Bagombo Snuff Box

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “You say those names checked? Over.”

  “I’m telling you to quit it, Rice. Right now. Forget the voices, do you hear? Give me a weather report. Over.”

  “Clear patches over Zones Eleven, Fifteen, and Sixteen. Looks like a solid overcast in One, Two, and Three. All clear in the rest. Over.”

  “That’s more like it, Able Baker Fox,” said the General. “We’ll forget about the voices, eh? Over.”

  “There’s an old woman calling out something in a German accent. Is Dr. Groszinger there? I think she’s calling his name. She’s asking him not to get too wound up in his work—not to—”

  Groszinger leaned over the radio operator’s shoulder and snapped off the switch on the receiver. “Of all the cheap, sickening stunts,” he said.

  “Let’s hear what he has to say,” said the General. “Thought you were a scientist.”

  Groszinger glared at him defiantly, snapped on the receiver, and stood back, his hands on his hips.

  “—saying something in German,” continued the voice of Major Rice. “Can’t understand it. Maybe you can. I’ll give it to you the way it sounds: ‘Alles geben die Götter, die unendlichen, ihren Lieblingen, ganz. Alle—’”

  Groszinger turned down the volume. “‘Alle Freuden, die unendlichen, alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, ganz,’” he said faintly. “That’s how it ends.” He sat down on the cot. “It’s my mother’s favorite quotation—something from Goethe.”

  “I can threaten him again,” said the General.

  “What for?” Groszinger shrugged and smiled. “Outer space is full of voices.” He laughed nervously. “There’s something to pep up a physics textbook.”

  “An omen, sir—it’s an omen,” blurted the radio operator.

  “What the hell do you mean, an omen?” said the General. “So outer space is filled with ghosts. That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Nothing would, then,” said Groszinger.

  “That’s exactly right. I’d be a hell of a general if anything would. For all I know, the moon is made of green cheese. So what. All I want is a man out there to tell me that I’m hitting what I’m shooting at. I don’t give a damn what’s going on in outer space.”

  “Don’t you see, sir?” said the radio operator. “Don’t you see? It’s an omen. When people find out about all the spirits out there they’ll forget about war. They won’t want to think about anything but the spirits.”

  “Relax, Sergeant,” said the General. “Nobody’s going to find out about them, understand?”

  “You can’t suppress a discovery like this,” said Groszinger.

  “You’re nuts if you think I can’t,” said General Dane. “How’re you going to tell anybody about this business without telling them we’ve got a rocket ship out there?”

  “They’ve got a right to know,” said the radio operator.

  “If the world finds out we have that ship out there, that’s the start of World War Three,” said the General. “Now tell me you want that. The enemy won’t have any choice but to try and blow the hell out of us before we can put Major Rice to any use. And there’d be nothing for us to do but try and blow the hell out of them first. Is that what you want?”

  “No, sir,” said the radio operator. “I guess not, sir.”

  “Well, we can experiment, anyway,” said Groszinger. “We can find out as much as possible about what the spirits are like. We can send Rice into a wider orbit to find out how far out he can hear the voices, and whether—”

  “Not on Air Force funds, you can’t,” said General Dane. “That isn’t what Rice is out there for. We can’t afford to piddle around. We need him right there.”

  “All right, all right,” said Groszinger. “Then let’s hear what he has to say.”

  “Tune him in, Sergeant,” said the General.

  “Yes, sir.” The radio operator fiddled with the dials. “He doesn’t seem to be transmitting now, sir.” The shushing noise of a transmitter cut into the hum of the loudspeaker. “I guess he’s coming in again. Able Baker Fox, this is Dog Easy Charley—”

  “King Two X-ray William Love, this is William Five Zebra Zebra King in Dallas,” said the loudspeaker. The voice had a soft drawl and was pitched higher than Major Rice’s.

  A bass voice answered: “This is King Two X-ray William Love in Albany. Come in W5ZZK, I hear you well. How do you hear me? Over.”

  “You’re clear as a bell, K2XWL—twenty-five thousand megacycles on the button. I’m trying to cut down on my drift with a—”

  The voice of Major Rice interrupted. “I can’t hear you clearly, Dog Easy Charley. The voices are a steady roar now. I can catch bits of what they’re saying. Grantland Whitman, the Hollywood actor, is yelling that his will was tampered with by his nephew Carl. He says—”

  “Say again, K2XWL,” said the drawling voice. “I must have misunderstood you. Over.”

  “I didn’t say anything, W5ZZK. What was that about Grantland Whitman? Over.”

  “The crowd’s quieting down,” said Major Rice. “Now there’s just one voice—a young woman, I think. It’s so soft I can’t make out what she’s saying.”

  “What’s going on, K2XWL? Can you hear me, K2XWL?”

  “She’s calling my name. Do you hear it? She’s calling my name,” said Major Rice.

  “Jam the frequency, dammit!” cried the General. “Yell, whistle—do something!”

  Early-morning traffic past the university came to a honking, bad-tempered stop, as Groszinger absently crossed the street against the light, on his way back to his office and the radio room. He looked up in surprise, mumbled an apology, and hurried to the curb. He had had a solitary breakfast in an all-night diner a block and a half from the laboratory building, and then he’d taken a long walk. He had hoped that getting away for a couple of hours would clear his head—but the feeling of confusion and helplessness was still with him. Did the world have a right to know, or didn’t it?

  There had been no more messages from Major Rice. At the General’s orders, the frequency had been jammed. Now the unexpected eavesdroppers could hear nothing but a steady whine at 25,000 megacycles. General Dane had reported the dilemma to Washington shortly after midnight. Perhaps orders as to what to do with Major Rice had come through by now.

  Groszinger paused in a patch of sunlight on the laboratory building’s steps, and read again the front-page news story, which ran fancifully for a column, beneath the headline “Mystery Radio Message Reveals Possible Will Fraud.” The story told of two radio amateurs, experimenting illegally on the supposedly unused ultra-high-frequency band, who had been amazed to hear a man chattering about voices and a will. The amateurs had broken the law, operating on an unassigned frequency, but they hadn’t kept their mouths shut about their discovery. Now hams all over the world would be building sets so they could listen in, too.

  “Morning, sir. Nice morning, isn’t it?” said a guard coming off duty. He was a cheerful Irishman.

  “Fine morning, all right,” agreed Groszinger. “Clouding up a little in the west, maybe.” He wondered what the guard would say if he told him what he knew. He would laugh, probably.

  Groszinger’s secretary was dusting off his desk when he walked in. “You could use some sleep, couldn’t you?” she said. “Honestly, why you men don’t take better care of yourselves I just don’t know. If you had a wife, she’d make you—”

  “Never felt better in my life,” said Groszinger. “Any word from General Dane?”

  “He was looking for you about ten minutes ago. He’s back in the radio room now. He’s been on the phone with Washington for half an hour.”

  She had only the vaguest notion of what the project was about. Again, Groszinger felt the urge to tell about Major Rice and the voices, to see what effect the news would have on someone else. Perhaps his secretary would react as he himself had reacted, with a shrug. Maybe that was the spirit of this era of the atom bomb, H-bomb, God-knows-what-next bomb—to be amazed at nothing. Science ha
d given humanity forces enough to destroy the earth, and politics had given humanity a fair assurance that the forces would be used. There could be no cause for awe to top that one. But proof of a spirit world might at least equal it. Maybe that was the shock the world needed, maybe word from the spirits could change the suicidal course of history.

  General Dane looked up wearily as Groszinger walked into the radio room. “They’re bringing him down,” he said. “There’s nothing else we can do. He’s no damn good to us now.” The loudspeaker, turned low, sang the monotonous hum of the jamming signal. The radio operator slept before the set, his head resting on his folded arms.

  “Did you try to get through to him again?”

  “Twice. He’s clear off his head now. Tried to tell him to change his frequency, to code his messages, but he just went on jabbering like he couldn’t hear me—talking about that woman’s voice.”

  “Who’s the woman? Did he say?”

  The General looked at him oddly. “Says it’s his wife, Margaret. Guess that’s enough to throw anybody, wouldn’t you say? Pretty bright, weren’t we, sending up a guy with no family ties.” He arose and stretched. “I’m going out for a minute. Just make sure you keep your hands off that set.” He slammed the door behind him.

  The radio operator stirred. “They’re bringing him down,” he said.

  “I know,” said Groszinger.

  “That’ll kill him, won’t it?”

  “He has controls for gliding her in, once he hits the atmosphere.”

  “If he wants to.”

  “That’s right—if he wants to. They’ll get him out of his orbit and back to the atmosphere under rocket power. After that, it’ll be up to him to take over and make the landing.”

  They fell silent. The only sound in the room was the muted jamming signal in the loudspeaker.

  “He don’t want to live, you know that?” said the radio operator suddenly. “Would you want to?”

  “Guess that’s something you don’t know until you come up against it,” said Groszinger. He was trying to imagine the world of the future—a world in constant touch with the spirits, the living inseparable from the dead. It was bound to come. Other men, probing into space, were certain to find out. Would it make life heaven or hell? Every bum and genius, criminal and hero, average man and madman, now and forever part of humanity—advising, squabbling, conniving, placating …

  The radio operator looked furtively toward the door. “Want to hear him again?”

  Groszinger shook his head. “Everybody’s listening to that frequency now. We’d all be in a nice mess if you stopped jamming.” He didn’t want to hear more. He was baffled, miserable. Would Death unmasked drive men to suicide, or bring new hope? he was asking himself. Would the living desert their leaders and turn to the dead for guidance? To Caesar … Charlemagne … Peter the Great … Napoleon … Bismarck … Lincoln … Roosevelt? To Jesus Christ? Were the dead wiser than—

  Before Groszinger could stop him, the sergeant switched off the oscillator that was jamming the frequency.

  Major Rice’s voice came through instantly, high and giddy. “… thousands of them, thousands of them, all around me, standing on nothing, shimmering like northern lights—beautiful, curving off in space, all around the earth like a glowing fog. I can see them, do you hear? I can see them now. I can see Margaret. She’s waving and smiling, misty, heavenly, beautiful. If only you could see it, if—”

  The radio operator flicked on the jamming signal. There was a footfall in the hallway.

  General Dane stalked into the radio room, studying his watch. “In five minutes they’ll start him down,” he said. He plunged his hands deep into his pockets and slouched dejectedly. “We failed this time. Next time, by God, we’ll make it. The next man who goes up will know what he’s up against—he’ll be ready to take it.”

  He put his hand on Groszinger’s shoulder. “The most important job you’ll ever have to do, my friend, is to keep your mouth shut about those spirits out there, do you understand? We don’t want the enemy to know we’ve had a ship out there, and we don’t want them to know what they’ll come across if they try it. The security of this country depends on that being our secret. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Groszinger, grateful to have no choice but to be quiet. He didn’t want to be the one to tell the world. He wished he had had nothing to do with sending Rice out into space. What discovery of the dead would do to humanity he didn’t know, but the impact would be terrific. Now, like the rest, he would have to wait for the next wild twist of history.

  The General looked at his watch again. “They’re bringing him down,” he said.

  At 1:39 p.m., on Friday, July 28th, the British liner Capricorn, two hundred eighty miles out of New York City, bound for Liverpool, radioed that an unidentified object had crashed into the sea, sending up a towering geyser on the horizon to starboard of the ship. Several passengers were said to have seen something glinting as the thing fell from the sky. Upon reaching the scene of the crash, the Capricorn reported finding dead and stunned fish on the surface, and turbulent water, but no wreckage.

  Newspapers suggested that the Capricorn had seen the crash of an experimental rocket fired out to sea in a test of range. The Secretary of Defense promptly denied that any such tests were being conducted over the Atlantic.

  In Boston, Dr. Bernard Groszinger, young rocket consultant for the Air Force, told newsmen that what the Capricorn had observed might well have been a meteor.

  “That seems quite likely,” he said. “If it was a meteor, the fact that it reached the earth’s surface should, I think, be one of the year’s most important science news stories. Usually meteors burn to nothing before they’re even through the stratosphere.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” interrupted a reporter. “Is there anything out beyond the stratosphere—I mean, is there any name for it?”

  “Well, actually the term ‘stratosphere’ is kind of arbitrary. It’s the outer shell of the atmosphere. You can’t say definitely where it stops. Beyond it is just, well—dead space.”

  “Dead space—that’s the right name for it, eh?” said the reporter.

  “If you want something fancier, maybe we could put it into Greek,” said Groszinger playfully. “Thanatos, that’s Greek for ‘death,’ I think. Maybe instead of ‘dead space’ you’d prefer Thanasphere.’ Has a nice scientific ring to it, don’t you think?”

  The newsmen laughed politely.

  “Dr. Groszinger, when’s the first rocket ship going to make it into space?” asked another reporter.

  “You people read too many comic books,” said Groszinger. “Come back in twenty years, and maybe I’ll have a story for you.”

  Mnemonics

  Alfred Moorhead dropped the report into his Out basket, and smiled to think that he had been able to check something for facts without referring to records and notes. Six weeks before, he couldn’t have done it. Now, since he had attended the company’s two-day Memory Clinic, names, facts, and numbers clung to his memory like burdocks to an Airedale. The clinic had, in fact, indirectly cleared up just about every major problem in his uncomplicated life, save one—his inability to break the ice with his secretary, Ellen, whom he had silently adored for two years….

  “Mnemonics is the art of improving the memory,” the clinic’s instructor had begun. “It makes use of two elementary psychological facts: You remember things that interest you longer than things that don’t, and pictures stick in your mind better than isolated facts do. I’ll show you what I mean. We’ll use Mr. Moorhead for our guinea pig.”

  Alfred had shifted uncomfortably as the man read off a nonsensical list and told him to memorize it: “Smoke, oak tree, sedan, bottle, oriole.” The instructor had talked about something else, then pointed to Alfred. “Mr. Moorhead, the list.”

  “Smoke, oriole, uh—” Alfred had shrugged.

  “Don’t be discouraged. You’re perfectly normal,” the instructor had said. �
��But let’s see if we can’t help you do a little better. Let’s build an image, something pleasant, something we’d like to remember. Smoke, oak tree, sedan—I see a man relaxing under a leafy oak tree. He is smoking a pipe, and in the background is his car, a yellow sedan. See it, Mr. Moorhead?”

  “Uh-huh.” Alfred had seen it.

  “Good. Now for ‘bottle’ and ‘oriole.’ By the man’s side is a vacuum bottle of iced coffee, and an oriole is singing on a branch overhead. There, we can remember that happy picture without any trouble, eh?” Alfred had nodded uncertainly. The instructor had gone on to other matters, then challenged him again.

  “Smoke, sedan, bottle, uh—” Alfred had avoided the instructor’s eyes.

  When the snickering of the class had subsided, the instructor had said, “I suppose you think Mr. Moorhead has proved that mnemonics is bunk. Not at all. He has helped me to make another important point. The images used to help memory vary widely from person to person. Mr. Moorhead’s personality is clearly different from mine. I shouldn’t have forced my images on him. I’ll repeat the list, Mr. Moorhead, and this time I want you to build a picture of your own.”

  At the end of the class, the instructor had called on Alfred again. Alfred had rattled the list off as though it were the alphabet.

  The technique was so good, Alfred had reflected, that he would be able to recall the meaningless list for the rest of his life. He could still see himself and Rita Hayworth sharing a cigarette beneath a giant oak. He filled her glass from a bottle of excellent wine, and as she drank, an oriole brushed her cheek with its wing. Then Alfred kissed her. As for “sedan,” he had lent it to Aly Khan.

  Rewards for his new faculty had been splendid and immediate. The promotion had unquestionably come from his filing-cabinet command of business details. His boss, Ralph L. Thriller, had said, “Moorhead, I didn’t know it was possible for a man to change as much as you have in a few weeks. Wonderful!”