After Utopia Read online

  After Utopia

  Mack Reynolds

  It is the far future. Earth is a beautifully planned, efficiently run and happily united. But still it is a world with problems—people have become so lazy, so self-satisfied, that human progress has all but ceased. Addicts of the newly-developed “programmed dreams” are increasing at an enormous rate. Only a few individuals realize that the human race is destroying itself. This book is about what those few people do.

  After Utopia

  by Mack Reynolds

  Part One

  REVOLUTION

  Chapter One

  Tracy Cogswell yawned again, gave up and left the letter in his typewriter unfinished. He could do it in the morning. It wasn’t important anyway. Some instructions to a group of Montevideo.

  He sometimes wondered at the advisability of the movement’s making an effort in countries like Uruguay. What was the percentage? The decisions were going to be made in the most advanced countries: the United States, Common Europe, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China. The small nations could do no more than string along. The movement couldn’t succeed in a country that wasn’t highly industrialized and self-sufficient.

  He was living in a small apartment, in a small apartment house, on Rue Dr. Fumey, Tangier, Morocco. In a city famed for the anonymity of its population, Tracy Cogswell was possibly the most anonymous of them all. At times he wondered if even Interpol was familiar with his efforts. They probably were. You didn’t fight in Spain as a boy and twenty years later in Hungary—not to mention his other activities over the years—without getting into the dossiers of the political police of the world, on both sides of the Curtain.

  For a moment, he considered taking an amphetamine and knocking out some more work, but decided against it. That wasn’t the way. Over a period of time you got more done without resorting to lifters, and Tracy Cogswell was trained in the long view.

  He considered the pamphlet sitting on the coffee table next to his reading chair. It was an early work of the older Liebknecht, and Cogswell wasn’t finding the going particularly easy, largely because he didn’t know very much about what the situation in Imperial Germany had been before the turn of the century. However, in its way it was a classic, and Cogswell, though not a scholar by inclination, worked at acquiring a good foundation.

  He decided that he was too groggy to concentrate on political economy, put his beret on his head, and left the room. Come to think of it, he hadn’t been out all day and that didn’t pay off. He’d wind up in a mental rut and there were too many people depending on his staying out of ruts. It was not by error that Tracy Cogswell was working full-time in the movement as a sort of international clearinghouse.

  The apartment was a fifth floor walkup. During the three years that Cogswell had lived here, he’d had no visitors other than the plumber and, once, an electrician. And each time they’d appeared he’d gone to considerable trouble to alter the apartment’s usual appearance, to make it look a bit less than what it really was. On the occasion where it was necessary to make explanations, Tracy put himself over as an unsuccessful writer, always at work on his serious novel. But the layout of his apartment was different from what even the most extensive researcher among writers might utilize. Too many files, too many stacks of mimeograph paper, too many pamphlets, leaflets, brochures; and his library was heavy with political economy, practically bare of anything else save a certain amount of history and reference.

  Ordinarily, the recreation Cogswell allowed himself was rather limited to attending the local cinema. In the movies one can relax mentally and physically—and anonymously. Tonight, however, he had no desire for the Hollywood never-never land.

  He walked down Rue Dr. Fumey to Rue De La Croix and turned right up to Mousa ben Nusair and the Bar Novara. This was the French section of town, and, except for an occasional haik clad, veiled fatima on her way home from a maid’s job, you could have thought yourself in Southern France.

  Paul Lund’s bar had few claims to uniqueness so far as its appearance was concerned. It looked like any other bar.

  The Vandyked owner-bartender was a typical resident of extradition-free Tangier. Exsmuggler, excon man, ex-half a dozen other types of criminal, the knowledge that Interpol was waiting for him anywhere out of Tangier kept him hemmed in; and kept him honest, for that matter. Paul Lund was smart enough not to foul his sole remaining nest.

  Paul said, “Hi, Tracy. Haven’t seen you for donkey’s years.”

  Cogswell said, “I’ve been working. Having trouble with my eighth chapter.” He flicked his eyes over the two other occupants of the bar and recognized them both: an American sergeant of the marines, stationed at the local consulate, and a French teacher at the French lycée, a parlor-pink type who got his kicks out of supporting the Commie party line in public but who, in the finals, would probably turn out to be a rabid DeGaulle man.

  Paul was saying, “Eight chapters? Haven’t you got any further than that with that poxy book of yours? Wot’ll you have?”

  “I’m rewriting,” Cogswell said. “Let me have a pastis.”

  “Absinthe?”

  “Hell no, that stuff fuzzes up my head for days.”

  Paul Lund poured an inch of Pernod into a tumbler and added three parts of cold water to it. Cogswell climbed up on one of the tiny bar’s six stools and took a sip. He wondered how Desage was doing in Marseille. The police had nabbed him the week before, but they had nothing on him. France was one of the countries where the movement was legal; the authorities didn’t like it, but it wasn’t illegal. The same was true of the States and England. In the smaller countries they were underground. The smaller ones and the Soviet countries. It meant a bullet in the back of your head if you were caught behind the Curtain.

  Paul winked at him and indicated the other two customers with a gesture of his head. “Jim and Pierre are solving all the troubles of the world.”

  Cogswell grunted. He listened uninterestedly to the argument. It occurred to him that Jim looked surprisingly like a taller Mickey Rooney and Pierre Meunier like David Niven.

  The argument wasn’t unique. The American marine evidently got his opinions as well as his facts from Time. Pierre Meunier was reciting the Commie party line like a tape. In fact, as Cogswell listened he decided that Meunier wasn’t even doing a particularly good job of that. He evidently wasn’t aware of the fact that the party line had shifted in one or two particulars just that morning. Among other things, the American president was no longer a mad fascist dog; he was now a confused liberal. Meunier seemed to be of the opinion that he was still a mad fascist dog.

  Jim finally turned to Tracy Cogswell plaintively. “Look, Mr. Cogswell, what do you think? Should the free world put up with the Russkies using the UN for a propaganda drum?”

  “Free world!” Pierre Meunier snorted. “Yankee dollar imperialists on one extreme and feudalistic countries like Saudi Arabia on the other. The free world! Among others, Portugal, with its African slave colonies. Morocco, with its absolute monarchy. South Africa, that land of freedom! And Spain, that one! And the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, and Nicaragua, and Formosa, and South Korea and South Vietnam. All those freedom-loving countries.”

  Tracy Cogswell made a point of avoiding political discussions in Tangier. It wasn’t his job to make individual converts. His position as an international coordinator remained possible so long as he remained anonymous. He also made a point of not arguing his political beliefs while he was drinking.

  But in this case, something had happened. Jim had called him Mr. Cogswell. Unconsciously, Cogswell ran his right hand up over the scar that ran along the ridge of his jaw, disappearing into the sideburn. A mortar bomb fragment had creased him there at the debacle at Gerona during the Sp
anish civil war. The sideburn was now going gray. Jim must have been a child when the Abraham Lincoln Battalion had been all but wiped out at Gerona toward the end of the Spanish fracas.

  Spain! That was where, even as a teenager, he’d gotten his bellyful of the damn Russians and where he’d begun to achieve some maturity in political economy. Spain, where the idealistic kids of a score of countries had flocked to fight for democracy and had wound up dying for Russian expediency.

  Mr. Cogswell, yet! Was he that far along? Did he look like an old fogy to the marine?

  He pushed his glass over toward Paul Lund and said, “Let’s have another one.”

  To Jim he said, “Our position seems to be that the virtues of western democracy are so superior to the Soviet system that a few blasts on our trumpet will bring the Commie Jericho down. It might’ve been true, had the premise it rested upon been a little sounder. Unfortunately, the West doesn’t form the community of unsullied virgins which the triumph of virtue predicates. As a matter of fact, the most shrill of the anti-Commie harridans are usually those of least political repute. For every Denmark or Holland, we’ve got a South Korea or Turkey. The big western powers seem to have recruited their allies not for their adherence to the principles we preach but for their opposition to the principles we oppose.”

  Pierre Meunier was grinning happily. “My point, exactly,” he said.

  Tracy Cogswell turned on him and snapped, “As for the Commies, where did you get the idea that because one side might be wrong, the other must be right?”

  Meunier said something like, “Ung?”

  Cogswell growled, “I sometimes think that if there wasn’t any such thing as the Communist party that it’d be to the interest of the western powers to create one. It makes the biggest bogy of all time. In the name of fighting the Commies you can pull just about anything in the way of keeping your people from examining your own institutions. In Guatemala, if the fruit pickers decide they need a union to get better pay than six bucks a week, the cry goes up they’re commies! and the leaders are thrown into the jug. In South Africa the natives decide that some of the freedom they’ve been hearing about might be a good idea and start making some noises to that effect. Commies! the call goes up and they’re slapped down flat. It applies to every country outside the Soviet ones. Any man in his right mind can see that what they’ve got in the Soviet Union is no answer, so even men of good will allow almost anything to be pulled just as long as its done in the name of fighting communism.”

  Tracy Cogswell took an angry pull at his drink, finishing it. “I think that the worst thing that ever happened to social progress was that damned premature Bolshevik revolution.”

  Paul Lund was laughing at him. “What side are you on, anyway?”

  Cogswell slid off his stool and tossed two hundred francs to the counter. He grunted his disgust. “That was the point I was trying to make. It’s about time the people in this world find out both sides are wrong and start looking for something else. Good night, gentlemen.”

  Jim said vacantly, “So long.” He hadn’t followed Cogswell’s argument very well, but he could see by Meunier’s unhappy expression that the party line hadn’t been extolled.

  Back in his apartment, he grunted sourly to himself. What did he think he was accomplishing? None of the three men he’d sounded off to were potential material for the movement. And there was a remote possibility that, as a result of his little curse-on-both-your-houses speech, word would get around that he, Tracy Cogswell, had rather strong political opinions, and that was the last thing he wanted.

  He went out into his tiny kitchen and poured himself still another drink. Cogswell wasn’t generally much for belting the bottle, but at the moment he felt the need for another drink. He brought his glass back to the living room and sat it on the coffee table next to his reading chair.

  He picked up the Leibnecht pamphlet and thumbed through the pages idly. He was still in no mood for concentration.

  Something alien flickered in his eyes, and he scowled and looked up at the wall opposite. There seemed to be some sort of light reflection. No, that wasn’t the word.

  Cogswell frowned, trying to figure out what it could be. Some reflection, or something, from somewhere. But where? Anything coming through the window that opened onto Rue Dr. Fumey would hardly…

  He squinted at the vague flickering. What was it that it reminded him of? Why, a Fourth of July pin wheel, like they used to have when he was a kid in Cincinnati. One of the little penny ones.

  His mind went back to Cincinnati.

  The big swimming pool where the adults would throw in pennies and you’d dive for them. You could get enough to go to the movies if you worked at it long enough. Ten cents was the price of a kid’s admission.

  The movies in Cincinnati, back in the 1920s. He’d been a real fan. Lon Chaney, Hoot Gibson, Rin-Tin-Tin, Tom Mix, Our Gang.

  The pin wheel was larger and turning faster. What in the world could it be? Quite an optical illusion. He knew that if he got up and walked over to it, either it would fade away or he would be able to determine what caused it. He felt too lazy to make the effort.

  It still seemed to be growing in size.

  That Pernod he’d had at Paul Lund’s had hit him harder than he’d expected. Evidently he’d had too little dinner, and the alcohol had free range.

  Of a sudden, Tracy Cogswell shook his head. He was getting drowsy and that wasn’t right. That damned spinning was having hypnotic effect on him. He was going to have to…

  Part of him backed away in astonishment. Why, he was actually, in a strange manner, under. Asleep, though still awake, from the effects of the spinning and… and something else. He didn’t know what else. Good Jesus Christ, certainly Paul hadn’t put something in his drink. No, that was ridiculous.

  But now, in an impossible sort of way, part of his brain seemed to stand off and watch the rest of him. As though—what was the term the occult crackpots used?—as though his astral body was standing aloof from him and watching his every action.

  Chapter Two

  Tracy Cogswell stood up suddenly. The pinwheel was gone now. But there was still something there. And still his second self stood off and seemingly watched, completely puzzled. And there was even a touch of fear. Was he simply drunk?

  Purposefully, Cogswell strode over to the heaviest of the steel files, fished his keys from his pocket and unlocked it. Inside the bottom drawer was a heavy strongbox. Another key opened it. He fished out more than a thousand dollars in pounds, French francs, fifty-dollar bills and British gold sovereigns. His emergency money. He also brought forth two bankbooks, one on Barclay’s in Gibraltar and one on the Moses Pariente bank here in Tangier, as well as his emergency forged Australian passport.

  He tucked all of these into his pockets and went into the bedroom where he fished a suitcase from under the bed.

  While his separate ‘sane’ self watched in growing amazement and disconcertedness, Tracy Cogswell rapidly packed his bag. He ignored the light Luger in the top drawer of his bureau and, contrary to his usual custom, packed no reading material at all.

  Fifteen minutes after first seeing the pin wheel, he was carefully locking the door of his apartment behind him.

  Down on the street, he strolled over to Rue Goya, tossing his apartment keys into a corner refuse can on the way. In front of the Goya Theatre, he hailed a Chico Cab and said, “ Je voudrais aller au Grand Zocco.”

  This could only be a dream. A dream composed of too much work, too little relaxation, too much strain, and two of Paul Lund’s heavy charges of Pernod.

  But all the time he knew it was no dream.

  In the Grand Zocco, the open-air market of the medina section of town, he paid the cab driver and started purposefully down the Rue Siaghines, which led to the Petit Zocco, once the most notorious square in the world.

  Past him streamed the multiracial populace of what was possibly the most cosmopolitan city on earth. Berbers and Arabs, Rifs and B
lue men, shabby Europeans from both sides of the Curtain. Indians in saris, Moslems in jellabas and shuffling babouche slippers. The Moorish fez, the Indian turban, the Jewish skullcap, the French beret. Rue Siaghines, the widest street in the medina, practically the only one in which you couldn’t touch the walls along both sides while standing in the middle. Lined by Indian shops with the products of a hundred lands. Cameras from Germany, perfumes from France, watches from Switzerland.

  And, for that matter, pornography from Japan, hashish from southern Morocco, heroin from Syria, aphrodisiacs from Egypt.

  As he walked, his mentally clear astral self stood back in dumbfounded amazement. If this were no dream, then where was he going, what was he doing? Tracy Cogswell seldom came into the native section of Tangier. He had no reason to. His work and what little recreation he allowed himself all took place in the westernized section of town. He shopped in the French market, ate occasionally in a French or Spanish restaurant, visited the American library to read the papers and magazines, attended the cinema possibly two or three times a week.

  He came to the Petit Zocco, crossed it, and took the narrow side street to the right, the one headed by what had been the Spanish post office when Tangier had been an International Zone. He ended at the Tannery Gate.

  A hundred yards down it, he turned into Luigi’s Pension, an establishment he’d never noticed before, one of a dozen similar cheap hotels.

  Luigi, who Cogswell decided looked like a sinister version of the Mexican comedian Cantinflas, spoke English. Their business was quickly transacted. Tracy Cogswell’s voice showed no indication of stress, certainly Luigi acted as though nothing untoward was going on. A man with a suitcase and an Australian passport was taking a room with full pension, three meals, at a cost of five hundred Moroccan francs per day. A bit over an American dollar.