Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [107]
Sooner or later, almost everybody had a good reason for giving it a try. There got to be millions and finally more than a billion of us—invisible, insubstantial, indestructible, and, by golly, true to ourselves, no trouble to anybody, and not afraid of anything.
When we’re not in bodies, the Amphibious Pioneers can meet on the head of a pin. When we get into bodies for the Pioneers’ Day Parade, we take up over fifty thousand square feet, have to gobble more than three tons of food to get enough energy to march; and lots of us catch colds or worse, and get sore because somebody’s body accidentally steps on the heel of somebody else’s body, and get jealous because some bodies get to lead and others have to stay in ranks, and—oh, hell, I don’t know what all.
I’m not crazy about the parade. With all of us there, close together in bodies—well, it brings out the worst in us, no matter how good our psyches are. Last year, for instance, Pioneers’ Day was a scorcher. People couldn’t help being out of sorts, stuck in sweltering, thirsty bodies for hours.
Well, one thing led to another, and the Parade Marshal offered to beat the daylights out of my body with his body, if my body got out of step again. Naturally, being Parade Marshal, he had the best body that year, except for Konigswasser’s cowboy, but I told him to soak his fat head, anyway. He swung, and I ditched my body right there, and didn’t even stick around long enough to find out if he connected. He had to haul my body back to the storage center himself.
I stopped being mad at him the minute I got out of the body. I understood, you see. Nobody but a saint could be really sympathetic or intelligent for more than a few minutes at a time in a body—or happy, either, except in short spurts. I haven’t met an amphibian yet who wasn’t easy to get along with, and cheerful and interesting—as long as he was outside a body. And I haven’t met one yet who didn’t turn a little sour when he got into one.
The minute you get in, chemistry takes over—glands making you excitable or ready to fight or hungry or mad or affectionate, or—well, you never know what’s going to happen next.
That’s why I can’t get sore at the enemy, the people who are against the amphibians. They never get out of their bodies and won’t try to learn. They don’t want anybody else to do it, either, and they’d like to make the amphibians get back into bodies and stay in them.
After the tussle I had with the Parade Marshal, Madge got wind of it and left her body right in the middle of the Ladies’ Auxiliary. And the two of us, feeling full of devilment after getting shed of the bodies and the parade, went over to have a look at the enemy.
I’m never keen on going over to look at them. Madge likes to see what the women are wearing. Stuck with their bodies all the time, the enemy women change their clothes and hair and cosmetic styles a lot oftener than we do on the women’s bodies in the storage centers.
I don’t get much of a kick out of the fashions, and almost everything else you see and hear in enemy territory would bore a plaster statue into moving away.
Usually, the enemy is talking about old-style reproduction, which is the clumsiest, most comical, most inconvenient thing anyone could imagine, compared with what the amphibians have in that line. If they aren’t talking about that, then they’re talking about food, the gobs of chemicals they have to stuff into their bodies. Or they’ll talk about fear, which we used to call politics—job politics, social politics, government politics.
The enemy hates that, having us able to peek in on them any time we want to, while they can’t ever see us unless we get into bodies. They seem to be scared to death of us, though being scared of amphibians makes as much sense as being scared of the sunrise. They could have the whole world,