While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [8]
We banged over another chuckhole. George had to grab the wheel with both hands. Steadying down the truck steadied him down, too. He didn’t talk anymore till we got where we were going.
Where we were going was a white mansion with pillars across the front. It was Norbert Hoenikker’s house. He was doing very well. He was assistant director of GHA research. He’d been George’s best friend years before—before he’d taken George’s wife Nancy away from him.
Lights were on all over the house. We parked the van behind a doctor’s car out front. We knew it was a doctor’s car because it had a tag with those twined snakes on it up above the back license plate. The minute we parked, the front door of the house opened, and Norbert Hoenikker came out. He was wearing a bathrobe and slippers, and he hadn’t slept all night.
He didn’t shake hands with George. He didn’t even say hello. He started right out with a rehearsed speech. “George,” he said. “I’m going to stay out here while you go in. I want you to consider it your house while you’re in there—with complete freedom for you and Nancy to say absolutely anything you have to say to each other.”
The last thing George wanted to do was to go in there and face Nancy alone. “I—I haven’t got anything to say to her,” he said. He actually put his hand on the ignition key, got ready to start up the van and roar away.
“She has things to say to you,” Mr. Hoenikker said. “She’s been asking for you all night. She knows you’re out here now. Lean close when she talks. She isn’t very strong.”
George got out, shambled up the walk to the house. He walked like a diver on the bottom of the sea. A nurse helped him into the house and closed the door.
“Is there a cot in back?” Mr. Hoenikker asked me.
“Yessir,” I said.
“I’d better lie down,” he said.
Mr. Hoenikker lay down on the cot, but he couldn’t get any rest. He was a tall, heavy man, and the cot was too little for him. He sat up again. “Got a cigarette?” he said.
“Yessir,” I said. I gave him one and lit it. “How is she, sir?” I said.
“She’ll live,” he said, “but it’s made an old lady out of her like that.” He snapped his fingers. It was a weak snap. It didn’t make any noise. He looked at the face of Jenny, and it hurt him. “He’s got a shock coming in there,” he said. “Nancy doesn’t look like that anymore.” He shrugged. “Maybe that’s good. Maybe he’ll have to look at her as a fellow human being now.”
He got up. He went to Jenny’s brains and shook a steel rack that carried part of them. The rack didn’t give at all. Hoenikker wound up shaking himself. “Oh, God,” he said, “what a waste, what a waste, what a waste. One of the great technical minds of our time,” he said, “living in a moving van, married to a machine, selling appliances somewhere between Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and Flamingo, Florida.”
“I guess he is pretty bright,” I said.
“Bright?” Hoenikker said. “He isn’t just George Castrow. He’s Dr. George Castrow. He spoke five languages when he was eight, mastered calculus when he was ten, and got his Ph.D. from M.I.T. when he was eighteen!”
I whistled.
“He never had any time for love,” Hoenikker said. “Didn’t believe in it, was sure he could get along without it—whatever it was. There was too much else to do for George to bother with love. When he came down with pneumonia at the age of thirty-three, he had never so much as held the hand of a woman.”
Hoenikker saw the magic shoes where George had put them, under the cot. He slipped off his bedroom slippers and slipped on the magic shoes. He was pretty familiar with them. “When pneumonia hit George,” he said, “he was suddenly in terror of death and in desperate need of a nurse’s touch many times a day. The nurse was Nancy.”
Hoenikker turned on Jenny’s master control switch. Her brains