Читать книгу Towers of Utopia - Mack Reynolds - Страница 6

As always, Bat Hardin awakened at first dawn. He yawned uphappily, ran the back of his fist over his thickish lips. He got up and threw the covers up in such wise that it would be easier for the automatic to make the bed. Sometimes the things jammed it up, although he understood the later models were just about perfect.

He pressed the button that folded the bed into the wall and made his way into the bath, still yawning. His place was not quite a mini-apartment but it was by no means large. In fact, he had precious little more space than he had enjoyed in his mobile home back when he’d worked at being a policeman in the mobile art colony of New Woodstock.

The usual washing and shaving routine over, he went over to the delivery box and dialed fresh underwear, a shirt and socks from the ultra-market down in the bowels of the building. He threw the equal numbers from the day before into the disposal chute. He could have had them laundered, of course, but rejected the idea. Storage space in an average apartment was so limited that it hardly made sense to accumulate clothing, especially with textile prices what they were these days. Pants and jackets, yes. You saved by making them last awhile. Clothes with sentimental attachments, yes; that was another thing.

He went into the kitchenette and into the routine of making coffee. He could simply have dialed it on the auto-table, but that was one item where he drew the line. He liked coffee the way he made it, not the mass-produced product of the Restaurant Division down in the lower levels. He wondered vaguely how much coffee the automated kitchens turned out daily in Shyler-deme. Almost twenty thousand inhabitants. Some, of course, weren’t coffee drinkers, but on the other hand that would be balanced by some who probably drank several cups for breakfast alone.

He grunted sour amusement. He’d have to figure it out sometime on the slipstick. Say, twenty thousand cups. What was the content of a single cup? It would run into many a gallon. Gallons, ha! It probably got into the magnitude of barrels, if not tank cars full. It would be a darned sight easier just to ask the Head Chef. An efficient type, old Pete would know down to the ounce.

The coffee ready, he dialed a straight rum on his auto-bar in the living room cum bedroom. Bat Hardin wasn’t a heavy drinker by heavy drinker standards but during the Asian War he had picked up the habit of taking a slug of spirits with his coffee each morning by way of starting the body juices coursing.

He began to pour the drink into the black coffee and then stopped. He brought the small shot glass to his nose and, frowning, smelled. He tasted it and screwed up his heavy-set face into a scowl.

He muttered, “What the hell! This is rum?”

He turned the scowl to the auto-bar. It was programmed to deliver any of ten drinks which he selected. One of them was straight Jamaican rum, one of his few expensive indulgences. He insisted upon the imported stuff, straight from the island. The more common synthetic spirits just weren’t the same thing.

He shrugged and poured the drink into his coffee and took it over to the window and stared out over the square mile of parks, woods, playgrounds and gardens that surrounded the apartment building. In the distance, one mile off, was a sister ultra-apartment house, Victory-deme. In all, there were four demes in the pseudo-city of Phoenecia; roughly eighty thousand inhabitants, smallish as pseudo-cities went; however, large enough to offer the facilities that city dwellers desired.

A good many of the facilities city dwellers desired were less than necessary, so far as Bat Hardin was concerned. All over again, he wondered if he had made a mistake in leaving the mobile towns. He wondered where New Woodstock was by now. He had left the art colony on wheels at Mexico City and it had continued on its way down the Pan American Highway, South America its eventual goal.

Bat Hardin sighed. He had always wanted to see Peru.

Well, he had made his decision.

He finished the coffee and, not being hungry enough to eat it, threw the cup into the disposal chute and turned to that small section of his living room that he was pleased to call his study. He sat down before the typer, activated the TV library booster screen and slipped on his student’s headphones. He sighed again and dialed the next lesson in the Business Management course he was taking, among others, among many others.

Studying again, after all these years, didn’t come easily to Bat Hardin in his mid-thirties, but at least he had determination. Under Meritocracy, you needed it. High I.Q., determination, education … and luck. You needed them all to get even remotely toward the top under Meritocracy.

Particularly when you got as late a start working your way up the totem pole as had Bat Hardin. He inwardly cursed, still once again, the years he had spent in the military, and then the years he had spent living on Negative Income Tax while donating his services as town police officer to the mobile towns in which he had lived.

Yes, Bat Hardin was getting a late start; however, he was under way.

He put in an hour at the lessons, checked the time on his TV phone screen, pulled off the headphones, stretched and headed for the closet for his jacket. He made a point of never getting to work late. Bat Hardin was on his way up—if it killed him.

Out in the hall, he had to pause a moment to let one of his neighbors go by. He was mildly surprised to see her up and around at this hour. He nodded a good morning, and received not even a flicker of a flicker in return.

He looked after her for a moment. A weird, as they called them these days. She wore a soiled pair of khaki shorts, nothing more. Not even shoes. Probably returning from the apartment of one of the others of her group. The weirds made a point of promiscuity.

What was it about youth in revolt that they almost invariably ran to the ridiculous in dress? Few of them probably realized it but the weirds were not exactly first when it came to being rebels against the status quo. Bat Hardin sometimes suspected that every generation was at least partially a lost generation. The flappers and sheiks of Scott Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s Lost Generation with their skirts above the knee and their coonskin coats weren’t the first off-beats, no matter how daring they might have thought themselves, complete with hip flasks of gin. Their kids, in turn, had become the jitterbugs and zoot-suiters of the thirties and forties; and theirs had become the hippies of the fifties and sixties, complete with pot and LSD. And now, Bat thought, we have the weirds. Barefooted and often bare-breasted, and almost invariably soiled of clothing and uncombed of hair. What was there about being far-out that demanded you be dirty? If she could have raised a beard she probably would have.

Rebels without a cause. Sneering at society, but without a solution to its ills. And willing to a man to collect the free-loading Negative Income Tax. For Bat Hardin’s money, they were a bunch of bums.

It was a damn shame that Barry Ten Eyck, Shylerdeme’s Demecrat, had seen fit to allow them to move in. They pulled down a deme’s standing. More conservative elements were prone to move out of a deme with too many weirds in residence. However, he knew Ten Eyck’s motivation. You couldn’t return a profit on a deme unless you had a high percentage of occupancy. And if nobody else would move into your building, you had to take such off-beats as weirds and escapists.

He proceeded to the elevator banks and headed down for the building’s Administration offices.

As Vice-Demecrat of Shyler-deme, Bat Hardin was supposedly capable of taking over the management of any Division in the building and hence, at the present, found himself in charge of Security. Evidently, Barry Ten Eyck, knowing Bat had in the past been a police officer, was in no hurry to find a new Chief of Security. He was saving budget by doubling up officers.

He entered the outer offices and nodded to the single Security officer who handled the six hour night shift. Bat said, “Morning, Jeffers.”

Jeffers said, “The Head Chef has been trying to get you, Mr. Hardin.”

“Pete Daunou? Oh? What’s up?”

The other looked at him strangely. “You better talk to him. It doesn’t make much sense to me.”

Bat Hardin went into his inner office and sat down at his desk. His secretary, Ruth Wheeler, wasn’t on the scene as yet. He activated one of his phone screens and said into it, “Restaurant Division, please. Pierre Daunou.”

The chef’s rounded face, with its ridiculous little French mustache, faded in. He puffed his rosy cheeks out and popped his eyes.

“What’s the crisis, Pierre?” Bat said. The kitchen division wasn’t exactly from whence you expected to be called on in Security.

“Monsieur Hardin. It is fantastic!” He popped his eyes some more and reared back slightly and held his breath, as though expecting the other immediately to be astounded.

“Okay,” Bat said. “What?”

“Twenty-five barrels of olive oil, they have been stolen.”

Bat Hardin stared at him. “Twenty-five barrels.”

“Twenty-five barrels,” the chef said dramatically. “My own special Montenegrin olive oil.”

“How in the hell can you steal twenty-five barrels of olive oil?”

“Listen, how in the hell can you steal twenty-five barrels of olive oil?” Bat Hardin said, looking around the storage room.

Pierre Daunou made a Gallic gesture of despair. “One does not know. It is impossible. It is ridiculous. What would one even do with it if one was not a chef for twenty thousand people?”

His assistant, who was standing next to him, grunted. “It is more than five thousand liters of the best oil. If I had five thousand liters of Montenegrin olive oil and couldn’t sell it for a small fortune I would go out of business. I would soon find out where.”

Bat Hardin didn’t know the man, which mildly surprised him. He was reasonably well acquainted with the staff of Shyler-deme.

Pierre Daunou looked at the other in contempt. “Best of oil, ha! One knows little of olive oil if one makes such sweeping statements. For salads, yes!” He made a gesture of sweeping approval. But then his face turned indignant. “For cooking, but no. For the flavoring of, say, gazpacho, no. But, no. For such, Spanish olive oil.”

His assistant was no brown-noser. He snapped, “I prefer the Italian.”

“No.”

“Or even the more delicate oils of Provence.”

“Then you are an idiot.”

They glared at each other.

Bat said, “Listen …”

Pierre Daunou turned his glare at him. “You too perhaps prefer the olive oil of Italy to that of Spain for cooking gazpacho?”

Bat said, “I think the Greek is best.”

They both glowered their indignation.

“Holy Smokes,” Bat rasped. “Let’s get off this. I don’t even really know if they make olive oil in Greece and I haven’t the vaguest idea of what gazpacho is. Let’s get to the facts. You call me and say twenty-five barrels of olive oil have been swiped out of your storerooms. It doesn’t make sense. Pilferage, yes. It always happens. Pilferage we will always have with us. But you don’t pilfer twenty-five barrels of anything. What does twenty-five barrels of olive oil, Montenegrin, Spanish, or any other kind, come to? I mean in pseudo-dollars.”