Курт Воннегут - Player Piano (Utopia 14)

"To hell with the Meadows."

"You don't mean that."

"I mean we're still going out next Wednesday."

"Well, I hope you know what you're doing. You're the captain."

"I'm the captain."

EDGAR R. B. HAGSTROHM, thirty-seven, R&R - 131313, Undercoater First Class, 22nd Surface Preserving Battalion, 58th Maintenance Regiment, 110th Building and Grounds Division, Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, had been named after his father's favorite author, the creator of Tarzan - Tarzan, who, far away from the soot and biting winter of the Hagstrohms' home town, Chicago, made friends with lions and elephants and apes, and swung through trees on vines, and was built like a brick outhouse with square wheels and Venetian blinds, and took what he wanted of civilization's beautiful women in tree houses, and left the rest of civilization alone. E. R. B. Hagstrohm liked Tarzan as much as his father had, and hated being a little man and being in Chicago ten times as much.

And Edgar was reading about Tarzan in the bedroom when his fat wife, Wanda, called to him from her station before the picture window in the front room of their prefabricated home in Proteus Park, Chicago, a postwar development of three thousand dream houses for three thousand families with presumably identical dreams. "Gosh, here he comes, Edgar!"

"All right, all right, all right," said Edgar. "So he's coming! So what am I supposed to do, holler bloody murder, kiss his feet, and faint?" He took his time about getting off the bed, and he didn't smooth out the dent he'd made in the bedding. He laid his book open on the bedside table, so the visitors would see that he was a reader, and started for the living room. "What's he look like, Wan?"

"You gotta see, Ed - like a Chinese bird cage or something, all gold and fancy."

The Shah of Bratpuhr had asked his guide, Doctor Ewing J. Halyard, if he might see the home of a typical Takaru , freely translated, from one culture to another, as "average man." The request had been made as they were passing through Chicago from Carlsbad Caverns, and Halyard had stopped off at the local personnel office for the name of a representative American in the neighborhood.

The personnel machines had considered the problem and ejected the card of Edgar R. B. Hagstrohm, who was statistically average in every respect save for the number of his initials: his age (36), his height (5'7"), his weight (148 lbs.), his years of marriage (11), his I.Q. (83), the number of his children (2: 1 m., 9; 1 f., 6), the number of his bedrooms (2), his car (3 yr. old Chev. 2 dr. sed.), his education (h.s. grad, 117th in class of 233; maj. in business practice; 2nd string f'ball, b'k'tb'l; soc. comm., sen'r play; no coll.) his vocation (R&R), his avocations (spec'r sports, TV, softb'l, f'sh'g), and his war record (5 yrs., 3 ov'sea; T-4 radioman; 157th Inf. Div.; battle stars: Hjoring, Elbesan, Kabul, Kaifen, Ust Kyakhta; wounded 4 times; P'ple H't, 3 cl.; Silv. Star; Br'ze Star, 2 cl.; G'd Cond. Med.).

And the machines could have made an educated guess that, since Hagstrohm had gone that far in being average, he had probably been arrested once, had had sexual experience with five girls before marrying Wanda (only moderately satisfying), and had had two extramarital adventures since (one fleeting and foolish, the other rather long and disturbing), and that he would die at the age of 76.2 of a heart attack.

What the machines couldn't guess was that Edgar's second extramarital affair, the deep one, was with a widow named Marion Frascati, that it was still going on, and that Marion's deceased husband had been Lou Frascati, a second-coater first class, Edgar's best friend. To their own profound shock, Edgar and Marion had found themselves in each other's arms a scant month after good old Lou's death. And again, and again, and again - and they'd tried to bring it to an end, honest-to-God they had. But it was like a bright, fat cherry on the gray mush of their lives. And they thought, wistfully, weakly, that maybe it wouldn't really matter as long as no one was hurt -the kids; sweet, loyal Wanda. And that Lou wouldn't have wanted anything more, now that he had another variety of bliss, than that good old Edgar and good old Marion make the most of life while they had the use of their flesh.

But they hadn't believed it. And the kids noticed something screwy was going on, and Wanda'd cried a couple of times lately and refused to tell him why, and probably Lou, wherever he was. . . . Anyway, Edgar was going to go on seeing Marion, but he was going to tell Wanda, God bless her and God help her - tell her, and - Who was banging on the Hagstrohm door but the goddam Shah of Bratpuhr, for chrissakes.

"Come in, come in," said Edgar, and he added under his breath, "your majesty, your highness, emperor of the universe and all the ships at sea, you nosy son-of-a-bitch."

When Halyard had phoned him about the visit, Hagstrohm had made a point of not being impressed by the Shah's title, or by Halyard's rank. It was rare that he got the opportunity to show what he thought of rank - that a man was a man for all that. He was going to behave perfectly naturally, just as he would if the callers had been fellow Reeks and Wrecks. Wanda had taken a different view, and had started frantically to clean the place from top to bottom, and to make lemonade and send Edgar, Jr., out for little cookies, but big Edgar had put a stop to all that. He put the kids out, and that was the only cleaning up that was to be done.

The door opened, and in came the Shah, followed by Khashdrahr, Halyard, and Doctor Ned Dodge, the manager of Proteus Park.

"Aha!" said the Shah, gingerly touching the enameled steel wall of the living room. "Mmmmm."

Edgar held out his hand, and the parade brushed past it, heedless. "Well, kiss mine," he muttered.

"Eh?" said Doctor Dodge.

"You heard me."

"You're not in a saloon now, Hagstrohm," whispered Dodge. "Watch yourself; this is international relations."

"All right if I go to a saloon?"

"What's eating you, anyway?"

"The guy walks into my house and won't even shake my hand."

"It's not the custom in his country."

"Is it in yours?"

Dodge turned his back and grinned hospitably at the Shah. "Two bedrooms, living room with dining alcove, bath, and kitchen," he said. "This is the M-17 house. Radiant heating in the floor. The furniture was designed after an exhaustive national survey of furniture likes and dislikes. The house, the furniture, and the lot are sold as a package. Simplified planning and production all the way round."

" Lakki-ti, Takaru? " piped the Shah, looking at Edgar closely for the first time.

"What's he say?"

"He wants to know if you like it here," said Khashdrahr.

"Sure - I guess. It's all right. I suppose. Yeah."

"It's nice," said Wanda.

"Now, if you'll follow me into the kitchen," said Doctor Dodge, leaving Wanda and Edgar behind, "you'll see the radar range. Cooks by high frequency, and cooks the inside of whatever's being cooked as fast as the outside. Cooks anything in a matter of seconds, with perfect control. Make bread without a crust, if you want to."

"What is the matter with crust on bread?" asked Khashdrahr politely.

"And this is the ultrasonic dishwasher and clothes-washer," said Dodge. "High-frequency sound passing through the water strips dirt and grease off anything in a matter of seconds. Dip in, take out, bingo!"

"And then what does the woman do?" asked Khashdrahr.

"Then she puts the clothes or dishes in this drier, which dries them out in a matter of seconds, and - here's a nifty trick, I think - gives the clothes a spanking-clean outdoors odor, like they were dried in the sun, see, with this little ozone lamp in here."