Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [59]
“I’ll have to look him up,” said Bernie.
Hold on to your hats!
Listen: Uncle Carl, in 1900 or thereabouts, experimented with the effects of X rays and radioactivity on condensation in a cloud chamber, a wooden cylinder filled with a fog he himself had concocted. He concluded and published as a certainty that ionization was relatively unimportant in condensation.
At about the same time, friends and neighbors, the Scottish physicist Charles Thomson Rees Wilson performed similar experiments with a cloud chamber made of glass. The canny Scot proved that ions produced by X rays and radioactivity had a lot to do with condensation. He criticized Uncle Carl for ignoring contamination from the wood walls of his chamber, for his crude method of making clouds, and for not shielding his fog from the electrical field of his X-ray apparatus.
Wilson went on to make paths of electrically charged particles visible to the naked eye by means of his cloud chamber. In 1927, he shared a Nobel Prize for Physics for doing this.
Uncle Carl must have felt like something the cat drug in!
56
A Luddite to the end, as was Kilgore Trout, as was Ned Ludd, the possibly but not certainly fictitious workman who smashed up machinery, supposedly, in Leicestershire, England, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, I persist in pecking away at a manual typewriter. That still leaves me technologically several generations ahead of William Styron and Stephen King, who, like Trout, write with pens on yellow legal pads.
I correct my pages with pen or pencil. I have come into Manhattan on business. I telephone a woman who has been doing my retyping for years and years now. She doesn’t have a computer, either. Maybe I should can her. She has moved from the city to a country town. I ask her what the weather is like out that way. I ask if there have been any unusual birds at her bird feeder. I ask if squirrels have found a way to get at it, and so on.
Yes, the squirrels have found a new way to get at the feeder. They can become trapeze artists, if they have to.
She has had back trouble in the past. I ask her how her back is. She says her back is OK. She asks how my daughter Lily is. I say Lily is OK. She asks how old Lily is now, and I say she’ll be fourteen in December.
She says, “Fourteen! My gosh, my gosh. It seems like only yesterday she was just a little baby.”
I say I have a few more pages for her to type. She says, “Good.” I will have to mail them to her, since she doesn’t have a fax. Again: Maybe I should can her.
I am still on the third floor of our brownstone in the city, and we don’t have an elevator. So down the stairs I go with my pages, clumpity, clumpity, clumpity. I get down to the first floor, where my wife has her office. Her favorite reading when she was Lily’s age was stories about Nancy Drew, the girl detective.
Nancy Drew is to Jill what Kilgore Trout is to me, so Jill says, “Where are you going?”
I say, “I am going to buy an envelope.”
She says, “You are not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes and put them in a closet?” She thinks she is being logical. She has a computer. She has a fax. She has an answering machine on her telephone, so she doesn’t miss any important messages. She has a Xerox. She has all that garbage.
I say, “I’ll be back real soon.”
Out into the world I go! Muggers! Autograph hounds! Junkies! People with real jobs! Maybe an easy lay! United Nations functionaries and diplomats!
Our house is near the UN, so there are all kinds of really foreign-looking people getting in or out of illegally parked limousines, doing the best they can, like all the rest of us, to hold their self-respect together. As I saunter a half-block to the news store on Second Avenue, which also sells stationery, I