After Utopia

wanted some clothes. Which is exactly one of the first things I’m going to want when I get out of here. How would I go about getting them?”

Walter Stein said, “You would simply dial the distribution center in Tangier and order them. See here, Tracy, as your physician—”

“How would I pay for them?”

“You wouldn’t,” Edmonds said, as though reasonably. “No need to, don’t you know.”

Tracy glared at him again. “Oh, I wouldn’t, eh? They’d be for free, eh?”

“Yes.”

Tracy shook his head in despair. “I don’t seem to get it. When I was working in the movement, we commonly believed that given a sane system of society we would be able to produce an abundance for all. But everything wasn’t going to be free. Everybody was going to have to work. You’d do your share and you’d get your share. I think it was a guy named Herman Kahn, in a book about the year 2000, who predicted that by that time we’d have a per capita product worth something like $10,000 a year, and an average family income of $20,000.”

“Failure of nerve and imagination,” Edmonds murmured. “Most of those who tried to extrapolate at that time had similar trouble.”

Academician Stein was making worried motions with his hands to quiet things down. He said, “Look here, Tracy Cogswell. I thought that we had made clear to you that the world today produces an absolute abundance for everyone.”

“There’s a limit to everything. Everything just can’t be free.”

“Tracy, Tracy,” Betty said. “You can only eat three or four meals a day, even if you’re a glutton. You can only wear one outfit of clothes at a time. You can only sleep in one bed. You can only ride in one vehicle at a time. You can only live in one house at a time. All of these things we have in abundance. Plenty of them for everybody.”

“All right, all right,” he said impatiently. “For that sort of thing, okay. But suppose I dialed this distribution center, or whatever you called it, and ordered all the diamonds they had in stock. Would they be free?”

“Diamonds?” Edmonds said blankly.

Betty said, “What in heavens would you want with diamonds?”

He looked at her in exasperation. “Diamonds, diamonds. Flawless blue diamonds. One of the most vahiable things in the world.”

“Oh,” Edmonds said. “Of course. They used to be. Gems. Rubies, sapphires, uh, emeralds. That sort of thing, what? Jewelry.” He looked over at Betty. “You know. Women used to wear it. Status symbols. That sort of thing.” He turned his eyes back to the impatient Cogswell. “Women don’t wear jewelry much any more. I doubt if there would be any diamonds at the local distribution center but if you wanted some they certainly wouldn’t take more than twenty-four hours to manufacture you as many as you wanted.”

“Manufacture?”

The other nodded. “Yes, certainly. If I remember correctly, a diamond is a pure or nearly pure form of carbon, crystalized in the isometric system. I believe that in the old days they were useful as points to tools due to their hardness. However, we now have artificial substances that are considerably harder, so diamonds are no longer utilized. Of course, another factor is that they were quite rare and difficult to locate and to mine.” He frowned and added, “It seems to me that even in your day they were already beginning to manufacture diamonds, weren’t they?”

Tracy gave up. He sighed and said, “Now that you mention it, I think they were able to produce small industrial diamonds. They had to subject carbon to extreme heat and pressure, or something. Damn it. They were beautiful! Precious! That’s why people wanted them.”

“No they weren’t,” Betty said decisively. “I’ve seen some of the old jewelry in museums. The former British crown jewels, for instance. Gaudy, garish. And from twenty feet away you couldn’t have told the difference between a diamond and a cleverly cut piece of glass or rhinestone. It would take an expert up close with his equipment to tell a flawed diamond from an unflawed one. Jo is right. They were status symbols, a symbol of wealth. Oh, some gems had a beauty of their own. Opals, star sapphires, jade, turquoise, but, as I recall, none of those were particularly precious. They were sort of semiprecious.”

Cogswell was frustrated. “All right. I shouldn’t have picked jewelry for my example. But this matter of everything being free. Suppose I dialed this super-supermarket of yours and had them deliver a Rembrandt.”

Stein said, still soothingly, as though to calm his patient, “You mean the artist?”

“Yes, I mean the artist. Don’t tell me you no longer look at paintings.”

The Academician said, “Oh, most certainly we do. We’re very art conscious. Certainly you’ve noted the many we have in the house. Rembrandt is not a particular favorite of mine; however, if I wanted a reproduction of any of his… ”

Cogswell had him now. “I wasn’t talking about a reproduction,” he said. “I was talking about an original Rembrandt. The real thing.”

The other shook his head in despair. He said, “You didn’t have duplicators in your day, did you?”

“Duplicator?”

The Academician nodded. “Tracy Cogswell, today we have equipment that… well, we can take the Rembrandt painting you wish and so duplicate it that Rembrandt himself would not know the difference between the original and the copy. It would be exactly the same, down to practically the last molecule in the paint. And then you could make a copy of the copy and a copy of that and they would all be exactly alike… down to the last molecule.”

“So why would you want the original?” Betty said in a reasonable tone.” She thought about it. “Come to think, I doubt if anyone knows where any of the originals of a painter as famous as Rembrandt might be. Everything he ever did has been copied over and over again, probably thousands of times. How could you ever find the original?“ Her expression indicated that the question had never crossed her mind before.

Tracy gave up. “The hell with it,” he said. “At any rate, I’m getting out of here. All I want from you three is a little knowledge of the ropes. How I get a room in a hotel. How I get food in a restaurant. How I order from these distribution centers. I think that you owe me at least that much.”

Jo Edmonds flipped his piece of jade and said softly, “Where would you go?”

“I don’t know,” Tracy said. “Somewhere to get orientated until I can get a job.”

Walter Stein said, his voice still placating, “Tracy Cogswell, there are no jobs.”

Tracy was scornful of that opinion. He said, “I’ll find something. I’m no bum. You mean there’s a lot of unemployment? I thought this was Utopia.”

The academician sighed. He said, “Unemployment isn’t quite the way to put it, Tracy Cogswell. Did you ever hear of a Dr. Richard Bellman of the Rand Corporation? Possibly he came after your time, I don’t quite remember. At any rate, he predicted that by the end of the twentieth century two percent of the labor force would be able to produce all the products the United States could consume. Obviously, the rest of the developed nations were in much the same position.”

“Once again, failure of nerve and imagination,” Edmonds put in. “He failed to realize the extent to which automation and the computer, not to speak of nuclear fussion and other breakthroughs, would take over.”

Tracy was staring again. He said, in utter disbelief, “You mean nobody works?”

Edmonds shrugged. “For all practical purposes, nobody has to work. Even those who do are usually employed at make-work projects. They wouldn’t have to if they didn’t want to.”

Tracy had to reject that one. It was just out of the question. He said, “That’s crazy! There’ll always be some work that has to be done.”

Stein nodded agreement to that and said, “Yes, and always some compulsive workers available to do it. But for all practical purposes labor has been eliminated. Machines do it so very much better.”

Tracy Cogswell slumped back in his chair. So many curves had been thrown at him in the past hour or so that he simply couldn’t assimilate them.

The academician said, “Tracy Cogswell, it’s what we told you. The human race is turning to mush. It no longer has purpose.” He chuckled, but this time bitterly. “They used to think that the Romans went to pot because they gave their people free bread and circuses. Ha! Bread and circuses. In our age, we give our people everything free.”

Tracy squared his shoulders and said, “All right, so be it, but I’m not your patsy. I’m clearing out of here just