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streets, and in the quieter districts sections of sidewalk would be deserted
for fifty yards or More.
Now, of course, the older buildings had been torn down and replaced by housing
batteries, or converted into apartment blocks. The great banqueting room in
the former City
Hall had been split horizontally into four decks, each of these cut up into
hundreds of cubicles.
As for the streets, traffic had long since ceased to move about them. Apart
from a few hours before dawn when only the sidewalks were crowded, every
thoroughfare was always packed with a shuffling mob of pedestrians, perforce
ignoring the countless 'Keep Left' signs suspended over their heads, wrestling
past each other on their way to home and office, their clothes dusty and
shapeless. Often 'locks' would occur when a huge crowd at a street junction
became immovably jammed. Sometimes these locks would last for days. Two years
earlier Ward had been caught in one outside the stadium, for over forty-eight
hours was trapped in a giganti,'c pedestrian jam containing over o%0o0 people,
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fed by the crowds leaving the stadium on one side and those approaching it on
the other. An entire square mile of the local neighbourhood had been
paralysed, and he vividly remembered the nightmare of swaying helplessly on
his feet as the jam shifted and heaved, terrified of losing his balance and
being trampled underfoot. When the police had finally sealed off the stadium
and dispersed the jam he had gone back to his cubicle and slept for a week,
his body blue with bruises.
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'I hear they may reduce the allocation to three and a half metres,' Rossiter
remarked.
Ward paused to allow a party of tenants from the sixth floor to pass down the
staircase, holding the door to prevent it jumping off its latch. 'So they're
always saying,' he eom-mented.
'I can remember that rumour ten years ago.'
'It's no rumour,' Rossiter warned him. 'It may well be necessary soon. Thirty
million people are packed into this city now, a million increase in just one
year. There's been some pretty serious talk at the Housing Department.'
Ward shook his head. 'A drastic revaluation like that is almost impossible to
carry out. Every single partition would have to be dismantled and nailed up
again, the administrative job alone is so vast it's difficult to visualize.
Millions of cubicles to be redesigned and certified, licences to be issued,
plus the complete resettlement of every tenant. Most of the buildings put up
since the last revaluation are designed around a four-metre modulus - you
can't simply take ha[fa metre off the end of each cubicle and then say that
makes so many new cubicles. They may be only six inches wide.'
He laughed. 'Besides, how canyou live in just three and a half metres ?'
Rossiter smiled. 'That's the ultimate argument, isn't it ?
They used it twenty-five years ago at the last revaluation, when the minimum
was cut from five to four. It couldn't be done they all said, no one could
stand living in only four square metres, it was enough room for a bed and
suitcase, but you couldn't open the door to get in.' Rossiter chuckled softly.
'They were all wrong. It was merely decided that from then on all doors would
open outwards. Four square metres was here to stay.'
Ward looked at his watch. It was 7.3°. 'Time to eat. Let's see if we can get
into the food-bar across the road.'
Grumbling at the prospect, Rossiter pulled himself off the bed. They left the
cubicle and made their way down the staircase. This was crammed with luggage
and packing cases so that only a narrow interval remained around the banister.
On the floors below the congestion was worse.
Corridors were wide enough to be chopped up into single
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.txt cubicles, and the air was stale and dead, cardboard walls hung with damp
laundry and makeshift larders. Each of the five rooms on the floors contained
a dozen tenants, their voices reverberating through the partitions.
People were sitting on the steps above the second floor, using the staircase
as an informal lounge, although this was against the fire regulations, women [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]