Mack Reynolds: Rolltown

“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.

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.”