Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [108]
They’ve got contraptions all over the place that are supposed to detect amphibians. The gadgets aren’t worth a nickel, but they seem to make the enemy feel good—like they were lined up against great forces, but keeping their nerve and doing important, clever things about it. Know-how—all the time they’re patting each other about how much know-how they’ve got, and about how we haven’t got anything by comparison. If know-how means weapons, they’re dead right.
I guess there is a war on between them and us. But we never do anything about holding up our side of the war, except to keep our parade sites and our storage centers secret, and to get out of bodies every time there’s an air raid, or the enemy fires a rocket, or something.
That just makes the enemy madder, because the raids and rockets and all cost plenty, and blowing up things nobody needs anyway is a poor return on the taxpayer’s money. We always know what they’re going to do next, and when and where, so there isn’t any trick to keeping out of their way.
But they are pretty smart, considering they’ve got bodies to look after besides doing their thinking, so I always try to be cautious when I go over to watch them. That’s why I wanted to clear out when Madge and I saw a storage center in the middle of one of their fields. We hadn’t talked to anybody lately about what the enemy was up to, and the center looked awfully suspicious.
Madge was optimistic, the way she’s been ever since she borrowed that burlesque queen’s body, and she said the storage center was a sure sign that the enemy had seen the light, that they were getting ready to become amphibious themselves.
Well, it looked like it. There was a brand-new center, stocked with bodies and open for business, as innocent as you please. We circled it several times, and Madge’s circles got smaller and smaller, as she tried to get a close look at what they had in the way of ladies’ ready-to-wear.
"Let’s beat it," I said.
"I’m just looking," said Madge. "No harm in looking."
Then she saw what was in the main display case, and she forgot where she was or where she’d come from.
The most striking woman’s body I’d ever seen was in the case—six feet tall and built like a goddess. But that wasn’t the payoff. The body had copper-colored skin, chartreuse hair and fingernails, and a gold lame evening gown. Beside that body was the body of a blond, male giant in a pale blue field marshal’s uniform, piped in scarlet and spangled with medals.
I think the enemy must have swiped the bodies in a raid on one of our outlying storage centers, and padded and dyed them, and dressed them up.
"Madge, come back!" I said.
The copper-colored woman with the chartreuse hair moved. A siren screamed and soldiers rushed from hiding places to grab the body Madge was in.
The center was a trap for amphibians!
The body Madge hadn’t been able to resist had its ankles tied together, so Madge couldn’t take the few steps she had to take if she was going to get out of it again.
The soldiers carted her off triumphantly as a prisoner of war. I got into the only body available, the fancy field marshal, to try to help her. It was a hopeless situation, because the field marshal was bait, too, with its ankles tied. The soldiers dragged me after Madge.
The cocky young major in charge of the soldiers did a jig along the shoulder of the road, he was so proud. He was the first man ever to capture an amphibian, which was really something from the enemy’s point of view. They’d been at war with us for years, and spent God knows how many billions of dollars, but catching us was the first thing that made any amphibians pay much attention to them.
When we got to the town, people were leaning out of windows and waving their flags, and cheering the soldiers, and hissing Madge and me. Here were all the people who didn’t want to be amphibious, who thought it was terrible for