Chapter 2 – The Planets Are for the Prosperous
“I can still see some of the graffiti up towards the very top of the middle, Kyle! And there’s still a little more paint staining a few of the letters! You’re going to have to hurry to clean it all before the lottery’s satellite passes overhead!”
Winston Clayton didn’t enjoy shouting at Kyle as the adolescent boy scampered about the billboard’s narrow platform in a hurried, almost frantic, effort to remove any trace of the vandalism the people of the Allentown housing stack had discovered that morning. The vandals, perhaps intruders from a housing stack who were as desperate to lift off of Earth as was anyone who called Allentown home, had struck the very day the lottery’s satellite was scheduled to fly far overhead, with its cameras clicking to determine which housing tower best proved its inhabitants deserved a shot to rise into the heavens. More likely, Winston feared, that graffiti was the work of the Libertines, another sign that the sinister organization continued to increase its influence within the housing stack.
Regardless of the vandalism’s culprit, Winston realized he couldn’t allow his worries to push Kyle too hard. The boy didn’t wear any safety rigging, and Winston flinched as the boy teetered for a second while stretching from the top of the platform’s railing to reach a splotch of the cerulean blue paint marring the sign. The billboard perched atop a very long pole that extended all the way up between the sixth and seventh stories of the housing stack, and Winston needed no mathematics to recognize Kyle wouldn’t survive any fall from the height. What would Kyle’s parents, Norm and Maureen, think of Winston if they learned he had been the one who gave Kyle permission to scale that billboard’s ladder to wash away at a vandal’s paint? Would they ever forgive him if they heard him urging their son to hurry in such dangerous work upon that platform?
Ralph Washington, perhaps the oldest man living in the Allentown housing stack, glanced at the ancient wristwatch ticking at his wrist and grumbled.
“That young man’s going to have to hurry.” Ralph cupped his hands to his mouth. “We’re running out of time, Kyle!”
Winston glared at Ralph. “Are you trying to push him off that platfrom? Kyle was the only one of any of us brave enough to climb that ladder, and you want to hurry him off of the side?”
“Don’t think that I wouldn’t have gladly volunteered.”
Winston rolled his eyes. “Yeah, Ralph, I know. Only your knees hurt too badly on account of the arthritis, on account that, just like the rest of us in our stack, you can’t afford the surgery to get them replaced.”
Ralph scowled. “I’m not ashamed of it.”
“Listen, I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. I’m just saying we need to be careful that we don’t push Kyle too hard.”
Ralph sighed. “That satellite’s certainly not going to slow down for him. That satellite’s going to be clicking its cameras in only a few more minutes.”
Up on the platform, Kyle’s foot slipped in another stretch towards the graffiti. The boy regained his balance, but not before kicking his pale of suds and water onto the ground. Winston thanked the Maker that it hadn’t been Kyle who toppled from the billboard onto the piles of sheet metal and twisted rebar waiting below the platform. The boy was doing all he could to clean the sign, but Winston realized the boy was never going to reach high enough to erase all of the vandal’s handiwork.
“You better climb back down, Kyle!” Winston shouted. “You’ve done all you could, and the rest of us are just going to have to live with it.”
Ralph grumbled. “That graffiti isn’t going to help our chances of making it into the final hopper for this month’s lottery selection.”
“I know, but I’m not going to make Kyle pay for it.”
“Forgive me for sounding cruel,” Ralph relented, “but I still remember what this world looked like before they ever built a single housing stack, before this sea of junk showed up to surround our apartment tower. I can remember what most of this ruin looked like before it was tossed out to rust. You’re just going to have to ignore an old man who too badly wants to see some new glimmer up in those stars before he dies.”
“I know, Ralph.”
“Why do men do such things?”
Winston sighed. “The world’s become a desperate, Ralph, and men turn vengeful after they lose hope.”
Winston’s heart rate returned to normal when Kyle returned safely to the ground. The vandal delivered a cruel stroke when he tossed his paint on the billboard perched outside of the Allentown housing stack. Kyle was forced to scrub very hard to remove splotches of the bright, blue paint from that photo showing a trio of young, tan and sexy women soaking up the sun on some alien seashore discovered in the stars. Winston could see how Kyle’s cleaning brush had pulled color away from the sign’s underlining photograph, creating ugly and pale blemishes across the billboard’s original color. He would type up a letter to the lottery offices, and if he worded it just right, perhaps they would be kind enough to replace that tarnished billboard with a new one. How long had it been since the lottery office had given the Allentown housing stack a new sign? Winston could no longer remember whatever scene preceded that photograph of that exotic world currently set atop of that tall pole.
Sadly however, there was nothing more that could be done about that billboard before the satellite flew overhead.
Kyle hurried to Winston. “You should’ve shouted something at me, Mr. Clayton. I didn’t realize I was taking off the original paint.”
“You did your best,” Ralph winked.
“And what if the lottery throws us out of the drawing on account that sign looks like such a mess? What if they think our tower looks too cluttered to hold prosperous people?”
Winston gripped the boy’s shoulder. “Then there’s always next month’s lottery. Don’t worry. The letters still look great.”
Bold letters shaped in reflective paint stretched across every billboard erected next to every housing stack proclaimed in sans-serif font a slogan devised to give hope to the desperate: “The Planets Were for the Prosperous.” Native Earth might well be spent, and no science or miracle might ever resurrect the old home from its grave. Population might have spiraled beyond bounds, so that hunger expanded more quickly than the seas of junk that accumulated outside of every housing stack. Opportunity, employment, wealth and comfort might’ve been for decades reserved to those born within the modern, air-conditioned marvels of the domes that the fortunate among humankind called home. Yet hope still remained in the planets daily discovered in the heavens. Modern physics had unlocked the power of faster-than-light travel, and the incredible new star-jumping engines brought the most distant of stars within grasp. Those who lived in the crowded and stinking housing stacks only needed to keep the faith. They only needed to lift up their chins. By taking pride in the seas of waste and junk they inherited from their grandparents, those of the stacks might prove that they deserved a world of their very own in the colonies quickly being established in that night sky teeming with so many stars.
Old Ralph held up a hand, and everyone gathered outside the housing stack, tending to the debris encircling the Allentown housing stack as best as they could, stopped their efforts and went quiet.
And far, far overhead, a satellite clicked its photographs of the piece of real estate Winston, Ralph and Kyle called home.
“It’s beyond us now,” Ralph sighed. “The satellite won’t be back around for another month.”
Winston shrugged. “All we can do is wait.”
“At least we had the trash looking pretty good,” Kyle winked.
“I’ll kill the next person I see wearing the patch of the Libertines,” Ralph snarled.
“We don’t know they were responsible,” offered Winston.
“Of course they were responsible,” Ralph responded. “You think someone walked all the ground separating us from the nearest housing stack, through all that trash, during the night? You know as well as me that this w
as an inside job, that the Libertines in our housing stack are responsible for it.”
Winston hated the Libertines as much as anyone else in Allentown. That group of malcontents was as old as the lottery; for each monthly contest produced far more losers than it did winners, and Winston supposed it was only natural for the disappointment felt by such losers to grow into a stronger sense of discontentment. The Libertines recruited those living within the stacks who grew angrier each time the lottery failed to name them as winners, so that their ranks swelled with the heartbroken who could no longer bear to sit in front of their radios each month to hear another housing stack again named winner of another waiting world. The Libertines feasted on despair. They claimed each lottery was a fixed contest, that the lottery’s ultimate aim had far more to do with purging the Earth of swelling numbers of hungry and poor than it had anything to do with spreading humankind into the universe. The Libertines claimed that the wealthy bluebloods in their air-conditioned domes were using the lottery to protect the status they had earned through no other means than birth. The Libertines claimed that the lottery office didn’t care at all about how well a housing stack’s population cleaned and organized their courtyards and junk piles. The Libertine’s cared not about settling alien worlds teeming with potential. They viewed the entire business as a ruse, a scam, which only guaranteed that the poor would remain subservient up to the bitter end. The Libertine’s true goal was to insure that everyone suffered the same amount of pain as Earth finally withered.
Winston Clayton couldn’t imagine a more depressing wish.
“Maybe they are, Ralph,” spoke Winston, “but it’s always easier to destroy than it is to create, and all those planets out there are waiting for builders. Old man, do you still have one of those antique cameras?”
Ralph nodded. “What do you need it for?”
Winston smiled. “It’s going to help us get a new billboard from the lottery office. I want to provide some pictures to make sure the lottery sees all we’ve done around our housing stack. I doubt they can really appreciate it all from their satellites way up on high.”
“It’s a wonderful idea,” Kyle added.
“Then just be patient while my old knees hobble to fetch it. The elevator’s out again, so thank the stars my apartment’s no higher than the fourth floor.”
The ugly and square camera Ralph returned with was one of old Earth’s instant models. Ralph fiddled with some levels, and he grunted softly as he shook the camera, trying to determine whether batteries or imps powered the device. He pressed his eye to the viewfinder and centered Kyle into the frame before poking at the orange button on top of the black device. An internal mechanism clicked, and the camera spit out a glossy square of featureless paper.
Ralph shrugged. “I suppose it’s busted. Looks like I took a picture of smoke.”
“No. Wait a moment.” Kyle’s quick fingers snatched the photograph. “I think there’s something rising to the surface. Let me try shaking it.”
The men gasped as the shadows and details of Kyle’s face appeared to magically form in the glossy paper’s sheen.
Winston’s eyes widened. “The old world must’ve been a very rich one if these types of devices were commonplace.”
“It truly was,” Ralph whispered.
Winston accepted the camera from Ralph, and the three friends turned away from the lottery’s billboard and focused their attention onto the junkyard of rubbish surrounding the Allentown housing stack. No one among the stacks had ever written an official history explaining how the world of apartment towers came to dot the landscape, always surrounded by piles of rusting metal and teetering litter. Most who lived in the stacks assumed that the first families forced to leave their homes in order to resettle in a housing stack had carried all they could to their new home, and that those families had held no other option upon arriving other than to abandon their refuse at the foot of those towers when their new quarters proved too cramp to hold most of their possessions. Dead cars and trucks swayed in piles. The combustible engines from their wreckage gathered in another mound. Dark, lifeless television screens stood about the weeds like tombstones. Bedsprings and appliances shaped a maze of sharp twists and turns. Tin cans and glass bottles crunched beneath one’s boot heel, while faded clothing fluttered upon the rebar that remained to mark where an old build had stood.
As did so many doomed to be born outside of the wealthy domes, the people of the Allentown stack did their best to prove they were a prosperous people by doing what they might to transform the old wreckage surrounding their tower into some semblance of order and art. The tower’s best illustrators used cans of spray-paint found in the trash to draw colorful murals on the steel shipping containers scattered about the stack’s courtyard. Children loved to spend mornings carefully picking out shards of colorful glass from the trash so that they could glue the pieces together into mosaics of rabbits, frogs and cardinals that had long gone extinct in their world. Men gathered metal and reshaped it with flame into the shapes of artificial trees filled with clamoring wind chimes. Chunks of concrete were repositioned into walkways that provided a safer and more direct route through old Earth’s discarded ruin.
Though no official representative had ever traveled to any housing stack to explain the rules governing the lottery contest, most everyone, save for the Libertines, believed that cleaning the trash surrounding the apartment buildings improved a housing stack’s odds of being chosen to lift into the stars. The new planets, with all that clean air and water, required prosperous people to conduct their development, and what better way was there for the people of a tower to display their industry than through the organization of the old world’s heaping trash? Why else would the lottery float their satellite overhead if not to survey the cleaning efforts to help decide which housing stacks deserved the best chances of being granted a new world?
“Make sure you get a few pictures of Irene Landry’s tent city,” Kyle pointed at a dozen green and red tents rising out from a clearing in the rubble. “She’s salvaged all that fabric from old dresses uncovered in the rubble. And lots of folks say that its more comfortable sleeping within a tent than it is within an apartment.”
Winston clicked the camera’s shutter button, and the box hurled a new square to Ralph, who shook the paper until an image coalesced just below the surface.
“And don’t forget the still Abe Millstadt constructed from discarded pipes,” Ralph offered. “The moonshine’s not too bad as long as you drink it slowly.”
“There’s Niles Simonton’s crow sculpture made of reshaped steel,” Winston pointed out.
The treasures found in that ruin surprised the three men. Winston snapped a photograph each time Ralph and Kyle pointed at a new curiosity - from Ian Wheeler’s blinking pinball machines to Esther Williams’ ice cream churns. But too soon for any of the men’s preference, the camera emptied of paper and would vomit no more photographs to assist in Winston’s efforts to secure a replacement lottery billboard. Thus they returned to Ralph’s fourth-story apartment to look at the collected images before the lottery announced what housing stack won that month’s planetary lottery.
“What do you think, Winston? Do we have what it’s going to take to convince the lottery to give us a closer look?”
“I can’t say, Ralph.” Winston gazed at a photograph and wondered how Macy Lowe ever learned how to reshape so much cardboard into such elegant swans and cranes. “But I think the photos will earn us a new billboard if there’s a shred of justice remaining in this world.”
“I hope you’re right,” Kyle added. “I’ll dream all night about what kind of alien world we might see on a new billboard.”
A few hours later, Ralph cursed at the knobs of his antique radio until the music of the lottery office’s brass band filled the apartment. Winston clicked away at his formal petition for a replacement billboard behind a manual typewriter that hammered crooked letters, while Kyle leaned out of the apartment window with an
antenna to assist with the radio’s reception. A collective groan echoed through the housing stack’s halls as a voice from the lottery announced that the newest planet prepared for colonization would be rewarded to a apartment complex named New Trenton.
Ralph switched off his radio rather than listen to any of the following celebratory music.
“I suppose we couldn’t realistically expect to win this time around,” Ralph sighed, “not with our billboard in the shape it was.”
Kyle hopped back into the room. “It’ll be fine, Ralph. We’ve made real steps today towards improving our chances. Winston’s petition and those photographs are going to show the lottery office that we’re a very prosperous people.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Ralph.
“He’s right,” Winston nodded. “Sooner or later, the planets come to the prosperous.”
Ralph smiled. “I only hope I live long enough to see a planet come to us.”
Dreams of alien landscapes visited those friends that night, dreams so vivid that they could feel and taste the ocean spray of an alien shore, dreams so vivid they could smell the scent of an extra-terrestrial forest. Earth was a wasted and ruined place, but all three believed it a place they would not have to call home much longer. Justice would not be denied within the heavens. Maybe next month, or maybe next year, their housing stack would be called to take its turn colonizing the stars.
* * * * *