ten I went to New York City almost respectably, in a cheap front-office suit, aboard a tourist rocket, steerage class. Above me the respectable Costa Rican consumers oohed and ahed at the view from the prism windows or anxiously counted their pennies, wondering how far they’d take them in the pleasures for sale by the colossus of the North. Below decks we were a shabbier, tougher gang, but it was no labor freighter. We had no windows, but we had lights and vending machines and buckets. A plant protection man had made a little speech to us before we loaded: “You crumbs are going North, out of Costa Rican jurisdiction. You’re going to better jobs. But don’t forget that they are jobs. I want each and every one of you to remember that you’re in hock to Chlorella and that Chlorella’s claim on you is a prior lien. If any of you think you can break your contract, you’re going to find out just how fast and slick extradition for a commercial offense can be. And if any of you think you can just disappear, try it. Chlorella pays Burns Detective Agency seven billion a year, and Burns delivers the goods. So if you crumbs want to give us a little easy exercise, go ahead; we’ll be waiting for you. Is everything clear?” Everything was clear. “All right, crumbs. Get aboard and good luck. You have your assignment tickets. Give my regards to Broadway.” We slid into a landing at Montauk without incident. Down below, we sat and waited while the consumers on tourist deck filed out, carrying their baggage kits. Then we sat and waited while Food Customs inspectors, wearing the red-and-white A&P arm bands, argued vociferously with our stewards over the surplus rations-
four of us had died on the trip, and the stewards, of course, had held out their Chicken Little cutlets to sell in the black market. Then we sat and waited. Finally the order came to fall out in fifties. We lined up and had our wrists stamped with our entry permits; marched by squads to the subway; and entrained for the city. I had a bit of luck. My group drew a freight compartment. At the Labor Exchange we were sorted out and tagged for our respective assignments. There was a bit of a scare when it came out that Chlorella had sold the contracts on twenty of us to I. G. Farben -nobody wants to work in the uranium mines-but I wasn’t worried. The man next to me stared moodily as the guards cut out the unlucky twenty and herded them off. “Treat us like slaves,” he said bitterly, plucking at my sleeve. “It’s a crime. Don’t you think so, Mac? It violates the essential dignity of labor.” I gave him an angry glare. The man was a Consie, pure and simple. Then I remembered that I was a Consie too, for the time being. I considered the use of the handclasp, and decided against it. He would be worth remembering if I needed help; but if I revealed myself prematurely he might call on me. We moved on to the Chlorella depot in the Nyack suburbs. Waste not, want not. Under New York, as under every city in the world, the sewage drains led to a series of settling basins and traps. I knew, as any citizen knows, how the organic waste of twenty-three million persons came water-borne through the venous tracery of the city’s drains; how the salts were neutralized through ion-exchange, the residual liquid piped to the kelp farms in Long Island Sound, the sludge that remained pumped into tank barges for shipment to Chlorella. I knew about it, but I had never seen it. My title was Procurement Expediter, Class 9. My job was coupling the flexible hoses that handled the sludge. After the first day, I shot a week’s pay on soot-extractor plugs for my nostrils; they didn’t filter out all the odor, but they made it possible to live in it. On the third day I came off shift and hit the showers. I had figured it out in advance: after six hours at the tanks, where no vending machines were for the simple reason that no one could conceivably eat, drink, or smoke anything in the atmosphere, the pent-up cravings of the crew kept them on the Popsie-Crunchie-Starrs cycle for half an hour before the first man even thought of a