The doctor looked at Bat narrowly. “You better come into the next room and sit down for a time. A little shock is beginning to set in. Let me see your eyes.” He looked closely at the pupils. “I don’t think you’ve got a concussion. You must have a skull as thick as armor plate. What’d he hit you with?” He was leading the way into the adjoining room which served as a waiting room of the clinic during the day hours.
“A baseball bat,” Bat growled unhappily. He was feeling slightly nauseated. He suffered Nurse Stevens to help him into an easy chair.
The doctor sat down across from him but the nurse left, evidently to clean up the emergency room.
Bat Hardin said, “Why did they donate this outfit? It must have cost a fortune.”
“Contrary to some opinion, these mobile towns are not necessarily solely populated by bums on NIT,” Barnes said. “Some people, even well to do people, prefer to live this way. Admittedly, the swanker mobile towns and cities usually exclude anyone not of a certain financial standing but an art colony such as this attracts men like Armanruder and Blake because of the companionship.”
“That still doesn’t answer my question.”
Doc Barnes said impatiently, “They donated it shortly before you joined New Woodstock because I told them I wouldn’t take the job unless we had better facilities than were provided at that time.”
Bat scowled. “What job? I thought you volunteered your services.”
“I do. I’m retired and have all the income I need. Sort of an old workhorse that hates to be out of harness. I saw an advertisement in one of the magazines devoted to mobile town life for a doctor and answered it. New Woodstock’s doctor had passed away. Armanruder and Blake liked my qualifications and for the sake of their own selves and family members ponied up the necessary if I’d stay.”
“Damn nice of them.”
Doc shifted his thin shoulders. “You need a competent general practitioner in a mobile town. It wasn’t completely altruistic on their part. They get sick as often as anyone else.”
Bat said, “Well, if you wanted to remain in practice, why didn’t you stay up north?”
The doctor said testily, “Because I’m outdated. In medicine today you become outdated about every five years. Normally, a competent physician will return to school every five years and spend one or two years catching up on the latest advances. I’ve got to the age where it’s too difficult to keep up. Besides, I like this life. I’m not so confoundedly senile that I don’t appreciate a change of scene, open air life, the beach or lakeside in the summer, a southern climate in the winter.”
Bat was beginning to feel better but he was in no hurry to go. He liked old Doc Barnes and suspected that the other had been a top man of his field in his day.
He said, “Were all the other auxiliary trailers acquired the same way?”
Doc Barnes squinted at him. “You should know, you’ve lived in mobile towns before, haven’t you?”
“They sometimes differ in how they’re composed,” Bat said. “The only other one I’ve lived in was even smaller than this and specialized in archeology. There were precious few auxiliaries, and those largely inadequate, except for the mobile museum. We’d go to archeological digs and set up the town and stay there until the majority wanted to move on to some other archeological site. We were in Yucatan for a while, in the Mayan ruins; very interesting.”
“Why did you leave?” Doc said.
Bat shrugged. “For some reason archeological ruins seem to be usually located in grim places. I got tired of heat, mosquitos, inadequate town sites, drab views and abstent-minded-scholar types. I decided an art colony would provide more interesting companionship and be inclined to move around in the beauty spots of the continent, instead of parking in jungles, deserts and such. I considered joining up with one of the resort towns, the type that head up for New England or the Canadian Rockies in the summer months and then down to Florida or here to Mexico for the beaches in the winters. But the thing is, those towns are a little too much on the hedonistic side for me. Too much boozing, too much partying. Nobody seems to have much interest in anything but having a good time. Here in New Woodstock almost everybody works at something or at least pretends to. I prefer even a demi- buttocked artist to someone who makes no pretense of doing anything at all except sitting on the beach during the day and getting smashed at a party at night.”
The doctor shifted his shoulders again. “I feel the same way. As far as the auxiliaries are concerned, some, such as the ad building and the school, were bought by popular subscription when the town first organized some years ago. Others are privately owned. Sam Prager’s TV and electronic repair shop, for instance. Evidently, Sam had always loved to tinker. When his job was automated out from under him, he and his wife, Edith, took what resources they had and made a down-payment on a mobile home and equipped one room as a repair shop.”
“I wonder why Sam joined New Woodstock,” Bat said. “You’d think he’d look up a town that had a lot of members with similar interests in fiddling around with electronics.”
“Edith writes. Poetry, I believe. She’s on the striving intellectual side. Answer the question yourself, Bat. Why has a healthy, comparatively young fellow like you retired to a life in New Woodstock?”
Bat told him.
The doctor was irritated. “The word intelligence has its elastic qualities,” he said. “The tests we now use are considerably more efficient than they used to be; however, the I.Q. test largely measures the speed of your thinking, not necessarily its quality.”
“How do you mean?”
The testy old man said, “See here. Suppose you were shipwrecked on a deserted island. Who would you rather have as a companion, a computer programmer with an I.Q. of 150#longdash#gifted, in short#longdash#or a chappie with an I.Q. of 110, slightly above average, who was a professional fisherman and spent his vacations in hunting, hiking and skin diving.”
Bat said dryly, “These days, you’re not apt to be shipwrecked. And under the Meritocracy high I.Q. is the criteria that counts.”
The doctor said, “Fast thinking isn’t always the best. All chess players of premier standing don’t necessarily have high I.Q.s, nor do all top-ranking scientists. Some are pluggers, rather than speed-demon types. In mathematics, for another example, I once studied a boy of twelve who could do problems in his head almost as fast as you could state them. His mind worked at computer speed when it came to multiplication or division. Yet he was just short of being a moron.”
“Well, be that as it may, under the Meritocracy you’re primarily judged by your I.Q. and evidently on an average the system works. You’ve really got to operate to buck the system, get a decent education, get a position with one of the major corporations.”
Doc Barnes reached over and took Bat’s wrist. He said, “Your pulse is all right and you’ve lost the clammy feeling of shock. I suppose you could go now. One thing I ought to say to you, Bat, on this low I.Q. thing. You’re building up a grand inferiority complex.”
Bat Hardin stood and turned to leave. He said, lowly, “It’s not an inferiority complex, Doc. I
VI
Before going to the mobile mansion which was the home of Dean Armanruder, Bat Hardin headed for the considerably less ostentatious home of his deputy, Al Castro.
On the way, he passed the camper of Ferd Zogbaum and considered momentarily sticking his head inside and inquiring about the other’s headache. It was a strange thing, that headache. What had Ferd said? That every time he got into a fight the headache hit him.
He approached the other’s camper but then drew himself up. Through one of the windows he could see Ferd sitting at his tiny desk talking earnestly into a TV phone. There was a, well, anxious look on his face, one of strain, although he was seemingly trying to control that element of his expression.
Bat shrugged and moved on. Since it seemed unlikely that the freelance writer had any contacts here in Mexico, he must have been communiciating with someone back in the States and the conversation was seemingly of more than passing interest.
Bat shrugged again. For all he knew, Ferd was querying some editor about an article. Possibly the strained
