Fred Hoyle - Element 79

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.