Galápagos

by Kurt Vonnegut

  He stayed within the fence, and walked around the hotel again and again. On each of three laps he passed the open doorway of the laundry room. Right inside was a gray steel box fixed to the wall. He knew what it contained: the junctions which married the hotel's telephones to the outside world. A good citizen of a million years ago might have thought of such a box, "What the telephone company hath joined together, let no man put asunder."

  Yes, and such was the overt sentiment in the brain of Jesus Ortiz. He would never harm a box that important to so many people. But brains back then were so big that they could actually deceive their owners. His brain wanted him to disconnect all the telephones the first time he went past the laundry room, but it knew how opposed his soul was to bad citizenship. So, in order to keep him from becoming paralyzed, his brain kept reassuring him, in effect, "No, no--of course we would never do such a thing."

  On the fourth lap, it got him into the laundry room, but also gave him a cover story for what he was doing in there. Good citizen that he was, he was searching for the green pants suit of a hotel guest, Mary Hepburn, which had apparently disappeared into some other universe the night before.

  And then he opened the box and ripped apart the junctions. In a matter of seconds, a typical brain of a million years ago had turned the best citizen in Guayaquil into a ravening terrorist.

  17

  ON THE ISLAND OF MANHATTAN, a middle-aged American publicity man contemplated the collapse of his masterpiece, which was "the Nature Cruise of the Century." He had just moved into new offices within the hollow crown of the Chrysler Building, formerly the showroom of a harp company which found itself bankrupt--like the City of Ilium and Ecuador and the Philippines and Turkey, and on and on. His name was Bobby King.

  He was in the same time zone as Guayaquil, and a line drawn due south from the deep crease in his brow to just below the equator would have found a terminal in an even deeper crease in the brow of Andrew MacIntosh in Guayaquil. MacIntosh was trying to shout life into a dead telephone. *MacIntosh might as well have been holding a stuffed Galapagos marine iguana alongside his boxy head as he cried out ever more imperiously: "Hello! Hello!"

  Bobby King had a stuffed Galapagos marine iguana on his desk; had in fact amused more than one visitor by pretending that he had mistaken it for his telephone, holding it alongside his head and saying, "Hello! Hello!"

  He was in no joking mood now, though, surely. In his own way, he had done as much as Charles Darwin to make the Galapagos Islands famous--with a ten-month campaign of publicity and advertising which had persuaded millions of people all over the planet that the maiden voyage of the Bahia de Darwin would indeed be "the Nature Cruise of the Century." In the process, he had made celebrities of many of the islands' creatures, the flightless cormorants, the blue-footed boobies, the larcenous frigate birds, and on and on.

  His clients were the Ministry of Travel of Ecuador, Ecuatoriana Airlines, and the owners of the Hotel El Dorado and the Bahia de Darwin, the paternal uncles of *Siegfried and Captain Adolf von Kleist. Neither the hotel manager nor the Captain had to work for livings, incidentally. They were fabulously well to do through inheritance, but felt that they should keep busy all the same.

  It now appeared certain to King, although he had not been told so yet, that his work had been for nothing, that "the Nature Cruise of the Century" would not take place.

  As for the stuffed marine iguana on his desk: He had made that reptile the totemic animal for the cruise--had caused its image to be painted on either side of the Bahia de Darwin's bow, and to appear as a logo in every ad and at the top of every publicity release.

  In real life, the creature could be more than a meter long, and look as fearsome as a Chinese dragon. Actually, though, it was no more dangerous to life forms of any sort, with the exception of seaweed, than a liverwurst. Here is what its life is like in the present day, which is exactly what its life was like a million years ago:

  It has no enemies, so it sits in one place, staring into the middle distance at nothing, wanting nothing, worried about nothing, until it is hungry. It then waddles down to the ocean and swims slowly and not all that ably until it is a few meters from shore. Then it dives like a submarine, and stuffs itself with seaweed, which is at that time indigestible. The seaweed is going to have to be cooked before it is digestible.

  So the marine iguana pops to the surface, swims ashore, and sits on the lava in the sunshine again. It is using itself for a covered stewpot, getting hotter and hotter while the sunshine cooks the seaweed. It continues to stare into the middle distance at nothing, as before, but with this difference: It now spits up increasingly hot saltwater from time to time.

  During the million years I have spent in these islands, the Law of Natural Selection has found no way to improve, or, for that matter, to worsen this particular survival scheme.

  King knew that six persons had actually reached Guayaquil, and were in the Hotel El Dorado at that very moment, still expecting to take "the Nature Cruise of the Century." This was a minor shock to him. He had assumed that those who had made their own arrangements to get there would surely stay away, since the news from the area was so bad.

  He had the names of all six. One was entirely unknown to him, a Canadian named Willard Flemming. That was actually James Wait, of course. King could not imagine how this person had gotten onto the passenger list, which, with the exception of Mary Hepburn and a Japanese veterinarian and his wife, was supposed to be composed of newsmakers and trend-setters of the highest potency.

  It puzzled King that Mary Hepburn was down there, but not her husband, Roy. He hadn't heard that Roy was dead. And he knew something about the Hepburns, even though they were complete nobodies on a passenger list of celebrities, because they were the very first persons to sign up for "the Nature Cruise of the Century." That was at a time when King had reason to doubt that any really famous person could be induced to make the trip.

  When the Hepburns signed on, in fact, King had played with the idea of turning them into mini-celebrities somehow, with appearances on talk shows and newspaper interviews and so on. He would never meet them, but he did talk to Mary on the telephone, hoping against hope that there might be something interesting about the Hepburns, even though they held the most ordinary sorts of jobs in a drab industrial town with the highest unemployment rate in the country. One or the other might have a famous ancestor or relative, or Roy might have been a hero in some war, or they might have won a lottery, or they might have suffered a recent tragedy, or whatever.

  And parts of King's conversation with Mary back in January had gone like this:

  "Well--I am a distant relative of Daniel Boone," she said. "My maiden name was Boone, and I was born in Kentucky."

  "That's wonderful!" said King. "You're his great-great-great-granddaughter or what?"

  "I don't think it's quite that direct," she said. "It never meant much to me, so I never tried to get it straight."

  "But your maiden name was Boone."

  "Yes, but that's just a coincidence. My father's name was Boone, but he wasn't any relative of Daniel Boone. I'm related to Daniel Boone on my mother's side."

  "If your father's name was Boone, and he was a Kentuckian, then he had to be related to Daniel Boone some way, don't you think?" said King.

  "Not necessarily," she said, "because his father was a horse trainer from Hungary named Miklos Gombos, who changed his name to Michael Boone."

  On the subject of prizes or honors she or Roy might have won, Mary said that her husband certainly deserved plenty of them for all the good work he had done at GEFFCo, but that that company didn't believe in anything of that sort except for its very top executives.

  "No military medals--nothing like that," he said.

  "He was in the Navy," she said, "but he didn't fight."

  If King had called three months later, of course, and gotten Roy on the phone, he would have received an earful about Roy's tragic exploits during the bomb tests in the Pacific
.

  "You have children?" said King.

  "Not in the usual sense," said Mary. "But I consider every student a child of mine, and Roy is active in scouting, and he considers every member of his troop to be a son of his."

  "That's a wonderful attitude," said King, "and it has been awfully nice to talk to you, and I hope you and your husband enjoy the trip."

  "I'm sure we will," she said, "but I still have to get up enough nerve to tell the principal that I want three weeks off right in the middle of a semester."

  "You'll have so many wonderful things to tell your students when you get back," said King, "that he'll be glad to let you go." King, incidentally, had never seen the Galapagos Islands firsthand, and never would. Like Mary Hepburn, he had certainly seen plenty of pictures of them.

  "Oh--" said Mary as he was about to hang up, "you were asking about honors and prizes and medals and all that ..."

  "Yes?" said King.

  "I'm just about to get a kind of prize, or what feels like a prize to me. I'm not supposed to know about it, so I probably shouldn't tell you about it."

  "My lips are sealed," said King.

  "I just happened to find out about it by accident," said Mary. "But this year's senior class is going to dedicate its yearbook to me. They give me a nickname in the dedication, which I just happened to see in a printshop where I was picking up some birth announcements for a friend. She had twins--a boy and a girl."

  "Aha!" said King.

  "Do you know the nickname those nice young people are giving me?" said Mary.

  "No," said King.

  "'Mother Nature Personified,'" said Mary.

  And there are no tombs in the Galapagos Islands. The ocean gets all the bodies to use as it will. But if there were a tombstone for Mary Hepburn, no other inscription would do but this one: "Mother Nature Personified." In what way was she so like Mother Nature? In the face of utter hopelessness on Santa Rosalia, she still wanted human babies to be born there. Nothing could keep her from doing all she could to keep life going on and on and on.

  18

  WHEN BOBBY KING heard that Mary Hepburn was one of the six unfortunate enough to have reached Guayaquil, he thought about her for the first time in months. He thought that perhaps Roy was with her, since they had sounded like such an inseparable couple, and that his name had been omitted accidentally by the Hotel El Dorado's manager, whose teletyped communications were becoming more hectic by the hour.

  King knew about me, by the way, although not by name.

  He knew a workman had been killed during the building of the ship.

  But he no more wanted to publicize this piece of information, which might imply to the superstitious that the Bahia de Darwin had a ghost, than the von Kleist family wished it known that one of its members was hospitalized with Huntington's chorea, and that two more of its members had a fifty-fifty chance of being carriers of that disease.

  *

  Did the Captain ever tell Mary Hepburn during their years together on Santa Rosalia that he might be a carrier of Huntington's chorea? He revealed that terrible secret only after they had been marooned ten years, and he realized that she had been playing fast and loose with his sperm.

  Of the six guests at the El Dorado, King was acquainted with only two: *Andrew MacIntosh and his blind daughter Selena--and, of course, Kazakh, Selena's dog. Anybody who knew the MacIntoshes also knew the dog, although Kazakh, thanks to surgery and training, had virtually no personality. The MacIntoshes were frequenters of several restaurants which were King's clients, and *MacIntosh, but not the dog and the daughter, had been on talk shows with some of his clients. King had watched the shows with Selena and the dog on a backstage monitor. It was his impression that the daughter had little more personality than the dog when she wasn't right next to her father. And her father was all she could talk about.

  *Andrew MacIntosh certainly enjoyed his exposure on talk shows. He was a welcome guest on them because he was so outrageous. He held forth about what fun life was if you had unlimited money to spend. He pitied and scorned people who weren't rich, and so on.

  Thanks to the rigors of Santa Rosalia, Selena would develop a personality very distinct from her father's before she went down the blue tunnel into the Afterlife. She would also be fluent in Japanese. In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way.

  Look at mine.

  After Roy and Mary Hepburn, the MacIntoshes and the Hiroguchis were the next people to join the passenger list for "the Nature Cruise of the Century." That was in February. The Hiroguchis were to be MacIntosh's guests, and they would travel under false names, so that Zenji Hiroguchi's employers would not discover that he was negotiating a business deal with *MacIntosh.

  As far as King and *Siegfried von Kleist and anybody else connected with the cruise knew, the Hiroguchis were the Kenzaburos, and *Zenji was a veterinarian.

  That meant that fully half of the guests at the El Dorado weren't who they were supposed to be. As a fillip to all this big-brained deceiving going on, Mary Hepburn's war-surplus combat fatigues still bore the embroidered last name of their previous owner over the left breast pocket, which was Kaplan. And when she and James Wait finally met in the cocktail lounge, he would tell her his false name and she would tell him her true name, but he would keep calling her "Mrs. Kaplan" anyway, and extol the Jewish people and so on.

  And they would later be married by the Captain on the sundeck of the Bahia de Darwin, and as far as she knew, she had become the wife of Willard Flemming, and as far as he knew, he had become the husband of Mary Kaplan.

  This sort of confusion would be impossible in the present day, since nobody has a name anymore--or a profession, or a life story to tell. All that anybody has in the way of a reputation anymore is an odor which, from birth to death, cannot be modified. People are who they are, and that is that. The Law of Natural Selection has made human beings absolutely honest in that regard. Everybody is exactly what he or she seems to be.

  When *Andrew MacIntosh signed up for three staterooms on the Bahia de Darwin's maiden voyage, Bobby King had reason to be mystified. *MacIntosh had a private yacht, the Omoo, which was nearly as large as the cruise ship, and so could have gone to the Galapagos Islands on his own--without submitting to the close contacts with strangers and the disciplines which would be imposed by "the Nature Cruise of the Century." The cruise passengers, for example, would not be able to go ashore whenever they pleased, and to behave there however they pleased. They were to be escorted and supervised at all times by guides, all of them trained by scientists at the Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island, and all of them holding graduate degrees in one of the natural sciences.

  So when King, making his rounds of restaurants and clubs one night, saw *MacIntosh and his daughter and her dog and two other people having a late supper in a celebrity hangout called Elaine's, he stopped by their table to say how pleased he was that they were taking the cruise. He wanted very much to hear why they were taking it--so that he might use their reasons as inducements for other newsmakers to come along.

  Only after greeting the MacIntoshes did King realize who the other two people at the table were. He knew them both to speak to, and he did so now. The woman was the most admired female on the planet, Mrs. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, and her escort that evening was the great dancer Rudolf Nureyev.

  Nureyev, incidentally, was a former citizen of the Soviet Union, who had been granted political asylum in Great Britain. And I was still alive then, and I was a United States citizen who had been granted political asylum in Sweden.

  Yes, and we both liked to dance.

  At the risk of reminding *MacIntosh that he owned an oceangoing yacht, King asked him what he had found so attractive about the Bahia de Darwin. *MacIntosh, who was highly intelligent and well read, thereupon delivered a speech on the damage selfish and ignorant persons had done to the Galapagos Islands while going ashore un-supervised. This material was all lifted from an article i
n the National Geographic magazine, which he read from cover to cover every month. The magazine's point was that Ecuador would require a navy the size of the combined fleets of the world to keep persons from going ashore on the islands and doing as they pleased, so that the fragile habitats could be preserved only if individuals were educated to exercise self-restraint. "No good citizen of the planet," said the article, "should ever go ashore unless escorted by a well-trained guide."

  When Mary Hepburn and the Captain and Hisako Hiroguchi and Selena MacIntosh and the rest of them were marooned on Santa Rosalia, they would not have a trained guide along. And, for their first few years there, they would raise perfect hell with the fragile habitat.

  Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking--that they weren't merely visitors.

  There in Elaine's Restaurant, *MacIntosh angered his spellbound audience with tales of boots crushing the camouflaged nests of iguanas, of greedy fingers stealing the eggs of boobies, and on and on. His most moving atrocity story by far, though, again lifted from the National Geographic, was of persons cradling fur seal pups in their arms as though they were human infants--for the sake of photographs. When the pup was returned to its mother, he said bitterly, she would no longer nurse it because its smell had been changed.

  "So what happens to that darling pup, which has just had the great honor of being cuddled by a bighearted nature lover?" asked *MacIntosh. "It starves to death--all for the sake of a photograph."

  So his answer to Bobby King's question was that he was setting a good example he hoped others would follow by taking "the Nature Cruise of the Century."

  It is a joke to me that this man should have presented himself as an ardent conservationist, since so many of the companies he served as a director or in which he was a major stockholder were notorious damagers of the water or the soil or the atmosphere. But it wasn't a joke to *MacIntosh, who had come into this world incapable of caring much about anything. So, in order to hide this deficiency, he had become a great actor, pretending even to himself that he cared passionately about all sorts of things.