Welcome to the Monkey House
Kurt Vonnegut
Copyright
Welcome to the Monkey House
Copyright ©
1950,1951,1953,1954,1955,1956,1958,1960,1961,1962,1964,
1966,1968 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2012 by
RosettaBooks, LLC
This is a work of fiction.Names, characters, places and incidents are
either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,
any resemblance to actual person, living or dead, business
establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Electronic edition published 2012 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.
ISBN Acrobat eBook edition: 9780795319112
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1 Where I Live
Chapter 2 Harrison Bergeron
Chapter 3
Who Am I This Time?
Chapter 4
Welcome to the Monkey House
Chapter 5
Long Walk to Forever
Chapter 6
The Foster Portfolio
Chapter 7
Miss Temptation
Chapter 8
All the King’s Horses
Chapter 9
Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog
Chapter 10 New Dictionary
Chapter 11 Next Door
Chapter 12 More Stately Mansions
Chapter 13 The Hyannis Port Story
Chapter 14 D.P.
Chapter 15 Report on the Barnhouse Effect
Chapter 16 The Euphio Question
Chapter 17
Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son
Chapter 18
Deer in the Works
Chapter 19
The Lie
Chapter 20
Unready to Wear
Chapter 21
The Kid Nobody Could Handle
Chapter 22
The Manned Missiles
Chapter 23
EPICAC
Chapter 24
Adam
Chapter 25
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
For
Knox Burger
Ten days older than I am.
He has been a very good
father to me.
“Beware of all enterprises
that require new clothes.”
___Thoreau
PREFACE
HERE
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IT IS,
a retrospective exhibition of the shorter
works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.-and Vonnegut is s t i l l very much
with us, and I am still very much Vonnegut. Somewhere in
Germany is a stream called the Vonne. That is the source of my
curious name.
I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have
no theories about writing that might help others. When I write
I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet
two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the
writing.
In the water I am beautiful.
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...
My father and paternal grandfather were architects in Indianapolis, Indiana, where I was born. My maternal grandfather
owned a brewery there. He won a Gold Medal at the Paris
Exposition with his beer, which was Lieber Lager. The secret
ingredient was coffee.
My only brother, eight years older than I, is a successhl
scientist. His special field is physics as it relates to clouds. His
name is Bernard, and he is hnnier than I am. I remember a
letter he wrote after his first child, Peter, was born and brought
home. “Here I am,” that letter began, “cleaning shit off of
practically everything.”
My only sister, five years older than I, died when she was
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PREFACE
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forty. She was over six feet tall, too, by an angstrom unit or so.
She was heavenly to look at, and gracefbl, both in and out of
water. She was a sculptress. She was christened “Alice,” but she
used to deny that she was really an Alice. I agreed. Everybody
agreed. Sometime in a dream maybe I will find out what her
real name was.
Her dying words were, “No pain.” Those are good dying
words. It was cancer that killed her.
And I realize now that the two main themes of my novels
were stated by my siblings: “Here I am cleaning shit off of
practically everything” and “No pain.” The contents of this
book are samples of work I sold in order to finance the writing
of the novels. Here one finds the fruits of Free Enterprise.
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I used to be a public relations man for General Electric,
and then I became a free-lance writer of so-called “slick fiction,” a lot of it science fiction. Whether I improved myself
morally by making that change I am not prepared to say. That is
one of the questions I mean to ask God on Judgment Dayalong with the one about what my sister’s name really was.
That could easily be next Wednesday.
I have already put the question to a college professor,
who, climbing down into his Mercedes-Benz 300SL grun furism, assured me that public relations men and slick writers
were equally vile, in that they both buggered truth for money.
I asked him what the very lowest grade of fiction was, and
he told me, “Science fiction.” I asked where he was bound in
such a rush, and learned that he had to catch a Fan-Jet. He was
to speak at a meeting of the Modern Language Association in
Honolulu the next morning. Honolulu was three thousand
miles away.
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.
.
a
My sister smoked too much. My father smoked too
much. My mother smoked too much. I smoke too much. My
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PREFACE
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brother used to smoke too much, and then he gave it up, which
was a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes.
And one time a pretty girl came up to me at a cocktail
party, and she asked me, “What are you doing these days?”
“I am committing suicide by cigarette,” I replied.
She thought that was reasonably funny. I didn’t. I thought
it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away
on cancer sticks. My brand is Pall Mall. The authentic suicides
ask for Pall Malls. The dilettantes ask for Pell Mells.
I have a relative who is secretly writing a history of parts
of my family. He has showed me some of it, and he told me this
about my grandfather, the architect: “He died in his fortiesand I think he was just as glad to be out of it.” By “it,” of
course, he meant life in Indianapolis-and there is that yellow
streak about life in me, too.
The public health authorities never mention the main
reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that
smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.
...
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It is disgraceful that I should ever have wanted out of “it,”
and I don’t want out any more. I have six children, three of my
own and three of my sister’s. They’ve turned out gloriously.
My first marriage worked, and continues to work. My wife is
still beautiful.
I never knew a writer’s wife who wasn’t beautiful.
In honor of the marriage that worked, I include in this
collection a sickeningly slick love story h m The Ladies’ Home
Journal, God help us, entitled by them “The Long Walk to
Forever.” The title I gave it, I think, was “Hell to Get Along
With.’’
It describes an afternoon I spent with my wife-to-be.
Shame, shame, to have lived scenes fiom a woman’s magazine.
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PREFACE
The New Yorker once said that a book of mine, God Bless
You, Mr. Rosewater, was “. . . a series of narcissistic giggles.”
This may be another. Perhaps it would be helphl to the reader
to imagine me as the White Rock girl, kneeling on a boulder
in a nightgown, either looking for minnows or adoring her
own reflection.
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WHERE I LIVE
NnNo
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v ERY
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LONG A G0 ,
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an encyclopedia salesman stopped
by America’s oldest library building, which is the lovely Sturgis
Library in Barnstable Village, on Cape Cod’s north shore. And
he pointed out to the easily alarmed librarian that the library’s
most recent general reference work was a 1938 Britunnicu, backstopped by a 1910 Americana. He said many important things
had happened since 1938, naming, among others, penicillin and
Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
He was advised to take his astonishment to some of the
library’s directors. He was given their names and addresses.
There was a Cabot on the list-and a Lowell and a Kittredge,
and some others. The librarian told him that he had a chance of
catching several directors all at once, if he would go to the
Barnstable Yacht Club. So he went down the narrow yacht club
road, nearly broke his neck as he hit a series of terrific bumps
put in the road to discourage speeders, to kill them, if possible.
He wanted a martini, wondered if a nonmember could
get service at the bar. He was appalled to discover that the club
was nothing but a shack fourteen feet wide and thirty feet long,
a touch of the Ozarks in Massachusetts. It contained an hilariously warped ping-pong table, a wire lost-and-found basket
with sandy, fiagrant contents, and an upright piano that had
been under a leak in the roof for years.
There wasn’t any bar, any telephone, any electricity.
There weren’t any members there, either. To cap it all, there
wasn’t a drop of water in the harbor. The tide, which can be as
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WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE
great as fourteen feet, was utterly out. And the so-called yachts,
antique wooden Rhodes 18’s, Beetlecats, and a couple of Boston
Whalers, were resting on the bluish-brown glurp of the emptied
harbor’s floor. Clouds of gulls and terns were yelling about all
that glurp, and about all the good things in it they were finding
to eat.
A few men were out there, too, digging clams as fat as
partridges from the rim of Sandy Neck, the ten-mile-long sand
finger that separates the harbor from the ice-cold bay. And
ducks and geese and herons and other waterfowl were out
there, too, teemingly, in the great salt marsh that bounds the
harbor on the west. And, near the harbor’s narrow mouth, a
yawl from Marblehead with a six-foot keel lay on her side,
waiting for the water to come back in again. She should never
have come to Barnstable Village, not with a keel like that.
The salesman, very depressed, insensitive to the barbarous
beauty all around him, went to lunch. Since he was in the seat
of the most booming county in New England, Barnstable
County, and since the boom was a tourist boom, he had reason
to expect something mildly voluptuous in the way of a place to
eat. What he had to settle for, though, was a chromium stool at
a formica counter in an aggressively un-cute, un-colonial institution called the Barnstable News Store, another Ozarks touch,
an Ozarks department store. The motto of the place: “If it’s any
good, we’ve got it. If it’s no good, we’ve sold it.”
M e r lunch, he went trustee-hunting again, was told to
try the village museum, which is in the old brick Customs
House. The building itself is a memorial to long-gone days
when the harbor was used by fair-sized ships, before it filled up
with all that bluish-brown glurp. There was no trustee there,
and the exhibits were excruciatingly boring. The salesman
found himself strangling on apathy, an affliction epidemic
among casual visitors to Barnstable Village.
He took the customary cure, which was to jump into his
car and roar off toward the cocktail lounges, motor courts,
bowling alleys, gift shoppes, and pizzerias of Hyannis, the com2
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WHERE
I LIVE
mercial heart of Cape Cod. He there worked off his fkustrations
on a miniature golf course called Playland. At that time, that
particular course had a pathetic, maddening feature typical of
the random butchery of the Cape's south shore. The course
was built on the lawn of what had once been an American
Legion Post-andy right in the middle of the cunning little
bridges and granulated cork fairways was a Sherman tank, set
there in simpler and less enterprising days as a memorial to the
veterans of World War Two.
The memorial has since been moved, but it is still on the
south side, where it is bound to be engulfed by indignities
again.
The dignity of the tank would be a lot safer in Barnstable
Village, but the village would never accept it. It has a policy of
never accepting anything. As a happy consequence, it changes
about as fast as the rules of chess.
The biggest change in recent years has taken place at the
polls. Until six years ago, the Democratic poll watchers and
the Republican poll watchers were all Republicans. Now the
Democratic poll watchers are Democrats. The consequences of
this revolution have not been nearly as awful as expected-so
far.
Another break with the past has to do with the treasury of
the local amateur theatrical society, the Barnstable Comedy
Club. The club had a treasurer who, once a month for thirty
years, angrily refixed to say what the balance was, for fear that
the club would spend it foolishly. He resigned last year. The
new treasurer announced a balance of four hundred dollars and
some odd cents, and the membership blew it all on a new
curtain the color of spoiled salmon. This ptomaine curtain,
incidentally, made its debut during a production of The Caine
Mutiny Court Martial in which Captain Queeg did not nervously
rattle steel balls in his hand. The balls were eliminated on the
theory that they were suggestive.
Another big change took place about sixty years ago,
when it w a s discovered that tuna were good to eat. Barnstable
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WELCOME TO THE M O N K E Y HOUSE
fishermen used to call them “horse mackerel,” and curse
whenever they caught one. Still cursing, they would chop it up
and throw it back into the bay as a warning to other horse
mackerel. Out of courage or plain stupidity, the tuna did not go
away, and now make possible a post-Labor Day festival called
the Barnstable Tuna Derby. Sportsmen with reels as big as
courthouse clocks come h m all over the Eastern seaboard for
the event, the villagers are always mystified as to what brought
them. And nobody ever catches anything.
Another discovery that still lies in the future for the villagers to make and to learn to live with is that mussels can be eaten
without causing instant death. Barnstable Harbor is in places
clogged with them. They are never disturbed. One reason for
their being ignored, perhaps, is that the harbor abounds in two
other delicacies far simpler to prepare-striped bass and clams.
To get clams, one can scratch almost anywhere when the tide is
out. To get bass, one follows the birds, looks for cone-shaped
formations of them, casts his lure to the place where the cone
points. Bass will be feeding there.
As for what else the fimre holds: Few Cape villages have
much chance of coming though the present greedy, tasteless
boom with their souls intact. H. L. Mencken once said something to the effect that “Nobody ever went broke overestimating the vulgarity of the American people,” and fortunes now
being made out of the vulgarization of the Cape surely bear t h i s
out. The soul of Barnstable Village just might survive.
For one thing, it is not a hollow village, with everything
for rent, with half of the houses empty in the winter. Most of
the people live there all year round, and most of them aren’t
old, and most of them work-as carpenters, salesmen, masons,
architects, teachers, writers, and what have you. It is a classless
society, a sometimes affectionate and sentimental one.
And these f
dl houses, often riddled by termites and dry
rot, but good, probably, for a few hundred years more, have
been built chockablock along Main Street since the end of the
Civil War. Developers find very little room in which to work
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WHERE I LIVE
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their pious depredations. There is a seeming vast green meadow
to the west, but this is salt marsh, the bluish-brown glurp
capped by a mat of salt hay. It was this natural hay, by the way,
that tempted settlers down from Plymouth in 1639. The marsh,
laced by deep creeks that can be explored by small boats, can
never be built upon by anyone sane. It goes underwater at every
moon tide, and is capable of supporting a man and his dog, and
not much more.
Speculators and developers got very excited for a while
about the possibility of improving Sandy Neck, the long, slender barrier of spectacular dunes that bounds the harbor on the
north. There are grotesque forests of dead trees out there, trees
suffocated by sand, then unburied again. And the outer beach,
for all practical purposes infinite, puts the beach of Acapulco to
shame. Surprisingly, too, fiesh water can be had out there h m
quite shallow wells. But the local government, thank God, is
buying up all of Sandy Neck but the tip, at the harbor mouth,
and is making it a public park to be kept unimproved forever.
There is a tiny settlement on the tip of the neck, the tip
that the government is not taking over. It is clustered around
the abandoned lighthouse, a lighthouse that was once needed
when there was water enough around to let big ships come and
go. The bleached and tacky settlement can be reached only by
boat or beach buggy. There is no electricity there, no telephone. It is a private resort. Less than a mile f b m Barnstable
Village, the tip of the neck is where many villagers go when
they need a vacation.
And all of the anachronistic, mildly xenophobic, charming queernesses of Barnstable Village might entitle it to the
epithet, “Last Stronghold of the True Cape Codders,” if it
weren’t for one thing: Hardly anyone in the village was born on
Cape Cod. Just as petrified wood is formed by minerals slowly
replacing organic materials, so has the present-day petrified
Barnstable been formed by persons from Evanston and Louisville and Boston and Pittsburgh and God-only-knows-whereelse, slowly replacing authentic rural Yankees.
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WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE
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If the real Cape Codders could rise from their churchyard
graves, cast aside their beautifully lettered slate headstones, and
attend a meeting of the Barnstable Village Civic Association,
they would approve of the proceedings. Every proposal that has
ever come before the organization has been hotly debated and
voted down, except that a new siren be bought for the rescue
truck. The siren goes bweep-bweep-bweep instead of rowrrr, and is
guaranteed to be audible at a distance of three miles.
The library, incidentally, now has a new Britannica, and a
new Americana, too, purchases it made effortlessly, since it has
money coming out of its ears. But so far, the school marks of
the children and the conversation of the adults have not conspicuously improved.
Since the village exists for itself, and not for passersby, and
since it specializes in hastening tourists on to paradises elsewhere, visitors play hell finding anything to like about it. For a
quick sample of how good it can be, a visitor might stop off at
St. Mary’s Church on Main Street, which has, unadvertised
anywhere, the most enchanting church garden in America. The
garden is the work of one man, Robert Nicholson, an Episcopalian minister, a good man who died young.
At a village cocktail party one time--and the villagers do
drink a lot-Father Nicholson was talking to a Roman Catholic and a Jew, trying to find a word to describe the underlying
spiritual unity of Barnstable. He found one. “We’re Druids,”
he said.
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(1964)
6
HARRlSON BERGERON
THE
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and everybody was finally equal.
They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were
equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody
else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody
was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was
due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United
States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though.
April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took
George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison,
away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t
think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except
in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way
above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He
was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a
government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like
George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George and Hazel were watching television. There were
tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment
what they were about.
O n the television screen were ballerinas.
Y E A R W A S 2011,
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WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE
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A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in
panic, like bandits bom a burglar alarm.
“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,”
said Hazel.
“Huh?” said George.
“That dance-it was nice,” said Hazel.
“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the
ballerinas. They weren’t really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with
sash-weights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked,
so that no one, seeing a fiee and gracefid gesture or a pretty
face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was
toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be
handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another
noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself,
she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.
“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball
peen hammer,” said George.
“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the
different sounds,” said Hazel, a little envious. “All the things
they think up.”
“Um,” said George.
“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I
would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong
resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said
Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in
honor of religion.”
“I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.
“Well-maybe make ’em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think
I’d make a good Handicapper General.”
“Good as anybody else,” said George.
“Who knows better’n I do what normal is?” said Hazel.
“Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly
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HARRISON BERGERON
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about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison,
but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.
“Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?”
It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling,
and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight
ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their
temples.
“All of a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why
don’t you stretch out on the sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She was referring to the
forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a
little while,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re not equal to me
for a while.”
George weighed the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind
it,” he said. “I don’t notice it any more. It’s just a part of me.”
“You been so tired lately-kind of wore out,” said Hazel.
“If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the
bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls.
Just a few.”
“Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for
every ball I took out,” said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.”
“If you could just take a few out when you came home
don’t compete with
from work,” said Hazel. “I mean-you
anybody around here. You just set around.”
“If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other
people’d get away with it-and pretty soon we’d be right back
to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”
“I’d hate it,” said Hazel.
“There you are,” said George. “The minute people start
cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?”
If Hazel hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to
this question, George couldn’t have supplied one. A siren was
going off in his head.
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WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE
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“Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.
“What would?” said George blankly.
“Society,” said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you
just said?”
“Who knows?” said George.
The television program was suddenly interrupted for a
news bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first as to what the bulletin was
about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious
speech impediment. For about halfa minute, and in a state of
high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and gentlemen-”
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to
read.
“That’s all right-”
Hazel said of the announcer, “he
tried. That’s the big thing. He tried to do the best he could
with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying
so hard.”
“Ladies and gentlemen-” said the ballerina, reading the
bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautifd, because
the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she
was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her
handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundredpound men.
And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which
was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a
warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me-” she said,
and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle
squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on
suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a
genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be
regarded as extremely dangerous.”
A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on
the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again,
then right side up. The picture showed the h l l length of Harri-
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HARRISON BERGERON
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son against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was
exactly seven feet tall.
The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and
hardware. Nobody had ever borne heavier handicaps. He had
outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think
them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he
wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick
wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not
only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a
certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to
strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In
the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that
he wear at a l l times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his
eyebrows shaved 06and cover his even white teeth with black
caps at snaggle-tooth random.
“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not-I repeat, do not-try to reason with him.”
There was the shriek of a door being torn fiom its hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the
television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the
screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune
of an earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and
well he might have-for many was the time his own home had
danced to the same crashing tune. “My God-” said George,
“that must be Harrison!”
The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the
sound of an automobile collision in his head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph
of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the
screen.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was s t i l l
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WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE
in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers
cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am
the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He
stamped his foot and the studio shook.
“Even as I stand here-”
he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened-I am a greater ruler than any man who ever
lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet
tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand
pounds.
Harrison’s scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock
that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that
would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.
“1 shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down
on the cowering people. “Let the first woman who dares rise to
her feet claim her mate and her throne!”
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like
a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear,
snapped off her physical handicaps with marvellous delicacy.
Last of all, he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
“Now-”
said Harrison, taking her heand, “shall we
show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!” he
commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. “Play your best,”
he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and earls.”
The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly,
false. But Harrison snatched two musicians hom their chairs,
waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it
played. He slammed them back into their chairs.
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HARRISON BERGERON
zy
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for
a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girl’s tiny waist,
letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air
they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the
law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap
brought the dancers nearer to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.
They kissed it.
And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will,
they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and
they kissed each other for a long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper
General, came into the studio with a double-barreled tengauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it
at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their
handicaps back on.
It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned
out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George.
But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You
been crying?” he said to Hazel.
“Yup,” she said.
zyx
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