Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [57]
In order to get them to do that, though, he had to tell them a lie. He said everybody was recovering from a nerve gas attack by persons unknown. So the first version of Kilgore’s Creed to reach millions in the nation, and then billions in the world, was this: “This is a CBS exclusive! There has been a nerve gas attack by persons unknown. You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do. Make sure all children and senior citizens are safe indoors.”
54
Certainly! Mistakes were made! But Trout’s silencing of automobile burglar alarms with his bazooka wasn’t one of them. If a manual is to be written about how to behave in urban areas should there be another timequake, and then a rerun, and then free will kicks in again, it should recommend that every neighborhood have a bazooka, and that responsible adults know where it is.
Mistakes? The manual should point out that vehicles themselves are not responsible for the damage they cause, whether controlled or not. Punishing automobiles as though they were rebellious slaves in need of a hiding is a waste of time! Scapegoating cars and trucks and buses still in running condition, simply because they are automobiles, moreover, deprives rescue workers and refugees of their means of transportation.
As Trout advises in MTYOAP: “Beating the daylights out of a stranger’s parked Dodge Intrepid may well afford fleeting relief from symptoms of stress. When all is said and done, though, that can only leave the life of its owner even more of a crock of shit than it was before. Do unto others’ vehicles as you would have them do unto yours.
“It is pure superstition that a motor vehicle with its ignition turned off can start itself up without the help of a human being,” he goes on. “If, after free will kicks in, you must yank the ignition keys out of driverless vehicles whose engines aren’t running, please, please, please throw the keys into a mailbox, and not down a storm sewer or into a trash-strewn vacant lot.”
The biggest mistake Trout himself made, probably, was in turning the American Academy of Arts and Letters into a morgue. The steel front door and its frame were tacked up back in place again, to keep the heat inside. It would have made more sense to line up the bodies outside, where the temperature was well below freezing.
And Trout couldn’t have been expected to worry about it, way-the-hell-and-gone up there on West 155th, but some awakened member of the Federal Aviation Administration should have realized, after all the crashing at ground level petered out, that there were still planes aloft on automatic pilot. Their crews and passengers, still gaga with untreated PTA, couldn’t care doodley what would happen when the fuel ran out.
In ten minutes, or maybe an hour, or maybe three hours or whatever, their heavier-than-air-craft, often six miles up, would cash in the chips, would buy the farm, for all aboard.
For the Mbuti, the rain forest Pygmies of Zaire, Africa, February 13th, 2001, was in all probability a day neither more nor less amazing than any other day, unless a rogue airplane happened to land on top of one of them after the rerun stopped.
The worst of all aircraft when free will kicks in, of course, are helicopters, or choppers, air screws first envisioned by the genius Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Choppers can’t glide. Choppers don’t want to fly in the first place.
A safer place than a helicopter aloft is a roller coaster or a Ferris wheel.
Yes, and when martial law was established in New York City, the former Museum of the American Indian was turned into a barracks, and Kilgore Trout was relieved of his bazooka, and the Academy’s headquarters were requisitioned as an officers’ club,