Mack Reynolds - After Utopia

After dinner the two of them strolled out to the garage and got into the hover-sedan which Betty had utilized to show him Gibraltar and the Costa del Sol.

Edmonds took the driver’s seat and Tracy sat next to him. He’d have to learn how to drive one of these fancy crafts, he decided. When he was on his own, it would be a necessity.

However, Edmonds muttered, his voice lazy, “The hell with driving manually,” and began fiddling with a dial set into the dashboard.

This was a world of goddamned dials, Tracy Cogswell decided.

The craft took off after emerging the few feet out of the garage. There were no hands on the wheel, and Tracy was horrified, especially now that they were airborne, and at one hell of a clip.

He cried out, “For holy Jesus Christ’s sake, what are you doing?”

Edmonds was unperturbed. “I hate driving, so I dialed our destination.”

“Jesus,” Tracy repeated. “You mean even this thing’s automated?”

The other was puzzled and said, “Yes. of course. Didn’t you already have some automated traffic in your time? I thought you did.”

“No,” Tracy said grimly, “and it makes me nervous. Where are we going on this big night on the town?”

“Torremolinos,” Edmonds said. “There it is, up ahead. Terrible place, don’t you know?”

Tracy could see the lights up ahead. He said, “I had got the impression that most people didn’t live in cities.”

“There are no more cities. Who would want to live in one? Dirty, crowded, terrible air… ”

Tracy said wryly, “When you people grabbed me, the whole damn population of the world was graviating toward the cities. It was one of the big problems; they were getting too big to function.”

“Economic necessity, not love of city life,” Edmonds said. “They had to go for jobs, when the small farms folded up. Or for business reasons… or to get on relief. We don’t have any of those motivations any more.”

“And you say this isn’t Utopia,” Tracy muttered under his breath. He stared down at the beach and sea below them. “Listen,” he said. “What keeps this thing up?”

“You mean the car?”

“Obviously, I mean the car.”

Edmonds shrugged lazily. “I haven’t the vaguest idea. It’s not my line.” He thought about it. “I’ve don’t believe I’ve ever met anybody whose line it was. Of course, the computers do most of the designing of vehicles these days.”

“You mean computers can devise new inventions?”

“Why, yes. With some supervision by highly advanced specialists.” Jo Edmonds thought about it. “At least I think they are still supervised a bit. It’s not really my line.”

For some reason or other, Edmonds still occasionally exasperated Tracy. He said now, his voice almost a snarl, “Just what in the hell is your line, Edmonds? How do you fit into all this?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, who in the hell are you? How do you fit in? Old Man Stein is the crackpot scientist who brought me through to this century. Betty is his daughter, who seems to double as a nurse, or whatever. But where do you fit in?”

“Oh,” Edmonds said. “I see what you mean, I should think.” He’d brought out his piece of flat jade and flicked it. “It would seem that I’m the Tracy Cogswell of this century.” He made an amused grimace.

“You’re what!”

“I’m the nearest thing to your counterpart, Cogswell. I’m the organization’s trouble-shooter. I’m the tough guy. I do the leg work. The organization sends me in when the situation calls for, uh, movement.”

Tracy was amazed. “You!”

“That’s right,” Edmonds said softly. “We have to utilize what small resources we have. Now do you begin to see why we brought you from the past?”

“Tough guy! Why, for Christ’s sake… ”

“Yes. However, do not carry it too far. I have made my bones, Cogswell.”

“Made your bones! Are you all the way around the bend? You can’t know what that means. That’s an old Mafia term. It means killing your first man.”

“Yes, I know.”

“But you told me that if somebody killed somebody else the Medical Guild took over. They did something so that you’d never do it again.”

“That’s correct.”

“And I got the impression that if you pulled some trick like that you just kind of turned yourself in and they… took care of you.”

“Yes, that is correct. That is the usual thing.”

“But you didn’t turn yourself in?”

“No,” Edmonds admitted. “You see, old chap, I was of the opinion that possibly the organization might need me again… in the same eventuality.”

“Oh, brother. You people get farther out by the minute. What did you hit this guy for?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Tracy said impatiently, “This man you shot. Why did you have to do it?”

“I see. Well, in actuality he was a very strong critic of the ideas we were trying to put over. He thought it quite insane that we should wish to change present-day society.”

“That makes two of us,” Tracy said. “So do I. This society has it made, from everything I’ve seen so far.”

Edmonds said, “He went to the extreme of wishing to initiate a return to laws, at least to the extent of outlawing our organization. He was a very aggressive man, very violent. I went to remonstrate with him.”

“I love that term remonstrate,” Tracy muttered. “I too, in my time, have been sent to remonstrate with people. Mussolini for one. I was working with a group of partisans up near Lake Como and he was trying to escape over the line to Switzerland with what remained of the fascist gold supply. We remonstrated with him. It was one of the most satisfying sights I’ve ever seen, him dangling by his heels in that gas station.” Tracy paused, in reflection. “Always felt sorry for the girl, Clara, though. She just wasn’t important. Just a whore. Tony shouldn’t have shot her. We shot people easy, though, in those days.”

Edmonds looked at him from the side of his eyes, seemingly surprised. “Mussolini! Did you actually meet him? To us, he is history. It’s as though you met someone who knew Napoleon. But I thought the men who executed him were Communists. You weren’t a Communist.”

It seemed a very long time ago… and it was. Tracy said, “Yeah, I met the bastard, in passing, just before we shot him. No, I wasn’t a Communist. At the time I was working with the American OSS, an outfit that I hated, but the thing was, what I wanted most was to hit characters like Mussolini, Hitler, Franco. I wouldn’t have minded taking a crack at Stalin, either, but you can’t have everything.”

“Hit?” Edmonds said.

Tracy snorted at him. “You’re not as up on Mafia jargon as you’d like to think. It means to kill. You say you’ve made your bones. Okay, I have, in my time, God forgive me, hit more men than you have years to your life.” He took a deep breath before saying, “Some of them shouldn’t have been killed.”

He got back to the present. “At any rate, what happened to your boy?”

Edmonds said carefully and distastefully, “He took violent exception to me and attempted to kill me. So I had to shoot him.”

“Shoot him?” Tracy said, surprised. “So you people still have guns kicking around here in Utopia.”

Edmonds said, “There are not many. But there is still some hunting, and some weapons carried by game preserves officers, explorers, and so forth.”

“Explorers!”

The other accepted his surprise. “We have deliberately kept some parts of the planet as they were originally. Borneo and the Amazon, for instance. It is invaluable for students in a score of subjects, including anthropology. We’ve even restored some areas to what they were in the past. Montana and North Dakota, as you called them in your time. Buffalo and other wildlife now have free range there. And there are still such things as poisonous snakes, wild boar, that sort of thing. So, yes, it is still possible to procure firearms. But here we are at Torremolinos.”