The Very Best of F & SF v1 (14 page)

F&SF
has been a good
venue for short, speculative parables, and “Harrison Bergeron” remains one of
the best of them. This brief and pointed tale has already been adapted for
television twice and a film adaptation is currently in the works. It marks the
only appearance in our pages by the great Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), but
perhaps it’s worth mentioning that Mr. Vonnegut’s fictitious science fiction
writer, Kilgore Trout, serialized his novel (by way of Philip Jos
é
Farmer)
Venus on the Half-Shell
in our magazine late in 1974. Or perhaps not.

The
year was
2081, and everybody was finally equal.
They weren’t only equal before God and the law, they were equal every which
way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else; nobody was better looking than
anybody else; nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this
equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution,
and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper
General.

Some things
about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still
drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month
that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son,
Harrison, away.

It was tragic,
all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a
perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything
except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above
normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear—he was required by law to
wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter, and every
twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep
people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel
were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d
forgotten for the moment what they were about, as the ballerinas came to the
end of a dance.

A buzzer sounded
in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar
alarm.

“That was a real
pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.

“Huh?” said
George.

“That dance—it was
nice,” said Hazel.

“Yup,” said
George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really
very good—no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were
burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so
that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel
like something the cat dragged in. George was toying with the vague notion that
maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it
before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced.
So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him
wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest
sound had been.

“Sounded like
somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball-peen hammer,” said George.

“I’d think it
would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel, a
little envious. “The things they think up.”

“Um,” said
George.

“Only, if I was
Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter
of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named
Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have
chimes on Sunday—just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.”

“I could think,
if it was just chimes,” said George.

“Well—maybe make
’em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.”

“Good as anybody
else,” said George.

“Who knows
better’n I do what normal is?” said Hazel.

“Right,” said
George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in
jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one gun salute in his head stopped that.

“Boy!” said
Hazel. “That was a doozy, wasn’t it?”

It was such a
doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his
red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were
holding their temples.

“All of a sudden
you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on the sofa, so’s
you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She was referring
to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked
around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a little while,” she said. “I
don’t care if you’re not equal to me for a while.”

George weighed
the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice it any
more. It’s just a part of me.”

“You been so
tired lately—kind of wore out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some way we
could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of
them lead balls. Just a few.”

“Two years in
prison and two-thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,” said George. “I
don’t call that a bargain.”

“If you could
just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean—you don’t
compete with anybody around here. You just set around.”

“If I tried to
get away with it,” said George, “then other people’d get away with it—and
pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing
against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

“I’d hate it,” said
Hazel.

“There you are,”
said George. “The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think
happens to society?”

If Hazel hadn’t
been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn’t have
supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.

“Reckon it’d
fall all apart,” said Hazel.

“What would?”
said George blankly.

“Society,” said
Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you just said?”

“Who knows?”
said George.

The television
program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first
as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers,
had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of
high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and gentlemen—”

He finally gave
up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.

“That’s all
right,” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing. He tried
to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for
trying so hard.”

“Ladies and
gentlemen—” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been
extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was
easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers,
for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men.

And she had to
apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to
use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me—” she said,
and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.

“Harrison
Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from
jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government.
He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and is extremely dangerous.”

A police
photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen— upside down, then
sideways, upside down again, then right-side up. The picture showed the full
length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was
exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of
Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever borne heavier
handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them
up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous
pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick, wavy lenses besides. The
spectacles were intended not only to make him half blind, but to give him
whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was
hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military
neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a
walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

And to offset
his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber
ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth
with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.

“If you see this
boy,” said the ballerina, “do not—I repeat, do not—try to reason with him.”

There was the
shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.

Screams and
barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of
Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to
the tune of an earthquake.

George Bergeron
correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have—for many was the
time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. “My God!” said George. “That
must be Harrison!”

The realization
was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in
his head.

When George
could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living,
breathing Harrison filled the screen.

Clanking,
clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The knob of the
uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians
and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.

“I am the
Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do
what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook.

“Even as I stand
here,” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened—I am a greater ruler than any
man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I
can
become!”

Harrison tore
the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps
guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.

Harrison’s
scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.

Harrison thrust
his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar
snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the
wall.

He flung away
his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of
thunder.

“I shall now
select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people. “Let the
first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!”

A moment passed,
and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.

Harrison plucked
the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with
marvelous delicacy.

Last of all, he
removed her mask. She was blindingly beautiful.

“Now—” said
Harrison, taking her hand. “Shall we show the people the meaning of the word
dance? Music!” he commanded.

The musicians
scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps,
too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and
earls.”

The music began.
It was normal at first—cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians
from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it
played. He slammed them back into their chairs.

The music began
again, and was much improved.

Harrison and his
Empress merely listened to the music for a while—listened gravely, as though
synchronizing their heartbeats with it.

They shifted their
weight to their toes.

Harrison placed
his big hands on the girl’s tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness
that would soon be hers.

And then, in an
explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!

Not only were
the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion
as well.

They reeled,
whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled and spun.

They leaped like
deer on the moon.

The studio
ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.

It became their
obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.

They kissed it.

And then,
neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air
inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

It was then that
Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a
double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the
Empress were dead before they hit the floor.