Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [110]
Down came the judge’s gavel again, and the brass started to shout me down. The television men turned off their cameras, and all the spectators, except for the biggest brass, were cleared out. I knew I’d really said something. All anybody would be getting on his television set now was organ music.
When the confusion died down, the judge said the trial was over, and that Madge and I were guilty of desertion.
Nothing I could do could get us in any worse, so I talked back.
"Now I understand you poor fish," I said. "You couldn’t get along without fear. That’s the only skill you’ve got—how to scare yourselves and other people into doing things. That’s the only fun you’ve got, watching people jump for fear of what you’ll do to their bodies or take away from their bodies."
Madge got in her two cents’ worth. "The only way you can get any response from anybody is to scare them."
"Contempt of court!" said the judge.
"The only way you can scare people is if you can keep them in their bodies," I told him.
The soldiers grabbed Madge and me and started to drag us out of the courtroom.
"This means war!" I yelled.
Everything stopped right there and the place got very quiet.
"We’re already at war," said a general uneasily.
"Well, we’re not," I answered, "but we will be, if you don’t untie Madge and me this instant." I was fierce and impressive in that field marshal’s body.
"You haven’t any weapons," said the judge, "no know-how. Outside of bodies, amphibians are nothing."
"If you don’t cut us loose by the time I count ten," I told him, "the amphibians will occupy the bodies of the whole kit and caboodle of you and march you right off the nearest cliff. The place is surrounded." That was hogwash, of course. Only one person can occupy a body at a time, but the enemy couldn’t be sure of that. "One! Two! Three!"
The general swallowed, turned white, and waved his hand vaguely.
"Cut them loose," he said weakly.
The soldiers, terrified, too, were glad to do it. Madge and I were freed.
I took a couple of steps, headed my spirit in another direction, and that beautiful field marshal, medals and all, went crashing down the staircase like a grandfather clock.
I realized that Madge wasn’t with me. She was still in that copper-colored body with the chartreuse hair and fingernails.
"What’s more," I heard her saying, "in payment for all the trouble you’ve caused us, this body is to be addressed to me at New York, delivered in good condition no later than next Monday."
"Yes, ma’am," said the judge.
When we got home, the Pioneers’ Day Parade was just breaking up at the local storage center, and the Parade Marshal got out of his body and apologized to me for acting the way he had.
"Heck, Herb," I said, "you don’t need to apologize. You weren’t yourself You were parading around in a body."
That’s the best part of being amphibious, next to not being afraid—people forgive you for whatever fool thing you might have done in a body.
Oh, there are drawbacks, I guess, the way there are drawbacks to everything. We still have to work off and on, maintaining the storage centers and getting food to keep the community bodies going. But that’s a small drawback, and all the big drawbacks I ever heard of aren’t real ones, just old-fashioned thinking by people who can’t stop worrying about things they used to worry about before they turned amphibious.
As I say, the oldsters will probably never get really used to it. Every so often, I catch myself getting gloomy over what happened to the pay-toilet business it took me thirty years to build.
But the youngsters don’t have any hangovers like that from the past. They don’t even worry much about something happening to the storage centers, the way us oldsters do.
So I guess maybe that’ll be the next step in evolution—to break clean like those first amphibians who crawled out of the mud into