Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [93]
“What makes you think that?” I said.
“We have captured a TV celebrity,” he said. “They won’t let anything happen to him. Too many people will be watching.”
“Who?” I said.
And he said, “Jason Wilder.”
THAT WAS THE first I heard that they had taken hostage not only Wilder but the whole Board of Trustees of Tarkington College. I now realize, too, that Alton Darwin would not have known that Wilder was a TV celebrity if old tapes of Wilder’s talk show hadn’t been run again and again at the prison across the lake. Poor people of any race on the outside never would have watched his show for long, since its basic message was that it was poor people who were making the lives of the rest of us so frightening.
36
“STAR WARS,” SAID Alton Darwin.
He was alluding to Ronald Reagan’s dream of having scientists build an invisible dome over this country, with electronics and lasers and so on, which no enemy plane or projectile could ever penetrate. Darwin believed that the social standing of his hostages was an invisible dome over Scipio.
I think he was right, although I have not been able to discover how seriously the Government considered bombing the whole valley back to the Stone Age. Years ago, I might have found out through the Freedom of Information Act. But the Supreme Court closed that peephole.
DARWIN AND HIS troops knew the lives of the hostages were valued highly by the Government. They didn’t know why, and I am not sure that I do, either. I think that the number of people with money and power had shrunk to the point where it felt like a family. For all the escaped convicts knew about them, they might as well have been aardvarks, or some other improbable animal they had never seen before.
Darwin regretted that I, too, was going to have to stay in Scipio. He couldn’t let me go, he said, because I knew too much about his defenses. There were none as far as I could see, but he sounded as though there were trenches and tank traps and mine fields all around us.
Even more hallucinatory was his vision of the future. He was going to restore this valley to its former economic vitality. It would become an all-Black Utopia. All Whites would be resettled elsewhere.
He was going to put glass back into the windows of the factories, and make their roofs weather-tight again. He would get the money to do this and so many other wonderful things by selling the precious hardwoods of the National Forest to the Japanese.
THAT MUCH OF his dream is actually coming true now. The National Forest is now being logged by Mexican laborers using Japanese tools, under the direction of Swedes. The proceeds are expected to pay half of day-before-yesterday’s interest on the National Debt.
That last is a joke of mine. I have no idea if any money for the forest will go toward the National Debt, which, the last I heard, was greater than the value of all property in the Western Hemisphere, thanks to compound interest.
ALTON DARWIN LOOKED me up and down, and then he said with typical sociopathic impulsiveness, “Professor, I can’t let you go because I need you.”
“What for?” I said. I was scared to death that he was going to make me a General.
“To help with the plans,” he said.
“For what?” I said.
“For the glorious future,” he said. He told me to go to this library and write out detailed plans for making this valley into the envy of the World.
So that, in fact, is what I mainly did during most of the Battle of Scipio.
It was too dangerous to go outside anyway, with all the bullets flying around.
MY BEST UTOPIAN invention for the ideal Black Republic was “Freedom Fighter Beer.” They would get the old brewery going again, supposedly, and make beer pretty much like any other beer, except that it would be called Freedom Fighter Beer. If I say so myself, that is a magical name for beer. I envisioned a time when, all over the world, the bored and downtrodden and weary would be bucking