John Brunner - The Squares of the City

I folded the list together with the memo and dropped them back on Angers’ desk. “Well, it’s no skin off my nose,” I said, shrugging. “As far as I’m concerned, the job’s just about over. You’ve got your scheme; it’s not my job to put it into effect—it’s yours. I’m through—and by God, Angers, I can never remember a contract I was so glad to finish.”

More in my job than perhaps in any other, there’s a complete change of viewpoint which sets in on termination of an assignment. I thought about the sometimes paradoxical consequences of this as I sat over a drink in the hotel lounge, watching passersby through the glass front wall.

Yesterday this city had been a problem to me: I was seeing its people as figures, units of pedestrian traffic. Today and from now on until I left, I was on holiday.

Oh, tomorrow, of course, I’d find out whether they’d decided to go ahead with the Pietermaritzburg expressway, and if they had, I’d offer my services. They’d probably hire me. I didn’t have to be vain, but I didn’t have to be modest, either—there weren’t at any one time more than half a dozen specialists available with my peculiar blend of skills.

Today, though…

I sipped my drink and tried to imagine that I was a well-heeled tourist who had come to Ciudad de Vados in order to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell this city with more air-conditioning units per head of population than any other in the world, this monumental creation of twentieth-century man, this town without traffic jams—

And, currently, without television or an opposition newspaper. I found myself frowning into my drink, drove my inside knowledge of the situation to the back of my mind, and tried to reassume my status as a tourist.

It wouldn’t work. I sighed and gave up trying. In the same moment I realized that someone had sat down in a chair next to me and was waiting for me to acknowledge the fact. It was Maria Posador, so I did so quickly.

“I haven’t seen you in here very often lately, senora,” I said. “A pity.”

She gave a smile tinged with weariness. “Much has been going on,” she answered obliquely. “I am told that your stay in Vados is over, also.”

“Pretty well.”

“Does that mean you are now leaving?”

“Not quite now, unfortunately. I’ll have to hang around for a few days—perhaps as long as a week—while they finish the costings and so forth and make up their minds to pay my fee. But I’ve done my share of the work.”

“You sound bitter,” she said after a pause. “Have you not enjoyed your time here?”

“You don’t have to ask that. Most of the time I’d have given anything to be a thousand miles away.”

She took out her gold cigarette case thoughtfully, selected one of the thin black cigarettes, lit it herself. “I am told,” she said through aromatic smoke, “you are not pleased with what you have done.”

“I haven’t tried to make a secret of that, either. In fact I’ve done the opposite, I hope. Hell, I was told when I first got here that my job was going to be that of a sort of white corpuscle killing off disease germs in the bloodstream of the city. I rather liked the idea at first. Then I found it was a filthy job. A white cell isn’t much different from the bacteria it has to dispose of—do you imagine the germs plead with it to spare their lives?”

“No,” said Senora Posador rather frigidly.

“All right,” I shrugged.

She was regarding me with her deep violet gaze as though trying to phrase difficult thoughts into words. She said in the end, “Senor Hakluyt, I am not greatly impressed by your disclaimers of responsibility. I think you are a shallow person; you judge too much by appearances and have little gift for understanding what lies deeper.”

Nettled, I answered, “Part of my job is to understand what lies deeper!”

“Then you cannot be so good at your work as you think you are.” She put it flatly, not admitting contradiction. “What is your opinion of el Presidente, for example?”

“As a man or as a president? They’re two different things.”

“The man and the president are one,” she retorted. “I wish you to answer directly.”

“All I can say, then, is that he’s a pretty good ruler, as his kind go. He’s ambitious, but he’ll certainly leave behind some solid achievements when he kicks off—”

“And they will still be cursing his name in the back streets of Astoria Negra,” said Senora Posador unemotionally. “Also there are places in Puerto Joaquin where they nightly roast his image at the fireside before falling asleep. Oh, perhaps I am unjust to say you are shallow—but you appear shallow because you are a rootless man; you live where you work, and you work everywhere. Do not let this brief stay in Aguazul delude you into thinking you understand the situation.”

And more quietly she added almost to herself, “For it will go on after you have left the city.”

“I know that,” I said soberly. “I think I do understand, pretty well, what forces are at work. But I haven’t had time to explore them, trace them to their source. I’ve just seen them impersonally affecting the lives of people I know. You say I’m shallow, but it isn’t true. It’s simply that detachment is necessary to my job. I’m pretty good at remaining detached now, and yet there are some times when I can’t. A few moments ago, when you arrived, I was thinking how different it is to be able to regard Vadeanos as people instead of units of traffic— but you can’t separate the two completely. A person is a unit of traffic if he lives in a social group; he’s a lot more besides, but that doesn’t prevent it. And in a way you can parallel the behavior of people as traffic and people as just people. I’m certain that someone like—oh, Alejandro Mayor, for example, if he’d lived—could develop the kind of math I employ to describe far more general activities than simple point-to-point progress.”

“Please go on, senor.” Sudden interest showed in Senora Posador’s face; she leaned forward as though not to miss a word.

A familiar-looking trio came in through the main entrance; people I had seen before, on my first day in the city. The mousy man with the notebook and the sheaf of pens was still shadowed by the same two gigantic escorts. He marched importantly up to one of the waiters, asked him a solemn question, which the waiter answered respectfully, and then went out again.

“What’s the question this time?” I asked Senora Posador, reflecting in passing that I hadn’t yet seen the result of one of these opinion polls published.

“Something to do with dispossessing Sigueiras,” came the impatient answer. “But please continue!”

I was only too ready. “Yes, in fact, I had an impression from some of Mayor’s early work that he might be aiming for something of the kind. Look, I can generalize about people as though they were identical molecules of gas; in fact, most of the formulae I employ are adapted from hydrodynamics and fluid mechanics. When people crowd into a subway on the way to work, they’re driven by a force which may be more abstract but is certainly no less efficient than a high-powered fan. That force doesn’t care if Auntie Mae has had a bad night, or the baby cried till four a.m., or Pedro overslept and hasn’t had his cup of coffee to quiet his grumbling belly. There’s a definite force at work, moving people, compelling them to form a visible flow.

“Now take advertising. Advertising isn’t actually a force— the motive power is compounded of some basic impulses, like hunger, thirst, the need for clothing and shelter, and some superficial impulses. The urge to keep up with the neighbors, for instance. Nonetheless, advertising men can and do channel this impalpable flux. They can launch a campaign of which the end-product is once again physical action, visible movement. In other words, people will go to a store and buy. That’s infinitely more subtle, but it’s still capable of direction, it can still be defined in predictable terms. You can say, ‘So many people will probably buy this product in such a period,’ quite as confidently as I can say, ‘So many people under such and such circumstances will be fouling up the subway system ten minutes after the offices close.’