Alongside Night

Elliot Vreeland is seventeen, and his New York is losing its money. A transit strike has taken the medallion cabs off the streets, and one evening he comes home to find his family gone without a note. J. Neil Schulman's novel, first published by Crown in 1979 and cited here from the Pulpless.Com thirtieth anniversary PDF of 2009, follows his search into an organized underground economy. The best reason to read it is that the underground has to work in plain view: each time Elliot pays, signs, registers or passes a guard, an institution shows how it would handle the job.

Payments show the breakdown first. An unlicensed cab driver wants two thousand blues for a crosstown ride. Once Elliot's search carries him into a hidden market complex called Aurora, breakfast goes onto a photo badge in gold cents. The complex's bank buys his paper at its estimate of Monday's rate, the earliest day it can sell, which shrinks his remaining cash to the price of a light lunch. When he asks how he can trust the bank, the officer concedes that long dealing is the best proof and offers an auditor's report from an arbitration group or inquiry with overseas correspondent banks. Schulman hands the depositor checks to run and leaves solvency unproven.

The same arbitration group appears earlier, because the Cadre that guards Aurora will not even talk to Elliot until he signs a general submission to arbitration. The arbitrators stand independent of the Cadre, and reciprocal jurisdiction between arbitration groups binds every submitter to every other. Awards bite through exclusion, since a party who defies one faces boycott and ostracism across the countereconomy. The government wants a channel for its own claims against the Cadre, with hearings held in countries without extradition treaties, yet the Cadre can collect little beyond the small compliance bond each side posts, because officials would invoke sovereign immunity and the government would refuse higher stakes. Traders who need the network fear its boycott; a state that can live without the network has little reason to.

Privacy in Aurora works through permissions. Elliot's guide tells him to use another name because Vreeland is too sensitive at the moment, and to learn no more Cadre business than directly concerns him. Registration then takes an hour at a terminal, until the computer seems to know more about him than he does, under a bonded assurance of confidentiality against any nonauthorized source; his palm print and photograph go onto a badge that opens his room and fails at the restricted elevator floors. The working name keeps the sensitive surname out of circulation while the Cadre holds the full record behind it, bound by that promise. Need-to-know binds Elliot, and his contract provides for lapses, letting the Cadre confine him for a capped period should he endanger its secrets.

The most careful restraint falls on defense. Aurora's merchants have delegated to the Cadre the monitoring of goods and communications entering and leaving, to keep the location secret, and they guard against that power by barring Cadre personnel from their trading floor and keeping armed guards of their own. In its own corridors the Cadre runs checkpoints where guards with Tasers screen arrivals and turn back stray explorers. Arbitrators and protectors are different actors, and the merchants who depend on the Cadre keep a force answerable to them. Schulman presses further in his 1979 talk printed after the novel, listing a centralized Cadre as a danger to liberty beside the necessity of separating courts from protection agencies, asking whether his Cadre is a protection agency or a government, and leaving the answer to readers.

All this institutional detail slows the plot. Explanation arrives as dialogue, an adult walking Elliot through a document while he interrupts to ask how the next piece works, and the method suits a reader who likes arguments staged as conversation. Between those talks the book runs as an adventure: Elliot travels sealed in a padded trunk with air tanks, and a teenage romance grows while he and another newcomer explore floors they lack clearance to enter. The 2009 text carries later touches, among them a father who distrusts email and anonymous remailers, so its details are not all 1979 forecasts. Separate afterwords by Samuel Edward Konkin III and J. Kent Hastings follow Schulman's novel, and the edition circulates as an archived PDF under an all rights reserved notice.

The underground functions because Schulman built it to function, so its success shows what such institutions would need and leaves open whether people could sustain them or whether any real state faces the collapse he imagines. Read the novel for the questions its encounters make concrete: what a depositor should demand of a bank whose best proof is its own record, and how a market that enforces judgments by exclusion should treat a party it cannot exclude.