FOREGROUND: materialised as though from air, crowding the sidewalk, scores—hundreds—of people, mostly Afram, some Puerto Rican, some WASP. One girl with an electronic accordion, fantastically loud at maximum volume, making windows rattle and eardrums hum, shrieking a song through a shouter which others took up and stamped to the rhythm of: “What shall we do with our fair city, dirty and dangerous, smelly and shitty?” Clang on the body of the prowlie whatever they could find to throw—lumps of concrete, garbage, bottles, cans. How long before the gas-gun and the flaming oil?
SETTING: the uniform twelve-storey faces of the buildings, each occupying a block or half a block, hardly punctuated by the canyon streets because the abandonment of cars within the city meant that a one-way lane for the use of official vehicles or cabs was enough. Buses ran only to the next corner left, two corners away right. The sidewalks were defined by four-inch concrete barriers, small enough to step over, high enough to prevent any legally passing vehicle from running into a pedestrian. On the face of almost every building, some sort of advertising display, so that spectators in upper rooms looked out of shabby oceans, the middle of a letter O, or the crotch of a receptive girl. A single exception to the cliff-wall nature of the street was formed by the adventure playground, like the intrusion of Einstein into the ordered world of Euclid.
DETAIL: the face of the building against which he cowered, opposite the playground, was ornamented more than the average of its neighbours, possessing both a broad stoop above street-level for access to the interior and a number of integral buttresses, flat-faced, arranged in pairs with a gap of about two feet between each, tapering from a thickness of two feet at the bottom to nothing at the level of the fourth floor. One of these embrasures sufficed to shield him from light, the passing and re-passing rioters, and the hurling of improvised missiles. Clanging of metal above made him look up. Someone was trying to get the retractable fire-escapes to angle outwards from the wall instead of straight down, so that from their vantage point things could be dropped on the roof of the trapped prowlie.
* * *
Fsst-crack. Fsst-crack. Whir-fsst-crack.
Gas-gun.
Grenades smashing against the walls of the buildings, each releasing a quart of sluggish vapour that oozed down into the narrow culvert of the street. The first victims coughed, howled and keeled over, having sucked in a full concentrated dose, and those lucky enough to be out of range of the first salvo ducked to the ground and hustled away crouching.
Fsst-crack. Whir-fsst-crack.
The girl whose mouth he had cut was staggering away from the middle of the street, coming towards him. Possessed of some vague impulse to help, Donald emerged from the shelter of the embrasure between the buttresses and called to her. She came because she heard a friendly voice, not seeing who spoke, and a clubbed arm slammed at the back of his left shoulder. From the corner of his eye he saw the hand was Afram. He ducked, dodged. The gas-gun crashed grenades on this side of the street now, and the first whiffs made breathing hateful. Those who had evaded gassing so far were taking to the skeletal branches of the playground like archetypal proto-man eluding a pack of wolves. The girl saw her brother, who had hit Donald, and together they hurried to the corner of the street, forgetting him. He followed because everyone was going away in one direction or another.
At the corner: late arrivals following a group of yonder-boys who had equipped themselves with sticks and big empty cans to make drums of, and howling with joy on seeing the stuck prowlie.
“Gas!”
The shouting faltered. There was a store across the road which had been open under automated supervision; the owner or manager had turned up and was hastily slamming the wire grilles over the display windows and the entrance, trapping three customers who seemed relieved rather than annoyed. An anonymous hand flung a rock through the last exposed window, which happened to have a liquor stand behind it. Cans and bottles thundered down, a heap of the former jammed the grille before it could rise and lock in place, and several of the crowd decided that was a better target than the prowlie.
Overhead a roaring noise. One of the tiny one-man copters capable of being manoeuvred between the tops of the high buildings and the Fuller Dome whose blushing underside formed Manhattan’s sky was scouting the scene to notify police headquarters of the extent of the disturbance. From a skylight somewhere away to the right there came a bang—an old-fashioned sporting gun. The copter wobbled and came down into the middle of the street, vanes screaming as the pilot fought for altitude. Mad with delight at having a fuzzy-wuzzy delivered into their hands the crowd went forward to greet him with clubs.
Donald fled.
On the next corner he found riot containment procedure already under way. Two water-trucks with hoses going were methodically washing people off the sidewalks into doorways. He turned at hazard in the opposite direction and shortly encountered sweep-trucks, paddywagons adapted with big snowplough-like arms on either side, serving the same purpose as the hoses but much less gentle. Keeping the crowd on the move was supposed to take away the chance of their organising into coherent resistance. Also another one-man copter droned down and started shedding gas-grenades into the street.
He was one of about fifty people being hustled and driven ahead of the official vehicles because they were off their own manor and had no place to go. He worked his way towards the wall of the building because some people, he saw, were dodging into hallways and vanishing, but at the first door he came close enough to to stand a fair chance of entering there were two Aframs armed with clubs who said, “You don’t live here, WASP—blast off before you get stung.”
At an intersection two hose-trucks and the sweep-truck he was running from coincided. A mass of people from all three streets was shoved into the fourth, taking them back towards the focus of the trouble. Now they were body to body, stumbling on each other’s heels and shrieking.
The prowlie was still stuck where it had been. Its driver sounded a blast of welcome to his colleagues in the sweep-truck. The gas had mostly dispersed, leaving victims choking and vomiting, but there was no end in sight to the riot. On the concrete arms of the playground men and women were still bellowing the song that the girl with the electronic accordion thundered out for them: “Find you a hammer and SMASH IT DOWN!” Virtually every window had been broken and glass crunched underfoot. The human beings were being shovelled together with the garbage into one vast rubbish pile, not only in the direction from which Donald was coming but from the other end of the street as well. The stock plan had been applied: close the area, keep ’em moving, jam ’em together and pack ’em off.
Adventurous mind-present youths jumped up on the arms of the sweep-truck as it passed the adventure playground and from there leapt to the security of the random concrete branches. Donald was too late to copy them; by the time he thought of it he had been forced on by.
Mindlessly he pushed and thrust and shouted like everyone else, hardly noticing whether it was a man or a woman he jostled, an Afram or a WASP. The gas-gun on the sweep-truck discharged grenades over his head and the booming music died in mid-chord. A whiff of the gas reached Donald’s nose and wiped away the last trace of rationality. Both arms flailing, careless of who hit him so long as he could hit back, he struggled towards the people from the opposite direction now impacting on the group he was enmeshed with.