Make Room! Make Room! - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Make Room! Make Room! is set in an overpopulated New York City of 1999 (thirty-three years later than the time of writing). Police detective Andy Rusch lives in half a room, sharing it with Sol, a retired engineer who has adapted a bicycle generator to power an old television set and a refrigerator.

When Andy queues for their continually reducing water ration he witnesses a public speech by the "Eldsters", people 65 years and older forcibly retired from work. Pandemonium starts when a nearby food shop has a sale on "soylent" (soya and lentil) steaks. Andy finds that the shop is under attack and being looted.

One of the looters, Billy Chung, a desperately poor boy, grabs a box of soylent steaks which he sells to fund himself as a messenger-boy. His first delivery takes him into a semi-fortified apartment block, complete with the rare luxuries of air conditioning and running water for showers. He delivers his message to a rich racketeer named "Big Mike" and sees Shirl, Mike's concubine. Billy leaves the apartment but hides in the basement, and then later breaks back in for theft. He kills Mike when surprised by him and flees.

While Andy investigates the murder, he becomes enamored of Shirl, and ensures that she is permitted to stay in the apartment until the end of the month. During this month they both live there in luxury and afterwards Shirl moves in with Andy and Sol.

Shirl becomes disappointed with their impoverished lifestyle. Andy attempts to investigate Mike's death despite contending with riots, paperwork, and the chief's trying to spread his meager force to its limit, which makes him irritable. This, in combination with his shame of the life he is now giving Shirl, distances him from her. He therefore becomes obsessed by the idea of capturing Billy Chung.

To evade capture, Billy leaves the part of the city to which he is accustomed, eventually breaking into the abandoned Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he comes to live with Peter, a fatalist hermit eagerly awaiting the new millennium as the end of the world. Soon they are attacked by a small group of homeless people and forced to leave their location, later to find a new home in a discarded car whose previous owner had frozen to death. Here, Peter's stoic acceptance of events frustrates Billy until he decides to return to his family, believing the police will have lost interest in him.

Meanwhile, Sol decides he can no longer remain passive in the face of what he sees as human life's growing crisis, and joins a protest march against the overturning of a legislative bill supporting family planning, in favor of population control as humanity's hope of survival. Sol is injured in a riot at the demonstration, becomes bedridden, catches pneumonia, and eventually dies.

A few days after Sol's funeral, a family takes Sol's living quarters as their own, making Shirl and Andy's life more miserable than before.

Andy stumbles upon Billy Chung and accidentally shoots and kills the boy in the latter's attempt to escape. The police chief therefore demotes Andy. On return to his own quarters, Andy finds Shirl gone.

The story ends with Andy on patrol in Times Square on New Year's Eve, where he glimpses Shirl among rich party-goers. As the clock strikes midnight, Andy encounters Peter, who is distraught that the world has not ended and asks how life can continue as it is; but gives him no answer. The story concludes with the Times Square screen announcing that "Census says United States had biggest year ever, end-of-the-century, 344 million citizens...".