As for the dancing teen-agers, they also made passage along the sidewalk even more difficult than it usually was at this hour, but Alex didn’t mind. He watched them fondly. They consumed, but did not produce. And it was a privilege to be allowed to walk at all. In downtown Manhattan, you either owned a canoe (if you were wealthy) or traveled by TA barge, and left your office by a second-story window.

  Twenty years ago, he liked to remember, Morningside Heights had consisted mostly of some (by modern standards) rather mild slums, completely surrounding the great university which had been their landlord. Today, like all other high ground in the city, the Heights was a vast skyscraper complex in which worked only the most powerful of the Earth. Lesser breeds had to paddle for it in the scummy, brackish canals of Times Square, Wall Street, Rockefeller Center, and other unimportant places, fending off lumps of offal and each other as best they could, or jamming over the interbuilding bridges, or trying to flag down an occasional blimp. Flatlands like Brooklyn—once all by itself one of the largest cities in the world—were of course completely flooded, which was probably just as well, for the earthquakes had been getting worse there lately.

  The most powerful of the Earth. Alex liked the sound of the phrase. He was one of Them. As the General President of Local 802 of the International Brotherhood of Sanitation Engineers, he had in fact few peers, and not only in his own estimation. Doubtless such a figure as Everett Englebert Loosli Vladimir Bingovitch Felice de Tohil Vaca, by virtue of his higher lineage and his still higher post of U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, Welfare, and Resources (Disposal of), was the more honored; but it was doubtful that with all his hereditary advantages he could be the more cultured... and the next few weeks, Alex thought, would show which of them was truly the more powerful.

  Adjusting his mask—no matter how new a mask was, it seemed to let in more free radicals from the ambient air every day—he put the thought resolutely aside and prepared to enjoy his stroll and his lunch. Today he was holding court with the writers, artists, and musicians in his circle—people of no importance whatsoever in the modern world, except to him; he was their patron. (Patroon, he corrected himself, with a nod toward the towers of Peter Stuyvesant’s water-girdled village.) One, whom he might even consider making the next of his wives if she continued to shape up, he had even licensed to keep cats, creatures as useless as aesthetes in this hardening civilization, though a good deal less productive of solid wastes.

  Nevertheless, he could not prevent himself—he was, after all, first and foremost a professional—from wondering how the masked men with the jackhammers were going to dispose of the asphalt they were cutting up. The project itself made sense: asphalt paving in a town where the noontime temperature rarely ran below eighty degrees ranged narrowly between being a nuisance and a trap. The dancers’ shoes were already being slowed down by plaques and gobbets of the stuff. Nevertheless, it was virtually indigestible; once the men had dug it up and taken it away, where were they going to drop it? There was an underground tar pool in Riverdale in which such wastes were slowly—far too slowly—metabolized into carbon dioxide and water by an organism called Bacillus aliphaticus, but it was almost overflowing now and the sludge was being pushed up toward the top of the reservoir by the gas-trapping stickiness of the medium, like a beer with its head on the bottom. The time wasn’t far off when the sewers of Riverdale would begin to ooze into its valleyed avenues not ordinary sewage, but stinking condensates so tacky and... indisposable... as to make hot asphalt seem as harmless as cold concrete. Nor was carbon dioxide a desirable end product any more....

  But never mind all that now. Alex knocked at the door of the Brackette de Poisson, was recognized, and was admitted. At his table his coterie was waiting, and hands were lifted solemnly to him. His glance had only just sought out Juliette Bronck in the dimness when Fantasia ad Parnassum rose ceremonially and said:

  “Ave, garbage-man.”

  Alex was deeply offended—nobody used that word any more—and worse, he was afraid it showed. People ought to understand that it is difficult to be friends with friends who won’t respect one’s sensitivities. But there was worse to come.

  “Listen,” Fantasia said with quiet vehemence. “Sit down. Drop your shovel. You won’t need it any more.”

  “Why not, Fan?”

  “Why not?” Fantasia made a production of being astonished. At last he added, “God damn it, Alex, don’t you know yet that the world is coming to an end?”

  So here we go again; Fan has a new hobby. It didn’t look, after all, like it was going to be a very pleasant lunch.

  “All right,” Alex said with a sudden accession of weariness. He sat down and looked around the table, trying to beam benevolently. It shouldn’t have been difficult. After all, there was Juliette, a cameolike, 26-year-old, bikini-sized brunette who, in fact, at the moment was dressed in very little else; Will Emshredder, a tall, cadaverous, gentle-voiced man who had once produced a twelve-hour-long Experience called The Junkpot Philosophy; Rosasharn Ellisam, who was a cultural heroine of Alex’s, since she made welded sculpture out of old bones which otherwise would have had to have been disposed of in some other way; Goldfarb Z, a white Muslim who for years had been writing, in invisible ink, a subliminal epic called thus i marshal mcmoonahan; Strynge Tighe, a desperate Irishman clad entirely in beads made of blue-dyed corn, who specialized in an unthinkably ancient Etruscan verse form called txckxrxsm; Beda Grindford, famous as the last man to get out of Los Angeles before the cyclone hit the Hyperion plant, but for nothing else; Arthur Lloyd Merlyn, a genuine, hereditary drip who was spending his life looking for somebody to put a plug in for him; Bang Jøhnsund, who wrote an interminable 3V serial named The T.H.I.N.G. from O.U.T.B.A.C.K.; Girlie Stonacher, a blond model who had been a hostess on the blimp limousine to the lunar orbital shuttle until all commercial lunar flights had been discontinued; Fantasia’s wife, Gradus, possibly the most beautiful woman since Eleanor of Aquitaine, who went about totally naked and would cut you to ribbons if you gave the faintest sign of noticing it; Polar Pons, who by virtue of being nine feet tall was in great demand as a lecturer; and, of course, the usual youngsters, who didn’t count.

  And, also of course, the inevitable thorn in the side of any such group, in this case Fantasia himself; there was always one. He was a smallish but handsome man of about fifty who exacerbated Alex, first of all, by having the largest and most distinguished lineage of any man in America, so distinguished that a mere list of his names read like three pages of a hotel register from the heyday of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; secondly, by having become wealthy in a blamelessly social way by a number of useful inventions (for example, he had invented a container for beer which, when the bottle was empty, combined with smog and dissolved down to its base to leave behind a cup containing one more swallow of beer, after which the base itself turned into counter polish); third, by being willing to argue on any side of any question, without seeming to care which side he was on so long as he could make a case for it (that was, in this gathering of artists, his art); and last (or almost last), by turning out to be right nearly every time Alex had been sure he had caught him out in his facts.

  Alex nevertheless rather loved him, and got along with him most of the time by refusing to believe that he took anything seriously. But this time, for the first time, Fantasia had genuinely insulted him; and—

  “—the end of the world,” Fantasia said grimly.

  “Carry a sign,” Alex said, picking up the menu with his very best indifference. He would have liked to have had Alaskan king crab, but it was extinct; the sea-level Guatemalan ship canal of 1980 had let the Atlantic’s high tides flow rhythmically into the Pacific, with results similar to but much more drastic than the admission through the St. Lawrence canal of the lamprey eel into the Great Lakes. Today’s Special was neon shrimp; knowing where they came from, Alex lost his appetite. He put the card down and looked at his sudden antagonist.

  “Listen, dammit.”

  “Eri tu, Brute?”

  “Alex,” Fan said with a sort of disturbing tenderness, “you won’t get out of this with dub macaronics, even with garbage sauce. Don’t wince, it’s time we called things by their right names. I’ve been doing some figuring, and no matter how I look at it, I think we’re dead.”

  Juliette took Alex’s elbow, in that gesture which said, Don’t listen, don’t let him hurt you, I’ll make it all up to you later; but Alex had no choice. He said, snake to mongoose, “Go ahead.”

  After the last gasp, and the last plea not to tumble off just yet, Alex arranged his feet among the cats and was on the shimmering verge of oblivion when Juliette said: “Alex, are you asleep?”

  He sighed, kneed away a cat with the demeaning name of Hausmaus, and propped himself up on one elbow. Beside him, Juliette exuded warmth and the mixed perfumes of spray deodorant and love, but her expression was that of a woman who now, at last, meant to get down to the real business of the evening. Thrusting a big toe vindictively into the ribs of the fat Siamese called Splat!, he said, “No, not lately. What is it?”

  “Do you think Fan is right?”

  “Of course not, he was just showing off. You know damned well that if I’d agreed with him, he’d have switched sides on the spot. Now let’s get some sleep. School keeps tomorrow, for me at least.”

  “But Alex, he sounded so... convinced. He said, ‘No matter how I look at it.’ ”

  “He always sounds convinced. Look, Juli, of course we’ve got a junk problem. Everybody knows that. Who could know it better than I do? But we’re coping. We always have coped. People have been predicting disaster for twenty years and there hasn’t been any disaster. And there won’t be.”

  “He did seem to have all the figures.”

  “And it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d got them right. They sounded right, where I was familiar with them. But what Fan doesn’t take into account is the sheer mass of the Earth—including the sea and the air, of which there’s a hell of a lot. You can’t create any major changes in a body that big just by a little litter. Making changes like that takes geological time.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Go to sleep.”

  Go to sleep...

  Some kinds of wastes—weather, rust, decay—are metabolized, or otherwise are returned to balance with the general order of nature. Others are not.

  Among those which are not are aluminum cans, glass bottles, and jugs, and plastic containers of all kinds. The torrent began in 1938, when in the United States alone about 35 million tons of these indigestible, unreclaimable, nonburnable, or otherwise indefeasible objects were discarded. By 1969, the rate was three quarters of a ton per year for every man, woman, and child in the country, and was increasing by 4 percent per year. That year, Americans threw away 48 billion aluminum cans, 28 billion glass bottles and jars, and uncountable billions of plastic containers of every conceivable size and shape... 140 million tons of indestructible garbage.

  By 1989, the total for the year had reached 311 million tons. None of it had ever gone away. The accumulation—again, in the United States alone—was 7,141,950,000 tons.

  Which is not to say that no attempts were made to cope with it. Cans that contained any iron at all were fished out by magnets. Some of the glass was pulverized to grains finer than sugar and fed into great cesspools like Lake Erie, where, since glass is slightly soluble in water, it would very slowly become a dissolved pollutant. But since glass had been broken and thrown away since the Phoenicians invented it, the pulverizing composters made no measurable difference in the world’s rising burden of grit, slag, and ashes.

  In the meantime, nylon “ghost nets” broke free from fishing vessels and were set floating as permanent fish destroyers. The composters tore up nylon stockings and socks into eight-inch fragments, which, however, refused to rot. Heavy concentrations of polyethylene continued to build in truck-garden soil, spread by compost plants which were supposed to be selling humus. Eventually, many of the polyethylene bags and plastic containers were screened out for burning, but almost nothing was known about what happens when plastics burn, and in fact most such polymerized substances simply evaporated, adding to the enormous load of air pollution, which by 1969 had reached the highest levels of the atmosphere from jet exhausts. By 1989, the air of the whole world—thanks to the law of the diffusion of gases, which no White House Office of Science and Technology had thought to repeal—was multiply ionized and loaded with poisons ranging from simple industrial gases like sulfur dioxide to constantly recomplexing hydrocarbons, and emphysema had become the principal cause of death, followed closely by lung cancer. Skin cancer, too, was rising in the actuarial tables, in incidence though not in mortality; the wide and beautiful sky had become a sea of carcinogens.

  Masks were introduced, but of course nobody could stop breathing and emitting carbon dioxide. In 1980 there were 4,500 million human carbon dioxide emitters on the Earth—very few of other species—and so much of the world had been paved over, or turned into desert, that the green plants had long lost the battle to convert the gas into oxygen and water vapor. The burning of fossil fuels, begun in prehistory among the peat bogs, might have fallen off with the invention of nuclear power, but the discovery in 1968—when nuclear power was still expensive to exploit, and which produced wastes so long-lived and so poisonous that people had the rare good sense to be terrified of them while it was still early enough to cut down on their production—of the Alaskan oil field, the fourth largest in history, aborted the nuclear boom and produced a new spurt in burning. The breathers, in the meantime, continued to multiply; by 1989 nobody knew what the population of the world was—most of the statistics of the increase had been buried under the statistics for the increment of garbage.

  Carbon dioxide is not a poisonous gas, but it is indefatigably heat-conservative, as are all the other heavy molecules that had been smoked into the air. In particular, all these gases and vapors conserved solar heat, like the roof of a greenhouse. In due course, the Arctic ice cap, which had been only a thin sheet over a small ocean, an ocean furthermore contained in a basin also heat-conservative, melted, followed by the Greenland cap. Now the much deeper Antarctic cap was dwindling, dumping great icebergs into the warming Antarctic Ocean. Great fog banks swept around the world, accelerating the process and chelating the heavier gas molecules as they moved, making them immune from attack by oxygen, ozone, or the activating effects of sunlight. The fogs stank richly of tars and arsenes, and were thicker and yellower than any London had seen in the worst years before the Clean Air Act had been passed.

  And the ice continued to melt. Sea level in 1989 was twenty-one feet higher than it had been in 1938; every harbor in the world had been obliterated, every shoreline changed, and the brokers of lower Manhattan had been forced to learn to paddle. The worldwide temperature rose; more bergs fell into the Ross Sea; the last Ice Age was over.

  Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee....

  For some reason, Alex awoke just before dawn. Disgruntled, he went to the head, had a long drink of water, took a tranquilizer, roughed up Splat!’s fur along the back until he purred with contented indignation and bit him, peeked lubriciously at Juliette in her cocoon, constructed what replies he might have made to Fantasia at lunch had he not been taken so completely aback, and finally lay down again; but nothing served—he was completely alert.

  Then he remembered: Today was the day of his appointment with Secretary de Tohil Vaca, and the beginning of their test of power. Suddenly Fan’s irresponsible hypothesizing, and the poses, hobbies, crotchets, and vapors of the rest of the coterie, suddenly even Juliette herself, fell into perspective. He was back in the real world, where nothing ever changed unless you made it change, and never mind those who merely talked. Reality was what counted.

  Swinging out of the warm bed with some reluctance, he sat on the edge until his hypotensive dizziness had passed, then washed, shaved, dressed, turned off the alarm—no point in having it wake Juli, since he had anticipated it—and kissed her on the end of the nose. She murmured disturbedly, “Lemonade,” as though she were having some peculiarly private dream, and resettled herself. She still exuded that unpublic, compound, organic fragrance which was her gift to him, and for a moment he felt a desperate urgency to pull off all his clothes and other arrangements and lie beside her again; but at the same moment of the impulse, he happened to see the teddy bear on her dresser, which, though it made her seem more pathetic, and the room even tinier, also re-reminded him of the substantial world.

  Well, but he would protect her. Part of protecting her was the matter of coping with the real world. He checked the contents of his briefcase carefully in the false dawn, and then left, closing the door very quietly.

  Some forty-five seconds later he was fumbling with the key before her door and fuming with loveless indignation. He had forgotten to feed the goddam cats.

  Juli’s apartment was on the fifth and only habitable floor of what had once been a moderately expensive apartment building in the Chelsea district. Occasionally, the landlord managed to rent out a fourth-floor flat at reduced rates to some gullible and desperate family, on the showing that even high tide did not reach that far; but they seldom lasted a month, or until the first storm sent waves breaking over their windowsills.

  Luckily, there was no wind today, nor even any rain. Alex put on his mask, settled his stretch homburg carefully atop it, and went down the hallway. Rats scurried and squeaked ahead of him. Juli let the cats roam free in the building after she got up, but the rats always came back; unlike the cats, they could swim.

  The canoe was lashed to the balcony of the fire escape, swung on davits, an arrangement kindly rigged by Fantasia; Alex himself could not so much as tie a knot without getting his forefinger caught in it. The tide was down today, and after settling himself in the canoe, he took a full five minutes lowering it gingerly to the greasy surface of the water. Once he had cast loose, however, he paddled up Eighth Avenue with fair skill and speed, an ability which was a by-product—not achieved without many spills—of the affair with Juli.