Bing Crosby crooned “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” from flower-shaped speakers, and Bill hummed along as he escorted Elaine along the upper atrium. There was just time for a stroll before the musical at Fleet Hall. Bill had brought Elaine for a Christmas-season outing. Their friend Mariska Lutz was looking after the baby.
“It’s funny about this place,” Elaine murmured, as she and Bill strolled along the balcony walk of Poseidon Plaza, in the neon-bright upper atrium of Fort Frolic. Elaine wore a shiny pink satin dress and Bill wore a white linen suit. Other couples hurried by, dressed up, hair coiffed, faces glowing with laughter. Almost like New York, Bill thought.
“What’s funny about it, love?” he asked. They were passing the entrance to the Sir Prize Games of Chance Casino, with its big knight’s helmet projecting between Sir and Prize. The neon signs seemed to radiate sheer insistence in an enclosed space. There was no sky to put them in perspective.
“Well, I mean—I thought it’d be really different from the surface world. It is, of course, in some ways—but—” She glanced through the windows at the people working the slot machines. “The idea was to bring just the best of the world down with us—but maybe we brought some of the worst too.”
Bill chuckled, tucking her hand under his arm. “That happens when a place is settled with people, love. They bring the worst and best with ’em wherever they go. People’ve got to have some place to let their ’air … their hair down. Got to have their Fort Frolic.”
They went down the stairs to the lower atrium, past Robertson’s Tobaccoria, and she sighed as they passed Eve’s Garden. She looked at it askance. “A strip club was necessary, was it?”
Bill shrugged. “Especially necessary, some would say—with all the men we’ve got here. Men building, working maintenance. Now me, I don’t need any such diversion. I’ve got the best-looking bird in Rapture to admire.”
“Well, don’t expect a strip show.” She batted her eyes at him like a flapper in a movie. “Until we get home I mean.”
“That’s my girl!”
She laughed. “Oh I don’t mean to sound like a bluenose—Let’s get some wine in Sinclair Spirits … or maybe something in the Ryan Club. You’d probably rather have ale…”
“It’s wine for milady! But we’ve got tickets for the show at Fleet Hall, love. Thought we’d have our drinks after.”
“Oh, Fleet Hall! I’ve been wanting to see it. That Footlight Theater place is kind of cramped.”
“Fleet’s big. Mr. Ryan planned for big all through Rapture.”
She glanced quizzically up at him. “You really admire Mr. Ryan, don’t you, Bill?”
“What, me? You know I do! Gave me everything I’ve got, he has. I was installing toilets, love—and he made me a builder of a new world!”
They passed the liquor and drug emporium Le Marquis D’Epoque—which was quite thronged, mostly with young men. He saw someone he knew inside, the rat-faced Stanley Poole, shifting from foot to foot, nervously buying a vial of some narcotic. Bill hurried on, not wanting to talk about the place with his wife—and not wanting to make small talk with the execrable Poole.
The piped music had become Fats Waller jazzily banging out the Jitterbug Waltz. Happy voices echoed from the high spaces of the atrium. People looked a bit ghostly in the reflected light from the neon, but they were happy ghosts, smiling, teasing one another. A young red-haired woman squealed as a young man pinched her. She remembered to slap him, but not very hard.
Bill saw one of Sullivan’s constables, big Pat Cavendish, looking like a hotel dick in his cheap suit and badge, swaggering about, hands in his pockets and gun on his hip, leering at a parcel of young girls.
Elaine brightened when they came to the Sophia Salon, and Bill resigned himself to standing about with his hands in his pockets as Elaine poked through the finery in the “high fashion” boutique. He bought her a nightgown and a new coat to be delivered to their flat, and then it was time to go back upstairs to Fleet Hall.
They hurried out of the boutique and up the stairs, where Bill spotted the architect Daniel Wales talking to Augustus Sinclair. But the younger Wales was in close conversation with the mercurial businessman and didn’t even look up.
Bill peered up at the ceiling, thinking about watertight integrity, and was pleased to see no sign of leakage. Some parts of Rapture were more scrupulously maintained than others. This one was pampered like a baby’s bottom.
It seemed to Bill that Rapture was thriving: the Atlantic Express rumbled efficiently from one building to another. Shops bustled with business. Rapture’s galleries and atriums glowed with light; its art deco fixtures gleamed with gold leaf. Crews of workmen kept the carpets clean, picked up trash, and repaired cracks in bulkheads. Looking down at the lower atrium, the increasing crowd, and the shining signs, Rapture seemed fully alive, thrumming with economic brio. And just maybe Mr. Ryan, the Wales brothers, Greavy—just maybe they couldn’t have done it without Bill McDonagh.
Bill and Elaine reached Fleet Hall, pausing to admire the grand blue-and-white sign. The archway was tricked out with radiant lines of white neon. A buzz of mingled conversations came from inside. Bill pressed Elaine’s arm to him and bent and kissed her cheek, and they went in.
The big, ornate concert hall was thronged, and they had seats in the orchestra section. The lights went down, the band struck up, and the musical Patrick and Moira commenced. It was a Sander Cohen production, thankfully without Cohen in it, and Elaine was enthralled. Bill found it all rather sentimental and a tad morbid—the play was about a ghostly couple who found each other in the afterlife—but he was happy to be there with Elaine, pleased she was having a good time. She seemed lost here on occasion. Now—he felt like they’d really found their place in the world … deep under the sea.
Heat Loss Monitoring, Hephaestus
1950
Bill almost had the heat monitor adjusted. Temperature control was just one of Rapture’s numerous points of vulnerability, one of many maintenance linchpins that had to be constantly adjusted to keep the city from breaking down. The city under the sea had been settled for just two years—a little less—but there was a great deal of repair to be done already.
Caught between fire and ice, me, Bill thought.
A certain amount of the cold water outside Rapture was drawn in through sea vents to modify the heat from the volcanic gases used to drive the turbines—water in one was cold enough to kill a man from hypothermia in under a minute; the water in the other hot enough to boil him. Bill had witnessed both tragedies.
Bill turned wheels to balance the mix of frigid coolant and volcanically heated water. He glanced out the window into the sea, where a complex of transparent pipes glowed dull red, conveying mineral-rich heated water from geothermal sources. Bill could faintly smell sulfur, though they tried hard to filter it all out. Still and all, the air in Rapture was usually cleaner than it was in New York City. Clean air was provided by gardens like Arcadia and the intake vents in the lighthouse structures.
The heat meters were bobbing just right now. He had the balance. Pablo Navarro was working at the other end of the apparatus-crowded room with Roland Wallace and Stanley Kyburz.
“That Navarro is always looking for a leg up,” Wallace grumbled, coming over. “Wants to be head engineer of the section, don’t you know.”
“That’s Greavy’s call, mate. But I don’t know as Pablo keeps at the job hard enough to deserve that title. How’s Kyburz working out?”
“Getting his work done. Good technical know-how. But those Aussies—they’re odd. And he’s the sullen sort, don’t you know.”
“Every Australian I ever knew was a sullen ol’ sod,” Bill said absently, eyeing the meters. “Holding steady so far.”
“Anyhow, there was an intercom buzz for you. Mr. Ryan wants you in Central Control.”
“Should’ve told me before! Right, I’m off.”
Bill checked the meters once more and then hurried out, hoping Elaine would be working in Ryan’s office.
He found Ryan pacing in front of his desk. No sign of Elaine. “Ah, Bill. I sent Elaine home early.”
Bill felt a sudden inner coldness. “Is she all right?”
“Yes, yes,” Ryan said distractedly. “Seemed fine. Wanted to look in on the nanny. Perhaps she came back to work too soon after the baby was born. How is the child?”
“The little one’s right as rain. Smiling and waving ’er arms about like she’s conducting a band…”
“Splendid, splendid…”
Bill hoped Elaine was all right. But she had insisted on getting a sitter and going back to work. She seemed to get cabin fever in the flat. Not easy to take the baby in a stroller through the park in Rapture—a bit of a journey to the small park areas.
“Bill, would you come with me? I have to have a chat with Julie Langford. I’d like your opinion on the new tea garden in Arcadia. And some other things. Plenty to talk about along the way…”
They traversed several passages and then entered a transparent corridor between buildings, sauntering untouched through the sea itself—heat vectored through the floor, protecting them from the North Atlantic’s frigidity. “I’m hearing rumblings in Rapture I don’t like, Bill,” Ryan muttered, pausing to watch a school of bright fish swim frantically by, pursued by an orca
Out there, it’s all as it should be. The big fish eats the smaller fish. Some fish elude predators and thrive. But here … there are those who disturb the balance.”
Bill stepped up beside Ryan, the two of them gazing through the glass like two people chatting at an aquarium. “Rumblings, guv’nor? Which sort? The pipe sort or the people sort?”
“It’s the people—if you want to call them that.” Ryan shook his head and added, “Parasites!,” his mouth twisting sharply with the word. “I thought we could weed them all out. But people are tainted, Bill—there are rumors of union organizers here in Rapture! Unions! In my city! Someone is encouraging them. I’d like to know who … and why.”
“Haven’t heard anything quite like that myself,” Bill remarked.
“Stanley Poole caught some union talk in the tavern. There’s a pamphlet being passed around complaining about ‘unfairness to the workingman of Rapture’…”
“People being tense—they naturally need to blow off steam, guv. Toss around their ideas, freelike. Even some ideas you … we … don’t like, Mr. Ryan. Unions and whatnot. Now, I won’t defend ’em—” he added hastily, “—but there’s a kind of marketplace of ideas too, yeah? People need to be able to trade in ideas…”
“Hm. Marketplace of ideas. Maybe. I try to be tolerant. But unions—we saw where that leads…”
Bill decided not to argue that one. They both silently watched a blue whale swim majestically overhead. Bubbles streamed up from the seabed; lights blinked on in the buildings of Rapture, rising spectrally through the blue-green water. The Wales brothers’ designs mixed sweeping lines with a certain artful intricacy. The architecture seemed calculated to project boldness, even bravado.
A neon sign across the watery way, running vertically down a building that could almost have been from mid Manhattan, read FLEET HALL. Another neon sign glowed in grape-purple to advertise WORLEY’S WINERY, the letters rippling with intervening sea currents. Most of the apartment buildings had square windows, not portholes—for the most part they looked like apartment buildings on dry land. The effect, at times, was more like a sunken Atlantis than a metropolis deliberately built beneath the sea—as if the polar ice caps had melted, flooding Manhattan, its steel and stone canyons immersed in a deep, mysterious watery world without a clear horizon.
“It could be,” Ryan went on at last, “that we were too hasty in some of our recruiting for Rapture. I may have picked some people who were not as likeminded as I’d hoped.”
“Most of our people believe in the Rapture way, Mr. Ryan—there’s plenty of free enterprise in Rapture.” Bill smiled as a stream of bubbles rose a few inches beyond the glass. “It’s bubblin’ with it!”
“You hearten me, Bill. I hope everyone stays busy—competing, carving out their place in our new world. Everyone should branch out, create new businesses! Do you still plan to open a tavern?”
“Right enough I do. Fighting McDonagh’s it’ll be called. After me old man; he was a boxer in his youth.”
“We’ll have a grand-opening party for you!” Ryan looked up, toward the heights of the towers mounting through the sea—hard to see the tops of many of them from here. He took a deep breath, looking pleased, seeming to buoy into a better mood. “Look at it, rising like an orchestral climax! Rapture is a miracle, Bill—the only kind of miracle that matters! The kind a real man creates with his own two hands. And it should be celebrated every day.”
“Miracles need a lot of maintenance, Mr. Ryan! Thing is, we’re short on people to deal with the sewage, the cleaning, and the landscaping in Arcadia. We got posh types who never suffered worse than a paper cut—but precious few who can dig a ditch or plumb a pipe.”
“Ah. We’ll have to lure men who have the skills we need, then. Find ways to house them. We’ll bring them in, don’t you worry about it. The light attracts the enlightened, Bill!”
Bill wondered how that would work out—bringing ever more blue-collar workers, men who might not take to a place where the guv’nor despised unions. Could be trouble down the road.
“Ah,” Ryan said, with satisfaction. “A supplies sub is coming in…”
They watched the submarine ghost by overhead, its lights glowing against the indigo depths. From here, its lines muted by the depths, the sub looked like a giant creature of the sea itself, another kind of whale. It would be heading to Neptune’s Bounty. Bill watched the sub angle downward for the hangar-sized intake airlock that led up to the wharf and Fontaine’s Fisheries.
“Dunno,” Bill said, “who might be encouraging unions—but I can tell you one person I don’t much trust is that Frank Fontaine.”
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