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you, and pretty soon you don’t even think about it anymore.
    The essential thing is to survive. If you mean to last here, you must have a way of earning money, and yet there are few jobs left in the old sense of the word. Without connections, you cannot apply for even the humblest governmentposition (clerk, janitor, Transformation Center employee, and so on). The same holds true for the various legal and illegal businesses around the city (the Euthanasia Clinics, the renegade food operations, the phantom landlords). Unless you already know someone, it is pointless to ask any of these people for work. For those at the bottom, therefore, scavenging is the most common solution. This is the job for people with no job, and my guess is that a good ten to twenty percent of the population is engaged in it. I did it myself for a while, and the facts are very simple: once you begin, it is nearly impossible to stop. It takes so much out of you, there is no time left to think of doing anything else.
    All scavengers fall into one of two basic categories: garbage collectors and object hunters. The first group is considerably larger than the second, and if one works hard, diligently sticking to it twelve or fourteen hours a day, there is an even chance of making a living. For many years now, there has been no municipal garbage system. Instead, the city is divided up by a number of private garbage brokers—one for each census zone—who purchased the rights from the city government to collect garbage in their areas. To get work as a garbage collector you must first obtain a permit from one of the brokers—for which you must pay a monthly fee, sometimes as much as fifty percent of your earnings. To work without a permit is tempting, but it is also extremely dangerous, for each broker has his own crew of inspectors to patrol the streets, making spot checks on anyone they see collecting garbage. If you can’t produce the proper papers, the inspectors have the legal right to fine you, and if you can’t pay the fine, you are arrested. That means deportation to one of the labor camps west of the city—and spending the next seven years in prison. Somepeople say that life in the camps is better than it is in the city, but that is only speculation. A few have even gone so far as to get themselves arrested on purpose, but no one has ever seen them again.
    Assuming that you are a duly registered garbage collector and that all your papers are in order, you earn your money by gathering up as much as you can and taking it to the nearest power plant. There you are paid so much money per pound—a trivial amount—and the garbage is then dumped into one of the processing tanks. The preferred instrument for transporting garbage is the shopping cart—similar to the ones we have back home. These metal baskets on wheels have proved to be sturdy objects, and there is no question that they work more efficiently than anything else. A larger vehicle would become too exhausting to push when filled to capacity, and a smaller one would require too many trips to the depot. (A pamphlet was even published on this subject a few years back, which proved the accuracy of these assumptions.) As a consequence, these carts are in great demand, and the first goal of every new garbage collector is to be able to afford one. This can take months, sometimes even years—but until you have a cart, it is impossible to make a go of it. There is a deadly equation buried in all this. Since the work brings in so little, you rarely have a chance to put anything aside—and if you do, that usually means you are depriving yourself of something essential: food, for example, without which you will not have the strength to do the work necessary to earn the money to buy the cart. You see the problem. The harder you work, the weaker you become; the weaker you are, the more draining the work. But that is only the beginning. For even if you manage to obtain a cart, you must be vigilantabout