Читать книгу Commune 2000 AD - Mack Reynolds - Страница 6

When the other’s face had faded, Ted Swain leaned back for a moment in his chair and let first surprise and then emotion wash over him. At long last.

He shook his head, took a deep breath and came to his feet. He went on into the bedroom, and to his closet, and selected a white Yucatan type shirt-jacket. He looked down at his kilts and considered donning more conservative trousers. But no, the hell with it, he decided. Badly as he wanted to get along with his director of dissertation, he didn’t want to toady to the man.

He brought forth a pair of high woolen socks, in the Scottish tradition, donned them and then a pair of comfortable loafers.

He brought out his pocket transceiver, touched the stud that activated the cover, and dialed for a single seater. He walked to the door and through it, when it automatically opened for him, and down the walk to the street.

His electrosteamer rounded a corner and smoothed up to the curb before him. It was an open car, as he had dialed, and instead of bothering to open the door he flung a long leg over the side and made himself comfortable behind the manual controls.

The controls were simplicity itself—an accelerator, a brake, the wheel. He put his pocket transceiver on the payment screen, so that the trip could be deducted from his credit account, touched the accelerator with his right toe and was off, heading for the entry to the underground expressway at the community center.

Ordinarily he preferred to drive on the surface, manually, but this time he was in a hurry to get to his destination. Before Englebrecht changed his mind, he thought wryly. But, besides that, he wanted to think without the distraction of driving.

At the community center, he waved a couple of times to friends in the tennis courts and the swimming pool, then drove up to the expressway autodispatcher, parked on the dispatch coordinator and flicked off the manual controls. He dialed his destination: the administration building of University City VII. The auto controls took over and the car smoothed forward. He knew from long experience that the ride would be twenty-two minutes, or, had he remained on the surface, at least an hour, probably more, according to traffic. The amount of traffic made no difference below ground.

His electrosteamer blended into the flow of cars, trucks, and buses on the slowest lane, faded over to the left into intermediate, and then into the high-speed lane. Ted closed his eyes and leaned back.

He hadn’t the vaguest idea what his director of dissertation had in mind. And, frankly, he mistrusted him. He thought the man an incompetent. Supposedly, under present society, it was impossible for an incompetent to maintain his position. Supposedly, the computers of the National Data Banks checked out your Ability Quotient to the finest hair and unless you had the most ability to hold down the position in question you were bounced out by that man or woman who did possess the ability.

Ability Quotient. It had its beginnings, perhaps, in the early I.Q. tests such as had been given to school children and later military personnel, in the categories of general aptitude, mechanical aptitude and mathematical aptitude. But Ability Quotient went far beyond I.Q. The I.Q. tests had not and couldn’t measure all-round intelligence, since there wasn’t any such thing. But they were the beginning. Present-day society still utilized an upgraded form of the I.Q. tests, but they also tested for verbal ability, verbal fluency, numerical ability, spatial ability, perceptual ability, memory, speed of reflexes, accident proneness, digital dexterity, analogizing power, mechanical aptitude, clerical aptitude, emotional maturity, veracity, tone discrimination, taste sensitivity, natural charm, color blindness, accuracy, persistence, drive, neurosis, powers of observation, health, and a few other things.

All of the people of United America were given the tests, almost continually from the cradle to the grave, although in actuality they fell off after you had reached retirement age. In fact, if you wished, you need not take them any longer after that period was achieved. Many didn’t. It gave them an inferiority complex to realize to what extent the young people coming up were doubling or even tripling their own, once proud, perhaps, Ability Quotients. It was a rapidly changing world.

Theoretically, on job-muster day, each year, the computers selected, from the data banks, the most suitable person for each job in the nation, on the basis of Ability Quotient, but there was more to it than that. Besides basic ability, experience was considered. And a man who had done superlative work on his job the proceeding year had a good chance of retaining it, even though another, fresh out of school, had a higher A.Q. But this was not always so. Selection was made frequently according to the position and level one achieved in the job hierarchy, and tenure counted more, particularly if one took booster courses in his field to keep him up on the latest developments.

His car swerved back into the intermediate speed lane, then over to the slowest, to emerge shortly onto a side road. About half a kilometer and it took a still narrower way and in a few moments entered the motor pool area of the administration building of the university city. It pulled up before the elevator banks and Ted Swain touched the door button so that he could get out. He said into the car’s screen, “Dismissed,” and it slid away to park itself until the computers summoned it for some other passenger.

Ted made his way over to the elevators that served the apartments on the high levels of the 110-story aluminum-sheathed twin-towered hi-rise building. Englebrecht lived in tower two, as did a good many other ranking professors and department heads. Not all of the school’s faculty chose to remain in residence, in the somewhat sterile atmosphere of the ultramodern building, but a majority did. There was a certain element of status symbol involved.

Ted looked at the compartment’s screen and said, “Theodore Swain to see Academician Englebrecht, apartment 355, tower two.”

“Your identification, please,” the screen said in its mechanical voice.

Ted had already drawn his pocket transceiver from his shirt jacket. He flicked open the cover and held it up against the screen, revealing his identity number, S-204-121645M.

“You are expected,” the voice said and the elevator began to rise, accelerating at a constant rate, but not too quickly for comfort.

It slowly decelerated, stopped, then shunted off to one side, at a much slower pace.

It stopped again and the door opened and the screen said, “Apartment 355.”

Ted stepped out and into the entranceway of Academician Englebrecht’s quarters. He hadn’t been there for some time and, once again the sheer luxury of the place impressed him greatly.

He stood there for a moment, waiting, and shortly a young man entered, very briskly. He was immaculately, though quite conservatively, dressed in brown tailored shorts, a checked, collarless shirt, reinforced with a Byronic cravat, and a lapelless jacket without pockets. His shoes were brown and very earnest; probably British import, Ted decided. He was a pale-faced, energetic type, with a certain supercilious quality. He wore a soft Van Dyke, his lips were too red, and Ted Swain suspected that he was a queerie. He was supposedly one of Englebrecht’s secretaries and lived in the academician’s quarters, which gave additional rise to Ted’s snide opinions of his director of dissertation. Englebrecht was a life-long bachelor.

The secretary’s name was Brian Fitz, and he said, “Ah, Doctor Swain, isn’t it?”

There it was, the supercilious touch. Fitz knew damn well it was Swain, the elevator had automatically notified him of Ted’s coming. Besides, they had met before.

“That’s right, Fitz,” Ted said. “The academician called about an hour ago saying he wanted to see me.”

Fitz fluttered a hand in a gesture to be followed, and turned to lead the way, saying over his shoulder, “Certainly. He is in his escape sanctum.”

Ted followed the other down a deeply carpeted hall. On the walls were several paintings which he suspected should have been in the university city’s museum. Well, Englebrecht wasn’t the only member of the upper reaches of the faculty to pull that one. The excuse was always that there wasn’t room to hang them in the museum and otherwise they would be collecting dust in the basements. Once, as a younger man, Ted Swain had participated in a dig in Mexico and had returned proudly with several excellent specimens of Chipicuaro pottery, a ceramic mask and two figurines. He had, of course, presented them to the school museum, and was somewhat disillusioned later to spot the pre-Columbian artifacts displayed in the home of the head of the archaeology department.

They stopped before a massive wooden door and Brian Fitz murmured softly, “Doctor Swain, sir.”

The door screen said, “Do come in,” and the door opened.

Ted Swain was impressed, once more, with the room’s magnificence.

Franz Englebrecht was sitting behind a desk which was impressively littered with papers, and devoid of TV phone, library booster, or any other electronic device of the present.

Very impressive, Ted thought lemonishly.

The other didn’t bother to come to his feet to shake hands. He beamed and said, “Excellent, Swain. I must say, you are prompt.”

“Good morning, sir,” Ted said. You’re goddamned right I’m prompt, he thought. You’d be prompt too, if you’d been waiting for this the better part of a decade. His eyes went about the room again.

It was an escape room fitted out by someone who didn’t know how to pinch pennies and who wasn’t expected to know how. It was large and square and the ceiling was high, high above. There was soft-piled rose broadloom on the baseboards, white metal Venetian blinds and gold damask draperies at the windows and redwood paneling on the only wall that wasn’t lined with shelves of books in rich bindings behind glass. A circular redwood stand in one corner supported a huge globe. Between two windows was the oversized desk at which the academician sat. It supported a dull bronze lamp.

Englebrecht saw the expression on his visitor’s face and chuckled. “Rank has its privileges, my boy, even in a collectivist society. You see, to get the most out of us, ah, upper executives, we have to have facilities not required by those we direct.”

“Would you call this a collectivist society?” Ted asked.

“Why, of course, I suppose so. I can’t think of any more appropriate term. Some would call it socialistic, but practically every country remaining in the world calls itself socialistic, and hardly two of them but differ. The term is too elastic. It ranges from the Soviet Complex to North Africa, which is still primarily an agrarian, Moslem society.”

The older man looked at his secretary. “I suppose that it is too early for a drink,” he said. “Brian, could you rustle up some coffee for Doctor Swain and myself?”

“Oh, yes sir.” He turned briskly and was off to dial the beverage in the pseudokitchen.

“Have a chair, Swain, my boy,” the director said. He beamed his jovial smile again, to his visitor’s distress.

Ted Swain sat down in a leather chair across from his host’s desk. “Needless to say, Academician Englebrecht, I was pleased to get your call.”

“Of course, of course. I’ve had an eye on you for a long time, my boy. I’ve been racking my mind for years in your behalf.”

Ted Swain tried to keep skepticism from his face and hoped that he was successful. Dissimulation wasn’t his strongest point.

“Very kind of you, sir.”

“The inspiration came just last night. To be perfectly honest, I checked it out with the data banks to see if any of my other candidates might be more highly qualified for the research.” He smirked fondly at Ted Swain. “None of them came within an inch of touching your qualifications.”

“Well, thank you, sir. But, well … just what is this thesis?”

Englebrecht puffed his cheeks out slightly, as though he were about to astound his caller. “You are a particular student of Henry Lewis Morgan and Bandelier.”

“Why, yes, I am.”

“Very well, of course, of course. The two of them, in the 19th Century, specialized in the primitive clans which were the basis of society in Neolithic times.”

“Gens,” Ted muttered. “They called them gens.”

“Of course, of course,” the other said, patting a well-larded knee with a larded hand. “Communal society, eh? The family, the clan, the tribe.”

It wasn’t exactly the way Ted Swain would have put it.

Englebrecht said, “You are acquainted with the present communes which are springing up throughout the nation like mushrooms after a rainfall?”

Ted looked at him blankly. “Well, I’ve heard about them. I haven’t had the opportunity to see or investigate the phenomenon.”

Englebrecht beamed. “You will, my boy. Your theme will be a comparison of the present-day communes with the primitive communes of ancient society.”