Rolltown. Mack Reynolds

his pocket. He fumbled at the door’s lock, and felt arms grasping him from the rear. He reached back, snagged an arm and threw the other brutally over his shoulder in the old wrestler’s favorite hold, the Flying Mare.

      Ferd Zogbaum erupted from the cantina and slammed the doors back into the faces of the enraged enemy.

      The car door was open. Bat Hardin darted in and snaked across the seat to the driver’s position. Ferd was still holding the rapidly emerging local citizens, his arms swinging like windmills. Bat reached out and grabbed him by the belt and pulled him bodily inside in a sprawl.

      The car began to move forward. Bat deliberately held down his speed so as not to seriously harm the two or three of the enemy who were immediately ahead, trying to stop him. They scurried to either side as he slowly speeded up. A few were already heaving rocks, which bounded off the car’s side.

      Ferd had finally managed to sit erect and now slammed shut the still open door on his side. “Fun and games!” he yelped. “Get us the hell out of here, Bat. If any of those jokers are heeled, we’ve had it.”

      Bat growled, “This is a converted police riot car. They’d have to have anti-tank guns.”

      They were back on the main road leading out of town and to the site where New Woodstock was parked.

      “Armored, eh?” Ferd said and then, “Hey, you’ve got a nasty cut on your head.” He pulled forth a handkerchief and handed it over. “This is clean.” Then he put a hand to his own head and groaned.

      Bat Hardin, driving with one hand, held the handkerchief to the cut. “What the hell’s the matter?” he said. “If there’d been any gunfire, I’d say you’d copped one.”

      “Splitting headache,” Ferd muttered. “I always get them, if I get into a fight.”

      “By Christ,” Bat said bitterly. “I always thought of you as an easygoing character. What the hell was the idea of calling that guy a greaser? Haven’t you ever heard that a gentle answer turneth away rats?”

      “Yeah, and you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make her,” Ferd groaned, still holding his head. “Listen, we had no more chance of getting out of that joint without a scrap than we have of flying without wings. Couldn’t you feel that in the air when we walked in? That bartender would have slipped us a mickey, if he’d had one handy. I just precipitated it before they got organized—thank God.”

      “More of your feminine intuition?” Bat said in disgust. He dabbed at his head and looked at the handkerchief. He was bleeding profusely. “I’ll have to take this to Doc,” he growled.

      They were approaching the camp site.

      Ferd looked over his shoulder. “None of them coming—yet.”

      “They won’t come,” Bat said, still in disgust. “There weren’t more than twenty or so of them, most of them tight. If we stuck around here for any length of time at all, they might stir up enough of the other townspeople to help them give us a hard time, but as of right now they’d be outnumbered. I suspect that the local cops, at this moment, are cooling them.”

      He pulled up before the mobile town’s clinic.

      Doc Barnes was sitting in a folding chair out front talking to his nurse who was also relaxed in the cool of the evening.

      Ferd muttered, “This head is killing me. I’ll go over to my own place. See you later, Bat.” He stumbled from the vehicle, head still in hands, and staggered away.

CHAPTER II

      New Woodstock had crossed the Rio Grande at McAllen and passed through the Mexican city of Reynosa.

      There had been two fairly major sites on the American side of the border with excellent facilities for as many as ten thousand homes apiece but Bat Hardin and the executive committee had checked to find that the next nearest site was at Linares, a full 254 kilometers to the southwest. They wanted to push on through and avoid the necessity of setting up for the night at some second class or emergency site where there would be inadequate supply facilities and other shortcomings. There would be enough of that when they got down into Central America and beyond.

      The committee had handled all the required border formalities the day before so that there was nothing to hold them up. Bat Hardin leading, as usual, they strung out along the highway, some five hundred homes strong, with the auxiliary vehicles spaced periodically between them. Most of the homes were drawn by fairly modern electro-steamers but when you were dealing with even five hundred mobile homes you could hardly expect very often to get through one whole day without some needed minor repairs.

      The stretch from Reynosa to the little town of China, where they branched off onto a side road so as to avoid the large city of Monterrey, was excellent enough. Above ground, of course, and not automated as would have been an American road of this size, but adequate. Even the Pan American Highway was far from completely automated and this was not the Pan American Highway as yet. They’d join that further south.

      Bat rode alone in his converted police vehicle, drawing his moderately-sized mobile home behind. He was far from a misogynist but at this junction in his life he had no permanent feminine affiliations and, for some reason not quite clear to even himself, he desired none. He was a fairly tall man with a military carriage and a habitually worried expression. His hair was crisp, his complexion dark and his features so heavy that he would hardly have been thought of as handsome by average American standards. He had a nervous habit of gnawing on his underlip at the slightest of problems.

      He wore a khaki semi-uniform. Local police often had a chip on their shoulders in their attitude toward the pseudo-police of the mobile towns, who, after all, had no authority in the areas through which they passed. Law in the mobile towns was largely a voluntary matter—minor infractions could be taken care of in the community but on any major matter it was necessary to call in the proper authorities of whatever area the town was in at the time. Yes, it was all very voluntary; however, there was a certain moral obligation to abide by the decisions of the easygoing town officials and that member of the community who persisted in revolt against community rules was soon invited to take himself off. It was the ultimate punishment that could be inflicted and for all practical purposes the only one save ostracism.

      This part of Mexico was not particularly attractive as areas Bat had known from earlier trips but the site at which they were to stay that evening was at the edge of the mountains and on the banks of a stream. And the following day they should be getting into the Mexico famed in story and song.

      At the thought of that Bat Hardin grunted deprecation. The world was becoming one in more than one sense. The larger cities, in particular, such as still existed at least, were becoming unbelievably alike. Somehow or other, they all seemed to look like Cincinnati. He was hoping that it would be different in South America. It was said that many areas of South America still resisted what was sometimes called the Coca-Cola-ization of the world.

      A mobile town, like a convoy of ships in wartime, moves at the speed of its slowest member. Alone, Bat Hardin’s electro-steamer could easily maintain a steady five hundred kilometers an hour, at least on an automated underground ultra-highway in the States. Even under manual control such as at present, three hundred kilometers an hour was quite possible. However, the average home behind him seldom got much above a hundred kilometers an hour, especially when traveling in a group.

      He shrugged that off. He was used to this reduced speed and they were in no hurry. No hurry at all. If they wished, they could take a year—or ten years—to reach their destination. He grunted at that, too. In actuality, they were rather vague on just what the destination was.

      What was really on his mind was the sullen quality that he had seemed to detect in some of the border officials. It was nothing he could quite put his finger upon and didn’t apply to all of the immigrations and customs people, but it was there in most. And he didn’t quite know why.

      He said into his car phone, “New Woodstock, Al Castro.”

      Al’s