In addition, Stillman’s entourage had come into collision with Olds, and Halloway now depended more than ever on the mute. Two of Stiliman’s men had tried to break into Olds’ automobile plant, complaining that the models they had ordered from him had not been delivered. For several days Olds had retreated to his rooftop eyrie above the garage at the airport. Without him everything soon began to run down. Halloway drove out to pacify him, and found Olds sitting below the wing of the glider tethered to the roof, calculators flicking in his hands as he brooded to himself. His eyes were gazing at the flights of birds taking off from the reservoirs around the airport, thousands of wild geese moving westwards across the city. Uneasily, Halloway noticed that the cars in his museum were still dusty and untended. One of them, the black Duesenberg, had been savagely attacked, its windows knocked in and upholstery slashed, controls pounded out of recognition by a heavy mallet.
But for a brilliant stroke of Halloway’s, Olds would long since have left. Two months beforehand, he had shown his first irritation with the throngs of youths and teenage girls who were entering the reclamation area. Many of them were idealists like Halloway, repressed by the passivity of the garden communities and eager to help re-start the city. However, an equal number were drifters and misfits, who resented taking orders from Olds and began to mimic him, flashing obscenities on the read-out panels of the pocket calculators they had taken from a business-machines store.
Searching for some way of retaining his hold over Olds, Halloway came up with the suggestion that the mute could own and manage his own automobile plant. The idea had immediately appealed to Olds. In an underground garage near the police-station he and his workforce soon constructed a crude but functioning production line, on which the dozens of cars being re-equipped and re-engined moved along a section of railway line. They entered as little more than wrecks picked up off the street by their prospective owners, and emerged at the far end of the line as fully functioning vehicles. Delighted by this, Olds had agreed to stay on in the city.
In fact, Halloway’s idea worked better than he hoped. The motor-car was the chief commodity of the city, and demand for it was insatiable. Almost every one of the new inhabitants now owned three or four cars, and their chief recreation was driving around the streets of the reclamation area dressed in the latest finery. Parking problems had become acute, and a special task force under Olds was renovating the kerbside meters, an unpopular measure grudgingly accepted only because of the special status of the automobile and the important position it occupied, economically and otherwise, in people’s lives.
Despite these problems, Halloway was satisfied with his achievement. In the four months since the first of the new arrivals had turned up, a genuine microcosm of the former metropolis had come into existence. The population of the city was now two hundred, girls and youths in their late teens and early twenties, emigrants from Garden City and Parkville, Laurel Heights and Heliopolis, drawn from these dozy pastoral settlements to the harsh neon glare that each evening lit up the night sky like a beacon.
By now any new immigrants — some of them, worryingly, little more than children — were rapidly inducted into urban life. On arrival they were interviewed by Halloway, issued with a list of possible jobs, either on Olds’ production line, in the clothing stores and supermarkets, or in any one of a dozen reclamation gangs. The last group, who foraged through the city at large for cars, fuel, food supplies, tools and electrical equipment, in effect represented the productive capacity of the new settlement, but in time Halloway hoped that they would embark on the original manufacture of an ever-wider range of consumer goods. Cash credits (banknote6 franked with Halloway’s name) were advanced to the new recruits against their first week’s pay, with which they could buy the garish clothing, records and cigarettes they seemed to need above all else. Most of the two hundred inhabitants were now heavily in debt, but rather than evict them from their apartments and close the discotheques, bars and amusement arcades where they spent their evenings, Halloway had astutely lengthened the working day from eight to ten hours, enticing them with generous though uneconomic overtime payments. Already, he happily realized, he was literally printing money. Within only a few months inflation would be rampant, but like the crime and pollution this was a real sign of his success, a confirmation of all he had dreamed about.
