Mack Reynolds: After Utopia

In the Grand Zocco, the open-air market of the medina section of town, he paid the cab driver and started purposefully down the Rue Siaghines, which led to the Petit Zocco, once the most notorious square in the world.

Past him streamed the multiracial populace of what was possibly the most cosmopolitan city on earth. Berbers and Arabs, Rifs and Blue men, shabby Europeans from both sides of the Curtain. Indians in saris, Moslems in jellabas and shuffling babouche slippers. The Moorish fez, the Indian turban, the Jewish skullcap, the French beret. Rue Siaghines, the widest street in the medina, practically the only one in which you couldn’t touch the walls along both sides while standing in the middle. Lined by Indian shops with the products of a hundred lands. Cameras from Germany, perfumes from France, watches from Switzerland.

And, for that matter, pornography from Japan, hashish from southern Morocco, heroin from Syria, aphrodisiacs from Egypt.

As he walked, his mentally clear astral self stood back in dumbfounded amazement. If this were no dream, then where was he going, what was he doing? Tracy Cogswell seldom came into the native section of Tangier. He had no reason to. His work and what little recreation he allowed himself all took place in the westernized section of town. He shopped in the French market, ate occasionally in a French or Spanish restaurant, visited the American library to read the papers and magazines, attended the cinema possibly two or three times a week.

He came to the Petit Zocco, crossed it, and took the narrow side street to the right, the one headed by what had been the Spanish post office when Tangier had been an International Zone. He ended at the Tannery Gate.

A hundred yards down it, he turned into Luigi’s Pension, an establishment he’d never noticed before, one of a dozen similar cheap hotels.

Luigi, who Cogswell decided looked like a sinister version of the Mexican comedian Cantinflas, spoke English. Their business was quickly transacted. Tracy Cogswell’s voice showed no indication of stress, certainly Luigi acted as though nothing untoward was going on. A man with a suitcase and an Australian passport was taking a room with full pension, three meals, at a cost of five hundred Moroccan francs per day. A bit over an American dollar.

The room was windowless, and drab beyond what the average westerner would expect. Tracy Cogswell didn’t notice. He shoved the suitcase in a corner unopened, undressed himself, locked and bolted the door, and went to bed.

When the physical body fell off to sleep, the mental astral self, which was the sane Tracy Cogswell, lapsed into unconsciousness as well, unbelieving all the time. Tomorrow it would be different.

The next day it was not different.

Tracy Cogswell awoke, as did his mental otherself, the sane self. As purposefully as during the previous evening, he dressed, went down for his breakfast, and then out onto the street. He walked down the hill to the foot of the medina area, and then he went out through the old Tannery Gate and took a Chico Cab to the Moses Pariente bank. At the bank he withdrew all the money his account contained, more than eight thousand dollars. He took it in large bills and then set about other business.

He made reservations to fly over to Gibraltar. He sought out a real estate agent with whom he had never come in contact before, and, using his Australian name, started the preliminary steps toward buying a fairly large piece of land in the vicinity of Cape Spartel, out near the Grottos of Hercules.

His astral self stood back aghast. This was organization money. The movement raised its funds the hard way. There were few of even moderate means among the members. This money was the dollar bills, the fifty-cent pieces, the hundred-peseta notes, the five escudas, the twenty dinars, the ten piasters—bills and coins of dedicated believers in the movement all over the world. It was in his safekeeping to be used, here, there, wherever an emergency or an opportunity arose.

The buying of the land was only the beginning. His expenditures went on in shocking disregard of reason. He entered an electrical supply house and ordered equipment that he had never heard of; it was not available in Tangier, had to be brought down from Switzerland and Germany. He asked that it be flown!

Days went by. He had no idea what was motivating him, unless it was sheer insanity of a type he’d never heard of. He—his real self—had no control whatsoever over his actions. Nor any understanding of them.

He went to Gibraltar and secured the money he had on deposit there. Once again it was money that belonged to the movement.

He made arrangements with a local craftsman to build to peculiar specifications an airtight metal box some seven feet in length and resembling a coffin.

He made arrangements with a contractor to have a sturdy monument built on the piece of land he’d purchased near the Grottos.

He bought delicate tools, some of which had to be flown in from New York.

He had no idea of the passage of time. Weeks must have elapsed before he spotted Whiteley. Dan Whiteley, one of the movement’s trouble-shooters, and Tracy Cogswell’s oldest and best friend. They had been co-workers. Even in his peculiar mental condition, Tracy unconsciously stroked his stiff left elbow. The elbow had been shattered by a fluke shot from a machine pistol in the hands of one of Tito’s bullyboys, that time when they’d smuggled Djilas across the Yugoslavian border. Dan Whiteley had been along on that operation. Easygoing in appearance, resembling Jimmy Stewart of twenty years earlier, he was a good man in the clutch.

There was no doubt about the tall, rangy Canadian’s reason for being in Tangier. No doubt at all. When last Cogswell had heard from him, he’d been on an assignment in the Argentine.

His sane self, his inner self, wanted to dash forward and throw himself into his friend’s hands. Anything was better than this, even death. His stolen body was betraying everything he had stood for during his adult life. Already, he had practically disposed of the full amount of money entrusted to him by the Executive Committee.

But he didn’t dash forward to greet Whiteley. Instead, he shrank back into an alcove and watched the other man narrowly. The Canadian hadn’t spotted him. Tracy Cogswell followed along behind, the quarry stalking the hunter.

They left the medina, proceeded up the Rue de la Liberte to the Place de France and then down ultramodern Boulevard Pasteur to Rue Goya, and then over to Moussa ben Maussair. It was obvious where Whiteley was going now. Tracy Cogswell held back more than a full block and watched the other disappear into Paul Lund’s bar. He didn’t know how long Dan Whiteley had been in town, but obviously the other was hot on his trail.

He returned to his pension room, dragged out some of his newly arrived packages, a soldering iron and other new tools, and set to work.

To work on what? He had no idea. Most of the tools were strange to him, as was the other equipment he had ordered. Tracy Cogswell had never been mechanically inclined, but everything he did now belied that fact. He worked almost until dawn.

Now that Whiteley was in town, Cogswell stayed off the streets as much as possible. He transacted as much business over the phone as he could.

For some things he had to emerge. The time, for instance, that he rented the truck, had his metal cabinet hoisted aboard, and transported it out to the monument on his Cape Spartel land. The monument, also completed by now, reminded his inner self of one of the Moslem holy men’s mausoleums that abounded in northern Morocco.

Somehow, despite his stiff elbow, he managed to manhandle the heavy cabinet from the truck and into the small inner chamber of the monument. Why he did this, he had no idea whatsoever.