woman, and didn’t particularly have any close feminine friends. There was something in her that the other women didn’t seem to take to. Not that she had active foes in New Woodstock, to any extent, it was just that she wasn’t the type to sit about and exchange gossip with the town’s married women.
He went over to the bar. “Drink?”
“Do you have pseudo-whiskey?”
“No, you can’t have whiskey.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re in Mexico. Drink the local product. In Mexico, drink tequila, mescal or Kahlua.”
“You’re a hard man, Hardin. What’s Kahlua?”
“A liqueur based on coffee,” he told her. “And one of the best liqueurs in the world.”
“Sounds too sweet. What are you drinking?”
“A tequila sour.”
“You talked me into it.”
He dialed another tequila sour and took it over to her and then returned to his own chair.
They sipped for a moment in silence. Finally, she said, “Remember that conversation we had about I.Q.?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve been thinking about it. I wonder if the question has ever occurred to anyone, is it desirable to breed for greater intelligence?”
He scowled at her. “How do you mean, Di?”
“Well, take greater height. Why is being a six-footer or over desirable? Why is the average height of the Japanese, slightly over five feet, not just as good, or better? Certainly, in the old days when men slugged it out with swords, or when they worked with a shovel or plow, physical size was desired, but why now? We don’t usually think of a man who weighs over two hundred as being in the best of shape, but we seem to have an absolute mania to be over six feet and to have a genius-level I.Q. Why? Has it ever been indicated, not to say proven, that the man with an I.Q. of 150 is happier than one with an I.Q. of 100? The genius, as well as the moron, is a misfit in society. Do we want to be smarter, or happier? If it is the pursuit of happiness that is our primary interest, then perhaps we should not seek, as a race, a high intelligence quotient.”
Bat thought about it, for some reason slightly irritated. The subject was not a favorite one with him. He said, finally, slowly, “Man is a thinking animal, Di. If it wasn’t for our superior intelligence we never would have gotten out of the caves.”
“All right. I’m not contending that we ought to breed for morons, just that we also shouldn’t make a fetish of the highest I.Q.s. Back when we were in the caves both intelligence and physical strength were necessary or the individual perished. So our I.Q. was bred up.”
Bat said, “As a matter of fact, I understand that not only Cro-Magnon but even Neanderthal man had a larger brain than modern man.”
“All right. But what I meant is, man has largely licked the problems he was confronted with in his infancy. We’ve defeated our animal enemies. We’ve conquered nature, at least to the extent that we can now produce all of our needs in abundance. All right. Isn’t it time we took stock and decided where we want to go from here? We’ve achieved the necessities of life, now shouldn’t we resume the pursuit of happiness?”
“Whatever that is,” Bat said sourly. “Anyway, it’s a great idea that possibly the average person, with his I.Q. of 100, is just as happy, or possibly happier, than one with 150. The trouble is, under the Meritocracy, I.Q. is what counts. And if you’re ambitious and want to get ahead in present-day society, you’d best have one in the upper brackets.”
She set her glass down and leaned forward slightly. “That’s what I mean. Maybe Ferd Zogbaum is correct. Maybe this Meritocracy of ours isn’t the end of the line so far as social evolution is concerned, if there’s ever an end.”
Bat said impatiently, “It’s true that in production today not
It was her turn to shake her head in despair. “You still sound like a goddamned professor of something or other to me,” she said. “And here you say you’re subnormal intellectually. But that was the very point I was trying to make.”
He regarded her, still frowning.
She said urgently. “Don’t you see? All members of society should be useful members of society. If they aren’t, something snaps sooner or later. Look at the Roman proletariat. At present, under the Meritocracy, things are temporarily going along well enough, perhaps. The people were raised too long in the tradition that it was a good thing to get something for nothing, feather-bedding, and so forth. Beating the rap was admirable; they even idealized bankrobbers and other criminals. But now that the ultimate in pay without work has been reached, the first stirrings of second thought are to be found. I think that instinctively a man strives. He may be seduced away from the desire to work, to strive. He may, but if so it is a temporary thing, as the history of the race goes. Man wants to work and achieve. The so-called fireman sitting in the cab of a locomotive seven hours a day without a single thing to do, since the locomotive is electric, is not a happy man. Certainly, the pay is good, and everybody tells him he is getting away with it, but he isn’t a happy man. If he is, he’s a sick man. If his fellows were contemptuous of him rather than pretending admiration, he’d get himself something else to do.”
Bat made a gesture of impatience. “But the fact remains that there is no place for us in modern production. A fraction of the people can handle all of the jobs. Maybe it’s not good for the rest of us to sit around, idle, but there’s no alternative.”
She leaned forward still further, her elbows on her knees and her voice very earnest.
She said, “Then we’ve got to make some changes. Back before we licked the problems of production of abundance that was, and had to be, the main goal of the race. Food, clothing, shelter, medicine, education, recreation for all, in abundance. But now that we’ve gained the goals, let’s stop a minute and look around. How about the arts, how about the handicrafts? Ours has become a synthetic world, why not devote these surplus energies of ours, devote the leisure time that hangs so heavily, into some of the old virtues? My grandfather mentions that when he was a boy practically everybody played some musical instrument. There was a bandstand in every park and at least one band in every town, no matter how small. Women used to sew, knit, crochet, embroider, make quilts and so forth. Have you ever seen some of those handmade quilts in a museum and compared them with the mass-produced things that we put on our beds today?”
Bat was chewing away on his lip. He said, “Some people already go into the arts; yourself, for instance. But not everybody has talent. And most are too lazy, if they don’t have to, to bother with doing ceramics, weaving cloth, quilting, or whatever.”
“Perhaps they are now, but that’s our problem,” she told him. “We’ve got to educate our people to want to do them. Take cooking. Cooking has become automated#longdash#and it tastes like it. Why, the person who could afford decent food a hundred years ago wouldn’t have dreamed of eating the tasteless stuff that we down these days. Never has food been more beautifully packaged, been so adulterated, and tasted so poorly. And music. For all practical purposes, it’s all canned these days. Sometimes I think that a few dozen musicians are turning out all the music for the country. How long has it been since you’ve seen a live musician? How long has it been since you’ve seen live theatre?”
Bat said doggedly, “It doesn’t make sense in this day for there to be live theatres, employing tens of thousands of actors, when a cast of twenty can entertain fifty million persons at a time over TV.”
“Like hell it doesn’t,” she said. “That’s exactly the point I was trying to make. I’m beginning to suspect that Ferd is right. Our present society needs a little subverting. What time is it?” She brought her pocket phone from her jeans and dialed for the time.
“Good Jesus,” she said. “Is it that late? I better get going. I assume we’re off to a fairly early start in the morning.”
Bat shrugged. “Not necessarily. We’ll probably only go about two hundred kilometers, so there’s no rush to get rolling.” He stood to show her to the door.
