No Direction Home Page 11

  That view across the Jersey lowlands always seems to shut them up for a while. Even that crud, Lumumba. God knows why. Sure it’s spectacular, bigger than anything these Africans could ever have seen where they come from, but when you come right down to it, you gotta admit that Ojubu was right—the Jersey lowlands are nothing but a giant pile of junk. Crap. Space-Age garbage. Sometimes looking at a place like that can piss me off. I mean, we had some ancestors. They built the greatest civilization the world ever saw, but what did they leave for us? The most spectacular junk piles in the world, air that does you in sooner or later even through filters, and a continent where seeing something alive that people didn’t put there is a big deal. Our ancestors went to the moon, they were a great people, the greatest in history, but sometimes I get the feeling they were maybe just a little out of their minds. Like that crazy “Merge with the Cosmic All” thing I found that time in Grand Central—still working after two centuries or so; it must do something besides kill people, but what? I dunno, maybe our ancestors went a little over the edge, sometimes…

  Not that I’d ever admit a thing like that to any black brothers! The Space-Agers may have been a little bit nuts, but who are these Africans to say so, who are they to decide whether a civilization that had them beat up and down the line was sane or not? Sane according to whom? Them, or the Space-Agers? For that matter, who am I to think a thing like that? An ant or a rat living off their garbage. Who are nobodies like us and the Africans to judge people who could go to the moon?

  Like I keep telling Karen, this damned tourist business is getting to me. I’m around these Africans too much. Sometimes, if I don’t watch myself, I catch myself thinking like them. Maybe it’s the lousy smog this far into the smog bank—but hell, that’s another crazy African idea!

  That’s what being around these Africans does to me, and looking at subway dwellers five times a week sure doesn’t help, either. Let’s face it, stuff like the subways and the lowlands is really depressing. It tells a man he’s a nothing. Worse, it tells him that people who were better than he is still managed to screw things up. It’s just not good for your mind.

  But as the copter crested the lip of the Palisades ridge and we looked out across that wide Hudson River at Manhattan, I was reminded again that this crummy job had its compensations. If you haven’t seen Manhattan from a copter crossing the Hudson from the Jersey side, you haven’t seen nothing, pal. That Fuller Dome socks you right in the eye. It’s ten miles in diameter. It has facets that make it glitter like a giant blue diamond floating over the middle of the island. Yeah, that’s right, it floats. It’s made of some Space-Age plastic that’s been turned blue and hazy by a couple of centuries of smog, it’s ten miles wide at the base, and the goddamned thing floats over the middle of Manhattan a few hundred feet off the ground at its rim like a cloud or a hover or something. No motors, no nothing. It’s just a hemisphere made of plastic panels and alloy tubing and it floats over the middle of Manhattan like half a giant diamond all by itself. Now, that’s what I call a real piece of Space-Age hardware!

  I could hear them suck in their breath behind me. Yeah, it really does it to you. I almost forgot to give them the spiel. I mean, who wants to? What can you really say to someone while he’s looking at the Fuller Dome for the first time?

  “Ladies and gentlemen, you are now looking at the world-famous Fuller Dome, the largest architectural structure ever built by the human race. It is ten miles in diameter. It encloses the center of Manhattan Island, the heart of Old New York. It has no motors, no power source, and no moving parts. But it floats in the air like a cloud. It is considered the First Wonder of the World.”

  What else is there to say?

  We came in low across the river toward that incredible floating blue diamond, the Fuller Dome, parallel to the ruins of a great suspension bridge which had collapsed and now hung in fantastic rusted tatters half in and half out of the wafer. Aside from. Ryan’s short guidebook speech, no one said a word as we crossed the water to Manhattan.

  Like the moon landing, the Fuller Dome was one of the peak achievements of the Space Age, a feat beyond the power of modern African civilization. As I understood it, the Dome held itself aloft by convection currents created by its own greenhouse effect, though this has always seemed to me the logical equivalent of a man lifting himself by his own shoulders. No one quite knows exactly how a dome this size was built, but the records show that it required a fleet of two hundred helicopters. It took six weeks to complete. It was named after Buckminster Fuller, one of the architectural geniuses of the curly Space Age, but it was not built till after his death, though it is considered his monument. But it was more than that; it was staggeringly, overwhelmingly beautiful.

  We crossed the river and headed toward the rim of the Fuller Dome at about two hundred feet, over a shoreline of crumbling docks and the half-sunken hulks of rusted-out ships; then over a wide strip of elevated highway filled with the usual wrecked cars; and finally we slipped under the rim of the Dome itself, an incredibly thin metal hoop floating in the air from which the Dome seemed to blossom like a soap bubble from a child’s bubble pipe.

  And we were flying inside the Fuller Dome. It was an incredible sensation—the world inside the Dome existed in blue crystal. Our helicopter seemed like a buzzing fly that had intruded into an enormous room. The room was a mile high and ten miles wide. The facets of the Fuller Dome had been designed to admit natural sunlight and thus preserve the sense of being outdoors, but they had been weathered to a bluish hue by the saturation smog. As a result, the interior of the Dome was a room on a superhuman scale, a room filled with a pale blue light—and a room containing a major portion of a giant city.

  Towering before us were the famous skyscrapers of Old New York, a forest of rectangular monoliths hundreds of feet high, in some cases well over a thousand feet tall. Some of them stood almost intact, empty concrete boxes transformed into giant somber tombstones by the eerie blue light that permeated everything. Others had been ripped apart by explosions and were jagged piles of girders and concrete. Some had bad walls almost entirely of glass; most of these were now airy mazes of framework and concrete platforms, where the blue light here and there flashed off intact patches of glass. And far above the tops of the tallest buildings was the blue stained-glass faceted sky of the Fuller Dome.

  Ryan took the helicopter up to the five-hundred-foot level and headed for the giant necropolis, a city of monuments built on a scale that would have caused the pharaohs to whimper, packed casually together like family houses in an African residential village. And all of it Was bathed in a sparkly blue-gray light which seemed to enclose a universe—here in the very core of the East Coast smog bank, where everything seemed to twinkle and shimmer.

  We all gasped as Ryan headed at one hundred miles per hour for a thin canyon that was the gap between two rows of buildings which faced each other across a not-very-wide street hundreds of feet below.

  For a moment, we seemed to be a stone dropping toward a narrow shaft between two immense cliffs—then, suddenly, the copter’s engines screamed, and the copter seemed to somehow skid and slide through the air to a dead hover no more than a hundred feet from the sheer face of a huge gray skyscraper.

  Ryan’s laugh sounded unreal, partially drowned out by the descending whine of the copter’s relaxing engines. “Don’t worry, folks,” he said over the public address system, “I’m in control of this aircraft at all times. I just thought I’d give you a little thrill. Kind of wake up those of you who might be sleeping, because you wouldn’t want to’ miss what comes next: a helicopter tour of what the Space-Agers called ‘The Sidewalks of New York.’ ”

  And we inched forward at the pace of a running man; we seemed to drift into a canyon between two parallel lines of huge buildings that went on for miles.

  Man, no matter how many times I come here, I still feel weird inside the Fuller Dome. It’s another world in there. New York seems like it’s built for people fifty
feet tall; it makes you feel so small, like you’re inside a giant’s room. But when you look up at the inside of the Dome, the buildings that seemed so big seem so small; you can’t get a grasp on the scale of anything. And everything is all blue. And the smog is so heavy you think you could eat it with a fork.

  And you know that the whole thing is completely dead. Nothing lives in New York between the Fuller Dome and the subways, where several thousand subway dwellers stew in their own muck. Nothing can. The air inside the Fuller Dome is some of the worst in the country, almost as bad as that stuff they say you can barely see through that fills the Los Angeles basin. The Space-Agers didn’t put up the Dome to atmosphere-seal a piece of the city; they did it to make the city warmer and keep the snow off the ground. The smog was still breathable then. So the inside of the Dome is open to the naked atmosphere, and it actually seems to suck in the worst of the smog, maybe because it’s about twenty degrees hotter inside the Dome than it is outside; something about convection currents, the Africans say, but I dunno.

  It’s creepy, that’s what it is. Flying slowly between two lines of skyscrapers, I had the feeling I was tiptoeing very carefully around some giant graveyard in the middle of the night. Not any of that crap about ghosts that I’ll bet some of these Africans still believe deep down; this whole city really was a graveyard. During the Space Age, millions of people lived in New York; now there was nothing alive here but a couple thousand stinking subway dwellers slowly strangling themselves in their stinking sealed subways.

  So I kind of drifted the copter in among the skyscrapers for a while, at about a hundred feet, real slow, almost on hover, and just let the customers suck in the feel of the place, keeping my mouth shut.

  After a while, we came to a really wide street, jammed to overflowing with wrecked and rusted cars that even filled the sidewalks, as if the Space-Agers had built one of their crazy car-pyramids right here in the middle of Manhattan, and it had just sort of run like hot wax. I hovered the copter over it for a while.

  “Folks,” I told the customers, “below you, you see some of the wreckage from the Panic of the Century which fills the sidewalks of New York. The Panic of the Century started right here in New York. Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, at the height of the Space Age, there were more than one hundred million cars, trucks, buses, and other motor vehicles operating on the freeways and streets of the United States. A car for every two adults! Look below you and try to imagine the magnificence of the sight of all of them on the road all at once!”

  Yeah, that would’ve been something to see, all right! From a helicopter, that is. Man, those Space-Age is sure had guts, driving around down there jammed together on the freeways at copter speeds with only a few feet between them. They must’ve had fantastic reflexes to be able to handle it. Not for me, pal, I couldn’t do it, and I wouldn’t want to.

  But, God, what this place must’ve been like, all lit up at night in bright colored lights, millions of people tearing around in their cars all at once! Hell, what’s the population of the United States today, thirty, forty million, not a city with five hundred thousand people, and nothing in all the world on the scale of this. Damn it, those were the days for a man to have lived!

  Now look at it! The power all gone except for whatever keeps the subway electricity going, so the only light above ground is that blue stuff that makes everything seem so still and quiet and weird, like the city’s embalmed or something. The buildings are all empty crumbling wrecks, burned out, smashed up by explosions, and the cars are ail rusted garbage, and the people are dead, dead, dead.

  It’s enough to make you cry—if you let it get to you.

  We drifted among the ruins of Old New York like some secretive night insect. By now it was afternoon, and the canyons formed by the skyscrapers were filled with deep purple shadows and intermittent avenues of pale blue light. The world under the Fuller Dome was composed of relative darknesses of blue, much as the world under the canopy of a heavy rain forest is a world of varying greens.

  We dipped low and drifted for a few moments over a large square where the top of a low building had been removed by an explosion to reveal a series of huge cuts and canyons extending deep into the bowels of the earth, perhaps some kind of underground train terminal, perhaps even a ruined part of the famous New York subways.

  “This is a burial ground of magics,” Kulongo said. “The air is very heavy here.”

  “They sure knew how to build,” Koyinka said.

  Beside me, Michael Lumumba seemed subdued, perhaps even nervous. “You know, I never knew it was all so big,” he muttered to me. “So big, and so strange, and so… so…”

  “Space Age, Mr. Lumumba?” Ryan suggested over the intercom.

  Lumumba’s jaw twitched. He was obviously furious at having Ryan supply the precise words he was looking for. “Inhuman, honkie, inhuman was what I was going to say,” he lied transparently. “Wasn’t there an ancient saying, ‘New York is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there?’ ”

  “Never heard that one, pal,” Ryan said. “But I can see how your ancestors might’ve felt that way. New York was always too much for anyone but a real Space-Ager.”

  There was considerable truth in what they both said, though of course neither was interested in true insight. Here in the blue crystal world under the Fuller Dome, in a helicopter buzzing about noisily in the graveyard silence, reduced by the scale of the buildings to the relative size of an insect, I felt the immensity of what had been Space-Age America all around me. I felt as if I were trespassing in the mansions of my betters. I felt like a bug, an insect. I remembered from history, not from instinct, how totally America had dominated the world during the Space Age—not by armed conquest, but by the sheer overwhelming weight of its very existence. I had never before been quite able to grasp that concept.

  I understood it perfectly now.

  I gave them the standard helicopter tour of the sidewalks of New York. We floated up Broadway, the street that had been called The Great White Way, at about fifty feet, past crazy rotten networks of light steel girders, crumbled signs, and wiring on a monstrous scale. At a thousand feet, we circled the Empire State Building, one of the oldest of the great skyscrapers, and now one of (ho best-preserved, a thousand-foot slab of solid concrete, probably just the kind of tombstone the Space-Agers would’ve put up for themselves if they had thought about it.

  Yeah, I gave them all the usual stuff. The ruins of Rockefeller Center. The U.N. Plaza Crater.

  Of course, they were all sucking it up, even Lumumba, though of course the slime wouldn’t admit it. After this, they’d be ripe for a nasty peek at the subway dwellers, and after they got through gaping at the animals, they’d be ready for dinner back in Milford, feeling they had got their money’s worth.

  Yeah, I can get the same money for a five-hour tour that most guides get for six, because I’ve got the stomach to take them into a subway station. As usual, it had just the right effect when I told them we were going to end the tour with a visit on foot to an inhabited subway station. Instead of bitching and moaning that the tour was too short, that they weren’t getting their money’s worth, they were all eager—and maybe a little scared—at actually walking among the really primitive natives. Once they’d had their fill of the subway dwellers, a ride home across the Hudson into the sunset would be enough to convince them they’d had a great day.

  So we were going to see the subway dwellers! Most of the native guides avoided the subways, and the American government for some reason seemed to discourage research by foreigners. A subtle discouragement, perhaps, but discouragement nevertheless. In a paper he published a few years ago, Omgazi had theorized that the modern Americans in the vicinity of New York had a loathing of the subway dwellers that amounted to virtually a superstitious dread. According to him, the subway dwellers, because they were direct descendants of diehard Space-Agers who had atmosphere-sealed the subways and set up a closed ecology inside rather than aband
on New York, were identified with their ancestors in the minds of the modern Americans. Hence, the modern Americans shunned the subway dwellers because they considered them shamans on a deep subconscious level.

  It had always seemed to me that Omgazi was being rather ethnocentric. He was dealing, after all, with modern Americans, not nineteenth-century Africans. Now I would have a chance to observe some subway dwellers myself. The prospect was most exciting. For, although the subway dwellers were apparently degenerating toward extinction at a rapid rate, in one respect they were unique in all the world—they still lived in an artificial environment that had been constructed during the Space Age. True, it had been a hurried, makeshift environment in the first place, and it and its inhabitants had deteriorated tremendously in two centuries, but, whatever else they were or weren’t, the subway dwellers were the only enclave of Space-Age Americans left on the face of the earth.

  If it were possible at all for a modern African to truly come to understand the reality of Space-Age America, surely confrontation with the lineal descendants of the Space Age would provide the key.

  Ryan set the helicopter down in what seemed to be some kind of large open terrace behind a massive, low, concrete building. The terrace was a patchwork of cracked concrete walkways and expanses of bare gray earth. Once, apparently, it had been a small park, before the smog had become lethal to vegetation. As a denuded ruin in the pale blue light, it seemed like some strange cold corpse as the helicopter kicked up dry clouds of dust from the surface of the dead parkland.

  As I stepped out with the others into the blue world of the Fuller Dome, I gasped: I had a momentary impression that I had stepped back to Africa, to Accra or Brazzaville. The air was rich and warm and humid on my skin. An instant later, the visual effect—everything a cool pale blue—jarred me with its arctic-vista contrast. Then I noticed the air itself and I shuddered, and was suddenly hyperconscious of the filters up my nostrils and the goggles over my eyes, for here the air was so heavy With smog that it seemed to sparkle electrically in the crazy blue light. What incredible, beautiful, foul poison!