While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [9]
Hoenikker tugged at his nose and closed his eyes, trying to remember a skill he’d had a long time ago. “Hello, Baby,” he said to Jenny. His toes wiggled in the magic shoes.
“Heh-le, Hah-uh-u-duh-suh-um,” Jenny said. There wasn’t any expression in her face. She spoke again, put the sounds together better. “Hello, Handsome,” she said to Hoenikker.
Hoenikker shook his head. “Nancy’s voice doesn’t sound like that anymore,” he said. “Lower, a little rougher now—not so liquid.”
“Huh-ear, huh-ut fuh-uh thu-uh suh-a-fuh uf-fuh Guh-od guh-o-yuh-oooo,” Jenny said to him. She smoothed that out, too, “Here, but for the Grace of God, go you,” she said.
“Say,” I said, “you’re good. I didn’t think anybody but George could make her talk.”
“Can’t make her seem alive—not the way George can,” Hoenikker said. “Never could—not even after I’d had a thousand hours of practice.”
“You put that many hours in on her?” I said.
“Sure,” said Hoenikker. “I was the one who was going to take her out on the road. I was the footloose bachelor who didn’t have much of a future in research anyway. George was the married man who was to stay home with his laboratory and his wife, and go on to bigger things.”
Life’s surprises made Hoenikker sniffle. “Designing Jenny—” he said, “that was supposed to be a little joke in the middle of George’s career—an electronic joke off the top of his head. Jenny was a little something he was to tinker with while he came drifting back to earth after his honeymoon with Nancy.”
Hoenikker rambled on about those olden days when Jenny was born. And sometimes he would make Jenny chime in, as though she remembered those days, too. Those were bad days for Hoenikker, because he fell in love with George’s wife. He’d been scared to death he would do something about it.
“I loved her for what she was,” he said. “Maybe it was all the pap George was spouting about love that made me fall in love with her. George would say something ridiculous about love or about her, and I’d think up real reasons for loving her. I wound up loving her as a human being, as a miraculous, one-of-a-kind, moody muddle of faults and virtues—part child, part woman, part goddess, and no more consistent than a putty slide-rule.”
“And then George began spending more and more time with me,” said Jenny. “He took to going home from the laboratory at the last possible moment, wolfing down his supper, and hurrying back to work on me till well past midnight. He would have the control shoes on all day long and half the night—and we would talk, and talk, and talk.”
Hoenikker tried to give her face some expression for what she was going to say next. He punched the Mona-Lisa-smile button Sully Harris had punched the day before. “I was excellent company,” she said. “I never once said anything he didn’t want to hear—and I always said what he wanted to hear exactly when he wanted to hear it.”
“Here,” said Hoenikker, undoing Jenny’s straps so she could step forward, “is the most calculating woman, the greatest student of the naïve male heart that ever walked the face of the earth. Nancy never had a chance.”
“Ordinarily,” said Hoenikker, “a man’s first wild dreams about his wife peter out after the honeymoon. The man then has to settle down to the difficult but rewarding business of finding out to whom he is really married. But George had an alternative. He could keep his wild dreams of a wife alive in Jenny. His neglect of the imperfect Nancy became a scandal.”
“George suddenly announced that I was too precious a mechanism to be entrusted in anyone’s care but his own,” said Jenny. “He was going to take his