Mack Reynolds - Rolltown

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.”