Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [73]
As he raised his head to look at me, I saw that his eyes were clouded with fatigue. "Hi," he said, "just can’t seem to get my sleeping done at night." He lighted a cigarette, his hands trembling slightly. "You the young man I’m supposed to help with a thesis?"
"Yes, sir," I said. In minutes he converted my misgivings to alarm.
"You an overseas veteran?" he asked.
"Yes, sir."
"Not much left over there, is there?" He frowned. "Enjoy the last war?"
"No, sir."
"Look like another war to you?"
"Kind of, sir."
"What can be done about it?"
I shrugged. "Looks pretty hopeless."
He peered at me intently. "Know anything about international law, the U.N., and all that?"
"Only what I pick up from the papers."
"Same here," he sighed. He showed me a fat scrapbook packed with newspaper clippings. "Never used to pay any attention to international politics. Now I study them the way I used to study rats in mazes. Everybody tells me the same thing—’Looks hopeless.’ "
"Nothing short of a miracle—" I began.
"Believe in magic?" he asked sharply. The professor fished two dice from his vest pocket. "I will try to roll twos," he said. He rolled twos three times in a row. "One chance in about 47,000 of that happening. There’s a miracle for you." He beamed for an instant, then brought the interview to an end, remarking that he had a class which had begun ten minutes ago.
He was not quick to take me into his confidence, and he said no more about his trick with the dice. I assumed they were loaded, and forgot about them. He set me the task of watching male rats cross electrified metal strips to get to food or female rats—an experiment that had been done to everyone’s satisfaction in the nineteen-thirties. As though the pointlessness of my work were not bad enough, the professor annoyed me further with irrelevant questions. His favorites were: "Think we should have dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima?" and "Think every new piece of scientific information is a good thing for humanity?"
However, I did not feel put upon for long. "Give those poor animals a holiday," he said one morning, after I had been with him only a month. "I wish you’d help me look into a more interesting problem—namely, my sanity."
I returned the rats to their cages.
"What you must do is simple," he said, speaking softly. "Watch the inkwell on my desk. If you see nothing happen to it, say so, and I’ll go quietly—relieved, I might add—to the nearest sanitarium."
I nodded uncertainly.
He locked the laboratory door and drew the blinds, so that we were in twilight for a moment. "I’m odd, I know," he said. "It’s fear of myself that’s made me odd."
"I’ve found you somewhat eccentric, perhaps, but certainly not—"
"If nothing happens to that inkwell, ’crazy as a bedbug’ is the only description of me that will do," he interrupted, turning on the overhead lights. His eyes narrowed. "To give you an idea of how crazy, I’ll tell you what’s been running through my mind when I should have been sleeping. I think maybe I can save the world. I think maybe I can make every nation a have nation, and do away with war for good. I think maybe I can clear roads through jungles, irrigate deserts, build dams overnight."
"Yes, sir."
"Watch the inkwell!"
Dutifully and fearfully I watched. A high-pitched humming seemed to come from the inkwell; then it began to vibrate alarmingly, and finally to bound about the top of the desk, making two noisy circuits. It stopped, hummed again, glowed red, then popped in splinters with a blue-green flash.
Perhaps my hair stood on end. The professor laughed gently. "Magnets?" I managed to say at last.
"Wish to heaven it were magnets," he murmured. It was then that he told me of dynamopsychism. He knew only that there was such a force; he could not explain it. "It’s me and me alone