day long. They could beg. They could get drunk. The basic scheme was this one: they were to stay there and not bother anybody anywhere else—until they were murdered for thrills, or until they were frozen to death by the wintertime.
• • •
Kilgore Trout wrote a story one time about a town which decided to tell derelicts where they were and what was about to happen to them by putting up actual street signs like this:
Bunny now smiled at himself in the mirror, in the leak.
He called himself to attention for a moment, became again the insufferably brainless, humorless, heartless soldier he had learned to be in military school. He murmured the motto of the school, a motto he used to have to shout about a hundred times a day—at dawn, at meals, at the start of every class, at games, at bayonet practice, at sunset, at bedtime:
“Can do” he said. “Can do.”
18
THE GALAXIE in which Kilgore Trout was a passenger was on the Interstate now, close to Midland City. It was creeping. It was trapped in rush hour traffic from Barrytron and Western Electric and Prairie Mutual. Trout looked up from his reading, saw a billboard which said this:
So Sacred Miracle Cave had become a part of the past.
• • •
As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply:
“Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me.”
• • •
Dwayne Hoover was only four miles away. He was sitting alone on a zebra-skin banquette in the cocktail lounge of the new Holiday Inn. It was dark in there, and quiet, too. The glare and uproar of rush hour traffic on the Interstate was blocked out by thick drapes of crimson velvet. On each table was a hurricane lamp with a candle inside, although the air was still.
On each table was a bowl of dry-roasted peanuts, too, and a sign which allowed the staff to refuse service to anyone who was inharmonious with the mood of the lounge. Here is what it said:
• • •
Bunny Hoover was controlling the piano. He had not looked up when his father came in. Neither had his father glanced in his direction. They had not exchanged greetings for many years.
Bunny went on playing his white man’s blues. They were slow and tinkling, with capricious silences here and there. Bunny’s blues had some of the qualities of a music box, a tired music box. They tinkled, stopped, then reluctantly, torpidly, they managed a few tinkles more.
Bunny’s mother used to collect tinkling music boxes, among other things.
• • •
Listen: Francine Pefko was at Dwayne’s automobile agency next door. She was catching up on all the work she should have done that afternoon. Dwayne would beat her up very soon.
And the only other person on the property with her as she typed and filed was Wayne Hoobler, the black parolee, who still lurked among the used cars. Dwayne would try to beat him up, too, but Wayne was a genius at dodging blows.
Francine was pure machinery at the moment, a machine made of meat—a typing machine, a filing machine.
Wayne Hoobler, on the other hand, had nothing machine-like to do. He ached to be a useful machine. The used cars were all locked up tight for the night. Now and then aluminum propellors on a wire overhead would be turned by a lazy breeze, and Wayne would respond to them as best he could. “Go,” he would say to them. “Spin ’roun’.”
• • •
He established a sort of relationship with the traffic on the Interstate, too, appreciating its changing moods. “Everybody goin’ home,” he said during the rush hour jam. “Everybody home now,” he said later on, when the traffic thinned out. Now the sun was going down.
“Sun goin’ down,” said Wayne Hoobler. He had no clues as to where to go next. He supposed without minding much that he might die of exposure that night. He had never seen death by exposure, had never been threatened by it, since he had so seldom been out-of-doors. He knew of death by exposure because the papery voice of the little radio in his cell told of people’s dying of exposure from time to time.
He missed that papery voice. He missed the clash of steel doors. He missed the bread and the stew and the pitchers of milk and coffee. He missed fucking other men in the