Clifford D. Simak - City

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City
Clifford D. Simak
EDITOR'S PREFACE
These are the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north. Then
each family circle gathers at the hearthstone and the pups sit silently and listen and when the story's done
they ask many questions:
"What is Man?" they'll ask.
Or perhaps: "What is a city?"
Or "What is a war?"
There is no positive answer to any of these questions. There are suppositions and there are theories
and there are many educated guesses, but there are no answers.
In the family circle, many a storyteller has been forced to fall back on the ancient explanation that it is
nothing but a story, there is no such thing as a Man or city, that one does not search for truth in a simple
tale, but takes it for its pleasure and lets it go at that.
Explanations such as these, while they may do to answer pups, are no explanations. One does search
for truth in such simple tales as these.
The legend, consisting of eight tales, has been told for countless centuries. So far as can be
determined, it has no historic starting point; the most minute study of it fails entirely to illustrate the stages
of its development. There is no doubt that through many years of telling it has become stylized, but there
is no way to trace the direction of its stylization.
That it is ancient and, as some writers claim, that it may be of non-Doggish origin in part, is borne out
by the abundance of jabberwocky which studs the tales-words and phrases, (and worst of all, ideas)
which have no meaning now and may have never had a meaning. Through telling and retelling, these
words and phrases have become accepted, have been assigned, through context, a certain arbitrary
value. But there is no way of knowing whether or not these arbitrary values even approximate the original
meaning of the words.
This edition of the tales will not attempt to enter into the many technical arguments concerning the
existence or nonexistence of Man, of the puzzle of the city, of the several theories relating to war, or of
the many other questions which arise to plague the student who would seek in the legend some evidence
of its having roots in some basic or historic truth.
The purpose of this edition is only to give the full, unexpurgated text of the tales as they finally stand.
Chapter notes are utilized to point out the major points of speculation, but with no attempt at all to
achieve conclusions. For those who wish some further understanding of the tales or of the many points of
consideration which have arisen over them there are ample texts, written by Dogs of far greater
competence than the present editor.
Recent discovery of fragments of what originally must have been an extensive body of literature has
been advanced as the latest argument which would attribute at least part of the legend to mythological
(and controversial) Man rather than to the Dogs. But until it can be proved that Man did, in fact, exist,
argument that the discovered fragments originated with Man can have but little point.
Particularly significant or disturbing, depending upon the viewpoint that one takes, is the fact that the
apparent title of the literary fragment is the same as the title of one of the tales in the legend here
presented. The word itself, of course, is entirely meaningless.
The first question, of course, is whether there ever was such a creature as Man. At the moment, in
the absence of positive evidence, the sober consensus must be that there was not, that Man, as presented
in the legend, is a figment of folklore invention. Man may have risen in the early days of Doggish culture
as an imaginary being, a sort of racial god, on which the Dogs might call for help, to which they might
retire for comfort.
Despite these sober conclusions, however, there are those who see in Man an actual elder god, a
visitor from some mystic land or dimensions, who came and stayed awhile and helped and then passed
on to the place from which he came.
There still are others who believe that Man and Dog may have risen together as two co-operating
animals, may have been complementary in the development of a culture, but that at some distant point in
time they reached the parting of the ways.
Of all the disturbing factors in the tales (and they are many) the most disturbing is the suggestion of
reverence which is accorded Man. It is hard for the average reader to accept this reverence as mere
story-telling. It goes far beyond the perfunctory worship of a tribal god; one almost instinctively feels that
it must be deep-rooted in some now forgotten belief or rite involving the pre-history of our race.
There is little hope now, of course, that any of the many areas of controversy which revolve about the
legend ever will be settled.
Here, then, are the tales, to be read as you see fit-for pleasure only, for some sign of historical
significance, for some hint of hidden meaning. Our best advice to the average reader: Don't take them too
much to heart, for complete confusion, if not madness, lurks along the road.
NOTES ON THE FIRST TALE
There is no doubt that, of all the tales, the first is the most difficult for the casual reader. Not
only is its nomenclature trying, but its logic and its ideas seem, at first reading, to be entirely
alien. This may be because in this story and the next a Dog plays no part, is not even mentioned.
From the opening paragraph in this first tale the reader is pitchforked into an utterly strange
situation, with equally strange characters to act out its solution. This much may be said for the
tale, however-by the time one has laboured his way through it the rest of the tales, by comparison,
seem almost homey.
Overriding the entire tale is the concept of the city. While there is no complete understanding
of what a city might be, or why it should be, it is generally agreed that it must have been a small
area accommodating and supporting a large number of residents. Some of the reasons for its
existence are superficially explained in text, but Bounce, who has devoted a lifetime to the study
of the tales, is convinced that the explanation is no more than the clever improvisations of an
ancient storyteller to support an impossible concept. Most students of the tales agree with Bounce
that the reasons as given in the tale do not square with logic and some, Rover among them, have
suspected that here we may have an ancient satire, of which the significance has been lost.
Most authorities in economics and sociology regard such an organization as a city an
impossible structure, not only from the economic standpoint, but from the sociological and
psychological as well. No creature of the highly nervous structure necessary to develop a culture,
they point out, would be able to survive within such restricted limits. The result, if it were tried,
these authorities say, would lead to mass neuroticism which in a short period of time would
destroy the very culture which had built the city.
Rover believes that in the first tale we are dealing with almost pure myth and that as a result
no situation or statement can be accepted at face value, that the entire tale must be filled with a
symbolism to which the key has long been lost. Puzzling, however, is the fact that if it is a
myth-concept, and nothing more, that the form by now should not have rounded itself into the
symbolic concepts which are the hallmark of the myth. In the tale there is for the average reader
little that can be tagged as myth-content. The tale itself is perhaps the most angular of the
lot-raw-boned and slung together, with none of the touches of finer sentiment and lofty ideals
which are found in the rest of the legend.
The language of the tale is particularly baffling. Phrases such as the classic "dadburn the kid"
have puzzled semanticists for many centuries and there is today no closer approach to what many
of the words and phrases mean than there was when students first came to pay some serious
attention to the legend.
The terminology for Man has been fairly well worked out, however. The plural for this
mythical race is men, the racial designation is human, the females are women or wives (two terms
which may at one time have had a finer shade of meaning, but which now must be regarded as
synonymous), the pups are children. A male pup is a boy. A female pup a girl.
Aside from the concept of the city, another concept which the reader will find entirely at odds
with his way of life and which may violate his very thinking, is the idea of war and of killing.
Killing is a process, usually involving violence, by which one living thing ends the life of another
living thing. War, it would appear, was mass killing carried out on a scale which is inconceivable.
Rover, in his study of the legend, is convinced that the tales are much more primitive than is
generally supposed, since it is his contention that such concepts as war and killing could never
come out of our present culture, that they must stem from some era of savagery of which there
exists no record.
Tige, who is almost alone in his belief that the tales are based on actual history and that the
race of Man did exist in the primordial days of the Dogs' beginning, contends that this first tale is
the story of the actual breakdown of Man's culture. He believes that the tale as we know it to-day
may be a mere shadow of some greater tale, a gigantic epic which at one time may have
measured fully as large or larger than to-day's entire body of the legend. It does not seem possible,
he writes, that so great an event as the collapse of a mighty mechanical civilization could have
been condensed by the tale's contemporaries into so small a compass as the present tale. What we
have here, says Tige, is only one of many tales which told the entire story and that the one which
does remain to us may be no more than a minor one.
I
CITY
Gramp Stevens sat in a lawn chair, watching the mower at work, feeling the warm, soft sunshine seep
into his bones. The mower reached the edge of the lawn, clucked to itself like a contented hen, made a
neat turn and trundled down another swath. The bag holding the clippings bulged.
Suddenly the mower stopped and clicked excitedly. A panel in its side snapped open and a cranelike
arm reached out, Grasping steel fingers fished around in the grass, came up triumphantly with a stone
clutched tightly, dropped the stone into a small container, disappeared back into the panel again. The
lawn mower gurgled, purred on again, following its swath.
Gramp grumbled at it with suspicion.
"Some day," he told himself, "that dadburned thing is going to miss a lick and have a nervous
breakdown."
He lay back in the chair and stared up at the sun-washed sky. A helicopter skimmed far overhead.
From somewhere inside the house a radio came to life and a torturing crash of music poured out. Gramp,
hearing it, shivered and bunkered lower in the chair.
Young Charlie was settling down for a twitch session. Dadburn the kid.
The lawn mower chuckled past and Gramp squinted at it maliciously.
"Automatic," he told the sky. "Ever' blasted thing is automatic now. Getting so you just take a
machine off in a corner and whisper in its ear and it scurries off to do the job."
His daughter's voice came to him out of the window, pitched to carry above the music.
"Father!"
Gramp stirred uneasily. "Yes, Betty."
"Now, Father, you see you move when that lawn mower gets to you. Don't try to out-stubborn it.
After all, it's only a machine. Last time you just sat there and made it cut around you. I never saw the
beat of you."
He didn't answer, letting his head nod a bit, hoping she would think he was asleep and let him be.
"Father," she shrilled, "did you hear me?"
He saw it was no good. "Sure, I heard you," he told her. "I was just flexing to move."
He rose slowly to his feet, leaning heavily on his cane.
Might make her feel sorry for the way she treated him when she saw how old and feeble he was
getting. He'd have to be careful, though. If she knew he didn't need the cane at all, she'd be finding jobs
for him to do and, on the other hand, if he laid it on too thick, she'd be having that fool doctor in to pester
him again.
Grumbling, be moved the chair out into that portion of the lawn that had been cut. The mower, rolling
past, chortled at him fiendishly.
"Some day," Gramp told it, "I'm going to take a swipe at you and bust a gear or two."
The mower hooted at him and went serenely down the lawn. From somewhere down the grassy
street came a jangling of metal, a stuttered coughing.
Gramp, ready to sit down, straightened up and listened.
The sound came more clearly, the rumbling backfire of a balky engine, the clatter of loose metallic
parts.
"An automobile!" yelped Gramp. "An automobile, by cracky!"
He started to gallop for the gate, suddenly remembered tha the was feeble and subsided into a rapid
hobble.
"Must be that crazy Ole Johnson," he told himself. "He's the only one left that's got a car. Just too
dadburned stubborn to give it up."
It was Ole.
Gramp reached the gate in time to see the rusty, dilapidated old machine come bumping around the
corner, rocking and chugging along the unused street. Steam hissed from the over-heated radiator and a
cloud of blue smoke issued from the exhaust, which had lost its muffler five years or more ago.
Ole sat stolidly behind the wheel, squinting his eyes, trying to duck the roughest places, although that
was hard to do, for weeds and grass had overrun the streets and it was hard to see what might be
underneath them.
Gramp waved his cane.
"Hi, Ole," he shouted.
Ole pulled up, setting the emergency brake. The car gasped, shuddered, coughed, died with a
horrible sigh.
"What you burning?" asked Gramp.
"Little bit of everything," said Ole. "Kerosene, some old tractor oil I found out in a barrel, some
rubbing alcohol."
Gramp regarded the fugitive machine with forthright admiration. "Them was the days," he said. "Had
one myself used to be able to do a hundred miles an hour."
"Still O.K.," said Ole, "if you only could find the stuff to run them or get the parts to fix them. Up to
three, four years ago I used to be able to get enough gasoline, but ain't seen none for a long time now.
Quit making it, I guess. No use having gasoline, they tell me, when you have atomic power."
"Sure," said Champ. "Guess maybe that's right, but you can't smell atomic power. Sweetest thing I
know, the smell of burning gasoline. These here helicopters and other gadgets they got took all the
romance out of travelling, somehow."
He squinted at the barrels and baskets piled in the back seat.
"Got some vegetables?" he asked.
"Yup," said Ole. "Some sweet corn and early potatoes and a few baskets of tomatoes. Thought
maybe I could sell them."
Champ shook his head. "You won't, Ole. They won't buy them. Folks has got the notion that this
new hydroponics stuff is the only garden sass that's fit to eat. Sanitary, they say, and better flavoured."
"Wouldn't give a hoot in a tin cup for all they grow in them tanks they got," Ole declared,
belligerently. "Don't taste right to me, somehow. Like I tell Martha, food's got to be raised in the soil to
have any character."
He reached down to turn over the ignition switch.
"Don't know as it's worth trying to get the stuff to town," he said, "the way they keep the roads. Or
the way they don't keep them, rather. Twenty years ago the state highway out there was a strip of good
concrete and they kept it patched and ploughed it every winter. Did anything, spent any amount of money
to keep it open. And now they just forgot about it. The concrete's all broken up and some of it has
washed out. Brambles are growing in it. Had to get out and cut away a tree that fell across it one place
this morning."
"Ain't it the truth," agreed Champ.
The car exploded into life, coughing and choking. A cloud of dense blue smoke rolled out from under
it. With a jerk it stirred to life and lumbered down the street.
Gramp clumped back to his chair and found it dripping wet. The automatic mower, having finished its
cutting job, had rolled out the hose, was sprinkling the lawn.
Muttering venom, Gramp stalked around the corner of the house and sat down on the bench beside
the back porch. He didn't like to sit there, but it was the only place he was safe from the hunk of
machinery out in front.
For one thing, the view from the bench was slightly depressing, fronting as it did on street after street
of vacant, deserted houses and weed-grown, unkempt yards.
It had one advantage, however. From the bench he could pretend be was slightly deaf and not hear
the twitch music the radio was blaring out.
A voice called from the front yard.
"Bill! Bill, where be you?"
Gramp twisted around.
"Here I am, Mark. Back of the house. Hiding from that dadburned mower."
Mark Bailey limped around the corner of the house, cigarette threatening to set fire to his bushy
whiskers.
"Bit early for the game, ain't you?" asked Grump.
"Can't play no game to-day," said Mark.
He hobbled over and sat down beside Grump on the bench.
"We're leaving," he said.
Cramp whirled on him. "You're leaving!"
"Yeah. Moving out into the country. Lucinda finally talked Herb into it. Never gave him a minute's
peace, I guess. Said everyone was moving away to one of them nice country estates and she didn't see
no reason why we couldn't."
Cramp gulped. "Where to?"
"Don't rightly know," said Mark. "Ain't been there myself. To north some place. Up on one of the
lakes. Got ten acres of land. Lucinda wanted a hundred, but Herb put down his foot and said ten was
enough. After all, one city lot was enough for all these years."
"Betty was pestering Johnny, too," said Gramp, "but he's holding out against her. Says he simply can't
do it. Says it wouldn't look right, him the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce and all, if he went
moving away from the city."
"Folks are crazy," Mark declared. "Plumb crazy."
"That's a fact," Cramp agreed. "Country crazy, that's what they are. Look across there."
He waved his hand at the streets of vacant houses. "Can remember the time when those places were
as pretty a bunch of homes as you ever laid your eyes on. Good neighbours, they were. Women ran
across from one back door to another to trade recipes. And the men folks would go out to cut the grass
and pretty soon the mowers would all be sitting idle and the men would be ganged up, chewing the fat.
Friendly people, Mark. But look at it now."
Mark stirred uneasily. "Got to be getting back, Bill. Just sneaked over to let you know we were
lighting out. Lucinda's got me packing. She'd be sore if she knew I'd run out."
Cramp rose stiffly and held out his hand. "I'll be seeing you again? You be over for one last game?"
Mark shook his head "Afraid not, Bill".
They shook hands awkwardly, abashed. "S5ure will miss them games," said Mark.
"Me, too," said Gramp. "I won't have nobody once you're gone."
"So long, Bill," said Mark.
"So long," said Champ.
He stood and watched his friend hobble around the house, felt the cold claw of loneliness reach out
and touch him with icy fingers. A terrible loneliness. The loneliness of age-of age and the outdated.
Fiercely, Gramp admitted it. He was outdated. He belonged to another age. He had outstripped his time,
lived beyond his years.
Eyes misty, he fumbled for the cane that lay against the bench, slowly made his way towards the
sagging gate that opened on to the deserted street back of the house.
The years had moved too fast. Years that had brought the family plane and helicopter, leaving the
auto to rust in some forgotten place, the unused roads to fall into disrepair. Years that had virtually wiped
out the tilling of the soil with the rise of hydroponics. Years that had brought cheap land with the
disappearance of the farm as an economic unit, had sent city people scurrying out into the country where
each man, for less than the price of a city lot, might own broad acres. Years had revolutionized the
construction of homes to a point where families simply walked away from their old homes to the new
ones that could be bought, custom-made, for less than half the price of a prewar structure and could be
changed at small cost, to accommodate need of additional space or just a passing whim.
Gramp sniffed. Houses that could be changed each year, like one would shift around the furniture.
What kind of thing was that?
He plodded slowly down the dusty path that was all that remained of what a few years before had
been a busy residencial street. A street of ghosts, Cramp told himself-of furtive, little ghosts that
whispered in the night. Ghosts of playing children, ghosts of upset tricycles and canted coaster wagons.
Ghosts of gossiping housewives. Ghosts of shouted greetings. Ghosts of flaming fireplaces and chimneys
smoking of a winter night.
Little puffs of dust rose around his feet and whitened the cuffs of his trousers.
There was the old Adams place across the way. Adams had been mighty proud of it, he
remembered. Grey field stone front and picture windows. Now the stone was green with creeping moss
and the broken windows gaped with ghastly leer. Weeds choked the lawn and blotted out the stoop. An
elm tree was pushing its branches against the gable. Gramp could remember the day Adams had planted
that elm tree.
For a moment he stood there in the grass-grown street, feet in the dust, both hands clutching the
curve of his cane, eyes closed.
Through the fog of years he heard the cry of playing children, the barking of Conrad's yapping pooch
from down the street. And there was Adams, stripped to the waist, plying the shovel, scooping out the
hole, with the elm tree, roots wrapped in burlap, lying on the lawn.
May, 1946. Forty-four years ago. Just after he and Adams had come home from the war together.
Footsteps padded in the dust and Gramp, startled, opened his eyes.
Before him stood a young man. A man of thirty, perhaps. Maybe a bit less.
"Good morning," said Gramp.
"I hope," said the young man, "that I didn't startle you."
"You saw me standing here," asked Gramp, "like a danged fool, with my eyes shut?"
The young man nodded.
"I was remembering," said Gramp.
"You live around here?"
"Just down the street. The last one in this part of the City."
"Perhaps you can help me then."
"Try me," said. Gramp.
The young man stammered. "Well, you see, it's like this. I'm on a sort of... well, you might call it a
sentimental pilgrimage-"
"I understand," said Gramp. "So am I."
"My name is Adams," said the young man. "My grandfather used to live around here somewhere. I
wonder-"
"Right over there," said Gramp.
Together they stood and stared at the house.
"It was a nice place once," Gramp told him. "Your grand-daddy planted that tree right after he came
home from the war. I was with him all through the war and we came home together. That was a day for
you..."
"It's a pity," said young Adams. "A pity..."
But Gramp didn't seem to hear him. "Your granddaddy?" he asked. "I seem to have lost track of
him."
"He's dead," said young Adams. "Quite a number of years ago."
"He was messed up with atomic power," said Gramp.
"That's right," said Adams proudly. "Got into it just as soon as it was released to industry. Right after
the Moscow agreement."
"Right after they decided," said Gramp, "they couldn't fight a war."
"That's right," said Adams.
"It's pretty hard to fight a war," said Gramnp, "when there's nothing you can aim at."
"You mean the cities," said Adams.
"Sure," said Granip, "and there's a funny thing about it. Wave all the atom bombs you wanted to and
you couldn't scare them out. But give them cheap land and family planes and they scattered just like so
many dadburned rabbits."
John I. Webster was striding up the broad stone steps of the city hall when the walking scarecrow
carrying a rifle under his arm caught up with him and stopped him.
"Howdy, Mr. Webster," said the scarecrow.
Webster stared, then recognition crinkled his face.
"It's Levi," he said. "How are things going, Levi?"
Levi Lewis grinned with snagged teeth. "Fair to middling. Gardens are coming along and the young
rabbits are getting to be good eating."
"You aren't getting mixed up in any of the hell raising that's being laid to the _houses_?" asked
Webster.
"No, sir," declared Levi. "Ain't none of us Squatters mixed up in any wrong-doing. We're
law-abiding God-fearing people, we are. Only reason we're there is we can't make a living no place else.
And us living in them places other people up and left ain't harming no one. Police are just blaming us for
the thievery and other things that's going on, knowing we can't protect ourselves. They're making us the
goats."
"I'm glad to hear that," said Webster. "The chief wants to burn the _houses_."
"If he tries that," said Levi, "he'll run against something he ain't counting on. They run us off our farms
with this tank farming of theirs but they ain't going to run us any farther."
He spat across the steps.
"Wouldn't happen you might have some jingling money on you?" he asked. "I'm fresh out of
cartridges and with them rabbits coming up-"
Webster thrust his fingers into a vest pocket, pulled out a half dollar.
Levi grinned. "That's obliging of you, Mr. Webster. I'll bring a mess of squirrels, come fall."
The Squatter touched his hat with two fingers and retreated down the steps, sun glinting on the rifle
barrel. Webster turned up the steps again.
The city council session already was in full swing when he walked into the chamber.
Police Chief Jim Maxwell was standing by the table and Mayor Paul Carter was talking.
"Don't you think you may be acting a bit hastily, Jim, in urging such a course of action with the
_houses_?"
"No, I don't," declared the chief. "Except for a couple of dozen or so, none of those houses are
occupied by their rightful owners, or rather, their original owners. Every one of them belongs to the city
now through tax forfeiture. And they are nothing but an eyesore and a menace. They have no value. Not
even salvage value. Wood? We don't use wood any more. Plastics are better. Stone? We use steel
instead of stone. Not a single one of those houses have any material of marketable value.
"And in the meantime they are becoming the haunts of petty criminals and undesirable elements.
Grown up with vegetation as the residential sections are, they make a perfect hideout for all types of
criminals. A man commits a crime and heads straight for the _houses_-once there he's safe, for I could
send a thousand men in there and he could elude them all.
"They aren't worth the expense of tearing down. And yet they are, if not a menace, at least a
nuisance. We should get rid of them and fire is the cheapest, quickest way. We'd use all precautions."
'What about the legal angle?" asked the mayor.
"I checked into that. A man has a right to destroy his own property in any way he may see fit so long
as it endangers no one else's. The same law, I suppose, would apply to a municipality."
Alderman Thomas Griffin sprang to his feet.
"You'd alienate a lot of people," he declared. "You'd be burning down a lot of old homesteads.
People still have some sentimental attachments-"
"If they cared for them," snapped the chief, "why didn't they pay the taxes, and take care of them?
Why did they go running off to the country, just leaving the houses standing. Ask Webster here. He can
tell you what success he had trying to interest the people in their ancestral homes."
"You're talking about that Old Home Week farce," said Griffin. "It failed. Of course, it failed.
Webster spread it on so thick that they gagged on it. That's what a Chamber of Commerce mentality
always does."
Alderman Forrest King spoke up angrily. "There's nothing wrong with a Chamber of Commerce,
Griffin. Simply because you failed in business is no reason..."
Griffin ignored him. "The day of high pressure is over, gentlemen. The day of high pressure is gone
forever. Ballyhoo is something that is dead and buried.
"The day when you could have tall-corn days or dollar days or dream up some fake celebration and
deck the place up with bunting and pull in big crowds that were ready to spend money is past these many
years. Only you fellows don't seem to know it.
"The success of such stunts as that was its appeal to mob psychology and civic loyalty. You can't
have civic loyalty with a city dying on its feet. You can't appeal to mob psychology when there is no
mob-when every man, or nearly every man has the solitude of forty acres."
"Gentlemen," pleaded the mayor. "Gentlemen, this is distinctly out of order."
King sputtered into life, walloped the table.
"No, let's have it out. Webster is over there. Perhaps he can tell us what he thinks."
Webster stirred uncomfortably. "I scarcely believe," he said, "I have anything to say."
"Forget it," snapped Griffin and sat down.
But King still stood, his face crimson, his mouth trembling with anger.
"Webster!" he shouted.
Webster shook his head. "You came here with one of your big ideas," shouted King. "You were
going to lay it before the council. Step up, man, and speak your piece."
Webster rose slowly, grim-lipped.
"Perhaps you're too thick-skulled," he told King, "to know why I resent the way you have behaved."
King gasped, then exploded. "Thick-skulled! You would say that to me. We've worked together and
I've helped you. You've never called me that before... you've-"
"I've never called you that before," said Webster levelly. "Naturally not. I wanted to keep my job."
"Well, you haven't got a job," roared King. "From this minute on, you haven't got a job."
"Shut up," said Webster.
King stared at him, bewildered, as if someone had slapped him across the face.
"And sit down," said Webster, and his voice bit through the room like a sharp-edged knife.
King's knees caved beneath him and he sat down abruptly. The silence was brittle.
"I have something to say," said Webster. "Something that should have been said long ago. Something
all of you should hear. That I should be the one who would tell it to you is the one thing that astounds me.
And yet, perhaps, as one who has worked in the interests of this city for almost fifteen years, I am the
logical one to speak the truth.
"Alderman Griffin said the city is dying on its feet and his statement is correct. There is but one fault I
would find with it and that is its understatement. The city... this city, any city... already is dead.
"The city is an anachronism. It has outlived its usefulness. Hydroponics and the helicopter spelled its
downfall. In the first instance the city was a tribal place, an area where the tribe banded together for
mutual protection. In later years a wall was thrown around it for additional protection. Then the wall
finally disappeared but the city lived on because of the conveniences which it offered trade and
commerce. It continued into modern times because people were compelled to live close to their jobs and
the jobs were in the city.
"But to-day that is no longer true. With the family plane, one hundred miles to-day is a shorter
distance than five miles back in 1930. Men can fly several hundred miles to work and fly home when the
day is done. There is no longer any need for them to live cooped up in a city.
"The automobile started the trend and the family plane finished it. Even in the first part of the century
the trend was noticeable-a movement away from the city with its taxes, its stuffiness, a move towards the
suburb and close-in acreages. Lack of adequate transportation, lack of finances held many to the city.
But now, with tank farming destroying the value of land, a man can buy a huge acreage in the country for
less than he could a city lot forty years ago. With planes powered by atomic there is no longer any
transportation problem."
He paused and the silence held. The mayor wore a shocked look. King's lips moved, but no words
came. Griffin was smiling.
"So what have we?" asked Webster. "I'll tell you what we have. Street after street, block after block,
of deserted houses, houses that the people just up and walked away from. Why should they have
stayed? What could the city offer them? None of the things that it offered the generations before them,
for progress has wiped out the need of the city's benefits. They lost something, some monetary
consideration, of course, when they left the houses. But the fact that they could buy a house twice as
good for half as much, the fact that they could live as they wished to live, that they could develop what
amounts to family estates after the best tradition set them by the wealthy of a generation ago-all these
things outweighed the leaving of their homes.
"And what have we left? A few blocks of business houses. A few acres of industrial plants. A city
government geared to take care of a million people without the million people. A budget that has run the
taxes so high that eventually even business houses will move to escape those taxes. Tax forfeitures that
have left us loaded with worthless property. That's what we have left.
"If you think any Chamber of Commerce, any ballyhoo, any bare-brained scheme will give you the
answers, you're crazy. There is only one answer and that is simple. The city as a human institution is
dead. It may struggle on a few more years, but that is all."
"Mr. Webster-" said the mayor.
But Webster paid him no attention.
"But for what happened to-day," he said, "I would have stayed on and played doll house with you. I
would have gone on pretending that the city was a going concern. Would have gone on kidding myself
and you. But there is, gentlemen, such a thing as human dignity."
The icy silence broke down in the rustling of papers, the muffled cough of some embarrassed listener.
But Webster was not through.
"The city failed," he said, "and it is well it failed. Instead of sitting here in mourning above its broken
body you should rise to your feet and shout your thanks it failed.
"For if this city had not outlived its usefulness, as did every other city-if the cities of the world had not
been deserted, they would have been destroyed. There would have been a war, gentleman, an atomic
war. Have you forgotten the 1950s and the 60s? Have you forgotten waking up at night and listening for
the bomb to come, knowing that you would not hear it when it came, knowing that you would never hear
again, if it did come?
"But the cities were deserted and industry was dispersed and there were no targets and there was no
war."Some of you gentlemen," he said, "many of you gentlemen are alive to-day because the people left
your city.
"Now, for God's sake, let it stay dead. Be happy that it's dead. It's the best thing that ever happened
in all human history."
John J. Webster turned on his heel and left the room.
Outside on the broad stone steps, he stopped and stared up at the cloudless sky, saw the pigeons
wheeling above the turrets and spires of the city hall.
He shook himself mentally, like a dog coming out of a pool. He had been a fool, of course. Now he'd
have to hunt for a job and it might take time to find one. He was getting a bit old to be hunting for a job.
But despite his thoughts, a little tune rose unbidden to his bps. He walked away briskly, lips pursed,
whistling soundlessly.
No more hypocrisy. No more lying awake nights wondering what to do-knowing that the city was
dead, knowing that what he did was a useless task, feeling like a heel for taking a salary that he knew he
wasn't earning. Sensing the strange, nagging frustration of a worker, who knows his work is
nonproductive.
He strode towards the parking lot, heading for his helicopter.
Now maybe, he told himself, they could move out into the country the way Betty wanted to. Maybe
he could spend his evenings tramping land that belonged to him. A place with a stream. Definitely it had
to have a stream he could stock with trout.
He made a mental note to go up into the attic and check his fly equipment.
Martha Johnson was waiting at the barnyard gate when the old car chugged down the lane.
Ole got out stiffly, face rimmed with weariness.
"Sell anything?" asked Martha.
Ole shook his head. "It ain't no use. They won't buy farm-raised stuff. Just laughed at me. Showed
me ears of corn twice as big as the ones I had, just as sweet and with more even rows. Showed me
melons that had almost no rind at all. Better tasting, too, they said."
He kicked at a clod and it exploded into dust.
"There ain't no getting around it," be declared. "Tank farming sure has ruined us."
"Maybe we better fix to sell the farm," suggested Martha.
Ole said nothing.
"You could get a job on a tank farm," she said. "Harry did. Likes it real well."
Ole shook his head.
"Or maybe a gardener," said Martha. "You would make a right smart gardener. Ritzy folks that's
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