Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison

and she could see the rivulets of perspiration running down his neck and even the dandruff on his thin hair; being this close to people bothered her. She turned to look at the street. People shuffling by, other cabs moving past the slower-moving tugtrucks with their covered loads. The bar on the corner of Park Avenue had a sign out saying BEER TODAY—2 P.M. and there were some people already lined up there. It seemed a long wait for a glass of beer, particularly at the prices they were charging this summer. There never was very much, they were always talking about grain allotments or something, but in the hot weather it was gone as soon as they got it in, and at fantastic prices. They turned down Lexington and stopped at the corner of Twenty-first Street and she got out and waited in the shade of the building while Tab paid the driver. A hoarse roar of voices came from the stalls in the food market that had smothered Gramercy Park. She took a deep breath and, with Tab close beside her so that she could rest her hand on his arm, she crossed the street.
    Around the entrance were the weedcracker stalls with their hanging rows of multicolored crackers reaching high overhead, brown, red, blue-green.
    “Three pounds of green,” she told the man at the stand where she always stopped, then looked at the price card. “Another ten cents a pound!”
    “That’s the price I gotta pay, lady, no more profit for me.” He put a weight on the balance scale and shook crackers onto the other side.
    “But why should they keep raising the price?” She took a broken piece of cracker from the scale and chewed it. The color came from the kind of seaweed the crackers were made from and the green always tasted better to her, less of the iodiney flavor than the others had.
    “Supply and demand, supply and demand.” He dumped the crackers into the shopping bag while Tab held it open. “The more people there is the less to go around there is. And I hear they have to farm weed beds farther away. The longer the trip the higher the price.” He delivered this litany of cause and effect in a monotone voice like a recording that has been played many times before.
    “I don’t know how people manage,” Shirl said as they walked away, and felt a little guilty because with Mike’s bankroll she didn’t have to worry. She wondered how she would get along on Tab’s salary, she knew just how little he earned. “Want a cracker?” she asked.
    “Maybe later, thanks.” He was watching the crowd and deftly shouldered aside a man with a large sack on his back who almost ran into her.
    A guitar band was slowly working its way through the crowded market, three men strumming homemade instruments and a thin girl whose small voice was lost in the background roar. When they came closer Shirl could make out some of the words, it had been the hit song last year, the one the El Trouba-dors sang.
    “… on earth above her … As pure a thought as angels are … to know her was to love her.”
    The words couldn’t possibly fit this girl and her hollow chest and scrawny arms, not ever. For some reason it made Shirl uncomfortable.
    “Give them a dime,” she whispered to Tab, then moved quickly to the dairy stand. When Tab came after her she dropped a package of oleo and a small bottle of soymilk—Mike liked it in his kofee—into the bag.
    “Tab Will you please remind me to bring the bottles back—this is the fourth one now! And with a deposit of two dollars apiece I’ll be broke soon if I don’t remember.”
    “I’ll tell you tomorrow, if you’re going shopping then.”
    “I’ll probably have to. Mike is having some people in for dinner and I don’t know how many yet or even what he wants to serve.”
    “Fish, that’s always good,” Tab said, pointing to the big concrete tank of water. “The tank is full.”
    Shirl stood on tiptoe and saw the shoals of tilapia stirring uneasily in the obscured depths.
    “Fresh Island ’lapia,” the fish woman