Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [36]
The real mayhem was wrought, as I said before, by self-propelled forms of transportation, of which there were none, of course, inside the former Museum of the American Indian. Things stayed peaceful in there, even as the crashing of vehicles and the cries of the injured and dying reached the climax of a crescendo outside.
“I fry mine in butter!” indeed.
The bums, or “sacred cattle,” as Trout called them, had been seated or prone or supine when the timequake struck. That was how they were when the rerun ended. How could free will hurt them?
Trout would say of them afterward: “Even before the timequake, they had exhibited symptoms indistinguishable from those of PTA.”
Only Trout jumped to his feet when a berserk fire truck, a hook-and-ladder, smacked the entrance of the Academy with its right front bumper and kept on going. What it did after that had nothing to do with people, and could have nothing to do with people. The sudden reduction of its velocity by its brush with the Academy caused the gaga firepersons aboard to hurtle through the air at the velocity it had reached going downhill from Broadway before it hit. Trout’s best guess, based on how far the firepersons flew, was about fifty miles an hour.
Thus slowed and depopulated, the emergency vehicle made a sharp left turn into a cemetery across the street from the Academy. It started up a steep slope. It stopped short of the crest, and then rolled backward. The collision with the Academy had knocked its gearshift into neutral!
Momentum alone had carried it up the slope. The mighty motor roared. Its throttle was stuck. But the only opposition it could offer to gravity was the inertia of its own mass. It wasn’t connected by the drive shaft to the back wheels anymore!
Listen to this: Gravity dragged the bellowing red monster back down into West 155th Street, and then ass-backward toward the Hudson River.
The rescue vehicle’s blow to the Academy was so severe, albeit glancing, that it caused a crystal chandelier to drop to the floor of the foyer.
The fancy light fixture missed the armed guard Dudley Prince by inches. If he hadn’t been standing upright, his weight equally distributed between his feet when free will kicked in, he would have fallen prone in the direction he was facing, toward the front door. The chandelier would have killed him!
You want to talk about luck? When the timequake struck, Monica Pepper’s paraplegic husband was ringing the doorbell. Dudley Prince was about to go to the steel front door. Before he could take a step in that direction, though, a smoke alarm went off in the picture gallery behind him. He froze. Which way to go?
So when free will kicked in, he was on the horns of the same dilemma. The smoke alarm behind him had saved his life!
When Trout learned of the miraculous escape from death by chandelier, thanks to a smoke alarm, he quoted Katharine Lee Bates, speaking rather than singing:
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the ftuited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.
The uniformed ex-convict, thanks to PTA, was a motivationally kaput statue when Kilgore Trout scampered in through the entrance, which was no longer blocked, minutes after the harsh rules of free will had been reinstated. Trout was shouting, “Wake up! For God’s sake, wake up! Free will! Free will!”
Not only was the steel front door lying flat on the floor, bearing the enigmatic message “UCK AR,” so Trout had to lope across it to reach Prince. It was still hinged and locked to the door frame. The door frame itself had let go on impact. It had parted from the surrounding masonry. The door and its hinges and bolts and whoozit were to all practical purposes as good as new, their frame had offered so little resistance to the berserk hook-and-ladder.
The contractor who installed the door and frame had cut corners when it came to securing the frame to the masonry. He had been a crook! As Trout would later say of