While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [13]
Millikan sobbed. He ran from the boardroom into his office, took a loaded revolver from his desk. As Breed and Dr. Everett burst in upon him, he blew his brains out, thereby maturing life insurance policies in the amount of one cool million.
And there lay one more case of the epizootic, the epidemic practice of committing suicide in order to create wealth.
“You know—” said the chairman of the board, “I used to wonder what was going to become of all the Americans like him, a bright and shiny new race that believed that life was a matter of making one’s family richer and richer and richer, or it wasn’t life. I often wondered what would become of them, if bad times ever came again, if the bright and shiny men suddenly discovered their net worths going down.” Breed pointed to the floor. Now he pointed to the ceiling. “Instead of up,” he said.
Bad times had come—about four months in advance of the epizootic.
“The one-way men—designed for up only,” said Breed.
“And their one-way wives and their one-way children,” said Dr. Everett. “Dear God—” he said, going to a window and looking out over a wintry Hartford, “the principal industry of this country is now dying for a living.”
(illustration credit 5)
HUNDRED-DOLLAR KISSES
Q: Do you understand that everything you say is going to be taken down by that stenographer over there?
A: Yes sir.
Q: And that anything you say may be used against you?
A: Understood.
Q: Your name, age, and address?
A: Henry George Lovell, Jr., thirty-three, living at 4121 North Pennsylvania Street, Indianapolis, Indiana.
Q: Occupation?
A: Until about two o’clock this afternoon, I was manager of the Records Section of the Indianapolis Office of the Eagle Mutual Casualty and Indemnity Company of Ohio.
Q: In the Circle Tower?
A: Right.
Q: Do you know me?
A: You are Detective Sergeant George Miller of the Indianapolis Police Department.
Q: Has anyone maltreated you or threatened you with maltreatment or offered you favors in order to obtain this statement?
A: Nope.
Q: Did you, at approximately two o’clock this afternoon, assault a man named Verne Petrie with a telephone?
A: I hit him on the head with the part you talk and listen in.
Q: How many times did you strike him with it?
A: Once. I hit him one good one.
Q: What is Verne Petrie to you?
A: Verne Petrie to me is what is wrong with the world.
Q: I mean, what was Verne Petrie to you in the organization of the office?
A: We were on the same junior executive level. We were in different sections. He wasn’t my boss, and I wasn’t his boss.
Q: You were competing for advancement?
A: No. We were in two entirely different fields.
Q: How would you describe him?
A: You want me to describe Verne with feeling, or just for the record?
Q: Any way you want to do it.
A: Verne Petrie is a big, pink, fat man about thirty-five years old. He has silky orange hair and two long upper front teeth like a beaver. He wears a red vest and chain-smokes very small cigars. He spends at least fifteen dollars a month on girlie magazines.
Q: Girlie magazines?
A: Man About Town. Bull. Virile. Vital. Vigor. Male Valor. You know.
Q: And you say Verne Petrie spends fifteen dollars a month on such magazines?
A: At least. The things generally cost fifty cents or more, and I never saw Verne come back from a lunch hour when he didn’t have at least one new one. Sometimes he had three.
Q: You don’t like girls?
A: Sure I like girls. I’m crazy about girls. I married one, and I’ve got two nice little ones.
Q: Why should you resent it that Verne buys these magazines?
A: I don’t resent it. It just seems kind of sick to me.
Q: Sick?
A: Girlie pictures are like dope to Verne. I mean, anybody likes to look at pin-up pictures off and on, but Verne, he has to buy armloads of them. He spends a fortune on them, and they’re realer than anything real to him. When it says at the bottom of a pin-up picture, “Come play with me, Baby,” or something like that, Verne believes it. He really thinks the girl is saying that to