Rolltown bh-3

by Mack Reynolds

  Dean Armanruder said testily, “See here, Hardin, the past hundred kilometers and more I’ve several times tried to get in touch with you to give instructions. I couldn’t get you.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Bat said. “I’ve had my screen on Al Castro and Luke Robertson continually so we’d be in instant touch if anything came up.”

  “Well, what did you call me for now?”

  “I suggest we drive all the way through to San Luis Potosi and put as much space between us and our anti-American friends as we can. It’s a fairly big city and listed as having several sites. You could call ahead, to be sure, for reservations for New Woodstock.”

  “How far is it?”

  “Three hundred and twenty kilometers.”

  “That’s a pretty long drag for a mobile town.”

  “Yes, sir, but we’ve got an early start. And I suggest we not stop for lunch.”

  The former magnate said testily, “Is this going to be a recommendation of yours every day, all the way to Peru?”

  Bat said, “No, sir. I’m in no more of a hurry, ordinarily, than anyone else but the sooner we get a good many kilometers between us and Don Caesar and his boys the happier I’ll be.”

  “It seems to me, Hardin, that you’re taking over a good deal of the running of this town.”

  Bat sighed inwardly. “Not deliberately, Mr. Armanruder. But I’m the town cop and we were being threatened.”

  “Well, just remember that New Woodstock is governed by an executive committee elected by the citizens.”

  Bat said, but gently, “Whose decisions have to be passed upon by the assembly of all town adults.”

  “Of course. Very well, Hardin, I’ll put it to the vote, whether to press on all the way to San Luis Potosi and to skip stopping for lunch.” His face faded.

  Bat grunted. He sometimes wondered at his desire to hold down this job. What did he get out of it? Not even a bit of gratitude from such as Dean Armanruder and the open dislike of such as Jeff Smith.

  Bat Hardin wondered who had voted for that worthy to take over Bat’s office. But then it came to him. Whoever the traitor was that had kept Don Caesar and his people informed as to the movements of the town had also wanted Bat out and someone less competent in the crucial office of town police officer. That was an interesting thought.

  San Luis Potosi was the most modern and progressive Mexican city they had as yet seen. Situated, as it was, on the Pan American Highway and the principal route from the States to Mexico City, it was well-equipped with sites for mobile towns. In fact, they spread out far over the countryside and, in area, were actually larger than the city itself, though it would seem doubtful if all the sites were ever completely occupied at one time.

  There were three grades of sites, the smallest, ultra-luxurious with a fine complement of stores, restaurants and even nightclubs and theatres. The least well-equipped was by far the largest and was aimed at mobile towns and cities largely occupied by persons with no other income than their NIT. However, even the accommodations at this site must have seemed exotic to the average Mexican, if the complaints of Don Caesar and his men were to be taken literally.

  Dean Armanruder had called ahead for reservations and had been accepted, in spite of the fact that two other towns were at present parked in San Luis Potosi, evidently, like New Woodstock, on their way through to points further south. Their town, art colony that it was, seldom took on the expense of renting space in sites of the more swank variety. Although some of New Woodstock’s citizens were wealthy, a considerably larger element were on NIT and had to watch expenditures. Here, in San Luis Potosi, they drove to the cheapest site available.

  Bat Hardin, as usual, parked near the administration building and before setting up his own home drifted about the town to see that all was well. Evidently it was. They’d had excellent luck all day with not a single breakdown. The town had kept well together, much more so than usual. New Woodstock’s artists were usually apt to be on the philosophical side and sometimes, on a long haul, the town might be stretched out several hundred kilometers. In fact, often single units or small groups would drop behind for days. It made life a misery for the town policeman who would have preferred more cohesion.

  Bat, sauntering alone, passed Jeff Smith who was setting up his overly large home; overly large in view of its single occupant. Smith’s mobile home wasn’t nearly so big as that of Armanruder or Blake, nor even Sam Prager’s, although the Prager establishment included the workshop, of course.

  Jeff Smith looked up at him and snorted contempt. “Vigilantes,” he said.

  Bat ignored him and went on. He was afraid that the southerner wasn’t going to make out in New Woodstock. Actually, he was sorry. He couldn’t like the man, but Smith was the only musical composer that the art colony boasted and could have been expected to break down, eventually, and have presented some of his work at community affairs.

  All seemed in order, but everyone so tired from the strain of the day and the long drive that it was a matter of a quick evening meal and then to bed. Bat returned to his own home and went through the automatic motions of setting it up.

  He went inside and dialed himself a tequila sour on the automatic bar. He could use the drink; he’d been, through a lot, and had gotten precious little sleep the last couple of nights.

  Glass in hand, he slumped into the most comfortable chair and automatically looked over at his small collection of books. But, the hell with it, he was too tired to read.

  On his phone screen, he dialed the local road map again and checked. Queretaro was the next major city, two hundred and three kilometers to the south. That would probably be their next stop. It was far enough, in that they’d been pushing themselves for the past several days. They had made their decision to make the trek to South America while parked in the vicinity of New Orleans and had kept on the road since then. Some of the younger children, in particular, were getting tired. He supposed that they would make at least a several days’ stop at Mexico City to rest up, make any repairs that had accumulated, shop for major items that might not be available in the smaller cities to the south, and allow time for those who had never seen the Mexican capital before doing some sightseeing. He checked. Oaxaca was a fairly good-sized town but otherwise the next major city to the south of Mexico City was Guatemala, in that country.

  There was a knock on his door and he said, “Come on in.”

  It was Diana Sward, for once wearing a shirt, due to the cool of the Mexican evening.

  She looked about the room and swore, “Damn it, every time I come into a bachelor’s home I notice all over again how much neater you are than a single female. Why don’t you mess it up a little, just in the way of creating an air of comfort?”

  He laughed at that, even as she sank down onto the couch, without invitation, stretching her long shapely legs out before her.

  He didn’t ask her the reason for her visit. It wasn’t the first time Di Sward had dropped in to chat. Alone, as was he, she sometimes spent a couple of hours with him just for the companionship. Diana Sward was a man’s woman, and didn’t particularly have any close feminine friends. There was something in her that the other women didn’t seem to take to. Not that she had active foes in New Woodstock, to any extent, it was just that she wasn’t the type to sit about and exchange gossip with the town’s married women.

  He went over to the bar. “Drink?”

  “Do you have pseudo-whiskey?”

  “No, you can’t have whiskey.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re in Mexico. Drink the local product. In Mexico, drink tequila, mescal or Kahlua.”

  “You’re a hard man, Hardin. What’s Kahlua?”

  “A liqueur based on coffee,” he told her. “And one of the best liqueurs in the world.”

  “Sounds too sweet. What are you drinking?”

  “A tequila sour.”

  “You talked me into it.”

  He dialed another tequila sour and took it
over to her and then returned to his own chair.

  They sipped for a moment in silence. Finally, she said, “Remember that conversation we had about I.Q.?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it. I wonder if the question has ever occurred to anyone, is it desirable to breed for greater intelligence?”

  He scowled at her. “How do you mean, Di?”

  “Well, take greater height. Why is being a six-footer or over desirable? Why is the average height of the Japanese, slightly over five feet, not just as good, or better? Certainly, in the old days when men slugged it out with swords, or when they worked with a shovel or plow, physical size was desired, but why now? We don’t usually think of a man who weighs over two hundred as being in the best of shape, but we seem to have an absolute mania to be over six feet and to have a genius-level I.Q. Why? Has it ever been indicated, not to say proven, that the man with an I.Q. of 150 is happier than one with an I.Q. of 100? The genius, as well as the moron, is a misfit in society. Do we want to be smarter, or happier? If it is the pursuit of happiness that is our primary interest, then perhaps we should not seek, as a race, a high intelligence quotient.”

  Bat thought about it, for some reason slightly irritated. The subject was not a favorite one with him. He said, finally, slowly, “Man is a thinking animal, Di. If it wasn’t for our superior intelligence we never would have gotten out of the caves.”

  “All right. I’m not contending that we ought to breed for morons, just that we also shouldn’t make a fetish of the highest I.Q.s. Back when we were in the caves both intelligence and physical strength were necessary or the individual perished. So our I.Q. was bred up.”

  Bat said, “As a matter of fact, I understand that not only Cro-Magnon but even Neanderthal man had a larger brain than modern man.”

  “All right. But what I meant is, man has largely licked the problems he was confronted with in his infancy. We’ve defeated our animal enemies. We’ve conquered nature, at least to the extent that we can now produce all of our needs in abundance. All right. Isn’t it time we took stock and decided where we want to go from here? We’ve achieved the necessities of life, now shouldn’t we resume the pursuit of happiness?”

  “Whatever that is,” Bat said sourly. “Anyway, it’s a great idea that possibly the average person, with his I.Q. of 100, is just as happy, or possibly happier, than one with 150. The trouble is, under the Meritocracy, I.Q. is what counts. And if you’re ambitious and want to get ahead in present-day society, you’d best have one in the upper brackets.”

  She set her glass down and leaned forward slightly. “That’s what I mean. Maybe Ferd Zogbaum is correct. Maybe this Meritocracy of ours isn’t the end of the line so far as social evolution is concerned, if there’s ever an end.”

  Bat said impatiently, “It’s true that in production today not all jobs require a high intelligence. There are various operations, the sensory-manipulative operations that are involved in handling a power shovel, for instance, which have no appreciable educational or intellectual requirements and which do not lend themselves to automatic processes. But the overwhelming majority of useful jobs today do require high I.Q. and there is simply little place for we who are not particularly bright, to put it bluntly.”

  It was her turn to shake her head in despair. “You still sound like a goddamned professor of something or other to me,” she said. “And here you say you’re subnormal intellectually. But that was the very point I was trying to make.”

  He regarded her, still frowning.

  She said urgently. “Don’t you see? All members of society should be useful members of society. If they aren’t, something snaps sooner or later. Look at the Roman proletariat. At present, under the Meritocracy, things are temporarily going along well enough, perhaps. The people were raised too long in the tradition that it was a good thing to get something for nothing, feather-bedding, and so forth. Beating the rap was admirable; they even idealized bankrobbers and other criminals. But now that the ultimate in pay without work has been reached, the first stirrings of second thought are to be found. I think that instinctively a man strives. He may be seduced away from the desire to work, to strive. He may, but if so it is a temporary thing, as the history of the race goes. Man wants to work and achieve. The so-called fireman sitting in the cab of a locomotive seven hours a day without a single thing to do, since the locomotive is electric, is not a happy man. Certainly, the pay is good, and everybody tells him he is getting away with it, but he isn’t a happy man. If he is, he’s a sick man. If his fellows were contemptuous of him rather than pretending admiration, he’d get himself something else to do.”

  Bat made a gesture of impatience. “But the fact remains that there is no place for us in modern production. A fraction of the people can handle all of the jobs. Maybe it’s not good for the rest of us to sit around, idle, but there’s no alternative.”

  She leaned forward still further, her elbows on her knees and her voice very earnest.

  She said, “Then we’ve got to make some changes. Back before we licked the problems of production of abundance that was, and had to be, the main goal of the race. Food, clothing, shelter, medicine, education, recreation for all, in abundance. But now that we’ve gained the goals, let’s stop a minute and look around. How about the arts, how about the handicrafts? Ours has become a synthetic world, why not devote these surplus energies of ours, devote the leisure time that hangs so heavily, into some of the old virtues? My grandfather mentions that when he was a boy practically everybody played some musical instrument. There was a bandstand in every park and at least one band in every town, no matter how small. Women used to sew, knit, crochet, embroider, make quilts and so forth. Have you ever seen some of those handmade quilts in a museum and compared them with the mass-produced things that we put on our beds today?”

  Bat was chewing away on his lip. He said, “Some people already go into the arts; yourself, for instance. But not everybody has talent. And most are too lazy, if they don’t have to, to bother with doing ceramics, weaving cloth, quilting, or whatever.”

  “Perhaps they are now, but that’s our problem,” she told him. “We’ve got to educate our people to want to do them. Take cooking. Cooking has become automated#longdash#and it tastes like it. Why, the person who could afford decent food a hundred years ago wouldn’t have dreamed of eating the tasteless stuff that we down these days. Never has food been more beautifully packaged, been so adulterated, and tasted so poorly. And music. For all practical purposes, it’s all canned these days. Sometimes I think that a few dozen musicians are turning out all the music for the country. How long has it been since you’ve seen a live musician? How long has it been since you’ve seen live theatre?”

  Bat said doggedly, “It doesn’t make sense in this day for there to be live theatres, employing tens of thousands of actors, when a cast of twenty can entertain fifty million persons at a time over TV.”

  “Like hell it doesn’t,” she said. “That’s exactly the point I was trying to make. I’m beginning to suspect that Ferd is right. Our present society needs a little subverting. What time is it?” She brought her pocket phone from her jeans and dialed for the time.

  “Good Jesus,” she said. “Is it that late? I better get going. I assume we’re off to a fairly early start in the morning.”

  Bat shrugged. “Not necessarily. We’ll probably only go about two hundred kilometers, so there’s no rush to get rolling.” He stood to show her to the door.

  But Diana didn’t return immediately to her own trailer.

  Her sexual binge with Ferd Zogbaum had been possibly the most satisfying she had ever known. It wasn’t just that her lover had been tireless, though heavens knew he was possibly the only man she had ever slept with who had truly satiated her. It was also that they were in rapport. He obviously liked her, was attracted to her, as much as she was to him. It is difficult to prevaricate in bed, in a sexual relationship, or, at least, she had always thought so.
She knew, instinctively, that he adored her body. She also knew, from the easygoing association she had had with the aspiring writer over the past weeks, that he was intellectually compatible with her.

  Now she approached his camper and knocked at the door. She made no effort at all to be stealthy. Not in New Woodstock. Nobody could have cared less if she was having an affair with the popular Ferd Zogbaum. In fact, if anybody discovered the development they undoubtedly would have been happy for them both. Probably half of the so-called married folk in town were actually living in what was once known as sin.

  She knocked at the door.

  He opened and looked at her and made a humor face and said, “Oh, no, not again.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Stand aside, young man. We’re going to play yes and no once more.”

  “I surrender.”

  She said, “Oh, darling, whatever is going to happen to us?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it can never be a normal relationship. Not with you continually having to be on guard with everything you say to me.”

  “No.”

  “I love you, Ferd Zogbaum.”

  There was no answer. They kissed again, hotly.

  “There is no answer, is there, darling?”

  “No.”

  “Even if it was possible for us to have a… permanent relationship, they wouldn’t allow it, would they? I’m an alien, an off-beat artist, a Bohemian#longdash#”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean they wouldn’t allow it?”

  “Yes.”

  She slumped a bit in his arms. “All we can have is this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or they’ll drag you back to prison#longdash#or to more brain surgery?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s get undressed.”

  They were resting between bouts.