Breakfast of Champions Page 0,64
way, so the Creator of the Universe can watch your reactions. They can no more feel or reason than grandfather clocks.
“The Creator of the Universe would now like to apologize not only for the capricious, jostling companionship he provided during the test, but for the trashy, stinking condition of the planet itself. The Creator programmed robots to abuse it for millions of years, so it would be a poisonous, festering cheese when you got here. Also, He made sure it would be desperately crowded by programming robots, regardless of their living conditions, to crave sexual intercourse and adore infants more than almost anything.”
• • •
Mary Alice Miller, incidentally, the Women’s Breast Stroke Champion of the World and Queen of the Arts Festival, now passed through the cocktail lounge. She made a shortcut to the lobby from the side parking lot, where her father was waiting for her in his avocado 1970 Plymouth Barracuda fastback, which he had bought as a used car from Dwayne. It had a new car guarantee.
Mary Alice’s father, Don Miller, was, among other things, Chairman of the Parole Board at Shepherdstown. It was he who had decided that Wayne Hoobler, lurking among Dwayne’s used cars again, was fit to take his place in society.
Mary Alice went into the lobby to get a crown and scepter for her performance as Queen at the Arts Festival banquet that night. Milo Maritimo, the desk clerk, the gangster’s grandson, had made them with his own two hands. Her eyes were permanently inflamed. They looked like maraschino cherries.
Only one person noticed her sufficiently to comment out loud. He was Abe Cohen, the jeweler. He said this about Mary Alice, despising her sexlessness and innocence and empty mind: “Pure tuna fish!”
• • •
Kilgore Trout heard him say that—about pure tuna fish. His mind tried to make sense of it. His mind was swamped with mysteries. He might as well have been Wayne Hoobler, adrift among Dwayne’s used cars during Hawaiian Week.
His feet, which were sheathed in plastic, were meanwhile getting hotter all the time. The heat was painful now. His feet were curling and twisting, begging to be plunged into cold water or waved in the air.
And Dwayne read on about himself and the Creator of the Universe, to wit:
“He also programmed robots to write books and magazines and newspapers for you, and television and radio shows, and stage shows, and films. They wrote songs for you. The Creator of the Universe had them invent hundreds of religions, so you would have plenty to choose among. He had them kill each other by the millions, for this purpose only: that you be amazed. They have committed every possible atrocity and every possible kindness unfeelingly, automatically, inevitably, to get a reaction from Y-O-U.”
This last word was set in extra-large type and had a line all to itself, so it looked like this:
• • •
“Every time you went into the library,” said the book, “the Creator of the Universe held His breath. With such a higgledy-piggledy cultural smorgasbord before you, what would you, with your free will, choose?”
“Your parents were fighting machines and self-pitying machines,” said the book. “Your mother was programmed to bawl out your father for being a defective moneymaking machine, and your father was programmed to bawl her out for being a defective housekeeping machine. They were programmed to bawl each other out for being defective loving machines.
“Then your father was programmed to stomp out of the house and slam the door. This automatically turned your mother into a weeping machine. And your father would go down to a tavern where he would get drunk with some other drinking machines. Then all the drinking machines would go to a whorehouse and rent fucking machines. And then your father would drag himself home to become an apologizing machine. And your mother would become a very slow forgiving machine.”
• • •
Dwayne got to his feet now, having wolfed down tens of thousands of words of such solipsistic whimsey in ten minutes or so.
He walked stiffly over to the piano bar. What made him stiff was his awe of his own strength and righteousness. He dared not use his full strength in merely walking, for fear of destroying the new Holiday Inn with footfalls. He did not fear for his own life, Trout’s book assured him that he had already been killed twenty-three times. On each occasion, the Creator of the Universe had patched him up and got him going again.
Dwayne restrained himself in