John Brunner - The Squares of the City

In the same instant he saw me standing looking at him.

He seemed to turn green—or perhaps that was an illusion caused by the mercury vapor lights. His mouth worked as if he were trying to find words to explain his action. He failed. When I silently put out my hand, he sheepishly dropped his plunder into it.

I just stood there. After a while he gave a foolish, apologetic smile and marched rapidly off down the passage, trying to look as though nothing had happened.

I put the money back in the boy’s pot and got across to him the idea that he would be better off somewhere else. Smiling and nodding his grotesque head, he gathered his serape around him, hid the pot under it, and shambled away.

I had no further difficulty in finding my way to the correct exit from the subway, which brought me out on the edge of the Plaza del Norte. I stood there for a moment, getting my bearings by reference to the two statues in the square. One was of el Liberador, Fernando Armendariz, first president of the Republic of Aguazul; the other—inevitably—was of Vados. Armendariz faced right, toward the palatial old-gold frontage of the Congress building, Vados left, toward the vast, plain City Hall.

It was only to be expected that there was a tremendous bustle of people coming and going before the City Hall—and nearly complete stillness in front of Congress.

I had just identified the third great building that fronted on the plaza as the Courts of Justice when there was a tug at my sleeve. I turned to find a small man with glasses, a notebook, and a fistful of ball-point pens. Behind him, two identically tall men in dark suits watched me closely. I disliked the look of them at once—”bodyguard” was the word they brought to my mind.

The small man addressed me rapidly in Spanish; it was too much for me to follow, and I said so. He laughed forcedly at his mistake.

“It is an error of mine, senor,” he said importantly. “I am asking the questions for the government, and I regret that I took you for a citizen.”

“What questions for the government?”

“Ah, the senor is perhaps not acquainted with some of our enlightened and progressive ideas!” He beamed at me. “Why, it is simple. When there is a matter of public importance to be decided, we take what is called a random sampling of the people’s opinion.”

“I see,” I nodded. This seemed much of a piece with what Senora Posador had told me yesterday about the Speakers’ Corner in the Plaza del Sur; it might even be another of Diaz’s ideas. Governmental public-opinion polls seemed like pretty good insurance for an absolute ruler, to find out which of his proposed decrees he would be unable to shove down his people’s throats.

“And what’s the current survey about?”

“It is on the citizenship rights in Ciudad de Vados,” said the small man. “But since the senor is not a citizen, he will excuse me for returning to my business.”

He bustled back importantly to the subway exit, and I saw him stop and question a pretty girl as she emerged. I wondered, watching her, whether, had I been a citizen, I could have spoken my mind honestly with those two tall and menacing characters staring at me.

I checked my watch and found I had spent five minutes too long on my way to the traffic department. I hurried across the plaza , toward City Hall.

The head of the traffic department had signed the contract that brought me to Vados; I knew therefore that his name was Donald Angers, and I had naturally assumed him to be North American.

He wasn’t. He was type-English almost to the point of affectation, and my first reaction to the discovery was to feel that he was almost as much out of place in Vados as the one-eyed beggar-boy.

He studied me hard as he shook my hand and then waved me to a chair. “I see you’ve caught a dose of the local manana temperament already, Mr. Hakluyt,” he said, with a glance at the clock on his office wall that was just discreet enough not to be offensive.

“I ran into one of your organs of government,” I said, and told him about the public-opinion pollster.

Angers gave a thin, wintry smile. “Ye-es… I suppose President Vados is one of the very few people ever to have put into practice the old saw about a government standing or falling by its public relations.”

He offered me a cigarette, and I accepted. “Is this another of Diaz’s ideas?” I suggested as I held out my lighter.

Angers hesitated momentarily before setting his cigarette to the flame. “What makes you think that?” he countered.

“It seems on a par with this sort of Speakers’ Corner they run in the Plaza del Sur, and a woman I met at my hotel last night told me that was one of Diaz’s notions.”

Again the wintry smile, this time a little broader. “Yes, that’s one of the best pieces of gallery play we have.” He made a note on a memorandum pad before him; he used a fine-nib fountain pen with light blue ink.

“Purely out of curiosity,” I said, “what the hell was going on in the Plaza del Sur when I arrived yesterday afternoon? I see the papers are full of it today, but I don’t speak very good Spanish.”

Angers drew in smoke thoughtfully, looking past me. “That isn’t strictly true,” he said. “Tiempo played it up, as was to be expected, but they naturally magnified it out of all proportion. As it happens, though, it was one minor aspect of a problem with which your work here is directly involved.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I’ll brief you as well as I can. The situation’s very complex, but I can at least give you an outline at once.” He stretched out a thin arm and tugged down the cord of a roller-mounted wall map on his right.

“You’ve probably made yourself acquainted with the history of Ciudad de Vados?” he added with a passing glance at me.

I nodded.

“Good. Then you’ll know it was planned about as thoroughly as a city could well be. But the human element is always the most difficult to legislate for, particularly when the human element concerned is not the population of the city itself, but the extremely balky and obstinate native group.”

There was a pause. I became aware that a comment was expected from me. I said, “This doesn’t sound much like an orthodox traffic problem.”

“Not much in Vados is orthodox,” said Angers pointedly. “As you have no doubt gathered. However, the essence of the problem is simple enough.

“Vados, of course, is an exceptionally farsighted and astute man. I believe that he had for a long time envisaged the possibility of building his new capital city before there was a chance of really doing it, but he was forced to admit that if he simply used up the funds and resources he had available in employing—uh—native talent, be would get not the handsome new town he hoped for, but something petty and rather squalid, like Cuatrovientos or Puerto Joaquin. You should visit those towns while you’re here, if you want to see a traffic man’s nightmare.

“Well, there was one possible solution, and he rather courageously went ahead and adopted it, in face—so I’m told—of extremely strong opposition from Diaz and a good few of his other supporters. That was to invite anyone and everyone who could make a positive contribution to his new city to invest their efforts in its building. Naturally enough, he wanted the very best of everything, and the very best simply wasn’t to be found in Aguazul.

“I myself was supervisory engineer on the road-building project between here and Puerto Joaquin, and like everyone who had played a major part in the creation of the city I was granted citizens’ rights and the offer of a permanent post when the job was over. The great majority of us took the posts we were offered, naturally; in fact, about thirty per cent of the city’s present population, the most influential and important section, acquired their citizens’ rights the same way. After all, a city isn’t something you can put down in the middle of nowhere, fill with people, and expect to run itself, is it?”