Harold Newcomb Wilbur. I awarded him the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Soldier's
Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and a Purple Heart with two Oak-Leaf Clusters, which
made him the second most decorated veteran in Midland City. I put all his medals under
his handkerchiefs in a dresser drawer.
He won all those medals in the Second World War, which was staged by robots so
that Dwayne Hoover could give a free-willed reaction to such a holocaust. The war was
such an extravaganza that there was scarcely a robot anywhere who didn't have a part
to play. Harold New-comb Wilbur got his medals for killing Japanese, who were yellow
robots. They were fueled by rice.
And he went on staring at me, even though I wanted to stop him now. Here was the
thing about my control over the characters I created: I could only guide their movements
approximately, since they were such big animals. There was inertia to overcome. It
wasn't as though I was connected to them by steel wires. It was more as though I was
connected to them by stale rubberbands.
So I made the green telephone in back of the bar ring. Harold Newcomb Wilbur
answered it, but he kept his eyes on me. I had to think fast about who was on the other
end of the telephone. I put the first most decorated veteran in Midland City on the other
end. He had a penis eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in
diameter, but practically all of it was in the fourth dimension. He got his medals in the
war in Viet Nam. He had also fought yellow robots who ran on rice.
"Cocktail lounge," said Harold Newcomb Wilbur.
"Hal-?"
"Yes?"
"This is Ned Lingamon."
"I'm busy."
"Don't hang up. The cops got me down at City Jail. They only let me have one call, so
I called you."
"Why me?"
"You're the only friend I got left."
"What they got you in for?"
"They say I killed my baby."
And so on.
This man, who was white, had all the medals Harold Newcomb Wilbur had, plus the
highest decoration for heroism which an American soldier could receive, which looked
like this:
He had now also committed the lowest crime which an American could commit,
which was to kill his own child. Her name was Cynthia Anne, and she certainly didn't live
very long before she was made dead again. She got killed for crying and crying. She
wouldn't shut up.
First she drove her seventeen-year-old mother away with all her demands, and then
her father killed her.
And so on.
As for the fortune I might have told for the waitress, this was it: "You will be swindled
by termite exterminators and not even know it. You will buy steel-belted radial tires for
the front wheels of your car. Your cat will be killed by a motorcyclist named Headley
Thomas, and you will get another cat Arthur, your brother in Atlanta, will find eleven
dollars in a taxicab."
I might have told Bunny Hoover's fortune, too: "Your father will become extremely ill,
and you will respond so grotesquely that there will be talk of putting you in the booby
hatch, too. You will stage scenes in the hospital waiting room, telling doctors and nurses
that you are to blame for your father's disease. You will blame yourself for trying for so
many years to kill him with hatred. You will redirect your hatred. You will hate your
mom."
And so on.
And I had Wayne Hoobler, the black ex-convict, stand bleakly among the garbage
cans outside the back door of the Inn, and examine the currency which had been given
to him at the prison gate that morning. He had nothing else to do.
He studied the pyramid with the blazing eye on top. He wished he had more
information about the pyramid and the eye. There was so much to learn!
Wayne didn't even know the Earth revolved around the Sun. He thought the Sun
revolved around the Earth, because it certainly looked that way.
A truck sizzled by on the Interstate, seemed to cry out in pain to Wayne, because he
read the message on the side of it phonetically. The message told Wayne that the truck
was in agony, as it hauled things from here to there. This was the message, and Wayne
said it out loud:
Here was what was going to happen to Wayne in about four days because I wanted
it to happen to him: He would be picked up and questioned by policemen, because he
was behaving suspiciously outside the back gate of Barrytron, Ltd., which was involved
in super-secret weapons work. They thought at first that he might be pretending to be
stupid and ignorant, that he might, in fact, be a cunning spy for the Communists.
A check of his fingerprints and his wonderful dental work proved that he was who he
said he was. But there was still something else he had to explain: What was he doing
with a membership card in the Playboy Club of America, made out in the name of Paulo
di Capistrano? He had found it in a garbage can in back of the new Holiday Inn.
And so on.
And it was time now for me to have Rabo Karabekian, the minimalist painter, and
Beatrice Keedsler, the novelist, say and do some more stuff for the sake of this book. I
did not want to spook them by staring at them as I worked their controls, so I pretended
to be absorbed in drawing pictures on my tabletop with a damp fingertip.
I drew the Earthling symbol for nothingness, which was this:
I drew the Earthling symbol for everything, which was this:
Dwayne Hoover and Wayne Hoobler knew the first one, but not the second one. And
now I drew a symbol in vanishing mist which was bitterly familiar to Dwayne but not to
Wayne. This was it:
And now I drew a symbol whose meaning Dwayne had known for a few years in
school, a meaning which had since eluded him. The symbol would have looked like the
end of a table in a prison dining hall to Wayne. It represented the ratio of the
circumference of a circle to its diameter. This ratio could also be expressed as a
number, and even as Dwayne and Wayne and Karabekian and Beatrice Keedsler and
all the rest of us went about our business, Earthling scientists were monotonously
radioing that number into outer space. The idea was to show other inhabited planets, in
case they were listening, how intelligent we were. We had tortured circles until they
coughed up this symbol of their secret lives:
And I made an invisible duplicate on my Formica table-top of a painting by Rabo
Karabekian, entitled The Temptation of Saint Anthony. My duplicate was a miniature of
the real thing, and mine was not in color, but I had captured the picture's form and the
spirit, too. This is what I drew:
The original was twenty feet wide and sixteen feet high. The field was Hawaiian
Avocado, a green wall paint manufactured by the O'Hare Paint and Varnish Company in
Hellertown, Pennsylvania. The vertical stripe was dayglo orange reflecting tape. This
was the most expensive piece of art, not counting buildings and tombstones, and not
counting the statue of Abraham Lincoln in front of the old Nigger high school.
It was a scandal what the painting cost. It was the first purchase for the permanent
collection of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts. Fred T. Barry, the
Chairman of the Board of Barrytron, Ltd., had coughed up fifty thousand dollars of his
own for the picture.
Midland City was outraged. So was I.
So was Beatrice Keedsler, but she kept her dismay to herself as she sat at the piano
bar with Karabekian. Karabekian, who wore a sweatshirt imprinted with the likeness of
Beethoven, knew he was surrounded by people who hated him for getting so much
money for so little work. He was amused.
Like everybody else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain with alcohol.
This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called yeast. Yeast organisms ate
sugar and excreted alcohol. They killed themselves by destroying their own
environment with yeast shit.
Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of
yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suf-
focated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came
close to guessing that they were making champagne. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]