Transcriber's note.
This etext was produced from Worlds of If, January 1962.Extensive research did not uncover anyevidence that the copyright on this publication was renewed.
Got a problem? Just pick up the phone. It solved them all—and all thesame way!
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by KURT VONNEGUT, JR.
Everything was perfectly swell.
There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, nopoverty, no wars.
All diseases were conquered. So was old age.
Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.
The population of the United States was stabilized at forty-millionsouls.
One bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man named EdwardK. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only manwaiting. Not many people were born a day any more.
Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose averageage was one hundred and twenty-nine.
X-rays had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. Thechildren would be his first.
Young Wehling was hunched in his chair, his head in his hand. He was sorumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible. Hiscamouflage was perfect, since the waiting room had a disorderly anddemoralized air, too. Chairs and ashtrays had been moved away from thewalls. The floor was paved with spattered dropcloths.
The room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as a memorialto a man who had volunteered to die.
A sardonic old man, about two hundred years old, sat on a stepladder,painting a mural he did not like. Back in the days when people agedvisibly, his age would have been guessed at thirty-five or so. Aging hadtouched him that much before the cure for aging was found.
The mural he was working on depicted a very neat garden. Men and womenin white, doctors and nurses, turned the soil, planted seedlings,sprayed bugs, spread fertilizer.
Men and women in purple uniforms pulled up weeds, cut down plants thatwere old and sickly, raked leaves, carried refuse to trash-burners.
Never, never, never—not even in medieval Holland nor old Japan—had agarden been more formal, been better tended. Every plant had all theloam, light, water, air and nourishment it could use.
A hospital orderly came down the corridor, singing under his breath apopular song:
If you don't like my kisses, honey,
Here's what I will do:
I'll go see a girl in purple,
Kiss this sad world toodle-oo.
If you don't want my lovin',
Why should I take up all this space?
I'll get off this old planet,
Let some sweet baby have my place.
The orderly looked in at the mural and the muralist. "Looks so real,"he said, "I can practically imagine I'm standing in the middle of it."
"What makes you think you're not in it?" said the painter. He gave asatiric smile. "It's called 'The Happy Garden of Life,' you know."
"That's good of Dr. Hitz," said the orderly.
He was referring to one of the male figures in white, whose head was aportrait of Dr. Benjamin Hitz, the hospital's Chief Obstetrician. Hitzwas a blindingly handsome man.
"Lot of faces still to fill in," said the orderly. He meant that thefaces of many of the figures in the mural were still blank. All blankswere to be filled with portraits of important people on either thehospital staff or from the Chicago Office of the