Rolltown bh-3

by Mack Reynolds

  When he had finished, he ate the plate and the spoon and fork and went back to his favorite chair to wait for Ferd Zogbaum.

  He considered dialing himself an after-dinner drink but decided not to. He had no idea of what they might run into in Linares and didn’t want to be even slightly befuddled. He spotted the two plastic glasses he and Ferd had drunk from and got up again to toss them into the sink where they could melt away and go down the drain. Bachelor-like, he hated to have the place cluttered up with dirties.

  He reached up for a book from his shelves and sat again. He could have, of course, sat before his library TV screen and dialed practically any book ever published. Long since, the National Data Banks had recorded every volume in the Library of Congress, the British Museum Library and the libraries of every university in the West, all available on his screen for free if the books were on the public domain or at a very nominal sum, automatically deducted from his credit account, if the copyright was still in the hands of the author. However, there was something in Bat Hardin that appreciated the feel of book-in-hand while he was reading. The size of his mobile home prevented him from collecting a large library but he carried with him his favorites, usually to the amusement of visitors to his home.

  V

  When Bat and Ferd had returned from their disastrous visit to Linares, Ferd had staggered off for his own quarters but Bat got out of his electro-steamer on his side and started over to the colony physician.

  Doc Earnes looked startled and came to his feet. “What in the world’s happened?” he snapped. And then to his nurse, “Miss Stevens!”

  Barbara Stevens hustled to her own feet and held open the door to the colony hospital.

  Bat headed into the interior, saying, “Ferd Zogbaum and I went into town and got into trouble at a bar.”

  Doc Barnes, following him, said grumpily, “I wouldn’t think either of you were the types to get into barroom brawls. Here, let me look at that.”

  They had entered the emergency room and Nurse Stevens, a middle-aged woman, professionally efficient, was going about the necessary tasks to treat the cut.

  Bat said, “They were laying for us, Doc. Haven’t you noticed the atmosphere?”

  “I can’t say that I have. Hold still.”

  “Well, we’re evidently not as popular around here as we might be.”

  The veteran doctor moved briskly, staunched the blood flow, treated the cut, closed it and placed a layer of pseudo-flesh over the wound. “There you are,” he said. “Nurse.”

  Barbara Stevens said, “Lower your pants.”

  Bat looked at her.

  She snorted at him and held up the hypodermic she had in hand.

  “Oh,” he said and obeyed orders.

  She gave him the shot in the right hip.

  “That’ll do it,” Doc Barnes said. “It’ll be healed in a few days.”

  “No stitches necessary?” Bat said.

  “We don’t use them for this sort of thing any more,” the older man said. “You going to see Dean about this?”

  Bat turned to leave. “I suppose so. I’ll have to. Thanks, Doc.” His eyes swept the mobile clinic. When on the road, it moved in two sections drawn by two heavy electro-steamers. When parked, and set up, it consisted of two floors, sporting twelve compartments in all, including Doc Barnes’ living quarters.

  Bat said, “You know, this is one of the best little hospitals I think I’ve ever seen in a town as small as this.”

  Doc Barnes said, “You can thank Dean Armanruder and Jim Blake for that. They split the cost fifty-fifty and donated it to the colony.”

  The doctor looked at Bat narrowly. “You better come into the next room and sit down for a time. A little shock is beginning to set in. Let me see your eyes.” He looked closely at the pupils. “I don’t think you’ve got a concussion. You must have a skull as thick as armor plate. What’d he hit you with?” He was leading the way into the adjoining room which served as a waiting room of the clinic during the day hours.

  “A baseball bat,” Bat growled unhappily. He was feeling slightly nauseated. He suffered Nurse Stevens to help him into an easy chair.

  The doctor sat down across from him but the nurse left, evidently to clean up the emergency room.

  Bat Hardin said, “Why did they donate this outfit? It must have cost a fortune.”

  “Contrary to some opinion, these mobile towns are not necessarily solely populated by bums on NIT,” Barnes said. “Some people, even well to do people, prefer to live this way. Admittedly, the swanker mobile towns and cities usually exclude anyone not of a certain financial standing but an art colony such as this attracts men like Armanruder and Blake because of the companionship.”

  “That still doesn’t answer my question.”

  Doc Barnes said impatiently, “They donated it shortly before you joined New Woodstock because I told them I wouldn’t take the job unless we had better facilities than were provided at that time.”

  Bat scowled. “What job? I thought you volunteered your services.”

  “I do. I’m retired and have all the income I need. Sort of an old workhorse that hates to be out of harness. I saw an advertisement in one of the magazines devoted to mobile town life for a doctor and answered it. New Woodstock’s doctor had passed away. Armanruder and Blake liked my qualifications and for the sake of their own selves and family members ponied up the necessary if I’d stay.”

  “Damn nice of them.”

  Doc shifted his thin shoulders. “You need a competent general practitioner in a mobile town. It wasn’t completely altruistic on their part. They get sick as often as anyone else.”

  Bat said, “Well, if you wanted to remain in practice, why didn’t you stay up north?”

  The doctor said testily, “Because I’m outdated. In medicine today you become outdated about every five years. Normally, a competent physician will return to school every five years and spend one or two years catching up on the latest advances. I’ve got to the age where it’s too difficult to keep up. Besides, I like this life. I’m not so confoundedly senile that I don’t appreciate a change of scene, open air life, the beach or lakeside in the summer, a southern climate in the winter.”

  Bat was beginning to feel better but he was in no hurry to go. He liked old Doc Barnes and suspected that the other had been a top man of his field in his day.

  He said, “Were all the other auxiliary trailers acquired the same way?”

  Doc Barnes squinted at him. “You should know, you’ve lived in mobile towns before, haven’t you?”

  “They sometimes differ in how they’re composed,” Bat said. “The only other one I’ve lived in was even smaller than this and specialized in archeology. There were precious few auxiliaries, and those largely inadequate, except for the mobile museum. We’d go to archeological digs and set up the town and stay there until the majority wanted to move on to some other archeological site. We were in Yucatan for a while, in the Mayan ruins; very interesting.”

  “Why did you leave?” Doc said.

  Bat shrugged. “For some reason archeological ruins seem to be usually located in grim places. I got tired of heat, mosquitos, inadequate town sites, drab views and abstent-minded-scholar types. I decided an art colony would provide more interesting companionship and be inclined to move around in the beauty spots of the continent, instead of parking in jungles, deserts and such. I considered joining up with one of the resort towns, the type that head up for New England or the Canadian Rockies in the summer months and then down to Florida or here to Mexico for the beaches in the winters. But the thing is, those towns are a little too much on the hedonistic side for me. Too much boozing, too much partying. Nobody seems to have much interest in anything but having a good time. Here in New Woodstock almost everybody works at something or at least pretends to. I prefer even a demi-buttocked artist to someone who makes no pretense of doing anything at all except sitting on the beach during the day and getting smashed at a party at night.”

>   The doctor shifted his shoulders again. “I feel the same way. As far as the auxiliaries are concerned, some, such as the ad building and the school, were bought by popular subscription when the town first organized some years ago. Others are privately owned. Sam Prager’s TV and electronic repair shop, for instance. Evidently, Sam had always loved to tinker. When his job was automated out from under him, he and his wife, Edith, took what resources they had and made a down-payment on a mobile home and equipped one room as a repair shop.”

  “I wonder why Sam joined New Woodstock,” Bat said. “You’d think he’d look up a town that had a lot of members with similar interests in fiddling around with electronics.”

  “Edith writes. Poetry, I believe. She’s on the striving intellectual side. Answer the question yourself, Bat. Why has a healthy, comparatively young fellow like you retired to a life in New Woodstock?”

  Bat told him.

  The doctor was irritated. “The word intelligence has its elastic qualities,” he said. “The tests we now use are considerably more efficient than they used to be; however, the I.Q. test largely measures the speed of your thinking, not necessarily its quality.”

  “How do you mean?”

  The testy old man said, “See here. Suppose you were shipwrecked on a deserted island. Who would you rather have as a companion, a computer programmer with an I.Q. of 150#longdash#gifted, in short#longdash#or a chappie with an I.Q. of 110, slightly above average, who was a professional fisherman and spent his vacations in hunting, hiking and skin diving.”

  Bat said dryly, “These days, you’re not apt to be shipwrecked. And under the Meritocracy high I.Q. is the criteria that counts.”

  The doctor said, “Fast thinking isn’t always the best. All chess players of premier standing don’t necessarily have high I.Q.s, nor do all top-ranking scientists. Some are pluggers, rather than speed-demon types. In mathematics, for another example, I once studied a boy of twelve who could do problems in his head almost as fast as you could state them. His mind worked at computer speed when it came to multiplication or division. Yet he was just short of being a moron.”

  “Well, be that as it may, under the Meritocracy you’re primarily judged by your I.Q. and evidently on an average the system works. You’ve really got to operate to buck the system, get a decent education, get a position with one of the major corporations.”

  Doc Barnes reached over and took Bat’s wrist. He said, “Your pulse is all right and you’ve lost the clammy feeling of shock. I suppose you could go now. One thing I ought to say to you, Bat, on this low I.Q. thing. You’re building up a grand inferiority complex.”

  Bat Hardin stood and turned to leave. He said, lowly, “It’s not an inferiority complex, Doc. I am inferior.”

  VI

  Before going to the mobile mansion which was the home of Dean Armanruder, Bat Hardin headed for the considerably less ostentatious home of his deputy, Al Castro.

  On the way, he passed the camper of Ferd Zogbaum and considered momentarily sticking his head inside and inquiring about the other’s headache. It was a strange thing, that headache. What had Ferd said? That every time he got into a fight the headache hit him.

  He approached the other’s camper but then drew himself up. Through one of the windows he could see Ferd sitting at his tiny desk talking earnestly into a TV phone. There was a, well, anxious look on his face, one of strain, although he was seemingly trying to control that element of his expression.

  Bat shrugged and moved on. Since it seemed unlikely that the freelance writer had any contacts here in Mexico, he must have been communiciating with someone back in the States and the conversation was seemingly of more than passing interest.

  Bat shrugged again. For all he knew, Ferd was querying some editor about an article. Possibly the strained element was there because he needed the money. But why should Ferd Zogbaum be hard up for money? He was a single fellow and eligible for his NIT. He could go all year without selling any of his pieces and never be really up against it, particularly since mobile town life was comparatively cheap and Mexico, in particular, considerably less expensive than the States. NIT, these days, was enough that anyone could live-it-up in Mexico or some of the other Latin American countries to the south. And more and more people were discovering the fact every day as witness the exodus of mobile towns and cities southward.

  Al Castro’s home was approximately the size of Bat’s own but since he lived with his well-larded wife, Pamela, the space was really less than he could have wished for. The place was lighted up but the curtains drawn. Bat rang the bell.

  Al came, yawning as ever, and opened up.

  “Hi, Bat, what’s on? Jesus, it’s been a hot day. I hate heat. Come on in. Have a drink. Me and the old lady’s having a gin and a mixer they call Del Valle down here, based on grapefruit juice. Makes something like a Tom Collins.”

  Bat followed him into the mobile home.

  Pamela Castro was sitting at the small dining-room table, a tall frosted glass there and a wilted look about her. She was an objectionably fat woman and Bat had never particularly got along with her. She couldn’t see any reason for her husband donating his time as Bat’s deputy when he received no compensation. Theoretically she was a water colorist but in actuality she spent precious little time working at it.

  Bat exchanged the usual amenities and turned back to Al Castro wondering all over again how any man could bear having a wife who outweighed him almost two to one and was a couple of inches taller to boot. Well, his wife was one of the few things that Al Castro never seemed to complain about, so evidently she suited him.

  Bat said, “No thanks. I just had a drink and got knocked for a loop.”

  “They got strong liquor down here, all right,” Al nodded. “But it tastes like turpentine. Take the tobacco stain right off your teeth. I’ll stick to Stateside grog.”

  “It wasn’t the liquor,” Bat said wryly. “It was the bartender. He slugged me with a kid-sized baseball bat.”

  Al Castro goggled him. “What’re you talking about?”

  Bat told him what had happened and then, “I’m heading over to see Armanruder but whatever he says I think we’d better post a guard tonight. Why don’t you round up a couple of the emergency deputies, say Jake Benton’s boy, Tom, and Luke Robertson? We’ll share watches, four hours on, four hours off.”

  “Heavens to Betsy,” Pamela complained in a half whine. “Is this getting to be an all day, all night thing? What do you get out of it, up and down all night? You’ll be too tired to drive tomorrow.”

  Al said placatingly, “It’s an emergency, honey. You know how seldom we have to guard the town at night.”

  “That was up in the States,” she grumbled. “I bet from now on you’ll be doing it every night, with these spies and all.”

  Al didn’t answer that. He turned back to Bat. “Okay, I’ll run over and get Tom and Luke. You want we should carry shooters?”

  “Good grief, no,” Bat told him. “That’s all we’d need, is to shoot one of these jokers. We’re not even in our own country. They’d stick you in the slammer until you rotted.”

  “Well, suppose somebody takes a shot at me, first?”

  Bat made a gesture of resignation with his hands. “In that case, what can you do? Make a beeline for home and get your own gun, but, oh man, tread carefully. For some reason or other, these people are already down on us. Damn if I can figure out why.” He turned to go, saying goodbye over his shoulder to the disgruntled Pamela Castro. She muttered a reply.

  Bat made his way across the center area to where Dean Armanruder was set up, not far from the mobile administrative building. The senior member of the executive committee this week had by far the most luxurious mobile home in New Woodstock. His three-section establishment was a far cry from the little trailer homes of the 1930s. Six vehicles in all were involved; three mobile homes which folded quite compactly while underway and three heavy electro-steamers which drew them. Two of the homes were joined
, on setting up, to make the quarters which Dean Armanruder and his secretary occupied, and the third home, considerably the smallest, was parked nearby for Manuel Chauvez and his wife, the only two servants in New Woodstock.

  Bat Hardin was on friendly enough terms with the retired corporation manager but found no real warmth in the man. In theory, Dean Armanruder dabbled in painting, but in actuality such real professionals as Diana Sward had to repress their shudders if they were unlucky enough to see his latest product.

  Armanruder was a phenomenon that has been known to the art colony down through the ages, the outsider who loves to associate with Bohemians#longdash#whatever a Bohemian is, Bat thought sourly.

  But then again, who was he to talk? He himself, no artist, had come to New Woodstock to enjoy the Bohemian atmosphere and to associate with artists such as Diana Sward and Jim Blake, and aspiring writers such as Ferd Zogbaum. The only difference between him and Dean Armanruder was that he, Bat Hardin, lived on his Negative Income Tax, while Armanruder probably had to pay enough taxes to support a round number of such as Bat Hardin.

  The Armanruder home was one of the few in New Woodstock that boasted an identity screen in the door. Bat activated it and stood there waiting for the door to open.

  It did and Armanruder’s voice came through the screen at the same moment. “Come in, Hardin. Good evening. We’re in the salon.”

  “Good evening,” Bat said and entered and made his way down the short corridor to where Dean Armanruder and his secretary, Nadine Paskov, were relaxing before the Tri-Di screen which was built into the end wall of the room, taking up most of it. It was the largest screen in New Woodstock and inwardly Bat Hardin was of the opinion that it was too damn large since the Armanruder salon wasn’t big enough for you to get far away enough to view it most effectively.

  When set up, the mobile mansion had a second floor which telescoped down into the bottom one when underway. The top floor was devoted to sleeping quarters, dressing rooms, closets and baths. Bat had never seen it. The ground floor was living quarters, library, dining room, a surprisingly extensive kitchen for a mobile home, storage space, a large office and a smaller one for Miss Paskov. Nadine Paskov was really a secretary though some snide elements in the colony preferred to doubt that. She also obviously doubled as Dean Armanruder’s mistress, and slept around with just about anybody else in New Woodstock who wore pants. She was possibly the most beautiful woman in town, unless Diana Sward held that honor. The difference between Di and Nadine was largely grooming; the latter’s every pore was in place and the former always looked like a slob so far as makeup and dress were concerned. However, for his money Bat Hardin would take the artist any day.