Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [17]
All it passed was sky-blue water.
"You never heard that story before—about how J. Edgar Nation came to invent ethical birth control?" the Foxy Grandpa wanted to know. His voice cracked.
"Never did," lied Nancy.
"I thought everybody knew that."
"It was news to me."
"When he got through with the monkey house, you couldn’t tell it from the Michigan Supreme Court. Meanwhile, there was this crisis going on in the United Nations. The people who understood science said people had to quit reproducing so much, and the people who understood morals said society would collapse if people used sex for nothing but pleasure."
The Foxy Grandpa got off his Barcalounger, went over to the window, pried two slats of the blind apart. There wasn’t much to see out there. The view was blocked by the backside of a mocked-up thermometer twenty feet high, which faced the street. It was calibrated in billions of people on Earth, from zero to twenty. The make-believe column of liquid was a strip of translucent red plastic. It showed how many people there were on Earth. Very close to the bottom was a black arrow that showed what the scientists thought the population ought to be.
The Foxy Grandpa was looking at the setting sun through that red plastic, and through the blind, too, so that his face was banded with shadows and red.
"Tell me—" he said, "when I die, how much will that thermometer go down? A foot?"
"No."
"An inch?"
"Not quite."
"You know what the answer is, don’t you?" he said, and he faced her. The senility had vanished from his voice and eyes. "One inch on that thing equals 83,333 people. You knew that, didn’t you?"
"That—that might be true," said Nancy, "but that isn’t the right way to look at it, in my opinion."
He didn’t ask her what the right way was, in her opinion. He completed a thought of his own, instead. "I’ll tell you something else that’s true: I’m Billy the Poet, and you’re a very good-looking woman."
With one hand, he drew a snub-nosed revolver from his belt. With the other, he peeled off his bald dome and wrinkled forehead, which proved to be rubber. Now he looked twenty-two.
"The police will want to know exactly what I look like when this is all over," he told Nancy with a malicious grin. "In case you’re not good at describing people, and it’s surprising how many women aren’t:
I’m five foot two,
With eyes of blue,
With Brown hair to my shoulders—
A manly elf
So full of self
The ladies say he smolders."
Billy was ten inches shorter than Nancy was. She had about forty pounds on him. She told him he didn’t have a chance, but Nancy was much mistaken. He had unbolted the bars on the window the night before and he made her go out the window and then down a manhole that was hidden from the street by the big thermometer.
He took her down into the sewers of Hyannis. He knew where he was going. He had a flashlight and a map. Nancy had to go before him along the narrow catwalk, her own shadow dancing mockingly in the lead. She tried to guess where they were, relative to the real world above. She guessed correctly when they passed under the Howard Johnson’s, guessed from noises she heard. The machinery that processed and served the food there was silent. But, so people wouldn’t feel too lonesome when eating there, the designers had provided sound effects for the kitchen. It was these Nancy heard—a tape recording of the clashing of silverware and the laughter of Negroes and Puerto Ricans.
After that she was lost. Billy had very little to say to her other than "Right," or, "Left," or "Don’t try anything funny, Juno, or I’ll blow your great big fucking head off."
Only once did they have anything resembling a conversation. Billy began it, and ended it, too. "What in hell is a girl with hips like yours doing selling death?" he asked her from behind.
She dared to stop. "I can answer that," she told him. She was confident that she could give him an answer that would shrivel him like napalm.
But he gave her a shove, offered to blow her fucking head off again.
"You don’t even want to hear my answer,"