There was a definite note of strain in David’s voice, part wheedling, part defiant. “It’s a man from S. G. & H.”
“And who are S. G. & H. when they’re home?”
“They’re investment bankers. They’re also the people who own all the legislators from Buffalo to Rochester, and the ones who can get the Bed-Stuy money out of committee.”
Feigerman leaned back, the scowl deepening. There was enough tension in David’s voice to make him wish he could see David’s face. But that was doubly impossible—“The man from S. G. & H. wouldn’t be named Gambiage, would he?”
“That’s the one.”
“He’s a goddamn gangster!”
“He’s never been convicted but, yes, I would agree with you, Dad.” The truculence was suppressed, but the wheedling was almost naked now. “All you have to do is listen to him, you know. His people have been buying utility stock options, and naturally he has an interest in Bed-Stuy—”
“I know what that interest is! He wants to own it!”
“He wants a piece of it, probably. Dad? I know how you feel—but don’t you want to get it built?”
Feigerman breathed out slowly. “I’ll see him when he comes in,” he said, and snapped the connection.
If he had only thirty minutes before a very unpleasant task, he needed to get ready for it. He reached to the gadget beside his chair and switched it on. It was his third set of eyes, the only ones that were any good at all over a distance exceeding a few yards. They had another advantage. Feigerman called them his daydreaming eyes, because they were the ones that allowed him to see what wasn’t there—yet.
Feigerman had designed it himself, and the machine on and around his desk had cost more than three hundred thousand dollars—less than half recouped when he licensed it for manufacture. It was not a mass-market item. Even the production models cost more than a hundred thousand, and there were no models which were in any sense portable. The size constraints could not be removed by engineering brilliance; they were built in to the limitations of the human finger.
The heart of the device was a photon-multiplier video camera that captured whatever was before it, located the areas of contrast, expressed them digitally, canceled out features too small to be displayed within its limits of resolution; and did it all twice, electronically splitting the images to produce stereo. Then it drove a pinboard matrix of two hundred by two hundred elements, each one a rounded plastic cylinder thinner than a toothpick—forty thousand pixels all told, each one thrust out of the matrix board a distance ranging anywhere from not at all to just over a quarter of an inch.
What came out of it all was a bas-relief that Feigerman could run his fingers over, as he might gently touch the face of a friend.
Feigerman could, in fact, recognize faces from it, and so could nearly a hundred other blind people well connected enough to be given or rich enough to buy the device. He could even read expressions—sometimes. He could, even, take a “snapshot”—freeze the relief at any point, to study in motionless form as long as he liked. What was astonishing was that even sighted persons could recognize the faces, too; and it was not just faces. Feigerman had no use for paintings on the walls, but if he wanted to “behold” the Rocky Mountains or the surface of the Moon his device had their stereo-tactile images stored in digital form, and a simple command let him trace with his fingers the Donner Pass or walk along the slopes of Tycho.
What he chose to do this morning, waiting for the gangster to show up and ruin his day, maybe even ruin his project!, was to “look out the window.”
For that the electronic camera mounted behind his chair was not good enough. The electronic “pupillary distance” was too small for a stereoscopic image. But he had mounted a pair of cameras high up on the wall of the observation deck of the building, and when he switched over to them all of Bedford-Stuyvesant rippled under his fingers.
What Feigerman felt with his fingers was not really much unlike the surface of the Moon. There were the craters of excavation, for the underground apartment dwellings that would house two hundred thousand human beings and for the garment workshops, the electronic assembly plants and all the other clean, undegrading industries that would give the two hundred thousand people work to do. There were the existing structures—the tenements not yet torn down, the guardhouses atop Nathanael Greene, the derelict factories, the containment shell over the breeder reactor, the Long Island Rail Road lines—a late shoppers’ express came hissing in on its maglev suspension, and the ripple of its passage tickled his fingers. There were the projects begun and the projects now going up—he recognized the slow, steady turn of a crane as it hoisted preformed concrete slabs onto the thermal water basin.
And there were the silent rows of dumpsters and diggers, backhoes and augers, that were not moving at all because of the lack of funds.
De Rintelen Feigerman didn’t count up his years anymore. Now that his wife was a rimey corpsicle somewhere under Inwood no one alive knew the total; but everyone knew that it was a lot of years. There could not be very many more. Feigerman was used to delays. You did not make a career of major construction in the most complicated city in the world without accepting long time overruns. But this one time in all his life he was not patient, for every minute wasted was a minute taken off what had to be a slender reserve.
And this was his masterpiece. East River East was just one more big damn housing development. The Inwood Freezer complex was only a cold-storage plant. Nathanael Greene was just another jail. But Bed-Stuy—
Bed-Stuy was the closest human beings could come to heaven on earth. The original idea wasn’t his; he had ferreted it out from old publications and dusty data chips; somebody named Charles Engelke had described a way of making a small suburban community self-sufficient for energy as far back as the 1970s—but who was interested in suburbs after that? Somebody else had pointed out that the blighted areas of American cities, the South Bronxes and the Detroits, could be rebuilt it new, human ways. But it was de Rintelen Feigerman who put it all together, and had the muscle, the
auteur
prestige, the political connections, the access to capital—had all the things that could make the dreams come true. Solar energy. Solar energy used in a thousand different ways: to heat water in the summer and pump it down into rechargeable lenses of fossil water far under the surface; the new hot water squeezes out the old cool, and the cool water that comes up drives summer air-conditioning. In winter the pumps go the other way, and the hot summer water warms the homes. Solar energy as photovoltaics, for driving electronic equipment. Solar energy as wind, also for generating electricity, more typically for pumping water in and out of the thermal aquifers. Solar energy, most of all, for the thing it was best equipped to do—domestic heating. Feigerman made an adjustment, and under his fingers the vista of Bed-Stuy grew from what it was to what it would be, as his datastore fed in the picture of the completed project.
Even forty thousand pixels could not give much detail in a plan that encompassed more than a square mile. Each element represented something about the size of a truck; a pedestrian, a fire hydrant, even a parked car was simply too tiny to be seen.
But what a glorious view! Feigerman’s fingers rested lovingly on the huge, aerodynamically formed hill that would enclose the surface-level water store and support the wind engines that would do the pumping. The smaller dome for the ice pond, where freezing winter temperatures would provide low-temperature reserves for summer cooling, even for food-processing. The milder slope that hid the great methane digesters—perhaps he loved the methane digesters best of all, for what could be more elegant than to take the most obnoxious of human by-products—shit!—and turn it into the most valuable of human resources—fuel? All the sewage of the homes and offices and factories would come here, to join with the lesser, but considerable, wastes from the men’s prison next to it. The shit would stew itself into sludge and methane; the heat of the process would kill off all the bacteria; the sludge would feed the farms, the methane would burn for process heat. Industries like glass-making, needing the precise heating that gas could produce better than anything else, would find cheap and reliable supplies—meaning jobs—meaning more self-sufficiency—meaning—
Feigerman sighed and brought himself back to reality. At command, the future Utopia melted away under his fingers and he was touching the pattern of Bed-Stuy as it was. The methane generator was still only an ugly hole in the ground next to the prison. The great wind hill was no more than a ragged Stonehenge circle of concrete, open at the top. The idle construction machinery was still ranked along a roadway—
“I didn’t want to disturb you, so I just let myself in, okay?”
The blind man started, twisted in his chair, banged his head against the support for the camera behind him. He was trying to do two things at once, to reach for the sonar crown that would let him see this intruder, to switch the tactile matrix back to the inside cameras so that he could feel him. The man said gently, amusedly, “You don’t need that gadget, Feigerman. It’s me, Mr. Gambiage. We’ve got business to talk.”
Feigerman abandoned the search for the coronet; the camera behind his head had caught the image of his visitor, and Feigerman could feel it under his fingers. “Sit down, Mr. Gambiage,” he said—pointedly, because the man was already sitting down. He moved silently enough! “You’re holding up my money,” he said. “Is that what you want to talk about?”
The image rippled under his fingers as Gambiage made an impatient gesture. “We’re not going to crap around,” he informed Feigerman. “I can get your money loose from Albany, no problem, or I can hold it up forever, and that’s no problem too. On the other hand, you could cost me a lot of money, so I’m offering you a deal.”
Feigerman let him talk. The tactile impression of Gambiage did not tell much about the man. Feigerman knew, because the news reports said so, that Gambiage was about fifty years old. He could feel that the man was short and heavyset, but that his features were sharp and strong. Classic nose. Heavy brows. Stubborn broad chin. But were his eyes mean or warm? Was his expression smile or leer or grimace? Gambiage’s voice was soft and, queerly, his accent was educated under the street-talk grammar. It could even be Ivy League—after all, there was nothing to say that the sons of the godfathers couldn’t go to college. And Feigerman had to admit that the man smelled good, smelled of washed hair and expensive leather shoes and the best of after-shave lotion. He could
hear the faint sound of movement as Gambiage made himself comfortable as he went on talking: could smell, could hear, could feel … could be frightened. For this man represented a kind of power that could not be ignored.
Feigerman had dealt with the mob before—you could not be involved in large construction in America without finding you had them for partners in a thousand ways. The unions; the suppliers; the politicians—the city planners, the building inspectors, the code writers—wherever a thousand-dollar bribe could get a million-dollar vote or approval or license, there the mob was. It did not always control. But it could not be set aside. The ways of dealing with the mob were only two, you went along or you fought. Feigerman had done both.
But this time he could do neither. He couldn’t fight, because he didn’t have time left in his life for a prolonged battle. And he couldn’t go along with what came to nothing less than the perversion of the dream.
“It’s the cogeneration thing,” Gambiage explained. “You make your own power, you cost the utilities a fortune. I’ve got stock options. They’re not going to be worth shit if the price doesn’t go up, and you’re the one that’s keeping the price from going up.”
“Mr. Gambiage, the whole point of the Bed-Stuy project is to be self-sufficient in energy so that—”
“I said we’re not going to crap around,” Gambiage reminded him. “Now we’re going to talk deal. You’re going to change your recommendations. You’ll agree to selling all the power-generating facilities to the utilities. Then I’ll recommend to my friends in Albany that they release your funds, and everything goes smoothly from there on. And I’ll make it more attractive to you. I’ll sell you my stock options for fifty thousand shares for what I paid for them. Thirty cents a share, for purchase at ninety-one and a quarter.”
Feigerman didn’t respond at once. He turned to his data processor and punched out the commands for a stock quotation. As he held the little earpiece to his ear the sexless synthesized-speech voice said: “Consolidated Metropolitan Utilities current sale, eighty-five.”
“Eighty-five!” Feigerman repeated.
“Right,” said Gambiage, and his voice was smiling. “That’s what you cost me so far, Feigerman. Now get a projection with us owning the cogeneration facilities and see what you get. We make it a hundred and ten, anyway.”
Feigerman didn’t bother to check that; there would be no point in lying about it. He simply punched out a simple problem in arithmetic: $110—(91.25 + .30)—say 1 percent for brokers’ fees, × 50,000. And the voice whispered, “Nine hundred thirteen thousand two hundred seventy-five dollars.”
He was being offered a bribe of nearly a million dollars.
A million dollars. It had been a legacy of less than a tenth of that that had put him through school and given him the capital to start his career in the first place. It was a magic number. Never mind that his assets were already considerably more than that. Never mind that money was not of much use to a man who was already too old to spend what he had. A million dollars! And simply for making a decision that could be well argued as being the right thing to do in any case.