Natural State
Damon Knight
Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1954
It was a world of wildest paradoxes - patriotism, for example, meant all loyalty to the city and all hatred for the country!
The most promising young realie actor in Greater New York, everyone agreed. was a beetle-browed Apollo named Alvah Gustad. His diction, which still held overtones of the Under Flushing labor pool, the unstudied animal grace of his movements and his habitually sullen expression enabled him to dominate any stage not occupied by an unclothed woman at least as large as himself. At twenty-six, he had a very respectable following among the housewives of Manhattan, Queens, Jersey and the rest of the seven boroughs. The percentage of blown fuses resulting from subscribers’ attempts to clutch his realized image was extraordinarily low-Alvah, his press agents explained with perfect accuracy, left them too numb.
Young Gustad, who frequently made his first entrance waterbeaded as from the shower, with a towel girded chastely around his loins, was nevertheless in his private life a modest and slightly bewildered citizen, much given to solitary reading, and equipped with a perfect set of the conventional virtues.
These included cheerful performance of all municipal duties and obligations-like every right-thinking citizen, Gustad held down two jobs in summer and three in winter. At the moment, for example, he was an actor by day and a metals-reclamation supervisor by night.
Chief among his less tangible attributes, was that emotion which in some ages has been variously described as civic pride or patriotism. In A.D. 2064, as in B.C. 400, they amounted to the same thing.
I
BEHIND the Manager’s desk, the wall was a single huge slab of black duroplast, with a map of the city picked out in pinpoints of brilliance. As Gustad entered with his manager and his porter, an unseen chorus of basso profundos broke into the strains of The Slidewalks of New York. After four bars, it segued to New York, New York, It’s a Pip of a Town and slowly faded out.
The Manager himself, the Hon. Boleslaw Wytak, broke the reverent hush by coming forward to take Alvah’s hand and lead him toward the desk. “Mr. Gustad-and Mr. Diamond, isn’t it? Great pleasure to have you here. I don’t know if you’ve met all these gentlemen. Commissioner Laurence, of the Department of Extramural Relations-Director Ostertag, of the Bureau of Vital Statistics-Chairman Neddo, of the Research and Development Board.”
Wytak waited until everyone was comfortably settled in one of the reclining chairs which fitted into slots in the desk, with cigars, cigarettes, liquor capsules and cold snacks at each man’s elbow. “Now, Mr. Gustad-and Mr. Diamond-I’m a plain blunt man and I know you’re wondering why I asked you to come here today. I’m going to tell you. The City needs a man with great talent and great courage to do a job that, I tell you frankly, I wouldn’t undertake myself without great misgivings.” He gazed at Gustad warmly, affectionately but sternly. “You’re the man, Alvah.”
Little Jack Diamond cleared his throat nervously. “What kind of a job did you have in mind, Mr. Manager? Of course, anything we can do for our city …” Wytak’s big face, without perceptibly moving a muscle, somehow achieved a total change of expression. “Alvah, I want you to go to the Sticks.”
Gustad blinked and tilted upright in his chair. He looked at Diamond.
The little man suddenly seemed two sizes smaller inside his box-cut cloth-of-silver tunic. He gestured feebly and wheezed, “Wake-me-up!” The porter behind his chair stepped forward alertly, clanking, and flipped open one of the dozens of metal and plastic boxes that clung to him all over like barnacles. He popped a tiny capsule into his palm, rolled it expertly to thumb-and-finger position, broke it under Diamond’s nose.
A reeking-sweet green fluid dripped from it and ran stickily down the front of Diamond’s tunic.
“Dumbhead!” said Diamond. “Not cream de menthy, a wake-me-up!” He sat up as the abashed servant produced another capsule. “Never mind.” Some color was beginning to come back into his face. “Blotter!” A wad of absorbent fibers. “Vacuum!” A lemon-sized globe with a flaring snout. “Gon-Stink! Presser!”
Gustad looked back at the Manager. “Your Honor, you mean you want me to go into the Sticks? I mean, he said, groping for words, you want me to play for the Muckfeet?”
“That is just exactly what I want you to do.” Wytak nodded toward the Commissioner, the Director, and the Chairman. “These gentlemen are here to tell you why. Suppose you start, Ozzie.”
OSTERTAG, the one with the fringe of yellowish white hair around his potato-colored pate, shifted heavily and stared at Gustad. “In my bureau, we have records of population and population density, imports and exports, ratio of births to deaths and so on that go back all the way to the time of the United States. Now this isn’t known generally, Mr. Gustad, but although New York has been steadily growing ever since its founding in 1646, our growth in the last thirty years has been entirely due to immigration from other less fortunate cities.
“In a way, it’s fortunate―I mean to say that we can’t expand horizontally, because it has been found impossible to eradicate the soil organisms―” a delicate shudder ran around the group― “left by our late enemies. And as for continuing to build vertically―well, since Pittsburgh fell, we have been dependent almost entirely on salvaged scrap for our steel. To put it bluntly, unless something is done about this situation, the end is in sight. Not alone of this administration, but of the city as well. Now the reasons for this―ah―what shall I say …”
With his head back, staring at the ceiling, Wytak began to speak so quietly that Ostertag blundered through another phrase and a half before he realized he had been superseded as interlocutor.
“Thirty years ago, when I first came to this town, an immigrant kid with nothing in the whole world but the tunic on my back and the gleam in my eye, we had just got through with the last of the Muckfeet Wars. According to your history books, we won that war. I’ll tell you something―we were licked!”
Alvah squirmed uncomfortably as Wytak raised his head and glanced defiantly around the desk, looking for contradiction; The Manager said, “We drove them back to the Ohio, thirty years ago. And where are they now?” He turned to Laurence. “Phil?”
Laurence rubbed his long nose with a bloodless forefinger. “Their closest settlement is twelve miles away. That’s to the southwest, of course. In the west and north―”
“Twelve miles,” said Wytak reflectively. But that isn’t the reason I say they licked us. They licked us because there are twenty million of us today … and about one hundred fifty million of them. Right, Phil?”
Laurence said, “Well, there aren’t any accurate figures, you know, Boley. There hasn’t been any census of the Muckfeet for almost a century, but―”
“About one hundred fifty million, interrupted Wytak. “Even if we formed a league with every other city on this continent, the odds would be heavily against us-and they breed like flies. He slapped the desk with his open palm. So do their filthy animals!”
A SHUDDER rippled across the group. Diamond shut his eyes tight.
“There it is, said Wytak. Rome fell. Babylon fell. The same thing can happen to New York. Those illiterate savages will go on increasing year by year, getting more ignorant and more degraded with every generation … and a century from now -or two, or five―they’ll be the human race. And New York …”