Rolltown bh-3

by Mack Reynolds

  He shrugged that off. He was used to this reduced speed and they were in no hurry. No hurry at all. If they wished, they could take a year#longdash#or ten years#longdash#to reach their destination. He grunted at that, too. In actuality, they were rather vague on just what the destination was.

  What was really on his mind was the sullen quality that he had seemed to detect in some of the border officials. It was nothing he could quite put his finger upon and didn’t apply to all of the immigrations and customs people, but it was there in most. And he didn’t quite know why.

  He said into his car phone, “New Woodstock, Al Castro.”

  Al’s face faded in. “The rear guard here,” he said, yawning. “I’ll sure as hell be glad when we get up into the mountains. I hate air conditioning.”

  Bat ignored the complaint of his second. Al Castro was a born complainer. He would have complained about Peter’s gate service, and the tone of Gabriel’s horn.

  He was a small man of about thirty-five. Thin and wiry, and absolutely reliable in the clutch. He was Bat’s right hand man, and the town cop would have hated to see the other leave New Woodstock.

  Bat said, “Anybody fallen behind so far?”

  Al Castro shook his head. “Surprise, surprise, no. Of course, we got well-organized before crossing the border. So we all got off together. But two will get you ten that by the time the lead homes get to Mexico City, we’ll be strung out over several hundred kilometers.”

  “Don’t I know it? No bet,” Bat groaned. “I suppose what we’ll have to do is rendezvous there, stay several days sightseeing and waiting for the stragglers to catch up.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so. We’ll be ready for a rest by then anyway.”

  “I’ll take it up with the executive committee,” Bat said. “Let me know if anybody drops out before we reach Linares. See you, Al.” He deactivated the phone.

  They were only to spend the one night in the Linares camp site so they made no particular efforts to arrange themselves in predetermined order; except, of course, that the administration and other auxiliary vehicles were parked in the center of their group. They occupied only about a third of the site’s most favored area, and aside from their own town there were only half a dozen other mobile homes. The site was large by New Woodstock’s needs but Bat Hardin wondered what would happen if a really large town came through. However, he supposed a really large mobile town wouldn’t come through the by-ways such as this. They stuck to the Pan American Highway and came down through Laredo, Monterrey and Saltillo.

  Bat himself parked near the administration building, noting that the driver, Milt Waterman, wasn’t bothering to set it up but was making his way over to his father’s home to rejoin his family. Milt usually drove the heavy steamer that drew the administration building but not always. There were other volunteers. In fact, of all the auxiliaries the ad building seemed to have some sort of mystic prestige. Bat supposed that Dean Armanruder had informed the youngster that for this short a stay, there would be no need for the offices.

  Bat detached his electro-steamer from his home, to have it ready in case of emergency, but left it to wander about on foot on the off chance that he could be of some assistance to someone setting up one of the larger and consequently more awkward homes. Jim Blake, for instance, could usually use an extra hand. Jim might be one of the most prominent artists in New Woodstock but he wasn’t mechanically-minded enough to wind a clock.

  Blake, however, had secured the services of one of his neighbors who didn’t have to set up since his home was a single unit. Ferd Zogbaum, a bachelor, lived in what was usually called a camper, a very compact bus-like vehicle that combined the electro-steamer and living quarters very neatly. Ferd was usually on hand to help out when help was called for. A damn good member of the community, Bat had long since decided.

  Clarke and Benton as usual were having a squabble over who parked where. For some reason, known only to themselves, they invariably parked side by side and invariably got into a spat. Bat was of the opinion that they were in actuality as good friends as were their wives but that neither would admit it. He stopped long enough to put in a mild word of suggestion and they grudgingly abided by it.

  Everything seemed to be settled down and Bat Hardin fell in beside Dag Stryn, the guru of the New Temple, and elderly Doc Barnes, leading toward the site’s ultra-market.

  He said to the town’s doctor, “How’s Mrs. Terwilliger?”

  Doc Barnes said, “She’ll be all right, Bat. I haven’t the facilities in the clinic to handle her operation but I’ll stop off with her at the first city with an adequate hospital. I have her in stasis for the time being.”

  “She and Phil will have to drop behind?” Bat said, nibbling his lower lip.

  “Not necessarily. She can convalesce in the clinic while we’re underway.”

  Dag Stryn, a blond Viking of a man but almost unbelievably gentle in all things, said, “I’m worried about the Terwilligers. They’re our oldest and I’m just wondering if this protracted a trip is the sort of thing they should be doing.”

  “Basically they’re both as strong as horses,” Barnes told him. “They’ll be all right. You can’t just sit and die because you’ve reached your seventies.”

  The doctor must know, Bat thought. He was certainly pushing that age himself.

  They reached the ultra-market and stood at the end of a short line that had formed.

  When his turn came, Bat took up a number key and walked on past the display shelves, periodically stopping before an item he wished and touching his key to the impulse device. Largely, the items in stock were familiar and again he thought about how the world was becoming one. Aside from a few items such as tortillas and an inordinate selection of chili peppers, he could have been in an ultra-market in Maine or Oregon. Today, seemingly, the Australians ate the same food, wore the same clothes, lived in the same type house and enjoyed the same entertainment as did a South African, an Argentine, or an Alaskan Eskimo.

  He wasn’t, he realized, particularly happy about the fact. It must have been interesting, in the old days, to be able to witness different cultures, eat exotic foods, sample different drinks, ogle girls attired in saris or sarongs, rather than the now practically universal Western world fashions.

  His selections all made, he returned to the delivery counter, put his number key in place and then slipped his pocket phone cum credit card in the appropriate slot. Within moments, his package erupted from the delivery chute and he picked it up and headed for the door.

  In turning abruptly, he caromed against one of the new community members named Jeff Smith.

  “Hey, watch yourself, boy,” the other snapped.

  “Sorry,” Bat said mildly.

  Smith grumbled something inarticulately and made off.

  Bat looked after him for a moment. Jeff Smith was a feisty little man of about thirty-five, fairly recent to New Woodstock and thus far hadn’t picked up much in the way of close companions. He was supposedly a composer and had a small piano in his unusually large mobile home. Bat occasionally heard rambling music from the Smith quarters but to this point the other had never offered to play any of his compositions or anything else at the community entertainments. For that matter, he seldom attended these though he, like Bat, was one of the unattached men in New Woodstock.

  Bat shrugged and continued on his way. He hoped that Jeff Smith worked out. In a mobile town there was small room for soreheads. You were either a tight community of cooperating fellows or you soon came apart as a town and dispersed to seek better companionship elsewhere. Bat Hardin liked New Woodstock and would have hated to see anything happen to it. It was unique as mobile towns went; in fact, to his knowledge, there simply weren’t any other mobile art colonies, at least not in North America.

  III

  He left his purchases in his home, decided to postpone his evening meal and walked around the site a bit more. In actuality, he was hoping to get an invitation to share a meal with one of
the families which boasted a better cook than Bat would ever become. Preparing food for a single individual isn’t conducive to haute cuisine and Bat usually wound up heating a prepared dinner, a form of stoking the furnace of which he was contemptuous. He pondered the desirability of teaming together with some of the other singles, such as Diana Sward, Ferd Zogbaum and, were the other a bit more compatible, possibly Jeff Smith, and taking turns cooking; not that he knew whether or not the others were any better in a mini-kitchen then he was.

  Speaking of Diana Sward, he came upon the girl sitting in a folding chair before her mobile home, an easel before her, a palette in hand and a scowl on her face. She was obviously trying to get the colorful mountain peaks to the west on her canvas.

  Bat said, “Hi, Di.”

  She muttered, “The damn light is off. This Mexican light is different. You’d think it would be the same as similar countryside up in California, or wherever, but it isn’t.”

  Bat said mildly, “How can light be different? Light is light.”

  “That shows how much you know about it,” she snorted. “Sit down, Bat.”

  He looked about him for a seat, found none, then went over to her trailer, opened the front door, stepped into the impossibly cluttered interior, threw some things off of a chair and onto the couch, and took the chair outside, setting it up across from her.

  She was potentially a very pretty young woman but made small effort to realize her potentialities. On the few occasions when she bothered to do herself up for some community affair or whatever, she wowed them all, looking surprisingly like a brunette version of the onetime movie star Marilyn Monroe, though it was unlikely that any of the residents of New Woodstock would have remembered that far back.

  Now she was attired in nothing save a pair of somewhat paint bespattered shorts and a streak of blue down her right cheek where she had obviously touched her brush in an absentminded moment of irritation. She was topless, and it was Bat’s opinion that she had the most magnificent pair of mammary glands he had ever seen.

  She said, “The hell with it,” and tossed the brush to the shelf of the easel. “I wonder if I’m going to get this all the way down to South America. I shoulda stood in Colorado.” She relaxed back into her chair and stifled a yawn.

  “What’s up?” she said.

  “Not much,” Bat answered. He looked at the hardly begun oil painting.

  “Are you any good, Di?” he said in a friendly dig.

  She grunted her disgust and scratched her bare stomach unconsciously as she thought about it. “Not very, but I make a modest living. I have a show or two a year and that usually puts me over the hump. Three or four idiots collect my stuff.”

  He was moderately surprised. “You mean you don’t have to live on NIT?”

  “NIT is for nitwits,” she retorted. “Besides, I’m not eligible for it.”

  “How do you mean? I thought three-quarters of this whole town depended on NIT. Surely I do.”

  “I’m an alien.”

  “We’re all aliens in Mexico.”

  “I mean, I’m an alien in the United States. I’m not eligible for the Negative Income Tax.” Then she added, inconsistently, in view of her crack about nitwits, “Damn it.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Bat said. “You talk like an American.”

  “I came over from Common Europe as a youngster. When the Germanies reunited, my mother had to hustle out. Some of the new authorities weren’t too happy about the stand she had taken in the old days. My name’s actually Diana von Sward und Hanse. Very impressive, eh? She was a Grafin.”

  “A what?”

  “Something like a countess from way back in the Kaiser’s day. She was also on the chauvinistic side and didn’t want to become an American. Since she seemingly had all the money she, and I, would need, she didn’t become a citizen. By the time she lost her capital#longdash#mother was an ass with money#longdash#it wasn’t as easy as all that to become an American. With the advent of NIT practically everybody in the world would have become a citizen if the government would have allowed.

  She changed the subject. “Bat, what in the hell are you doing in New Woodstock?”

  He shrugged. “Why not?”

  “You’re not really interested in any of the arts.”

  “I’m interested in all of them.”

  “I meant, you don’t participate in any of them.”

  He shrugged again. He liked this lusty girl, liked her company. “In any mobile town, even an art colony, you need other than artists, writers, musicians, sculptors, and the rest. You need, for instance, a cop or two.”

  “Sure, but I mean, what do you get out of it? There’s no pay goes with your position. It’s voluntary. Like you said, you live on NIT.”

  Bat thought about it, or at least pretended to. He already knew the answer.

  He said slowly, “I’m not a loafer by nature. Besides, I feel a need to identify, I suppose you’d call it. Be part of the community.” He added, “I want to do my share…”

  “You do more than your share,” she said in an unwontedly soft voice.

  “…carry my part of the load,” he finished. He thought some more. “I’m a cop, for free. Some of the others who don’t spend full time at their art act in helping on repairs, as car mechanics, electricians, tinkerers, teachers or whatever. For instance, why do you teach art classes to the kids three times a week?”

  “Touché,” she snorted. “But what I meant was, if you’re ambitious to work, don’t want to be a loafer as you called it, why do you stay in a community like this? Why the hell not get yourself a job up in the States?”

  “Hiiii,” he sighed. “Haven’t you heard of the Meritocracy?”

  “Come again?”

  “Di, old girl, we have a new socio-economic system in our America. Symbols die hard, labels die hard, but today such labels as democracy, capitalism, free enterprise and such are passé. We have Meritocracy. It’s a term that came in back in the 1950s or 1960s I think and it was starting even then.”

  “All right,” she told him. “Drop the other shoe. So what’s Meritocracy?”

  “Well, back when the United States was first formed, about 80 percent of the population was involved in agriculture, most of the rest in the other primary occupations such as fishing, forestry, hunting and mining. At that point, only a few were in secondary occupations concerned with processing the products of a primary occupation. Practically none were in tertiary occupations which render services to primary and secondary fields. Came the industrial revolution, however, and the secondary occupations overtook the primary and by the middle of the 20th century or so only five percent of the population was needed in agriculture and tertiary workers were growing rapidly in number. With the second industrial revolution, call it automation or the computer economy if you will, even the secondary occupations began to fall off. The blue collar worker gave way to the white collar employee. Even on the farm the technician took the place of the illiterate behind the plow, the mechanical cotton pickers the place of the darky plodding down the endless cotton rows dragging his sack.

  “But still that wasn’t the end. The quaternary occupations began to take precedence; occupations that render services to tertiary occupations or to each other. They are heavily concentrated among agencies of government, the professions, the arts, the nonprofit groups and the like. And along in here came the Meritocracy with the amalgamation of practically all information possessed by the human race into the National Data Banks of the computerized world.”

  He took a deep breath. “Because, Di, old girl, in those data banks is all the information obtainable about all of our people; all the dope that used to be involved in the census reports, the tax records, the Social Security records, your educational standing, your military record, your medical records, your employment records and so forth and so on, but above all your I.Q.”

  Di said, scowling at his bitter tone, “I seem to have missed a curve there.”

  “No.
At the same time Meritocracy took over, the full impact of automation hit us. It hadn’t been so bad when it struck the primary occupations, although one devil of a lot of the rural population were forced into the cities to try and find work, or, if not, relief. But by this time both the secondary and primary occupations were on the skids, numerically speaking. Five percent of our population could operate our farms and farm them more profitably than they had ever been farmed before. A fraction of the working force would operate the mines and mills, the factories and other industries. But when the automation hit the tertiary occupations, then, of a sudden, the majority of the population became occupationally displaced. It had come to the point where sales and services were employing the majority. Overnight, comparatively, that changed. The old system of bringing the product to the consumer was antiquated as was no other branch of our socio-economic system. Hundreds of thousands of individually operated stores, dispensing the same products, had been the past. Hundreds of thousands of repairmen, servicemen, tinkerers, had been involved in keeping our gadgets in repair.

  “Very well. The ultra-market finished off the small shopkeepers in much the same manner that agricultural automation finished off the small farmer. And automation also finished off the small repairman when it became cheaper to throw away a mixer, a refrigeration power unit, or even a TV set or the replaceable engine of a car than it was to repair it.”

  Di said in impatience, “What’s all this got to do with your Meritocracy?”

  “Just this. The majority of our population became unneeded in our socio-economic system. What John Kenneth Galbraith, the old economist, once called the Technostructure, in short, management, became for all practical purposes all of the working population. Practically everybody who worked was part of management; from scientists, through engineers to technicians. The blue collar worker was an anachronism. Happily#longdash#I guess#longdash#by this time production was at such a scale that the unneeded were not forced into starvation. Simultaneously with the advent of Meritocracy came the movement toward Guaranteed Annual Income, the Negative Income Tax and other floors beneath the income of every family in the country, employed usefully or not. In short, the dole.”