The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic by Ginger Strand

Author:Ginger Strand [Strand, Ginger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374711542
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

8

Out of the Blue

Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, generous of smile, rotund of body, arrived at GE sporting his traditional fez. He was trailed by his brocaded, bejeweled wife and flanked by nine handlers, two from the Department of State. The News Bureau had diligently organized the photo ops. At the Works, the prime minister was photographed smiling while a manager explained the engine assembly line. Then he was taken to the turbine department. Gamely, he stood by as a worker drove gleaming rivets into an enormous flywheel. Flashbulbs detonated like lightning.

The prime minister had left Pakistan to learn what was to be learned in the most powerful nation on earth for the good of his spanking-new country. His state visit, hastily arranged after Stalin invited him to the Soviet Union, was designed to cement young Pakistan’s alignment with Western democracy and free enterprise.

The Ali Khans received a full state tour of Washington, including visits to see President Truman, the Naval Academy, Mount Vernon, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Then they went to New York, where the prime minister received an honorary degree from Columbia University president Dwight D. Eisenhower. After that, they were hustled around the country—Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, New Orleans—inspecting everything from hospitals and factories to crop dusters and prize cattle. In Kansas City, they visited the home of an average American family. The average American husband and wife stood nervously in their Sunday best while Liaquat Ali Khan sat stiffly in their average American living room with their average American son on his lap.

When he and his wife arrived in Schenectady on May 24, 1950, Prime Minister Ali Khan had exactly 510 days to live. He would be assassinated on October 16, 1951, by an Afghani Pashtun ultranationalist. Conspiracy theories alleging U.S. or Soviet involvement would never be proved or disproved. But no one knew this on May 24. All anyone knew that day in Schenectady was that a brand-new nation’s head of state must be dazzled by the wonders of American industry.

Kurt didn’t write the press release for the prime minister’s visit, but he couldn’t have missed the fuss. GE loved nothing more than treating visiting dignitaries to a tour of the company’s showcase factory. But what was it like for someone like Liaquat Ali Khan to see the Schenectady Works? Did any of the guests treated to this spectacle of technological prowess and entrepreneurial efficiency ever question the value of all those toasters and refrigerators and washing machines and jet engines and tanks? Did anyone ever dare ask what it was all for?

At home, Kurt put a fresh piece of paper in his typewriter and banged out the words “Outline for a Science Fiction Novel.”

He figured that’s what he’d been writing: science fiction. Not crazy exotic tales of alien races and outer space and time travel; that wasn’t what he meant. He had never read the genre magazines full of monsters and Martians, intergalactic wars and improbable future worlds. He meant fiction about science and the probable future that science was spawning in the here and now.

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