two of them had still been arguing the matter while they walked down the stairs from the mezzanine floor, they had been arguing as Polly had smiled on them.

  “There, look at that,” exclaimed Serpens. “That’s a good-looker for you, and can you have her when you want her, will she come running at the snap of your fingers? Will she my fanny. Let me tell you, Earth, my boy, your system is a washout. That girl will get herself married. Someone else, not you, will work on her exactly the way he feels like working. Okay, so she’ll be divorced, so what? She’ll get married again, twice, three times, maybe. Then, at the end of it all, she’s yours, spoiled goods. I like ’em young and fresh myself, same as vegetables.”

  At this the terrestrial Devil became a little angry. He could have one little girl for the taking, he pointed out, anytime he wanted. What his system did was to give quantity, hundreds of thousands, soon millions. The Devil from α Serp replied that, while he must acknowledge it to be largely a matter of taste, he himself preferred one tasty dish to a veritable mountain of indigestible stuff. Then he broke off the conversation in a rather pointed way and went over to chat with the Devil from β Orionis.

  After this there was no other alternative, of course, but for the terrestrial Devil to give an open demonstration to the whole of his convention of all that could be done in Slippage City to a girl like Polly Warburg, in fact, to Polly Warburg herself. Wheels were made to revolve. Polly received a communication the following day from a glamour agency, one she had tried to interest in the first place. The offer from the agency was a distinctly good one, in fact, a really excellent one, as a thoroughly well-established independent agent confirmed to her.

  Polly was naturally elated to find her talents so worthily, if tardily, recognized. Her agent pointed out a possible hitch in the fine print attached to the contract which Polly signed, to the effect that the agreement would become null and void should a certain wealthy backer of the glamour project withdraw his support. The clause was quite a normal one, the agent said, not to worry about it.