Mack Reynolds: After Utopia

The difference came, Cogswell found, when they emerged from the garage, proceeded a few feet, and then took to the air, without wings, rotars, propeller, jets, or any other noticeable method of support or propulsion.

She could see he was taken aback and said, “What’s the.matter, Tracy?”

Cogswell said wryly, “I hadn’t expected this much progress in this much time.”

“Oh, you mean the car?”

So they still called them cars.

“You needed wings in my day,” Cogswell said dryly.

She was obviously a skilled driver… or pilot, as the case might be.

“I sometimes get my dates mixed,” Betty said, making a small moue. “But I thought that you were beginning to get air-cushioned cars, hover-craft, that sort of thing, in your time. And hadn’t Norman Dean already begun his work?”

“Never heard of him,” he said. Cogswell was looking down at the countryside beneath him.

Tangier had changed considerably. It had obviously become an ultrawealthy resort area. Gone was the Casbah, with its Moorish slums going back a thousand years and more. Gone was the medina with its teeming thousands of poverty-stricken Arabs and Riffs.

Tracy grunted to himself. He supposed that as Europe’s and America’s wealthy had discovered the climactic and scenic advantages of northern Morocco, they had displaced the multitude of natives who had formerly made uncomfortable by their obvious need those few of the well-to-do who had lived here before. The rich hate to see the poor; it makes them uncomfortable. Tracy Cogswell remembered the old story about the lush in the nightclub listening tearfully to a plaintive blues singer and saying, “Throw her out, she’s breaking my heart.”

There were quite a few of the flying cars such as he and Betty were in. That was a good thing, though. With flight on various levels, there was no congestion. However, he assumed that probably other traffic problems had evolved.

Betty put on speed and in a matter of five or ten minutes they were circling Gibraltar, perhaps the world’s most spectacular landfall. Here too the signs of the military of his own period had given way to villas and what he assumed were luxury apartment buildings.

Tracy said, “Where are all the stores, garages, and other business establishments?”

She said, “Underground.”

“Where you can’t see them and be bothered by their unattractiveness, eh?”

“That’s right,” she told him, evidently missing his sarcastic note.

They flew north along the coast, passing Estapona, Marbella and Fuengirola. Cogswell was impressed. Even in his own time the area had been booming, but he had never expected to see anything like this. Why, the whole coast seemed dotted with villas.

“It’s much too crowded,” Betty said in disgust. “I’ve always been amazed that so many people gravitate to the warm climates.”

He said impatiently, “Everyone would, wouldn’t they, given the wherewithal?”

“But why? She was surprised at his words. ”Why not stay in areas where you have season changes? For that matter, why not spend some seasons in the far north and enjoy the extremes of snow and cold weather? Comfortable homes can be built in any climate.”

Cogswell grunted. “You sound like that queen—what was her name?—who said ‘Let them eat cake.’ ”

Betty frowned not getting it. “Marie Antoinette? How do you mean I sound like her?”

Tracy Cogswell said impatiently, “Look. You people with lots of dough don’t realize what it can mean for somebody without it to spend some time in the sun. And… if possible, and it usually isn’t… to finally retire in a desirable climate in your old age. It’s something a lot of poor working stiffs dream of, but you wouldn’t know about that.”

Betty looked at him from the side of her eyes and frowned. “Dough?” she said.

“Money,” Cogswell said, still impatient. “Sure, if you have piles of money, you can build swell houses even up in Alaska, and live comfortably. You can live comfortably just about anywhere, given piles of money. But for most people, who’ve probably lived the greater part of their lives in some near-slum, in some stinking city, the height of ambition is to get into a warm climate and have a little bungalow in which to finish off the final years.”

Suddenly, Betty laughed.

Tracy Cogswell froze up, his face went expressionless. Until this, he had rather liked the beautiful girl. Now she was showing the typical arrogance of the rich.

She indicated the swank villas beneath them. They were flying over Torremolinos now, which had once been an art colony. She said, “Were you under the impression, Tracy, that those people down there had lots of money?”

That took time to sink in. It couldn’t possibly mean what he first thought.

Tracy said, “Possibly they don’t have by your standards, but by mine, yes.”

Betty said flatly, “None of them have any money at all, and neither do I.”

That was too much. He gaped at her.

Betty said, “There is no such thing as money any more, and there hasn’t been for quite a while. It was eliminated decades ago.”

He figured that he understood now, and said, “Well, it’s the same thing. Whatever the means of exchange is, credit cards, or whatever.”

Betty laughed again and there was honest amusement in her voice, not condescension. She said, and her voice was gentle now, “Tracy Cogswell, in all those years you belonged to your movement, in all the years of dedication, did you really think, really inwardly believe in your heart of hearts, that someday it might come true? That someday the millineum would arrive, Utopia be achieved?”

A deep cold went through him. He closed his mouth but continued to stare in disbelief at her.

“Tracy,” she said gently, “your movement was successful more than sixty years ago.”

After a long moment, he said, “Look, could we go back to the house? I could use a drink.”

She laughed still once again and spun the wheel of the hover-craft.

They were all three amused by his reactions, but it was a friendly amusement and with a somehow wry connotation which Tracy Cogswell didn’t quite get. So many things were bubbling through his head, so many questions to ask, he didn’t even have time for a complete answer before he was hurrying on to the next one.

“And the Russkies? What happened over there?” he demanded. “The Soviet Union and the other Commie countries?”

Jo Edmonds said, “The same as everywhere else. Overnight, the contradiction that had built up through the decades of misrule and misdirection finally boiled over. It was one of the few places where there was much violence. The Communists had gone too far, had done too much to too many, to have been allowed peaceful retirement.”

Betty shook her head. “According to accounts of the period, in some places it was quite horrible.”

Tracy Cogswell drew from his own memories pictures of members of the secret police hanging by their heels from lamp posts. He had been active with the Freedom Fighters in Budapest, during the 1956 uprising against the Russians. “Yes,” he said uncomfortably. Then he asked, “But countries like India, the African nations, South America and the other undeveloped countries. How do they stand now?”

Academician Stein was chuckling softly. “These things seem so long ago to us,” he said. “It’s almost unbelievable that they can be news to an intelligent adult. The backward countries? Why, given the all-out support of the most industrially advanced, they were brought up to a common level within a decade or two.”

“It was a universally popular effort,” Betty added. “Everybody pitched in. Instead of sending so-called aid to those countries, consisting largely of military equipment, we sent real aid and no strings attached.”