Читать книгу Commune 2000 AD - Mack Reynolds - Страница 8

When he arrived back at his home in the community of West Hurley, it was to receive a slap in the face.

Ted Swain was a bachelor. He had never been married. As it is sometimes with bachelors, he kept his establishment spotless. Everything had its place, everything was immaculate. It was a source of amazement to his feminine visitors, who usually expected unmade beds, dirty glasses and dishes, unswept floors and the rest. But not Ted Swain’s.

Thus it was that when he entered he knew almost immediately that the place had been ransacked. The job had been neatly done, and obviously whoever had gone through the house had made an effort to disguise the fact. But it couldn’t be hidden from Ted Swain. A writing stylo, which he invariably kept on the right side of his desk, was on the left. A file of his notes was not in exactly the same order as he had left it. There were other discrepancies.

Nothing seemed to be missing, nothing at all. But what could have been missing? He had nothing worth stealing. Petty crime and burglary were all but unknown in this age. Why steal when your Universal Guaranteed Income provided you with all you needed?

Mystified, he dialed the National Data Banks and requested a report on who had been recorded on his door identity screen that day. The computers automatically filed such information. It came in handy if you wanted to check on visitors who might have called while you were away from home.

He could only stare when the NDB reported that his identity screen had not recorded anyone.

He wandered around the house, his face twisted in disbelief. The intruder couldn’t possibly have come in through the windows; they automatically locked when he left the house, unless he set them otherwise. Their glass was unbreakable, or nearly so, so it made no difference. And they weren’t broken. The only entry was through the front door, or through the back, which led onto his Japanese-style rock garden. The back door, too, had been locked, and it also had an identity screen.

It was simply impossible. He knew the house had been searched, but by whom, and to what end, simply was unanswerable. He was a university scholar; he had no secrets, nothing of value beyond a few family keepsakes, meaningless to anyone else.

He gave up.

The stimmy he had taken that morning for studying had worn off, but he didn’t take another. It was pushing lunch time.

However, he couldn’t resist a quick initial approach to his subject. The enthusiasm of both of the older men had resolved some of his original misgivings. If the local head of the data banks thought a dissertation on the communes was a natural, who was Ted Swain to say him nay? He sat down at his library-booster screen.

He had difficulty locating the subject. Well, that wasn’t quite the way to put it. In actuality, there was so precious little to locate that he couldn’t believe it.

The National Data Banks supposedly contained all information available. The whole thing had begun back in the late 1960s when New Haven consolidated the city’s files on individuals into a single data pool open to all town agencies. And Santa Clara County, in California, put all county residents into a computer bank, listing age, address, birth record, driver’s license, voting and jury status, property holdings, occupation, health, welfare and police records.

The Federal Government hadn’t been far behind them. In 1968 the Internal Revenue Service began the utilization of computers to collect income tax and there was a good deal more information on income-tax forms than pertained to income alone. Adding social-security information to these data obviously made sense, as well as material from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Civil Service Commission, which had already held dossiers on nearly everyone who had ever applied for Federal employment since 1939. Then the Census Bureau information was added and the Defense Department’s military records, and finally the FBI files. Once the FBI records went into the data banks, they were soon followed by those of the house un-American Activities Committee and by the CIA. Some of the material was, of course, restricted, and available only to the proper officials.

Thus far, all these records had been Federal, but the addition of the FBI and other police files made so much sense that the local police of every state, city and town cooperated and there soon came to be a national criminal record of practically everyone in the country, even though an individual’s record might consist of no more than a traffic violation.

But that had just been the beginning. Medical information was soon added. At the same time another element was utilizing the computer data banks—the universities, the libraries, the newspapers and such depositories of human knowledge. Early in the game they began cooperation in storing information. Soon there was a gigantic data bank of books, encyclopedias, newspaper morgues; everything from Einstein’s works to Escoffier’s Cook Book. The big step had been taken when it was decided to include the Library of Congress and, a few years later, through a special exchange arrangement Her Majesty’s Government, the British Museum Library.

Ultimately, this educational material was combined with the Federal Government’s information on individual citizens and all was placed in the National Data Banks. The thing had really begun in earnest. Every newspaper, every magazine, every book and pamphlet published in the world, in every written language, was translated by computer and placed in the files, in both its original and translated forms.

Neck and neck with these developments were those in the field of banking and credit, the trend to the cashless-checkless society and the universal credit account. The computer, plus the portable pocket TV phone, made possible a national credit system eliminating money, in the old sense of the word. A person’s income was put to his account. By placing his pocket transceiver on the payment screen in any store, restaurant, public transportation vehicle, or wherever, he was debited to whatever extent required.

Yes. Everything, no matter how trivial, was in the data banks. Why not? There was infinite room. The early punch cards had been replaced by magnetic tapes, and they in turn by much-improved methods of storing the information flooding into the computer banks. The Encyclopedia Britannica could be compressed into an area no larger than a fifty-cent piece. So why not store it all, all accumulated information?

But the thing which presently confronted Ted Swain was that there was precious little, astonishingly little, on the modern commune culture, if that was what you could call it.

He imagined that his final work should include at least one chapter on the history of the commune, to trace it to its earliest origins. The conception could be found as far back as Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia. But that wasn’t quite it. They were both fictional.

Nevertheless, he thought, scowling into his screen as he dialed over and over again, trying to trace out what small information was available, there were actual equivalents of the modern commune in the cooperative movements of the 19th Century, most of them based on early Utopian socialism.

Yes, he could find all the information he needed for a chapter or so on the preliminaries to the modern commune movement. And he would have no trouble with the primitive communes. He was so up on that subject that he would hardly have to research it at all.

But the modern! There was practically nothing at all. No wonder Dollar had been keen for him to go ahead.

Oh, there was some material, most of it not applicable to his study, as he presently saw it; articles and pamphlets on how to organize a mobile town; how to set up a local government for it; a president, a central committee, a police and fire unit, a community mobile hospital, and so forth. They stressed the need for an adequate community of interests. There was, he noted, even an archaeological mobile town, complete with a small mobile museum. They evidently went from dig to dig, throughout North America, sometimes conducting digs of their own when they could get permission. It occurred to Ted Swain that it would be a commune after his own heart. But no; he wanted to be a professional, not an amateur.

His stomach was growling. He clicked off the TV screen, and stared ahead of him, wondering what time it was. He’d lost track of the passage of the hours. He’d been sitting there until just short of dinner, without anything in his stomach but the eggs he’d made for himself and Martha, or Marsha, or whatever the hell her name was, that morning.

Well, he didn’t have time to dial the ultramarket for the ingredients to cook a decent meal now, he thought. He’d go over to the restaurant. He came to his feet, yawning and scowling. The fact was that this was not something that could be researched in the data banks. He would have to get out in the field.

Where the hell was he going to begin? There didn’t even seem to be lists of the various communes. Evidently they came and went at such a pace that no record could be kept. They shifted. A communard might be in a local commune in New England one day and travel down to one on the Florida peninsula the next. Or, for that matter, the whole commune might make such a move.

He made his way into the living room and toward the door. That bastard Englebrecht hadn’t the foggiest notion, when he came up with this brainstorm, of what was involved. Ted had a sneaking suspicion that there were literally tens of millions of Americans now living in the many types of commune; fugitives from the ordinary way of life under this alleged Utopia, the ultrawelfare society which had evolved in the past quarter century.

Tens of millions? For the first time it occurred to him that more than ninety percent of the population of United America lived by what was actually the norm, on Universal Guaranteed Income. It was from this huge number that the communes were being formed.

The community buildings of West Hurley were about a kilometer from Ted Swain’s house. The inhabitants of the town valued privacy above all and their houses were not packed together. The very thought of living in a hi-rise apartment building along with several thousand others was enough to chill Ted Swain’s blood.

He didn’t bother to summon a car, since he never rode if he could walk. A full-time scholar could go to pot in short order if he didn’t take advantage of every opportunity to exercise.

The swimming pool, the tennis courts and even the jai alai court were getting a good afternoon play. Ted waved to various acquaintances, but pushed on to the restaurant, which he found practically empty.

Mike Latimer was sitting at the bar, nursing a drink. When Ted sat down at a table, he picked up his glass and brought it over.

He said, “You know what’s gone out of this world of ours?”

“No,” Ted said, looking up from the menu set into the table top. “What?”

“The bartender, that’s what. It used to be that a well-intentioned hard-drinking man could go into a bar and spend the afternoon telling the long-suffering bartender all his troubles. And the bartender had to listen. It was an occupational hazard. Now everything’s automated.” He sat down across from Ted Swain.

Ted said, “You can always talk with a friend.”

“No, that’s not it. You don’t get the scenario. If you’ve got a friend you’re drinking with he wants to tell you his troubles, not listen to yours. The old-fashioned bartender never told you his troubles, he just listened sympathetically to your woes.”

Ted chuckled. Mike was a slight, amiable type, good-looking, dark of hair and brows and with a beautiful speaking voice. All of which fitted in with his trade. He was a TV news commentator, specializing in this immediate vicinity, local news, local gossip. His sense of humor was sparkling and he was popular. He liked his work, and since his listeners liked him, he was returned to the job time after time on work-muster day. He was one of the few in West Hurley who had employment.

Ted ran his finger down the menu and ordered a whale steak, along with suitable vegetables and a salad. He felt ravenous. He put his transceiver on the payment screen, dialed the meal, leaned back and looked thoughtfully at his tablemate.

He pulled on the lobe of his right ear, which was big enough as it was, without needing stretching, and said, “You know, it occurs to me that you’re just the man I want.”

Mike Latimer pretended to wince. “So you’ve come to that, eh? Turned queerie. Well, no thanks. I go for girls.”

“Doesn’t everybody know it? You’ve poked practically every mopsy in town. What I meant was, if anybody knew anything about the communes in this area, you would.”

“Communes? What about the communes?”

“Academician Englebrecht has come up with a subject for my dissertation. He wants me to do my book on a comparison between prehistoric communes and the modern ones.”

Mike looked at him questioningly. “I thought your specialty was ancient society.”

“It is. This is a new departure for me. There’s practically nothing in the data banks on modern communes, a fact that floors me. How can anything as big as they are currently have no data on them?”

Mike Latimer took a pull at his drink. “They’re dropouts,” he said. “They’re misfits in this culture. Some of them are bitter about it. Some couldn’t care less. But they have no intention of living like the rest of us. They want to do their own thing, not be bothered by society. So they contribute as little as possible to the statistics compiled by the data banks.”

Ted Swain said, “You mean, all of them?”

“No, not all of them. West Hurley, here, is one type of commune. Less far out than most, perhaps, but a commune of single, largely young, people interested in lots of poking, lots of sports, lots of entertainment. But there aren’t many real rebels among us. Actually, we’re rather on the conservative side, as communes go. We cooperate with the authorities, including the National Data Banks, we vote in the civic elections, we get along with everybody. But we don’t live in apartments in one of the pseudocities; we’ve left the cities.”

Mike thought about it for a moment before adding, “I suspect that this commune thing is considerably bigger than has been let out. And I suspect that it’s going to get bigger still. In a way, you might say that Robert Owen lives.”

“Robert Owen?”

“Never heard of him? An early 19th Century British reformer. Father of the cooperative movement. Sort of a Utopian socialist, I suppose you’d call him,” Mike said.

The center of the table dropped and then returned with Ted’s meal. He took up his napkin and utensils and forked an initial bite.

He said, “I met George Dollar at Englebrecht’s apartment He was hot for the project. I got the impression that he thought the communes were getting out of hand.”

Mike was surprised. “Dollar, eh? He’s backing you?”

“To the extent he can, evidently. From what he said, he’d like to see more information in the National Data Banks on the communes. They don’t seem to have had much luck getting information out of them.”

Mike grunted. “I can see why. Suppose you wanted information on this new art colony mobile town that’s shaping up over toward Saugerties. Suppose you sent a man in, pretending he was an artist, to pry around. How long do you think it would be before they knew damn well he was no artist?”

He cut a bite of the steak. It was, as always, superlative. Marsha had been right; the autochef never missed. However, he still had his unfounded prejudice against automated cooking.

Ted said, “Why not send in a man who was an artist?”

“Because if a man has been selected by the computers for a job in the National Data Banks, he’s no artist. He’s a data man and how many statisticians know one end of a paint brush from the other?”

Ted said, “Well, I’m evidently committed. So tomorrow I start checking out the communes in this vicinity. You have any ideas?”

“Yeah, don’t.”

Ted scowled at him. “What do you mean? Why not? It’s my big chance to get my academician’s degree, hombre.”

“It’s also your big chance to get your teeth kicked in.”