Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [76]
"Did you give it everything you had?" asked the general dubiously.
"I was wide open," the professor replied.
The television images pulled themselves together, and mingled cries of amazement came over the radios tuned to the observers. The Aleutian sky was streaked with the smoke trails of bombers screaming down in flames. Simultaneously, there appeared high over the rocket target a cluster of white puffs, followed by faint thunder.
General Barker shook his head happily. "By George!" he crowed. "Well, sir, by George, by George, by George!"
"Look!" shouted the admiral seated next to me. "The fleet—it wasn’t touched!"
"The guns seem to be drooping," said Mr. Cuthrell.
We left the bench and clustered about the television set to examine the damage more closely. What Mr. Cuthrell had said was true. The ships’ guns curved downward, their muzzles resting on the steel decks. We in Virginia were making such a hullabaloo that it was impossible to hear the radio reports. We were so engrossed, in fact, that we didn’t miss the professor until two short snarls of Barnhouse static shocked us into sudden silence. The radios went dead.
We looked around apprehensively. The professor was gone. A harassed guard threw open the front door from the outside to yell that the professor had escaped. He brandished his pistol in the direction of the gates, which hung open, limp and twisted. In the distance, a speeding government station wagon topped a ridge and dropped from sight into the valley beyond. The air was filled with choking smoke, for every vehicle on the grounds was ablaze. Pursuit was impossible.
"What in God’s name got into him?" bellowed the general.
Mr. Cuthrell, who had rushed out onto the front porch, now slouched back into the room, reading a penciled note as he came. He thrust the note into my hands. "The good man left this billet-doux under the door knocker. Perhaps our young friend here will be kind enough to read it to you gentlemen, while I take a restful walk through the woods."
"Gentlemen," I read aloud, "as the first superweapon with a conscience, I am removing myself from your national defense stockpile. Setting a new precedent in the behavior of ordnance, I have humane reasons for going off. A. Barnhouse."
Since that day, of course, the professor has been systematically destroying the world’s armaments, until there is now little with which to equip an army other than rocks and sharp sticks. His activities haven’t exactly resulted in peace, but have, rather, precipitated a bloodless and entertaining sort of war that might be called the "War of the Tattletales." Every nation is flooded with enemy agents whose sole mission is to locate military equipment, which is promptly wrecked when it is brought to the professor’s attention in the press.
Just as every day brings news of more armaments. pulverized by dynamopsychism, so has it brought rumors of the professor’s whereabouts. During last week alone, three publications carried articles proving variously that he was hiding in an Inca ruin in the Andes, in the sewers of Paris, and in the unexplored lower chambers of Carlsbad Caverns. Knowing the man, I am inclined to regard such hiding places as unnecessarily romantic and uncomfortable. While there are numerous persons eager to kill him, there must be millions who would care for him and hide him. I like to think that he is in the home of such a person.
One thing is certain: at this writing, Professor Barnhouse is not dead. Barnhouse static jammed broadcasts not ten minutes ago. In the eighteen months since his disappearance, he has been reported dead some half-dozen times. Each report has stemmed from the death of an unidentified man resembling the professor, during a period free of the static. The first three reports were followed at once by renewed talk of rearmament and recourse to war. The saber-rattlers have learned how imprudent premature celebrations of the professor’s demise can be.
Many a stouthearted patriot has found himself prone in the tangled bunting and timbers of a smashed reviewing