Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [79]
After the broadcast, Fred, Lew, and I were cordial to one another to the point of being maudlin.
"I can’t remember when a broadcast has been such a pleasure," Lew said. Sincerity is not his forte, yet he meant it.
"It’s been one of the most memorable experiences of my life," Fred said, looking puzzled. "Extraordinarily pleasant."
We were all embarrassed by the emotion we felt, and parted company in bafflement and haste. I hurried home for a drink, only to walk into the middle of another unsettling experience.
The house was quiet, and I made two trips through it before discovering that I was not alone. My wife, Susan, a good and lovable woman who prides herself on feeding her family well and on time, was lying on the couch, staring dreamily at the ceiling. "Honey," I said tentatively, "I’m home. It’s suppertime."
"Fred Bockman was on the radio today," she said in a faraway voice.
"I know. I was with him in the studio."
"He was out of this world," she sighed. "Simply out of this world. That noise from space—when he turned that on, everything just seemed to drop away from me. I’ye been lying here, just trying to get over it."
"Uh-huh," I said, biting my lip. "Well, guess I’d better round up Eddie." Eddie is my ten-year-old son, and captain of an apparently invincible neighborhood baseball team.
"Save your strength, Pop," said a small voice from the shadows.
"You home? What’s the matter? Game called off on account of atomic attack?"
"Nope. We finished eight innings."
"Beating ’em so bad they didn’t want to go on, eh?"
"Uh, they were doing pretty good. Score was tied, and they had two men on and two outs." He talked as though he were recounting a dream. "And then," he said, his eyes widening, "everybody kind of lost interest, just wandered off. I came home and found the old lady curled up here, so I lay down on the floor."
"Why?" I asked incredulously.
"Pop," Eddie said thoughtfully, "I’m damned if I know."
"Eddie!" his mother said.
"Mom," Eddie said, "I’m damned if you know either."
I was damned if anybody could explain it, but I had a nagging hunch. I dialed Fred Bockman’s number. "Fred, am I getting you up from dinner?"
"I wish you were," Fred said. "Not a scrap to eat in the house, and I let Marion have the car today so she could do the marketing. Now she’s trying to find a grocery open."
"Couldn’t get the car started, eh?"
"Sure she got the car started," said Fred. "She even got to the market. Then she felt so good she walked right out of the place again." Fred sounded depressed. "I guess it’s a woman’s privilege to change her mind, but it’s the lying that hurts."
"Marion lied? I don’t believe it."
"She tried to tell me everybody wandered out of the market with her—clerks and all."
"Fred," I said, "I’ve got news for you. Can I drive out right after supper?"
When I arrived at Fred Bockman’s farm, he was staring, dumbfounded, at the evening paper.
"The whole town went nuts!" Fred said. "For no reason at all, all the cars pulled up to the curb like there was a hook and ladder going by. Says here people shut up in the middle of sentences and stayed that way for five minutes. Hundreds wandered around in the cold in their shirt-sleeves, grinning like toothpaste ads." He rattled the paper. "This is what you wanted to talk to me about?"
I nodded. "It all happened when that noise was being broadcast, and I thought maybe—"
"The odds are about one in a million that there’s any maybe about it," said Fred. "The time checks to the second."
"But most people weren’t listening to the program."
"They didn’t have to listen, if my theory’s right. We took those faint signals from space, amplified them about a thousand times, and rebroadcast them. Anybody within reach of the transmitter would get a good dose of the stepped-up radiations, whether he wanted to or not." He shrugged. "Apparently that’s like walking past a field of burning marijuana."
"How come you never felt the effect at work?"
"Because I never amplified and rebroadcast the signals. The radio station’s transmitter is what really