The Main Thing About Dr. Hoenikker 25

So much, for now, for the wampeter of my karass .

After my unpleasant interview with Dr. Breed in the Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company, I was put into the hands of Miss Faust. Her orders were to show me to the door. I prevailed upon her, however, to show me the laboratory of the late Dr Hoenikker first.

En route, I asked her how well she had known Dr. Hoenikker. She gave me a frank and interesting reply, and a piquant smile to go with it.

“I don’t think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they’re talking about secrets they’ve been told or haven’t been told. They’re talking about intimate things, family things, love things,” that nice old lady said to me. “Dr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren’t the main things with him.”

“What were the main things?” I asked her.

“Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth.”

“You don’t seem to agree.”

“I don’t know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.”

Miss Faust was ripe for Bokononism.

What God Is 26

“Did you ever talk to Dr. Hoenikker?” I asked Miss Faust.

“Oh, certainly. I talked to him a lot.”

“Do any conversations stick in your mind?”

“There was one where he bet I couldn’t tell him anything that was absolutely true. So I said to him, ‘God is love.’ ”

“And what did he say?”

“He said, ‘What is God? What is love?’ ”

“Um.”

“But God really is love, you know,” said Miss Faust, “no matter what Dr. Hoenikker said.”

Men from Mars 27

The room that had been the laboratory of Dr. Felix Hoenikker was on the sixth floor, the top floor of the building.

A purple cord had been stretched across the doorway, and a brass plate on the wall explained why the room was sacred:

IN THIS ROOM, DR. FELIX HOENIKKER, NOBEL LAUREATE IN PHYSICS,

SPENT THE LAST TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OF HIS LIFE.

“WHERE HE WAS, THERE WAS THE FRONTIER OF KNOWLEDGE.”

THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS ONE MAN IN THE

HISTORY OF MANKIND IS INCALCULABLE.

Miss Faust offered to unshackle the purple cord for me so that I might go inside and traffic more intimately with whatever ghosts there were.

I accepted.

“It’s just as he left it,” she said, “except that there were rubber bands all over one counter.”

“Rubber bands?”

“Don’t ask me what for. Don’t ask me what any of all this is for.”

The old man had left the laboratory a mess. What engaged my attention at once was the quantity of cheap toys lying around. There was a paper kite with a broken spine. There was a toy gyroscope, wound with string, ready to whirr and balance itself. There was a top. There was a bubble pipe. There was a fish bowl with a castle and two turtles in it.

“He loved ten-cent stores,” said Miss Faust.

“I can see he did.”

“Some of his most famous experiments were performed with equipment that cost less than a dollar.”

“A penny saved is a penny earned.”

There were numerous pieces of conventional laboratory equipment, too, of course, but they seemed drab accessories to the cheap, gay toys.

Dr. Hoenikker’s desk was piled with correspondence.

“I don’t think he ever answered a letter,” mused Miss Faust. “People had to get him on the telephone or come to see him if they wanted an answer.”

There was a framed photograph on his desk. Its back was toward me and I ventured a guess as to whose picture it was. “His wife?”

“No.”

“One of his children?”

“No.”

“Himself?”

“No.”

So I took a look. I found that the picture was of an humble little war memorial in front of a small-town courthouse. Part of the memorial was a sign that gave the names of those villagers who had died in various wars, and I thought that the sign must be the reason for the photograph. I could read the names, and I half expected to find the name Hoenikker among them. It wasn’t there.

“That was one of his hobbies,” said Miss Faust.

“What was?”

“Photographing how cannonballs are stacked on different courthouse lawns. Apparently how they’ve got them stacked in that picture is very unusual.”

“I see.”

“He was an unusual man.”

“I agree.”

“Maybe in a million years everybody will be as smart as he was and see things the way he did. But, compared with the average person of today, he was as different as a man from Mars.”

“Maybe he really was a Martian,” I suggested.

“That would certainly go a long way toward explaining his three strange kids.”

Mayonnaise 28

While Miss Faust and I waited for an elevator to take us to the first floor, Miss Faust said she hoped the elevator that came would not be number five. Before I could ask her why this was a reasonable wish, number five arrived.

Its operator was a small ancient Negro whose name was Lyman Enders Knowles. Knowles was insane, I’m almost sure — offensively so, in that he grabbed his own behind and cried, “Yes, yes!” whenever he felt that he’d made a point.

“Hello, fellow anthropoids and lily pads and paddlewheels,” he said to Miss Faust and me. “Yes, yes!”

“First floor, please,” said Miss Faust coldly.

All Knowles had to do to close the door and get us to the first floor was to press a button, but he wasn’t going to do that yet. He wasn’t going to do it, maybe, for years.

“Man told me,” he said, “that these here elevators was Mayan architecture. I never knew that till today. And I says to him, ‘What’s that make me — mayonnaise?’ Yes, yes! And while he was thinking that over, I hit him with a question that straightened him up and made him think twice as hard! Yes, yes!”

“Could we please go down, Mr. Knowles?” begged Miss Faust.

“I said to him,” said Knowles, “ ‘This here’s a re -search laboratory. Re -search means look again , don’t it? Means they’re looking for something they found once and it got away somehow, and now they got to re -search for it? How come they got to build a building like this, with mayonnaise elevators and all, and fill it with all these crazy people? What is it they’re trying to find again? Who lost what?’ Yes, yes!”

“That’s very interesting,” sighed Miss Faust. “Now, could we go down?”

“Only way we can go is down,” barked Knowles. “This here’s the top. You ask me to go up and wouldn’t be a thing I could do for you. Yes, yes!”

“So let’s go down,” said Miss Faust.

“Very soon now. This gentleman here been paying his respects to Dr. Hoenikker?”

“Yes,” I said. “Did you know him?”

“Intimately ,” he said. “You know what I said when he died?”

“No.”

“I said, ‘Dr. Hoenikker — he ain’t dead.’ ”

“Oh?”

“Just entered a new dimension. Yes, yes!” He punched a button, and down we went.

“Did you know the Hoenikker children?” I asked him.

“Babies full of rabies,” he said. “Yes, yes!”

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 544