John Brunner - The Squares of the City

The way he put it puzzled me slightly; I didn’t press the matter, though, and simply nodded. He looked past me through the glass wall. “Enrique’s still having trouble” he noted. “I don’t think we’d better disturb him for another few moments.”

I glanced around the room; as he spoke, my eye fell on a small row of books alongside the control panel, and I thought there was something familiar about the nearest of them. They were mainly cheap novels, presumably what the technicians or producer read during lulls or transmission of intercut tape. The one that caught my eye, however, was obviously out of place; it was stout and well-thumbed, and its red binding bore several cigarette burns. It looked like a textbook; I presumed it was a manual of television engineering, but— perhaps the author’s name rang a bell with me—I picked it up.

A book whose title, even in Spanish, meant something to me because the name of the author was very well-known to me indeed: Alejandro Mayor.

Several years rolled back in my mind; I was back at the university, arguing heatedly over the most controversial of many controversial books in our social science curriculum. In its English edition the book was called The Administration of the Twentieth-Century State, and the author was this same Alejandro Mayor.

I opened the book with interest; its title was El Hombre de la Ciudad de Hoy — The Modern City Man. I wondered if it was as pungent and original as the earlier work, for I saw it had only been published a matter of five years ago. Probably not, I decided with regret; in those days Mayor had been a firebrand type of youthful iconoclast causing a scandal in academic circles with every lecture course he gave at the Mexico City School of Social Science. Now he was probably a sedate conformist. That fate usually overtakes innovators— their ideas cease to be revolutionary.

Cordoban had been grinning at the inaudible difficulties Rioco was having with his run-through. Now he turned back and saw what I was doing.

“You’ve read that, perhaps?” he suggested. I shook my head. “Not this one. But I read his first book in college. It’s rather an odd sort of book to find in a TV studio, isn’t it?” I stuck it back in the rack. “I wonder what became of that man—I don’t seem to have heard of him for years.”

Cordoban regarded me with mild astonishment. “No?” he said quizzically. “Why—”

He glanced around through the glass wall and stiffened as the door of the studio swung open. “Why, there he is now.”

I followed his gaze and saw the balding, stout man whom I had met with Senora Cortes on my arrival. “Him?” I said blankly.

“But of course. Dr. Mayor has been Minister of Information and Communications in Aguazul for nearly eighteen years.”

“Why—that’s from long before the founding of Ciudad de Vados.”

Cordoban nodded. “That’s right. I’m surprised, though, at your saying his books were strange things to find in a television studio. Why, we regard them as indispensable handbooks.”

I frowned my way back into my memory. “I’m beginning to remember more clearly,” I said. “Didn’t he maintain from the start that communications were the essential tool of modern government? Yes, of course he did.” A further thought struck me. “Eighteen years, did you say? I was still in college then. But I thought Mayor had a chair of social science in Mexico City at that time.”

“I believe he did,” said Cordoban indifferently. “He lectures at the university here, too, of course.”

Out on the studio floor Enrique Rioco had finished his run-through; he seemed satisfied and had gone to have a word with Mayor.

“We just have time for that drink,” Cordoban said. “If you’d like one.”

I nodded, and we hurried out of the studio to a small but comfortable bar at the far end of the corridor. Over our drinks I came back to the previous subject.

“Does Dr. Mayor speak English?” I asked.

“I think so—I don’t know how well. Why? Do you want to meet him?”

“I’d be very interested,” I confirmed. “Maybe he’d be interested, too—he was a great influence on me when I was developing my own style.”

“Traffic analysts have styles?” Cordoban inquired sardonically. “How?”

“Why not? Architects have; they develop designs for living or designs for working; we develop designs for moving. There are half a dozen traffic analysts today with individual styles.”

Cordoban looked down at his glass. “I’m not quite sure I see how that’s possible,” he said. “But it’s interesting to know. Are you one of the half-dozen? I’m sorry—that’s a stupid question. You must be, or they wouldn’t have asked you to Ciudad de Vados.” He laughed. “We always say it, and we always flatter ourselves by saying it—only the best for Ciudad de Vados.”

He glanced at the wall clock and tossed down the rest of his drink.

“Time to get to our places,” he said. “Come on.”

Two minutes before the start of the program we were back in the studio. Cordoban ensconced me in a chair out of camera shot, explaining that he would signal to me to come up and take my place alongside him when he was ready to start the interview. Then he himself took a chair facing the number one camera, glanced at Rioco in the control room, and ringed his finger and thumb to signify okay. The first lines of his commentary went up on the teleprompter beside the camera. The red light came on.

The program was extremely well handled, if rather naive. It ran for thirty-five minutes, much of it on tape, and I watched it all on a master screen set high above Rioco’s head in the goldfish bowl. It started with a few shots of the planning and building of Vados, the opening ceremony with el Presidente himself officiating, and of traffic in the wide streets. I had little trouble following Cordoban’s smooth clear-spoken commentary, and I felt my interest more and more engaged as the program developed. This magnificent city really was, I thought, one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century.

After opening on a grandiose note, Cordoban tinged his voice with sadness as he referred to the recent problems that had developed in and around Vados. Shots of the most squalid dwellings imaginable, of diseased children sharing huts with pigs and burros, of overcrowding and overbreeding. The contrast with the clean, attractive city itself was appalling. Apparently one of the cameramen had actually gone down into Sigueiras’s slum under the monorail station; effective shots stressed the difference between the bright sunlit platforms of the station above and the dark, unsanitary warren below.

There was a brief taped interview with Caldwell, the young man from the city health department whom I had met in Angers’ office, who gave some alarming figures about disease and malnutrition in the shantytowns; then another, slightly longer, with Angers, taped in his office with the wall map of Vados unrolled behind him. He deplored the existing situation in tones of grave concern, and then cheered up slightly as he explained that the enlightened president had taken steps to remedy the evils now current.

He mentioned my name, and Cordoban signaled to me. I went over to the chair alongside his and sat down just out of shot.

Cheerfully Cordoban announced to the audience that he was privileged to have the person responsible for setting things to rights in the studio this evening.

“Aqui esta el senor Hakluyt —” and the camera turned on me.

After what I had seen from the taped shots, I got rather more heated in my replies to Cordoban’s questions than I had in the rehearsal, but my command of Spanish held out okay, and I received nods of approval and encouragement from Cordoban whenever he was off-camera. I really was feeling that it was a hell of a shame to mar the sleek beauty of Ciudad de Vados with these slums, and I did my best to reassure the viewers that a way would be found to cure the trouble. Then the program was suddenly over; Cordoban was getting up, smiling, to congratulate me on getting through it in Spanish; Senora Cortes came from the control room with Rioco to thank me for appearing, and as I was trying to find words to express my appreciation, the door of the studio opened and Mayor came in, beaming plumply and apologizing to Senora Cortes for doubting her ability to make a success of the program.