Make Room! Make Room!

Prologue In December, 1959, The President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, said: "This government . . . will not . . . as long as I am here, have a positive political doctrine in its program that has to do with this problem of birth control. That is not our business." It has not been the business of any American government since that time. In 1950 the United States-with just 9.5 per cent of the world's population-was consuming 50 per cent of the world's raw materials. This percentage keeps getting bigger and within fifteen years, at the present rate of growth, the United States will be consuming over 83 per cent of the annual output of the earth's materials. By the end of the century, should our population continue to increase at the same rate, this country will need more than 100 per cent of the planet's resources to maintain our current living standards. This is a mathematical impossibility-aside from the fact that there will be about seven billion people on this earth at that time and-perhaps-they would like to have some of the raw materials too. In which case, what will the world be like? Part I Monday, August 9, 1999 New York City- -stolen from the trusting Indians by the wily Dutch, taken from the law-abiding Dutch by the warlike British, then wrested in turn from the peaceful British by the revolutionary colonials. Its trees were burned decades ago, its hills leveled and the fresh ponds drained and filled, while the crystal springs have been imprisoned underground and spill their pure waters directly into the sewers. Reaching out urbanizing tentacles from its island home, the city has become a megaloplis with four of its five boroughs blanketing half of one island over a hundred miles long, engulfing another island, and sprawling up the Hudson River onto the mainland of North America. The fifth and original borough is Manhattan: a slab of primordial granite and metamorphic rock bounded on all sides by water,squatting like a steel and stone spider in the midst of its web of bridges, tunnels, tubes, cables and ferries. Unable to expand outward, Manhattan has writhed upward, feeding on its own flesh as it tears down the old buildings to replace them with the new, rising higher and still higher-yet never high enough, for there seems to be no limit to the people crowding here. They press in from the outside and raise families, until this city is populated as no other city has ever been in the history of the world. On this hot day in August in the year 1999 there are-give or take a few thousand-thirty-five million people in the City of New York. Chapter 1 The August sun struck in through the open window and burned on Andrew Rusch's bare legs until discomfort dragged him awake from the depths of heavy sleep. Only slowly did he become aware of the heat and the damp and gritty sheet beneath his body. He rubbed at his gummed-shut eyelids, then lay there, staring up at the cracked and stained plaster of the ceiling, only half awake and experiencing a feeling of dislocation, not knowing in those first waking moments just where he was, although he had lived in this room for over seven years. He yawned and the odd sensation slipped away while he groped for the watch that he always put on the chair next to the bed, then he yawned again as he blinked at the hands mistily seen behind the scratched crystal. Seven. . . seven o'clock in the morning, and there was a little number 9 in the middle of the square window. Monday the ninth of August, 1999-and hot as a furnace already, with the city still imbedded in the heat wave that had baked and suffocated New York for the past ten days. Andy scratched at a trickle of perspiration on his side, then moved his legs out of the patch of sunlight and bunched the pillow up under his neck. From the other side of the thin partition that divided the room in half there came a clanking whir that quickly rose to a high-pitched drone. "Morning. . ." he shouted over the sound, then began coughing. Still coughing he reluctantly stood and crossed the room to draw a glass of water from the wall tank; it came out in a thin, brownish trickle. He swallowed it, then rapped the dial on the tank with his knuckles and the needle bobbed up and down close to the Empty mark. It needed filling, he would have to see to that before he signed in at four o'clock at the precinct. The day had begun.