Fred Hoyle - Element 79

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. Women 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?