Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [21]
Get a load of what was going to happen to Dudley Prince, a monumental figure of authority and decency in the uniform of the security company that protected the beleaguered Academy around the clock, a holstered pistol at his hip, only fifty-one days from the first of the two Christmas Eves, 2000: The timequake was going to zap him back into a solitary confinement cell, into the hole, within the walls and towers of the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Facility at Athena, sixty miles south of his hometown of Rochester, where he used to own a little video rental store.
To be sure, the timequake had made him ten years younger, but that was no break in his case. It meant he was again serving two consecutive life sentences, without hope of parole, for the rape and murder of a ten-year-old girl of Chinese-American and Italian-American parentage, Kimberly Wang, in a Rochester crack house, of which he was entirely innocent!
Granted, at the start of the rerun Dudley Prince could remember, as could the rest of us, everything that was going to happen to him during the next ten years. He knew that in seven years he would be exonerated by DNA tests of dried ejaculate material on the victim’s panties. This exculpatory evidence would again be found languishing in a glassine envelope in the walk-in vault of the District Attorney who had framed him in the hopes of being nominated for Governor.
And, oh yes, that same DA would be found wearing cement overshoes on the bottom of Lake Cayuga in just six more years. Prince meanwhile was going to have to earn a High School Equivalency Certificate again, and make Jesus the center of his life again, and on and on.
And then, after he was sprung again, he would have to go on TV talk shows again with other people who had been wrongly incarcerated and then rightly exonerated, to say prison was the luckiest thing that ever happened to him because he found Jesus there.
17
On either one of the two Christmas Eves, 2000, and it didn’t matter which, except for people’s opinions of what was going on, the ex-jailbird Dudley Prince delivered “The Sisters B-36” to Monica Pepper’s office. Her husband Zoltan in his wheelchair was predicting the end of literacy in the not-too-distant future.
“The prophet Mohammed couldn’t do it,” Zoltan was saying. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph probably couldn’t do it, Mary Magdalen couldn’t do it. The Emperor Charlemagne confessed he couldn’t do it. It was just too hard! Nobody in the whole Western Hemisphere could do it, not even the sophisticated Mayas and Incas and Aztecs could imagine how to do it, until the Europeans came.
“Most Europeans back then couldn’t read and write, either. The few who could were specialists. I promise you, sweetheart, thanks to TV that will very soon be the case again.”
And then Dudley Prince said, rerun or not, “Excuse me, but I think maybe somebody is trying to tell us something.”
Monica read “The Sisters B-36” quickly, with increasing impatience, and declared it ridiculous. She handed it to her husband. But he got no further than the name of the author before he became electrified. “My God, my God,” he exclaimed, “after a quarter of a century of perfect silence, Kilgore Trout has come into my life again!”
Here’s the explanation of Zoltan Pepper’s reaction: When Zoltan was a high school sophomore in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he copied a story from one of his father’s collection of old science fiction magazines. He submitted it to his English teacher, Mrs. Florence Wilkerson, as his own creation. It was one of the last stories Kilgore Trout would ever submit to a publisher. By the time Zoltan was a sophomore, Trout was a bum.
The plagiarized story was about a planet in another galaxy, where the little green people, each with only one eye in the middle of his or her forehead, could get food only if they could sell goods or services to somebody else. The planet ran out of customers, and nobody could think of anything sensible to do about that. All the little green people starved