It was a source of amazement to his feminine visitors, who usually expected unmade beds, dirty glasses and dishes, unswept floors and the rest. But not Ted Swain’s.
Thus it was that when he entered he knew almost immediately that the place had been ransacked. The job had been neatly done, and obviously whoever had gone through the house had made an effort to disguise the fact. But it couldn’t be hidden from Ted Swain. A writing stylo, which he invariably kept on the right side of his desk, was on the left. A file of his notes was not in exactly the same order as he had left it. There were other discrepancies.
Nothing seemed to be missing, nothing at all. But what could have been missing? He had nothing worth stealing. Petty crime and burglary were all but unknown in this age. Why steal when your Universal Guaranteed Income provided you with all you needed?
Mystified, he dialed the National Data Banks and requested a report on who had been recorded on his door identity screen that day. The computers automatically filed such information. It came in handy if you wanted to check on visitors who might have called while you were away from home.
He could only stare when the NDB reported that his identity screen had not recorded anyone.
He wandered around the house, his face twisted in disbelief. The intruder couldn’t possibly have come in through the windows; they automatically locked when he left the house, unless he set them otherwise. Their glass was unbreakable, or nearly so, so it made no difference. And they weren’t broken. The only entry was through the front door, or through the back, which led onto his Japanese-style rock garden. The back door, too, had been locked, and it also had an identity screen.
It was simply impossible. He knew the house had been searched, but by whom, and to what end, simply was unanswerable. He was a university scholar; he had no secrets, nothing of value beyond a few family keepsakes, meaningless to anyone else.
He gave up.
The stimmy he had taken that morning for studying had worn off, but he didn’t take another. It was pushing lunch time.
However, he couldn’t resist a quick initial approach to his subject. The enthusiasm of both of the older men had resolved some of his original misgivings. If the local head of the data banks thought a dissertation on the communes was a natural, who was Ted Swain to say him nay? He sat down at his library-booster screen.
He had difficulty locating the subject. Well, that wasn’t quite the way to put it. In actuality, there was so precious little to locate that he couldn’t believe it.
The National Data Banks supposedly contained all information available. The whole thing had begun back in the late 1960s when New Haven consolidated the city’s files on individuals into a single data pool open to all town agencies. And Santa Clara County, in California, put all county residents into a computer bank, listing age, address, birth record, driver’s license, voting and jury status, property holdings, occupation, health, welfare and police records.
The Federal Government hadn’t been far behind them. In 1968 the Internal Revenue Service began the utilization of computers to collect income tax and there was a good deal more information on income-tax forms than pertained to income alone. Adding social-security information to these data obviously made sense, as well as material from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Civil Service Commission, which had already held dossiers on nearly everyone who had ever applied for Federal employment since 1939. Then the Census Bureau information was added and the Defense Department’s military records, and finally the FBI files. Once the FBI records went into the data banks, they were soon followed by those of the house un-American Activities Committee and by the CIA. Some of the material was, of course, restricted, and available only to the proper officials.
Thus far, all these records had been Federal, but the addition of the FBI and other police files made so much sense that the local police of every state, city and town cooperated and there soon came to be a national criminal record of practically everyone in the country, even though an individual’s record might consist of no more than a traffic violation.
But that had just been the beginning. Medical information was soon added. At the same time another element was utilizing the computer data banks—the universities, the libraries, the newspapers and such depositories of human knowledge. Early in the game they began cooperation in storing information. Soon there was a gigantic data bank of books, encyclopedias, newspaper morgues; everything from Einstein’s works to Escoffier’s Cook Book. The big step had been taken when it was decided to include the Library of Congress and, a few years later, through a special exchange arrangement Her Majesty’s Government, the British Museum Library.
Ultimately, this educational material was combined with the Federal Government’s information on individual citizens and all was placed in the National Data Banks. The thing had really begun in earnest. Every newspaper, every magazine, every book and pamphlet published in the world, in every written language, was translated by computer and placed in the files, in both its original and translated forms.
Neck and neck with these developments were those in the field of banking and credit, the trend to the cashless-checkless society and the universal credit account. The computer, plus the portable pocket TV phone, made possible a national credit system eliminating money, in the old sense of the word. A person’s income was put to his account. By placing his pocket transceiver on the payment screen in any store, restaurant, public transportation vehicle, or wherever, he was debited to whatever extent required.
Yes. Everything, no matter how trivial, was in the data banks. Why not? There was infinite room. The early punch cards had been replaced by magnetic tapes, and they in turn by much-improved methods of storing the information flooding into the computer banks. The Encyclopedia Britannica could be compressed into an area no larger than a fifty-cent piece. So why not store it all, all accumulated information?
But the thing which presently confronted Ted Swain was that there was precious little, astonishingly little, on the modern commune culture, if that was what you could call it.
He imagined that his final work should include at least one chapter on the history of the commune, to trace it to its earliest origins. The conception could be found as far back as Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia. But that wasn’t quite it. They were both fictional.
Nevertheless, he thought, scowling into his screen as he dialed over and over again, trying to trace out what small information was available, there were actual equivalents of the modern commune in the cooperative movements of the 19th Century, most of them based on early Utopian socialism.
Yes, he could find all the information he needed for a chapter or so on the preliminaries to the modern commune movement. And he would have no trouble with the primitive communes. He was so up on that subject that he would hardly have to research it at all.
But the modern! There was practically nothing at all. No wonder Dollar had been keen for him to go ahead.
Oh, there was some material, most of it not applicable to his study, as he presently saw it; articles and pamphlets on how to organize a mobile town; how to set up a local government for it; a president, a central committee, a police and fire unit, a community mobile hospital, and so forth. They stressed the need for an adequate community of interests. There was, he noted, even an archaeological mobile town, complete with a small mobile museum. They evidently went from dig to dig, throughout North America, sometimes conducting digs of their own when they could get permission. It occurred to Ted Swain that it would be a commune after his own heart. But no; he wanted to be a professional, not an amateur.
His stomach was growling. He clicked off the TV screen, and stared ahead of him, wondering what time it was. He’d lost track of the passage of the hours. He’d been sitting there until just short of dinner, without anything in his stomach but the eggs he’d made for himself and Martha, or Marsha, or whatever the hell her name was, that morning.
Well, he didn’t have time to dial the ultramarket for the ingredients to cook a decent meal now, he thought. He’d go over to the restaurant. He came to his feet, yawning and scowling. The fact was that this was not something that could be researched in the data banks. He would have to get out in the field.