Rolltown

III

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.”

Bat thought about it, or at least pretended to. He already knew the answer.

He said slowly, “I’m not a loafer by nature. Besides, I feel a need to identify, I suppose you’d call it. Be part of the community.” He added, “I want to do my share…”

“You do more than your share,” she said in an unwontedly soft voice.

“…carry my part of the load,” he finished. He thought some more. “I’m a cop, for free. Some of the others who don’t spend full time at their art act in helping on repairs, as car mechanics, electricians, tinkerers, teachers or whatever. For instance, why do you teach art classes to the kids three times a week?”

“Touché,” she snorted. “But what I meant was, if you’re ambitious to work, don’t want to be a loafer as you called it, why do you stay in a community like this? Why the hell not get yourself a job up in the States?”

“Hiiii,” he sighed. “Haven’t you heard of the Meritocracy?”

“Come again?”

“Di, old girl, we have a new socio-economic system in our America. Symbols die hard, labels die hard, but today such labels as democracy, capitalism, free enterprise and such are passé. We have Meritocracy. It’s a term that came in back in the 1950s or 1960s I think and it was starting even then.”

“All right,” she told him. “Drop the other shoe. So what’s Meritocracy?”

“Well, back when the United States was first formed, about 80 percent of the population was involved in agriculture, most of the rest in the other primary occupations such as fishing, forestry, hunting and mining. At that point, only a few were in secondary occupations concerned with processing the products of a primary occupation. Practically none were in tertiary occupations which render services to primary and secondary fields. Came the industrial revolution, however, and the secondary occupations overtook the primary and by the middle of the 20th century or so only five percent of the population was needed in agriculture and tertiary workers were growing rapidly in number. With the second industrial revolution, call it automation or the computer economy if you will, even the secondary occupations began to fall off. The blue collar worker gave way to the white collar employee. Even on the farm the technician took the place of the illiterate behind the plow, the mechanical cotton pickers the place of the darky plodding down the endless cotton rows dragging his sack.

“But still that wasn’t the end. The quaternary occupations began to take precedence; occupations that render services to tertiary occupations or to each other. They are heavily concentrated among agencies of government, the professions, the arts, the nonprofit groups and the like. And along in here came the Meritocracy with the amalgamation of practically all information possessed by the human race into the National Data Banks of the computerized world.”

He took a deep breath. “Because, Di, old girl, in those data banks is all the information obtainable about all of our people; all the dope that used to be involved in the census reports, the tax records, the Social Security records, your educational standing, your military record, your medical records, your employment records and so forth and so on, but above all your I.Q.”

Di said, scowling at his bitter tone, “I seem to have missed a curve there.”

“No. At the same time Meritocracy took over, the full impact of automation hit us. It hadn’t been so bad when it struck the primary occupations, although one devil of a lot of the rural population were forced into the cities to try and find work, or, if not, relief. But by this time both the secondary and primary occupations were on the skids, numerically speaking. Five percent of our population could operate our farms and farm them more profitably than they had ever been farmed before. A fraction of the working force would operate the mines and mills, the factories and other industries. But when the automation hit the tertiary occupations, then, of a sudden, the majority of the population became occupationally displaced. It had come to the point where sales and services were employing the majority. Overnight, comparatively, that changed. The old system of bringing the product to the consumer was antiquated as was no other branch of our socio-economic system. Hundreds of thousands of individually operated stores, dispensing the same products, had been the past. Hundreds of thousands of repairmen, servicemen, tinkerers, had been involved in keeping our gadgets in repair.

“Very well. The ultra-market finished off the small shopkeepers in much the same manner that agricultural automation finished off the small farmer. And automation also finished off the small repairman when it became cheaper to throw away a mixer, a refrigeration power unit, or even a TV set or the replaceable engine of a car than it was to repair it.”

Di said in impatience, “What’s all this got to do with your Meritocracy?”

“Just this. The majority of our population became unneeded in our socio-economic system. What John Kenneth Galbraith, the old economist, once called the Technostructure, in short, management, became for all practical purposes all of the working population. Practically everybody who worked was part of management; from scientists, through engineers to technicians. The blue collar worker was an anachronism. Happily#longdash#I guess#longdash#by this time production was at such a scale that the unneeded were not forced into starvation. Simultaneously with the advent of Meritocracy came the movement toward Guaranteed Annual Income, the Negative Income Tax and other floors beneath the income of every family in the country, employed usefully or not. In short, the dole.”

Diana Sward said, “Goddammit to hell, stop lecturing me largely about things I already know. What’s this got to do with you not being a loafer, not going up and getting yourself a job?”

He said bitterly, “There’s not enough work to go around, Di. And that which is available requires both I.Q. and education. You need both. I.Q. without education is, of course, worthless, but you need the I.Q. to get the education, in the schools that count, at least. I’ve never seen figures but I suspect that the average person who works today in American industry has an I.Q. of something like 130. The number that have an I.Q. of a hundred or less must be infinitesimal.

“Di, when you apply for a position with any corporation in the nation, the first thing they do is check your dossier in the National Data Banks. And shortly after your name and identity number is your good old Intelligence Quotient, which they have been testing periodically ever since you entered kindergarten. Di, half the population of the United States is below average, that is, half have I.Q.s of less than 100. When a fraction of the population can hold down all the jobs needed, why should any corporation in its right mind hire somebody with an I.Q. of less than 100?”

“What in the name of Good Jesus has that got to do with you?”

“I’ve got an I.Q. of 93, Di.”