"Vonnegut, Kurt - Galapagos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

Here was what had happened to their jobs: GEFFCo had furloughed almost its entire work force, blue-collar and white-collar alike, in order to modernize the Ilium operation. A Japanese company, Matsumoto, was doing the job. Matsumoto was also automating the _Bahнa de Darwin_. This was the same company which employed *Zenji Hiroguchi, the young computer genius who would be staying with his wife at the Hotel El Dorado the same time that Mary was there.
When the Matsumoto Corporation got through installing computers and robots, only twelve human beings would be able to run everything. So people young enough to have children, or at least ambitious dreams for the future, left town in droves. It was, as Mary Hepburn would say on her eighty-first birthday, two weeks before a great white shark ate her, ". . . as though the Pied Piper had passed through town." Suddenly, there were almost no children to educate, and the city was bankrupt for want of taxpayers. So Ilium High School would graduate its last class in June.

o

In April Roy was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumor. "The Nature Cruise of the Century" thereupon became what he was staying alive for. "I can hang on that long at least, Mary. November -- that's not far away, is it?"
"No," she said.
"I can hang on that long."
"You could have years, Roy," she said.
"Just let me take that cruise," he said. "Let me see penguins on the equator," he said. "That'll be good enough for me."

o

While Roy was mistaken about more and more things, he was right about there being penguins on the Galбpagos Islands. They were skinny things underneath their headwaiters' costumes. They had to be. If they had been swaddled in fat like their relatives on the ice floes to the south, half a world away, they would have roasted to death when they came ashore on the lava to lay their eggs and tend their young.
Like those of the flightless cormorants, their ancestors, too, had abandoned the glamor of aviation -- electing to catch more fish instead.
About that mystifying enthusiasm a million years ago for turning over as many human activities as possible to machinery: What could that have been but yet another acknowledgment by people that their brains were no damn good?









9



While Roy Hepburn was dying, and while the whole city of Ilium was dying, for that matter, and while both the man and the city were being killed by growths inimical to a healthy and happy humanity, Roy's big brain persuaded him that he had been a sailor at the United States atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, equatorial like Guayaquil, in 1946. He was going to sue his own government for millions, he said, because the radiation he had absorbed there had first prevented his and Mary's having children, and now it had caused his brain cancer.
Roy had served a hitch in the Navy, but otherwise his case against the United States of America was a weak one, since he was born in 1932, and his country's lawyers would have no trouble proving that. That would make him fourteen years old at the time of his supposed exposure.
That anachronism did not prevent his having vivid memories of the terrible things his government had made him do to so-called lower animals. As he told it, he worked virtually unassisted, first driving stakes into the ground all over the atoll, and then tying different sorts of animals to the stakes. "I guess they chose me," he said, "because animals have always trusted me."
This much was true: Animals all trusted Roy. While he had no formal education past high school, except for the apprentice program at GEFFCo, and while Mary had a master's degree in zoology from Indiana University, Roy was much better at actually relating to animals than Mary was. He could talk to birds in their own languages, for example, something she could never have done, since her ancestors were notoriously tone deaf on both sides of her family. There was no dog or farm animal, not even a guard dog at GEFFCo or a sow with piglets, so vicious that Roy couldn't, within five minutes or less, turn it into a friend of his.
So Roy's tears were understandable when he remembered tying animals to all those stakes. Such a cruel experiment had been performed on animals, of course, on sheep and pigs and cattle and horses and monkeys and ducks and chickens and geese, but surely not on a zoo such as Roy described. To hear him tell it, he had tethered peacocks and snow leopards and gorillas and crocodiles and albatrosses to the stakes. In his big brain, Bikini became the exact reverse of Noah's ark. Two of every sort of animal had been brought there in order to be atom-bombed.

o

The craziest detail in his story, which did not seem at all crazy to him, of course, was this one: "Donald was there." Donald was a golden retriever male who was roaming the neighborhood there in Ilium at that very moment, probably, maybe right outside the Hepburns' house, and was only four years old.
"It was all very hard," Roy would say, "but the hardest part was tying Donald to one of those stakes. I kept putting it off until I couldn't put it off any longer. Tying Donald to a stake was the. last thing I had to do. He let me do it, and after I did it he licked my hand and wagged that tail of his. And I said to him, and I'm not ashamed to say I cried: "So long, old pal. You're going to a different world now. It's sure to be a better one, since no other world could be as bad as this one is."

o

While Roy began putting on such performances, Mary was still teaching every weekday, still assuring the few students she had left that they should thank God for their great big brains. "Would you rather have the neck of a giraffe or the camouflage of a chameleon or the hide of a rhinoceros or the antlers of an Irish elk?" she would ask, and so on.
She was still spouting the same old malarkey.
Yes, and then she would go home to Roy, and his demonstrations of how misleading a brain could be. He was never hospitalized, except briefly for tests. And he was docile. He wasn't to drive a car anymore, but he understood that, and did not seem to resent it when Mary hid the keys to his Jeep station wagon. He even said that maybe they should sell it, since it didn't look like they were going to do much camping anymore. So Mary didn't have to hire a nurse to watch over Roy while she worked. Retired people in the neighborhood were glad to pick up a few dollars, keeping him company and making sure he didn't hurt himself in some way.
He was certainly no trouble to them. He watched a lot of television and enjoyed playing for hours, never leaving the yard, with Donald, the golden retriever who had died, supposedly, on Bikini Atoll.
As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galбpagos Islands, though, she would be stopped in mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: "Maybe I'm just a crazy lady who has wandered off the street and into this classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these young people. And they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything."
She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past, who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as Roy about what was really going on.