Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go
out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people.
But they found his halitosis unforgivable. And then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed
to the human race.
(pages 167-168)
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The Big Board
. . . It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They
were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.
These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing stock market quotations
and comodity prices along one wall of their habitat, and a news ticker, and a telephone that
was supposedly connected to a brokerage on Earth. The creatures on Zircon-212 told their captives
that they had invested a million dollars for them back on Earth, and that it was up to the captives
to manage it so that they would be fabulously wealthy when they were returned to Earth.
The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of course. They were simply stimulants
to make the Earthlings perform vividly for the crowds at the zoo--to make them jump up and down
and cheer, or gloat, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared shitless or to feel as contented
as babies in their mothers' arms.
The Earthlings did very well on paper. That was part of the rigging, of course. And religion
got mixed up in it, too. The news ticker reminded them that the President of the United States
had declared National Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray. The Earthlings had had a bad
week on the market before that. They had lost a small fortune in olive oil futures. So they gave
praying a whirl.
It worked. Olive oil went up.
(pages 201-202)
Back to index.
Untitled 2 - (Jesus And the Time Machine)
Another Kilgore Trout book there in the window was about a man who built a time machine
so he could go back and see Jesus. It worked, and he saw Jesus when Jesus was only twelve years
old. Jesus was learning the carpentry trade from his father.
Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on papyrus of a device they
wanted built by sunrise the next morning. It was a cross to be used in the execution of a
rabble-rouser.
Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work. And the rabble-rouser
was executed on it.
So it goes.
...
The time-traveller in the book went back to Bible times to find out one thing in particular:
Whether or not Jesus had really died on the cross, or whether he had been taken down while still
alive, whether he had really gone on living. The hero had a stethoscope along.
Billy skipped to the end of the book, where the hero mingled with the people who were taking
Jesus down from the cross. The time-traveller was the first one up the ladder, dressed in clothes of
the period, and he leaned close to Jesus so people couldn't see him use the stethoscope, and he
listened.
There wasn't a sound inside the emaciated chest cavity. The Son of God was dead as a doornail.
So it goes.
(pages 202-203)
Back to index.
Last modified: May 29, 1997
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