Galápagos

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galápagos Islands, though, she would be stopped in mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: “Maybe I’m just a crazy lady who has wandered off the street and into this classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these young people. And they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything.” She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past, who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as Roy about what was really going on.

This new explosive was regarded as a great boon to big-brained military scientists. As long as they killed people with conventional rather than nuclear weapons, they were praised as humanitarian statesmen. As long as they did not use nuclear weapons, it appeared, nobody was going to give the right name to all the killing that had been going on since the end of the Second World War, which was surely “World War Three.”