Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [47]
"Would the dog go away if I bought him a humidor?" said the stranger.
"Pretty good joke, pretty good joke," said Bullard, amiably. Suddenly he clapped the stranger on his knee. "Sa-ay, you aren’t in plastics, are you? Here I’ve been blowing off about plastics, and for all I know that’s your line."
"My line?" said the stranger crisply, laying down his book. "Sorry—I’ve never had a line. I’ve been a drifter since the age of nine, since Edison set up his laboratory next to my home, and showed me the intelligence analyzer."
"Edison?" said Bullard. "Thomas Edison, the inventor?"
"If you want to call him that, go ahead," said the stranger.
"If I want to call him that?"—Bullard guffawed—"I guess I just will! Father of the light bulb and I don’t know what all."
"If you want to hink he invented the light bulb, go ahead. No harm in it." The stranger resumed his reading.
"Say, what is this?" said Bullard, suspiciously. "You pulling my leg? What’s this about an intelligence analyzer? I never heard of that."
"Of course you haven’t," said the stranger. "Mr. Edison and I promised to keep it a secret. I’ve never told anyone. Mr. Edison broke his promise and told Henry Ford, but Ford made him promise not to tell anybody else—for the good of humanity."
Bullard was entranced. "Uh, this intelligence analyzer," he said, "it analyzed intelligence, did it?"
"It was an electric butter churn," said the stranger.
"Seriously now," Bullard coaxed.
"Maybe it would be better to talk it over with someone," said the stranger. "It’s a terrible thing to keep bottled up inside me, year in and year out. But how can I be sure that it won’t go any further?"
"My word as a gentleman," Bullard assured him.
"I don’t suppose I could find a stronger guarantee than that, could I?" said the stranger, judiciously.
"There is no stronger guarantee," said Bullard, proudly. "Cross my heart and hope to die!"
"Very well." The stranger leaned back and closed his eyes, seeming to travel backward through time. He was silent for a full minute, during which Bullard watched with respect.
"It was back in the fall of eighteen seventy-nine," said the stranger at last, softly. "Back in the village of Menlo Park, New Jersey. I was a boy of nine. A young man we all thought was a wizard had set up a laboratory next door to my home, and there were flashes and crashes inside, and all sorts of scary goings on. The neighborhood children were warned to keep away, not to make any noise that would bother the wizard.
"I didn’t get to know Edison right off, but his dog Sparky and I got to be steady pals. A dog a whole lot like yours, Sparky was, and we used to wrestle all over the neighborhood. Yes, sir, your dog is the image of Sparky."
"Is that so?" said Bullard, flattered.
"Gospel," replied the stranger. "Well, one day Sparky and I were wrestling around, and we wrestled right up to the door of Edison’s laboratory. The next thing I knew, Sparky had pushed me in through the door, and bam! I was sitting on the laboratory floor, looking up at Mr. Edison himself."
"Bet he was sore," said Bullard, delighted.
"You can bet I was scared," said the stranger. "I thought I was face to face with Satan himself. Edison had wires hooked to his ears and running down to a little black box in his lap! I started to scoot, but he caught me by my collar and made me sit down.
" ’Boy,’ said Edison, ’it’s always darkest before the dawn. I want you to remember that.’
" ’Yes, sir,’ I said.
" ’For over a year, my boy,’ Edison said to me, ’I’ve been trying to find a filament that will last in an incandescent lamp. Hair, string, splinters—nothing works. So while I was trying to think of something else to try, I started tinkering with another idea of mine, just letting off steam. I put this together,’ he said, showing me the little black box. ’I thought maybe intelligence was just a certain kind of electricity, so I made this intelligence analyzer here. It works!