He happily popped one of the green pills into a gallon of water and lectured as it bubbled and fumed and turned the water into 100-octane gasoline.
The Eternal Match was interesting, the Two-Cent Sirloin was delicious, and the Vanishing Cream vanished a half-inch roll of fat from Bunny’s belly while he watched. “But Lord bless you, sir,” tittered the curator, “what would be the point of giving people something that worked? They’d just go ahead and use it, and then when they had no more need they’d stop using it, eh?
“And this one, sir, it isn’t really what you’d call suppressed. We’re just working on it to build it up some; perhaps in five years well have it looking like it costs five thousand dollars, and then well be able to sell it” “It” was three-dimensional, full-color television; the heart of the system was a flashlight battery, a small C-clamp and a pinch of baking soda.
Bunny visited also the vast pest-breeding establishment in the Rockies, where flies, roaches, mice, gnats, boll-weevils, the elm-rot fungus and the tobacco-mosaic virus were patiently raised to maximum virulence and dispatched by couriers to their proper places all over the world. The taciturn Connecticut Yankee who ran the sprawling plant snapped at him, “Danged better mousetraps almost wiped out the mousetrap industry. Think people’d have better sense. DDT almost killed off pesticide—whole danged business, employing two hun-
dred thousand. They think of that? Naw! So we had ter breed them DDT-resistant strains and seed ’em everywhere.”
Bunny began to acquire the instinct to which Witz had referred. When he encountered an Oil Texan he could tell that the man’s nervous hilarity and brag stemmed from his poverty, and he pitied him. When he encountered one day at Gonfalonieri’s place in Baja California a certain quiet fellow named Briggs, he knew without being told that Briggs was one of Us. It was no surprise to learn later that Briggs held all the basic patents on water.
Briggs it was, indeed, who took him aside for an important talk. The quiet man offered him a thousand-dollar cigar (for the growing of whose tobacco Briggs had caused an artificial island to be built in the deep Central Pacific at the exactly correct point of temperature, wind and humidity) and said to him, “It’s time you took a wife.”
Bunny, who could not these days leaf through Vogue or the New Yorker without a tender, reminiscent smile for each of the lovely models shown in the advertisements, disagreed. “Can’t see why, Briggs,” he muttered. “Having jolly good time. Never used to have much luck with girls—all different now. Mean to say, with—” he gave the whimsical little shrug—”what little I have, doing awfully well and it doesn’t cost me anything. Queer. When I had ten-twenty thou’, when I was poor, had to buy corsages, dinners. Afl different now. They buy me things. Platinum watches. Have limply dozens. But the rules—have to take ’em. Queer.”
“We’ve all been through it,” Briggs said. “When you get bored let me know.”
“Oh, promise,” Bunny said. “Absolutely promise.”
He spent the next six months in Hollywood where golden girls vied in plying him with coq au vin, solid indium meat grinders, and similar trifles. One charming lady who had come out to the sound stages in 1934 presented him with a genuine hand-embroidered antique scabbard said to date back to the Crusades. It was a pleasant gift and it varied the …
… the monotony?
He sat up abruptly on the mutation-mink coverlet, causing the shapely blond head which remained on the silken pillow to emit a small sleepy snort
“Monotony,” Bunny said in a tragic whisper. “Definitely.” He went home to Ohara, though not neglecting to pick up as
he left his little present for the evening, a golden nutcracker set with diamonds and lined with unborn leopard pelt.
Ohara dipped into his store of Oriental wisdom in an effort to console him. He suggested, “Missah Bunny think if must be monotonized, what beautifurr way to get monoto-nizedr
It did not help.
Ohara suggested, “You try make funny, fo’get monotony. Fo’ exampurr^ spend coupre mimon dorras make big reso’t town, cawr same Schmir-ton, Ohio. Think how mad Missah Nickey be, he put up hoterr, have to cawr same Hoterr Hk-ton Schmir-ton! Oh, raffs!”