Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [78]
My first brush with synthetic peace of mind was six months ago. It was also then that I got to know Lew Harrison, I’m sorry to say. Lew is chief announcer of our town’s only radio station. He makes his living with his loud mouth, and I’d be surprised if it were anyone but he who brought this matter to your attention.
Lew has, along with about thirty other shows, a weekly science program. Every week he gets some professor from Wyandotte College and interviews him about his particular field. Well, six months ago Lew worked up a program around a young dreamer and faculty friend of mine, Dr. Fred Bockman. I gave Fred a lift to the radio station, and he invited me to come on in and watch. For the heck of it, I did.
Fred Bockman is thirty and looks eighteen. Life has left no marks on him, because he hasn’t paid much attention to it. What he pays most of his attention to, and what Lew Harrison wanted to interview him about, is this eight-ton umbrella of his that he listens to the stars with. It’s a big radio antenna rigged up on a telescope mount. The way I understand it, instead of looking at the stars through a telescope, he aims this thing out in space and picks up radio signals coming from different heavenly bodies.
Of course, there aren’t people running radio stations out there. It’s just that many of the heavenly bodies pour out a lot of energy and some of it can be picked up in the radio-frequency band. One good thing Fred’s rig does is to spot stars hidden from telescopes by big clouds of cosmic dust. Radio signals from them get through the clouds to Fred’s antenna.
That isn’t all the outfit can do, and, in his interview with Fred, Lew Harrison saved the most exciting part until the end of the program. "That’s very interesting, Dr. Bockman," Lew said. "Tell me, has your radio telescope turned up anything else about the universe that hasn’t been revealed by ordinary light telescopes?"
This was the snapper. "Yes, it has," Fred said. "We’ve found about fifty spots in space, not hidden by cosmic dust, that give off powerful radio signals. Yet no heavenly bodies at all seem to be there."
"Well!" Lew said in mock surprise. "I should say that is something! Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in radio history, we bring you the noise from Dr. Bockman’s mysterious voids." They had strung a line out to Fred’s antenna on the campus. Lew waved to the engineer to switch in the signals coming from it. "Ladies and gentlemen, the voice of nothingness!"
The noise wasn’t much to hear—a wavering hiss, more like a leaking tire than anything else. It was supposed to be on the air for five seconds. When the engineer switched it off, Fred and I were inexplicably grinning like idiots. I felt relaxed and tingling. Lew Harrison looked as though he’d stumbled into the dressing room at the Copacabana. He glanced at the studio clock, appalled. The monotonous hiss had been on the air for five minutes! If the engineer’s cuff hadn’t accidentally caught on the switch, it might be on yet.
Fred laughed nervously, and Lew hunted for his place in the script. "The hiss from nowhere," Lew said. "Dr. Bockman, has anyone proposed a name for these interesting voids?"
"No," Fred said. "At the present time they have neither a name nor an explanation."
The voids the hiss came from have still to be explained, but I’ve suggested a name for them that shows plans of sticking: "Bockman’s’Euphoria." We may not know what the voids are, but we know what they do, so the name’s a good one. Euphoria, since it means a sense of buoyancy and well-being, is really the only