Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [32]
His ghouls also bring him brains of people who died in really stupid accidents, crossing busy streets against the light, starting charcoal fires at cookouts with gasoline, and so on, for comparison. So as not to arouse suspicion, they deliver the fresh brains one at a time in buckets stolen from a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Needless to say, Sunoco’s supervisors have no idea what he’s really doing when he works late night after night.
They do notice how much he likes fried chicken, apparently, ordering it by the bucket, and that he never offers anybody else some. They also wonder how he stays so skinny. During regular working hours, he does what he is paid to do, which is develop a birth control pill that takes all the pleasure out of sex, so teenagers won’t copulate.
At night, though, with nobody around, he slices up high-IQ brains, looking for little radios. He doesn’t think Mensa members had them inserted surgically. He thinks they were born with them, so the receivers have to be made of meat. Sunoco has written in his secret journal: “There is no way an unassisted human brain, which is nothing more than a dog’s breakfast, three and a half pounds of blood-soaked sponge, could have written ‘Stardust,’ let alone Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”
One night he finds an unexplained little snot-colored bump, no larger than a mustard seed, in the inner ear of a Mensa member, who as a junior high schooler had won spelling bee after spelling bee. Eureka!
He reexamines the inner ear of a moron who was killed when she was grabbing door handles of fast-moving vehicles while wearing Rollerblades. Neither of her inner ears has a snot-colored bump. Eureka!
Sunoco examines fifty more brains, half from people so stupid you couldn’t believe it, half from people so smart you couldn’t believe it. Only the inner ears of the rocket scientists, so to speak, have bumps. The bumps have to have been the reason the smarties were so good at taking IQ tests. An extra piece of tissue that little, and as nothing but tissue, couldn’t possibly have been much more help than a pimple. It has to be a radio! And radios like that have to be feeding correct answers to questions, no matter how recondite, to Mensas and Phi Beta Kappas, and to quiz show contestants.
This is a Nobel Prize-type discovery! So, even before he has published, Fleon Sunoco goes out and buys himself a suit of tails for Stockholm.
28
Trout said: “Fleon Sunoco jumped to his death into the National Institutes of Health parking lot. He was wearing his new suit of tails, which would never get to Stockholm.
“He realized that his discovery proved that he didn’t deserve credit for making it. He was hoist by his own petard! Anybody who did anything as wonderful as what he had done couldn’t possibly have done it with just a human brain, with nothing but the dog’s breakfast in his braincase. He could have done it only with outside help.”
When free will kicked in after a ten-year hiatus, Trout made the transition from déjà vu to unlimited opportunities almost seamlessly. The rerun brought him back to the point in the space-time continuum when he was again beginning his story about the British soldier whose head was where his ding-dong should have been and whose ding-dong was where his head should have been.
Without warning and silently, the rerun stopped.
This was one heck of a moment for anyone operating a form of self-propelled transportation, or who was a passenger in one, or who stood in the path of one. For ten years, machinery, like people, had been doing whatever it had done the first time through the decade, often with fatal results, to be sure. As Trout wrote in My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot: “Rerun or not, modern