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- SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
- OR THE CHILDREN'S
- CRUSADE
- A Duty-dance with Death
- KURT VONNEGUT, JR.
- Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:
- 'The Waking': copyright 1953 by Theodore Roethke from
- THE COLLECTED POEMS OF THEODORE ROETHKE
- printed by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.
- THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN by David Irving:
- From the Introduction by Ira C. Eaker, Lt. Gen. USAF (RET.) and Foreword by Air
- Marshall Sir Robert Saundby. Copyright 1963 by William Kimber and Co. Limited.
- Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. and William Kimber and
- Co. Limited.
- 'Leven Cent Cotton' by Bob Miller and Emma Dermer: Copyright 1928, 1929 by MCA
- Music, a Division of MCA Inc. Copyright renewed 1955,1956 and assigned to MCA
- Music, a division of MCA Inc. Used by permission.
- for
- Mary O’Hare
- and
- Gerhard Müller
- The cattle are lowing,
- The Baby awakes,
- But the little Lord Jesus
- No crying He makes.
- One
- All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I
- knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew
- really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war.
- And so on. I've changed all the names.
- I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It
- looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of
- human bone meal in the ground.
- I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we made friends
- with a taxi driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at
- night as prisoner of war. His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner
- of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and
- he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because
- there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now. He had a
- pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother
- was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.
- He sent O'Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and here is what it said:
- 'I wish you and your family also as to your friend Merry Christmas and a happy New
- Year and I hope that we'll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if
- the accident will.'
- I like that very much: 'If the accident will.'
- I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and
- time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it
- would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to
- do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece
- or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.
- But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then-not enough of them to
- make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an
- old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown. I think of how
- useless the Dresden -part of my memory has been, and yet how tempting Dresden has
- been to write about, and I am reminded of the famous limerick:
- There was a young man from Stamboul,
- Who soliloquized thus to his tool,
- 'You took all my wealth
- And you ruined my health,
- And now you won't pee, you old fool’
- And I'm reminded, too, of the song that goes
- My name is Yon Yonson,
- I work in Wisconsin,
- I work in a lumbermill there.
- The people I meet when I walk down the street,
- They say, 'What's your name?
- And I say,
- ‘My name is Yon Yonson,
- I work in Wisconsin...
- And so on to infinity.
- Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've
- usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
- I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows
- and inquired, 'Is it an anti-war book?'
- 'Yes,' I said. 'I guess.'
- 'You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?'
- 'No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?'
- 'I say, "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?"'
- What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to
- stop as glaciers. I believe that too.
- And, even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.
- When I was somewhat younger, working on my famous Dresden book, I asked an old
- war buddy named Bernard V. O'Hare if I could come to see him. He was a district
- attorney in Pennsylvania. I was a writer on Cape Cod. We had been privates in the war,
- infantry scouts. We had never expected to make any money after the war, but we were
- doing quite well.
- I had the Bell Telephone Company find him for me. They are wonderful that way. I
- have this, disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get
- drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then,
- speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to
- connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.
- I got O'Hare on the line in this way. He is short and I am tall. We were Mutt and Jeff in
- the war. We were captured together in the war. I told him who I was on the telephone. He
- had no trouble believing it. He was up. He was reading. Everybody else in his house was
- asleep.
- 'Listen,' I said, 'I'm writing this book about Dresden. I'd like some help remembering
- stuff. I wonder if I could come down and see you, and we could drink and talk and
- remember.'
- He was unenthusiastic. He said he couldn't remember much. He told me, though, to
- come ahead.
- 'I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby,' I said.
- 'The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of
- people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for
- taking a teapot. And he's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad.'
- 'Um,' said O'Hare.
- 'Don't you think that's really where the climax should come?' 'I don't know anything
- about it,' he said. 'That's your trade, not mine.'
- As a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and
- suspense and confrontations, I had outlined the Dresden story many times. The best
- outline I ever made, or anyway the prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper.
- I used my daughter's crayons, a different color for each main character. One end of the
- wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there
- was all that middle part, which was the middle. And the blue line met the red line and
- then the yellow line, and the yellow line stopped because the character represented by the
- yellow line was dead. And so on. The destruction of Dresden was represented by a
- vertical band of orange cross-hatching, and all the lines that were still alive passed
- through it, came out the other side.
- The end, where all the lines stopped, was a beetfield on the Elbe, outside of Halle. The
- rain was coming down. The war in Europe had been over for a couple of weeks. We were
- formed in ranks, with Russian soldiers guarding us-Englishmen, Americans, Dutchmen,
- Belgians, Frenchmen, Canadians, South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians,
- thousands of us about to stop being prisoners of war.
- And on the other side of the field were thousands of Russians and Poles and
- Yugoslavians and so on guarded by American soldiers. An exchange was made there in
- the rain-one for one. O'Hare and I climbed into the back of an American truck with a lot
- of others. O'Hare didn't have any souvenirs. Almost everybody else did. I had a
- ceremonial Luftwaffe saber, still do. The rabid little American I call Paul Lazzaro in this
- book had about a quart of diamonds and emeralds and rubies and so on' He had taken
- these from dead people in the cellars of Dresden.' So it goes.
- An idiotic Englishman, who had lost all his teeth somewhere had his souvenir in a
- canvas bag. The bag was resting on my insteps. He would peek into the bag every now
- and then, and he would roll his eyes and swivel his scrawny neck,, trying to catch people
- looking covetously at his bag. And he would bounce the bag on my insteps.
- I thought this bouncing was accidental. But I was mistaken. He had to show somebody
- what was in the bag, and he had decided he could trust me. He caught my eye, winked,
- opened the bag. There was a plaster model of the Eiffel Tower in there. It was painted
- gold. It had a clock in it.
- 'There's a smashin' thing,' he said.
- And we were flown to a rest camp in France, where we were fed chocolate malted
- milkshakes and other rich foods until we were all covered with baby fat. Then we were
- sent home, and I married a pretty girl who was covered with baby fat, too.
- And we had babies.
- And they're all grown up now, and I'm an old fart with his memories and his Pall
- Malls. My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a lumbermill there.
- Sometimes I try to call up old girl friends on the telephone late at night, after my wife
- has gone to bed. 'Operator, I wonder if you could give me the number of a Mrs. So-andSo.
- I think she lives at such-and-such.'
- 'I'm sorry, sir. There is no such listing.'
- 'Thanks, Operator. Thanks just the same.'
- And I let the dog out or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and
- he lets me know he likes me. He doesn't mind the smell of mustard gas and roses.
- 'You're all right, Sandy, I'll say to the dog. 'You know that, Sandy? You're O.K.'
- Sometimes I'll turn on the radio and listen to a talk program from Boston or New York.
- I can't stand recorded music if I've been drinking a good deal.
- Sooner or later I go to bed, and my wife asks me what time it is. She always has to
- know the time. Sometimes I don't know, and I say, 'Search me.'
- I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for a while
- after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that
- time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They
- may be teaching that still.
- Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly
- before my father died, he said to me, 'You know-you never wrote a story with a villain in
- it.'
- I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.
- While I was studying to be an anthropologist, I was also working as a police reporter
- for the famous Chicago City News Bureau for twenty-eight dollars a week. One time they
- switched me from the night shift to the day shift., so I worked sixteen hours straight. We
- were supported by all the newspapers in town, and the AP and the UP and all that. And
- we would cover the courts and the police stations and the Fire Department and the Coast
- Guard out on Lake Michigan and all that. We were connected to the institutions that
- supported us by means of pneumatic tubes which ran under the streets of Chicago.
- Reporters would telephone in stories to writers wearing headphones, and the writers
- would stencil the stories on mimeograph sheets. The stories were mimeographed and
- stuffed into the brass and velvet cartridges which the pneumatic tubes ate. The very
- toughest reporters and writers were women who had taken over the jobs of men who'd
- gone to war.
- And the first story I covered I had to dictate over the telephone to one of those beastly
- girls. It was about a young veteran who had taken a job running an old-fashioned elevator
- in an office building. The elevator door on the first floor was ornamental iron lace. Iron
- ivy snaked in and out of the holes. There was an iron twig with two iron lovebirds
- perched upon it.
- This veteran decided to take his car into the basement, and he closed the door and
- started down, but his wedding ring Was caught in all the ornaments. So he was hoisted
- into the air and the floor of the car went down, dropped out from under him, and the top
- of the car squashed him. So it goes.
- So I phoned this in, and the woman who was going to cut the stencil asked me. 'What
- did his wife say?'
- 'She doesn't know yet,' I said. 'It just happened.'
- 'Call her up and get a statement.'
- 'What?'
- 'Tell her you're Captain Finn of the Police Department. Say you have some sad news.
- Give her the news, and see what she says.'
- So I did. She said about what you would expect her to say. There was a baby. And so
- on.
- When I got back to the office, the woman writer asked me, just for her own
- information, what the squashed guy had looked Eke when he was squashed.
- I told her.
- 'Did it bother you?' she said. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar.
- 'Heck no, Nancy,' I said. 'I've seen lots worse than that in the war.'
- Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn't a famous air raid
- back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than
- Hiroshima, for instance. I didn't know that, either. There hadn't been much publicity.
- I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as
- I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The
- Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about
- how the Germans had made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on.
- All could say was, 'I know, I know. I know.'
- The Second World War had certainly made everybody very tough. And I became a
- public relations man for General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and a volunteer
- fireman in the Village of Alplaus, where I bought my first home. My boss there was one
- of the toughest guys I ever hope to meet. He had been a lieutenant colonel in public
- relations in Baltimore. While I was in Schenectady he joined the Dutch Reformed
- Church, which is a very tough church, indeed.
- He used to ask me sneeringly sometimes why I hadn't been an officer,, as though I'd
- done something wrong.
- My wife and I had lost our baby fat. Those were our scrawny years. We had a lot of
- scrawny veterans and their scrawny wives for friends. The nicest veterans in
- Schenectady,, I thought,, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most,
- were the ones who'd really fought.
- I wrote the Air Force back then, asking for details about the raid on Dresden, who
- ordered it, how many planes did it, why they did it, what desirable results there had been
- and so on. I was answered by a man who, like myself, was in public relations. He said
- that he was sorry, but that the information was top secret still.
- I read the letter out loud to my wife, and I said, 'Secret? My God-from whom?'
- We were United World Federalists back then. I don't know what we are now.
- Telephoners, I guess. We telephone a lot-or I do, anyway, late at night.
- A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, I really
- did go to see him. That must have been in 1964 or so-whatever the last year was for the
- New York World's Fair. Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni. My name is Yon Yonson. There
- was a young man from Stamboul.
- I took two little girls with me, my daughter, Nanny, and her best friend, Allison
- Mitchell. They had never been off Cape Cod before. When we saw a river, we had to stop
- so they could stand by it and think about it for a while. They had never seen water in that
- long and narrow, unsalted form before. The river was the Hudson. There were carp in
- there and we saw them. They were as big as atomic submarines.
- We saw waterfalls, too, streams jumping off cliffs into the valley of the Delaware.
- There were lots of things to stop and see-and then it was time to go, always time to go.
- The little girls were wearing white party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers
- would know at once how nice they were. 'Time to go, girls,' I'd say. And we would go.
- And the sun went down, and we had supper in an Italian place, and then I knocked on
- the front door of the beautiful stone house of Bernard V. O'Hare. I was carrying a bottle
- of Irish whiskey like a dinner bell.
- I met his nice wife, Mary, to whom I dedicate this book. I dedicate it to Gerhard
- Müller, the Dresden taxi driver, too. Mary O'Hare is a trained nurse, which is a lovely
- thing for a woman to be.
- Mary admired the two little girls I'd brought, mixed them in with her own children,
- sent them all upstairs to play games and watch television. It was only after the children
- were gone that I sensed that Mary didn't like me or didn't like something about the night.
- She was polite but chilly.
- 'It's a nice cozy house you have here,' I said, and it really was.
- 'I've fixed up a place where you can talk and not be bothered,' she said.
- 'Good,' I said, and I imagined two leather chairs near a fire in a paneled room, where
- two old soldiers could drink and talk. But she took us into the kitchen. She had put two
- straight-backed chairs at a kitchen table with a white porcelain top. That table top was
- screaming with reflected light from a two-hundred-watt bulb overhead. Mary had
- prepared an operating room. She put only one glass on it, which was for me. She
- explained that O'Hare couldn't drink the hard stuff since the war.
- So we sat down. O'Hare was embarrassed, but he wouldn't tell me what was wrong. I
- couldn't imagine what it was about me that could bum up Mary so. I was a family man.
- I'd been married only once. I wasn't a drunk. I hadn't done her husband any dirt in the
- war.
- She fixed herself a Coca-Cola, made a lot of noise banging the ice-cube tray in the
- stainless steel sink. Then she went into another part of the house. But she wouldn't sit
- still. She was moving all over the house, opening and shutting doors, even moving
- furniture around to work off anger.
- I asked O'Hare what I'd said or done to make her act that way.
- 'It's all right,' he said. "Don't worry about it. It doesn't have anything to do with you.'
- That was kind of him. He was lying. It had everything to do with me.
- So we tried to ignore Mary and remember the war. I took a couple of belts of the
- booze I'd brought. We would chuckle or grin sometimes, as though war stories were
- coming back, but neither one of us could remember anything good. O'Hare remembered
- one guy who got into a lot of wine in Dresden, before it was bombed, and we had to take
- him home in a wheelbarrow.
- It wasn't much to write a book about. I remembered two Russian soldiers who had
- looted a clock factory. They had a horse-drawn wagon full of clocks. They were happy
- and drunk. They were smoking huge cigarettes they had rolled in newspaper.
- That was about it for memories, and Mary was still making noise. She finally came
- out in the kitchen again for another Coke. She took another tray of ice cubes from the
- refrigerator, banged it in the sink, even though there was already plenty of ice out.
- Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me.
- She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger
- conversation. "You were just babies then!' she said.
- 'What?" I said.
- 'You were just babies in the war-like the ones upstairs! '
- I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of
- childhood.
- 'But you're not going to write it that way, are you.' This wasn't a question. It was an
- accusation.
- 'I-I don't know,' I said.
- 'Well, I know,' she said. 'You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be
- played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other
- glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a
- lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.'
- So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or
- anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by
- books and movies.
- So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise 'Mary,' I said, 'I don't think this
- book is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and
- thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there
- won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
- 'I tell you what,' I said, 'I'll call it The Children's Crusade.'
- She was my friend after that.
- O'Hare and I gave up on remembering, went into the living room, talked about other
- things. We became curious about the real Children's Crusade, so O'Hare looked it up in a
- book he had, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles
- Mackay, LL.D. It was first published in London in 1841.
- Mackay had a low opinion of all Crusades. The Children's Crusade struck him as only
- slightly more sordid than the ten Crusades for grown-ups. O'Hare read this handsome
- passage out loud:
- History in her solemn page informs us that the Crusaders were but ignorant and savage
- men, that their motives were those of bigotry unmitigated, and that their pathway was one
- of blood and rears. Romance, on the other hand, dilates upon their piety and heroism,
- and portrays, in her most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity,
- the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves, and the great services they rendered
- to Christianity.
- And then O'Hare read this: Now what was the grand result of all these struggles?
- Europe expended millions of her treasures, and the blood of two million of her people;
- and a handful of quarrelsome knights retained possession of Palestine for about one
- hundred years!
- Mackay told us that the Children's Crusade started in 1213, when two monks got the
- idea of raising armies of children in Germany and France, and selling them in North
- Africa as slaves. Thirty thousand children volunteered, thinking they were going to
- Palestine. They were no doubt idle and deserted children who generally swarm in great
- cities, nurtured on vice and daring, said Mackay, and ready for anything.
- Pope Innocent the Third thought they were going to Palestine, too, and he was thrilled.
- 'These children are awake while we are asleep!' he said.
- Most of the children were shipped out of Marseilles, and about half of them drowned
- in shipwrecks. The other half got to North Africa where they were sold.
- Through a misunderstanding, some children reported for duty at Genoa, where no slave
- ships were waiting. They were fed and sheltered and questioned kindly by good people
- there-then given a little money and a lot of advice and sent back home.
- 'Hooray for the good people of Genoa,' said Mary O'Hare.
- I slept that night in one of the children's bedrooms. O'Hare had put a book for me on
- the bedside table. It was Dresden, History, Stage and Gallery, by Mary Endell. It was
- published in 1908, and its introduction began
- It is hoped that this little book will make itself useful. It attempts to give to an
- English-reading public a bird's-eye view of how Dresden came to look as it does,
- architecturally; of how it expanded musically, through the genius of a few men, to its
- present bloom; and it calls attention to certain permanent landmarks in art that make its
- Gallery the resort of those seeking lasting impressions.
- I read some history further on
- Now, in 1760, Dresden underwent siege by the Prussians. On the fifteenth of July
- began the cannonade. The Picture-Gallery took fire. Many of the paintings had been
- transported to -the Konigstein, but some were seriously injured by splinters of
- bombshells-notably Francia's 'Baptism of Christ.' Furthermore, the stately Kreuzkirche
- tower, from which the enemy's movements had been watched day and night, stood in
- flames. It later succumbed. In sturdy contrast with the pitiful fate of the Kreuzkirche,
- stood the Frauenkirche, from the curves of whose stone dome the Prussian bombs -
- rebounded like rain. Friederich was obliged finally to give up the siege, because he
- learned of the fall of Glatz, the critical point of his new conquests. 'We must be off to
- Silesia, so that we do not lose everything.'
- The devastation of Dresden was boundless. When Goethe as a young student visited
- the city, he still found sad ruins 'Von der Kuppel der Frauenkirche sah ich these leidigen
- Trümmer zwischen die schone stddtische Ordnung hineingesät; da rühmte mir der Kiister
- die Kunst des Baumeisters, welcher Kirche und Kuppel auf einen so unerüinschten Fall
- schon eingeyichtet und bombenfest erbaut hatte. Der gute Sakristan deutete mir alsdann
- auf Ruinen nach allen Seiten und sagte bedenklich lakonisch: Das hat her Feind Gethan!'
- The two little girls and I crossed the Delaware River where George Washington had
- crossed it, the next morning. We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past
- had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the
- future would be like, according to General Motors.
- And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much
- was mine to keep.
- I taught creative writing in the famous Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa for
- a couple of years after that. I got into some perfectly beautiful trouble, got out of it again.
- I taught in the afternoons. In the mornings I wrote. I was not be disturbed. I was working
- on my famous book about Dresden.
- And somewhere in there a nice man named Seymour Lawrence gave me a three-book
- contract, and I said, 'O.K., the first of the three will be my famous book about Dresden.'
- The friends of Seymour Lawrence call him 'Sam.' And I say to Sam now: 'Sam-here's
- the book.'
- It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say
- about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want
- anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it
- always is, except for the birds.
- And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like 'Poo-teeweet?'
- I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in
- massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction
- or glee.
- I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and
- to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
- As I've said I recently went back to Dresden with my friend O'Hare. We had a million
- laughs in Hamburg and West Berlin and East Berlin and Vienna and Salzburg and
- Helsinki, and in Leningrad, too. It was very good for me, because I saw a lot of authentic
- backgrounds for made-up stories which I will write later on. One of them will be Russian
- Baroque and another will be No Kissing and another will be Dollar Bar and another will
- be If the Accident Will, and so on.
- And so on.
- There was a Lufthansa plane that was supposed to fly from Philadelphia to Boston to
- Frankfurt. O'Hare was supposed to get on in Philadelphia and I was supposed to get on in
- Boston, and off we'd go. But Boston was socked in, so the plane flew straight to
- Frankfurt from Philadelphia. And I became a non-person in the Boston Fog, and
- Lufthansa put me in a limousine with some other non-persons and sent us to a motel for a
- non-night.
- The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only with the
- electric clocks, but the wind-up kind, too. The second hand on my watch would twitch
- once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.
- There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling., I had to believe whatever
- clocks said-and calendars.
- I had two books with me, which I'd meant to read on the plane. One was Words for the
- Wind, by Theodore Roethke, and this is what I found in there:
- I wake to steep, and take my waking slow.
- I feet my late in what I cannot fear.
- I learn by going where I have to go.
- My other book was Erika Ostrovsky's Céline and His Vision. Céline was a brave
- French soldier in the First World War-until his skull was cracked. After that he couldn't
- sleep, and there were noises in his head. He became a doctor, and he treated poor people
- in the daytime, and he wrote grotesque novels all night. No art is possible without a dance
- with death, he wrote.
- The truth is death, he wrote. I've fought nicely against it as long as I could ... danced
- with it, festooned it, waltzed it around ... decorated it with streamers, titillated it...
- Time obsessed him. Miss Ostrovsky reminded me of the amazing scene in Death on the
- Installment Plan where Céline wants to stop the bustling of a street crowd. He screams on
- paper, Make them stop ... don't let them move anymore at all ... There, make them freeze
- ... once and for all! ... So that they won't disappear anymore!
- I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The
- sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained
- upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and
- He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that
- which grew upon the ground.
- So it goes.
- Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off
- without them.
- And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their
- homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
- She was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.
- People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.
- I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.
- This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins
- like this:
- Listen:
- Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
- It ends like this:
- Poo-tee-weet?
- Two
- Listen:
- Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
- Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has
- walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back
- through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he
- says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.
- He says.
- Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't
- necessarily fun. He is 'm a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows
- what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.
- Billy was bon in 1922 in Ilium, New York, the only child of a barber there. He was a
- funny-looking child who became a funny-looking youth-tall and weak, and shaped like a
- bottle of Coca-Cola. He graduated from Ilium High School in the upper third of his class,
- and attended night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before
- being drafted for military service in the Second World War. His father died in a hunting
- accident during the war. So it goes.
- Billy saw service with the infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans.
- After his honorable discharge from the Army in 1945, Billy again enrolled in the Ilium
- School of Optometry. During his senior year there, he became engaged to the daughter
- of the founder and owner of the school, and then suffered a mild nervous collapse.
- He was treated in a veterans' hospital near Lake Placid, and was given shock
- treatments and released. He married his fiancée, finished his education, and was set up in
- business in Ilium by his father-in-law. Ilium is a particularly good city for optometrists
- because the General Forge and Foundry Company is there. Every employee is required
- to own a pair of safety glasses, and to wear them in areas where manufacturing is going
- on. GF&F has sixty-eight thousand employees in Ilium. That calls for a lot of lenses and
- a lot of frames.
- Frames are where the money is.
- Bill became rich. He had two children, Barbara and Robert. In time, his daughter
- Barbara married another optometrist., and Billy set him up in business. Billy's son Robert
- had a lot of trouble in high school, but then he joined the famous Green Berets. He
- straightened out, became a fine Young man, and he fought in Vietnam.
- Early in 1968, a group of optometrists, with Billy among them, chartered an airplane to
- fly them from Ilium to an international convention of optometrists in Montreal. The plane
- crashed on top of Sugarbush Mountain, in Vermont. Everybody was killed but Billy. So
- it goes.
- While Billy was recuperating in a hospital in Vermont, his wife died accidentally of
- carbon-monoxide poisoning. So it goes.
- When Billy finally got home to Ilium after the airplane crash, he was quiet for a while.
- He had a terrible scar across the top Of his skull. He didn't resume practice. He had a
- housekeeper. His daughter came over almost every day.
- And then, without any warning, Billy went to New York City, and got on an all-night
- radio program devoted to talk. He told about having come unstuck in time. He said, too,
- that he had been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967. The saucer was from the planet
- Tralfamadore, he said. He was taken to Tralfamadore, where he was displayed naked in a
- zoo, he said. He was mated there with a former Earthling movie star named Montana
- Wildhack.
- Some night owls in Ilium heard Billy on the radio, and one of them called Billy's
- daughter Barbara. Barbara was upset. She and her husband went down to New York and
- brought Billy home. Billy insisted mildly that everything he had said on the radio was
- true. He said he had been kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians on the night of his daughter's
- wedding. He hadn't been missed, he said, because the Tralfamadorians had taken him
- through a time warp, so that he could be on Tralfamadore for years, and still be away
- from Earth for only a microsecond.
- Another month went by without incident, and then Billy wrote a letter to the Ilium
- News Leader, which the paper published. It described the creatures from Tralfamadore.
- The letter said that they were two feet high, and green., and shaped like plumber's
- friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely
- flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green
- eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They
- pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to
- teach Earthlings, especially about time. Billy promised to tell what some of those
- wonderful things were in his next letter.
- Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second
- letter started out like this:
- 'The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he
- only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to
- cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will
- exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can
- look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all
- the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an
- illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a
- string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
- 'When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad
- condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other
- moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what
- the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes."'
- And so on.
- Billy was working on this letter in the basement rumpus room of his empty house. It
- was his housekeeper's day off. There was an old typewriter in the rumpus room. It was a
- beast. It weighed as much as a storage battery. Billy couldn't carry it very far very easily,
- which was why he was writing in the rumpus room instead of somewhere else.
- The oil burner had quit. A mouse had eaten through the insulation of a wire leading to
- the thermostat. The temperature in the house was down to fifty degrees, but Billy hadn't
- noticed. He wasn't warmly dressed, either. He was barefoot, and still in his pajamas and a
- bathrobe, though it was late afternoon. His bare feet were blue and ivory.
- The cockles of Billy's heart, at any rate, were glowing coals. What made them so hot was
- Billy's belief that he was going to comfort so many people with the truth about time. His
- door chimes upstairs had been ringing and ringing. It was his daughter Barbara up there
- wanting in. Now she let herself in with a key, crossed the floor over his head calling,
- 'Father? Daddy, where are you?' And so on.
- Billy didn't answer her, so she was nearly hysterical, expecting to find his corpse. And
- then she looked into the very last place there was to look-which was the rumpus room.
- 'Why didn't you answer me when I called?' Barbara wanted to know, standing there in
- the door of the rumpus room. She had the afternoon paper with her, the one in which
- Billy described his friends from Tralfamadore.
- 'I didn't hear you,' said Billy.
- The orchestration of the moment was this: Barbara was only twenty-one years old, but
- she thought her father was senile, even though he was only forty-six-senile because of
- damage to his brain in the airplane crash. She also thought that she was head of the
- family, since she had had to manage her mother's funeral, since she had to get a
- housekeeper for Billy, and all that. Also, Barbara and her husband were having to look
- after Billy's business interests, which were considerable, since Billy didn't seem to give a
- damn for business any more. All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy
- flibbertigibbet. And Billy, meanwhile, was trying to hang onto his dignity, to persuade
- Barbara and everybody else that he was far from senile, that, on the contrary, he was
- devoting himself to a calling much higher than mere business.
- He was doing nothing less now, he thought, then prescribing corrective lenses for
- Earthling souls. So many of those souls were lost and wretched, Billy believed, because
- they could not see as well as Ws little green friends on Tralfamadore.
- 'Don't lie to me, Father,' said Barbara. 'I know perfectly well you heard me when I
- called.' This was a fairly pretty girl, except that she had legs like an Edwardian grand
- piano. Now she raised hell with him about the letter in the paper. She said he was making
- a laughing stock of himself and everybody associated with him.
- 'Father, Father, Father,' said Barbara, 'what are we going to do with you? Are you
- going to force us to put you where your mother is?' Billy's mother was still alive. She was
- in bed in an old people's home called Pine Knoll on the edge of Ilium.
- 'What is it about my letter that makes you so mad?' Billy wanted to know.
- 'It's all just crazy. None of it's true! '
- 'It's all true. ' Bill's anger was not going to rise with hers. He never got mad at
- anything. He was wonderful that way.
- 'There is no such planet as Tralfamadore.'
- 'It can't be detected from Earth, if that's what you mean,' said Billy. 'Earth can't be
- detected from Tralfamadore, as far as that goes. They're both very small. They're very far
- apart.'
- 'Where did you get a crazy name like "Tralfamadore?"'
- 'That's what the creatures who live there call it.
- 'Oh God,' said Barbara, and she turned her back on him. She celebrated frustration by
- clapping her hands. 'May I ask you a simple question?'
- 'Of course.'
- 'Why is it you never mentioned any of this before the airplane crash?'
- 'I didn't think the time was ripe.'
- And so on. Billy says that he first came unstuck in time in 1944, long before his trip to
- Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians didn't have anything to do with his coming unstuck
- They were simply able to give him insights into what was really going on.
- Billy first came unstuck while the Second World War was in progress. Billy was a
- chaplain's assistant in the war. A chaplain's assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the
- American Army. Billy was no exception. He was powerless to harm the enemy or to help
- his friends. In fact, he had no friends. He was a valet to a preacher, expected no
- promotions or medals, bore no arms, and had a meek faith in a loving Jesus which most
- soldiers found putrid.
- While on maneuvers in South Carolina, Billy played hymns he knew from childhood,
- played them on a little black organ which was waterproof. It had thirty-nine keys and two
- stops- vox humana and vox celeste. Billy also had charge of a portable altar, an olivedrab
- attaché case with telescoping legs. It was lined with crimson plush, and nestled in
- that passionate plush were an anodized aluminum cross and a Bible.
- The altar and the organ were made by a vacuum-cleaner company in Camden, New
- Jersey-and said so.
- One time on maneuvers Billy was playing 'A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,' with music
- by Johann Sebastian Bach and words by Martin Luther. It was Sunday morning. Billy and
- his chaplain had gathered a congregatation of about fifty soldiers on a Carolina hillside.
- An umpire appeared. There were umpires everywhere, men who said who was winning
- or losing the theoretical battle, who was alive and who was dead.
- The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically spotted from
- the air by a theoretical enemy. They Were all theoretically dead now. The theoretical
- corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime meal.
- Remembering this incident years later, Billy was struck by what a Tralfamadorian
- adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to eat at the same time.
- Toward the end of maneuvers., Billy was given an emergency furlough home because
- his father, a barber in Ilium, New York, was shot dead by a friend while they were out
- hunting deer. So it goes.
- When Billy got back from his furlough., there were orders for him to go overseas. He
- was needed in the headquarters company of an infantry regiment fighting in
- Luxembourg. The regimental chaplain's assistant had been killed in action. So it goes.
- When Billy joined the regiment, it was in the process of being destroyed by the
- Germans in the famous Battle of the Bulge. Billy never even got to meet the chaplain he
- was supposed to assist, was never even issued a steel helmet and combat boots. This was
- in December of 1944, during the last mighty German attack of the war.
- Billy survived, but he was a dazed wanderer far behind the new German lines. Three
- other wanderers, not quite so dazed, allowed Billy to tag along. Two of them were scouts,
- and one was an antitank gunner. They were without food or maps. Avoiding Germans
- they were delivering themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow.
- They went Indian file. First came the scouts, clever, graceful quiet. They had rifles.
- Next came the antitank gunner, clumsy and dense, warning Germans away with a Colt
- .45 automatic in one hand and a trench knife in the other.
- Last came Billy Pilgrim, empty-handed, bleakly ready for death. Billy was
- Preposterous-six feet and three inches tall, with a chest and shoulders like a box of
- kitchen matches. He had no helmet, no overcoat, no weapon and no boots. On his feet
- were cheap, low-cut civilian shoes which he had bought for his father's funeral. Billy had
- lost a heel, which made him bob up-and-down, up-and-down. The involuntary dancing up
- and down, up and down, made his hip joints sore.
- Billy was wearing a thin field jacket, a shirt and trousers of scratchy wool, and long
- underwear that was soaked with sweat. He was the only one of the four who had a beard.
- It was a random, bristly beard, and some of the bristles were white, even though Billy
- was only twenty-one years old. He was also going bald. Wind and cold and violent
- exercise had turned his face crimson.
- He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.
- And on the third day of wandering, somebody shot at the four from far away-shot four
- times as they crossed a narrow brick road. One shot was for the scouts. The next one was
- for the antitank gunner, whose name was Roland Weary.
- The third bullet was for the filthy flamingo, who stopped dead center in the road when
- the lethal bee buzzed past his ear. Billy stood there politely, giving the marksman another
- chance. It was his addled understanding of the rules of warfare that the marksman should
- be given a second chance. The next shot missed Billy's kneecaps by inches, going endon-end,
- from the sound of it.
- Roland Weary and the scouts were safe in a ditch, and Weary growled at Billy, 'Get
- out of the road, you dumb motherfucker.' The last word was still a novelty in the speech
- of white people in 1944. It was fresh and astonishing to Billy, who had never fucked
- anybody-and it did its job. It woke him up and got him off the road.
- 'Saved your life again, you dumb bastard,' Weary said to Billy in the ditch. He had
- been saving Billy's fife for days, cursing him, kicking him, slapping him, making him
- move. It was absolutely necessary that cruelty be used, because Billy wouldn't do
- anything to save himself. Billy wanted to quit. He was cold, hungry, embarrassed,
- incompetent. He could scarcely distinguish between sleep and wakefulness now, on the
- third day, found no important differences either, between walking and standing still.
- He wished everybody would leave him alone. 'You guys go on without me,' he said
- again and again.
- Weary was as new to war as Billy. He was a replacement, too. As a part of a gun crew,
- he had helped to fire one shot in anger-from a 57-millimeter antitank gun. The gun made
- a ripping sound like the opening of a zipper on the fly of God Almighty. The gun lapped
- up snow and vegetation with a blowtorch feet long. The flame left a black arrow on the
- ground, showing the Germans exactly where the gun was hidden. The shot was a miss.
- What had been missed was a Tiger tank. It swiveled its 88-millimeter snout around
- sniffingly, saw the arrow on the ground. It fired. It killed everybody on the gun crew but
- Weary. So it goes.
- Roland Weary was only eighteen, was at the end of an unhappy childhood spent
- mostly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He had been unpopular in Pittsburgh. He had been
- unpopular because he was stupid and fat and mean, and smelled like bacon no matter how
- much he washed. He was always being ditched in Pittsburgh by people who did not want
- him with them.
- It made Weary sick to be ditched. When Weary was ditched, le would find somebody
- who was even more unpopular than himself, and he would horse around with that person
- for a while, pretending to be friendly. And then he would find some pretext for beating
- the shit out of him.
- It was a pattern. It was a crazy, sexy, murderous relationship Weary entered into with
- people he eventually beat up. He told hem about his father's collection of guns and
- swords and torture instruments and leg irons and so on. Weary's father, who was a
- plumber, actually did collect such things, and his collection was insured for four thousand
- dollars. He wasn't alone. He belonged to a big club composed of people who collected
- things like that.
- Weary's father once gave Weary's mother a Spanish thumbscrew in - working
- condition-for a kitchen paperweight. Another time he gave her a table lamp whose base
- was a model one foot high of the famous 'Iron Maiden of Nuremburg.' The real Iron
- Maiden was a medieval torture instrument, a sort of boiler which was shaped like a
- woman on the outside-and lined with spikes. The front of the woman was composed of
- two hinged doors. The idea was to put a criminal inside and then close the doors slowly.
- There were two special spikes where his eyes would be. There was a drain in the bottom
- to let out all the blood.
- So it goes.
- Weary had told Billy Pilgrim about the Iron Maiden, about the drain in the bottom-and
- what that was for. He had talked to Billy about dum-dums. He told him about his father's
- Derringer pistol, which could be carried in a vest pocket, which was yet capable of
- making a hole in a man 'which a bull bat could fly through without touching either wing.'
- Weary scornfully bet Billy one time that he didn't even know what a blood gutter was.
- Billy guessed that it was the drain in the bottom of the Iron Maiden, but that was wrong.
- A blood gutter, Billy learned, was the shallow groove in the side of the blade of a sword
- or bayonet.
- Weary told Billy about neat tortures he'd read about or seen in the movies or heard on
- the radio-about other neat tortures he himself had invented. One of the inventions was
- sticking a dentist's drill into a guy's ear. He asked Billy what he thought the worst form of
- execution was. Billy had no opinion. The correct answer turned out to be this: 'You stake
- a guy out on an anthill in the desert-see? He's face upward, and you put honey all over his
- balls and pecker, and you cut off his eyelids so he has to stare at the sun till he dies.' So it
- goes.
- Now, lying in the ditch with Billy and the scouts after having been shot at, Weary
- made Billy take a very close look at his trench knife. It wasn't government issue. It was a
- present from his father. It had a ten-inch blade that was triangular 'in 'cross section. Its
- grip consisted of brass knuckles, was a chain of rings through which Weary slipped his
- stubby fingers. The rings weren't simple. They bristled with spikes.
- Weary laid the spikes along Billy's cheek, roweled the cheek with savagely
- affectionate restraint. 'How'd you-like to be hit with this-hm? Hmmmmmmmmm?' he
- wanted to know.
- 'I wouldn't,' said Billy.
- 'Know why the blade's triangular?'
- 'No.'
- 'Makes a wound that won't close up.'
- 'Oh.'
- 'Makes a three-sided hole in a guy. You stick an ordinary knife in a guy-makes a slit.
- Right? A slit closes right up. Right?
- 'Right.'
- 'Shit. What do you know? What the hell they teach you in college?'
- 'I wasn't there very long.' said Billy, which was true. He had had only six months of
- college and the college hadn't been a regular college, either. It had been the night school
- of the Ilium School of Optometry.
- "Joe College,' said Weary scathingly.
- Billy shrugged.
- 'There's more to life than what you read in books.' said Weary. 'You'll find that out.'
- Billy made no reply to this, either, there in the ditch, since he didn't want the
- conversation to go on any longer than necessary. He was dimly tempted to say, though,
- that he knew a thing or two about gore. Billy, after all, had contemplated torture and
- hideous wounds at the beginning and the end of nearly every day of his childhood. Billy
- had an extremely gruesome crucifix hanging on the wall of his little bedroom in Ilium. A
- military surgeon would have admired the clinical fidelity of the artist's rendition of all
- Christ's wounds-the spear wound, the thorn wounds, the holes that were made by the iron
- spikes. Billy's Christ died horribly. He was pitiful.
- So it goes.
- Billy wasn't a Catholic, even though he grew up with a ghastly crucifix on the wall.
- His father had no religion. His mother was a substitute organist for several churches
- around town. She took Billy with her whenever she played, taught him to play a little,
- too. She said she was going to join a church as soon as she decided which one was right.
- She never did decide. She did develop a terrific hankering for a crucifix, though. And
- she bought one from a Sante Fé gift shop during a trip the little family made out West
- during the Great Depression. Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life
- that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
- And the crucifix went up on the wall of Billy Pilgrim.
- The two scouts, loving the walnut stocks of their rifles in the ditch, whispered that it
- was time to move out again. Ten minutes had gone by without anybody's coming to see if
- they were hit or not, to finish them off. Whoever had shot was evidently far away and all
- alone.
- And the four crawled out of the ditch without drawing any more fire. They crawled
- into a forest like the big, unlucky mammals they were. Then they stood up and began to
- walk quickly. The forest was dark and cold. The pines were planted in ranks and files.
- There was no undergrowth. Four inches of unmarked snow blanketed the ground. The
- Americans had no choice but to leave trails in the show as unambiguous as diagrams in a
- book on ballroom dancing-step, slide, rest-step, slide,-rest.
- 'Close it up and keep it closed!' Roland Weary warned Billy Pilgrim as they moved out.
- Weary looked like Tweedledum or Tweedledee, all bundled up for battle. He was short
- and thick.
- He had every piece of equipment he had ever been issued, every present he'd received
- from home: helmet, helmet liner, wool cap, scarf, gloves, cotton undershirt, woolen
- undershirt, wool shirt, sweater, blouse, jacket, overcoat, cotton underpants, woolen
- underpants, woolen trousers, cotton socks, woolen socks, combat boots, gas mask,
- canteen, mess kit, first-aid kit, trench knife, blanket, shelter-half , raincoat, bulletproof
- Bible, a pamphlet entitled 'Know Your Enemy,' another pamphlet entitled 'Why We
- Fight' and another pamphlet of German phrases rendered in English phonetics,, which
- would enable Weary to ask Germans questions such as 'Where is your headquarters?' and
- 'How many howitzers have you?' Or to tell them, 'Surrender. Your situation is hopeless,'
- and so on.
- Weary had a block of balsa wood which was supposed to be a foxhole pillow. He had a
- prophylactic kit containing two tough condoms 'For the Prevention of Disease Only!' He
- had a whistle he wasn't going to show anybody until he got promoted to corporal. He had
- a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony. He had
- made Billy Pilgrim admire that picture several times.
- The woman and the pony were posed before velvet draperies which were fringed with
- deedlee-balls. They were flanked by Doric columns. In front of one column was a potted
- palm. The Picture that Weary had was a print of the first dirty photograph in history. The
- word photography was first used in 1839, and it was in that year, too, that Louis J. M.
- Daguerre revealed to the French Academy that an image formed on a silvered metal plate
- covered with a thin film of silver iodide could be developed in the presence of mercury
- vapor.
- In 1841, only two years later, an assistant to Daguerre, André Le Fèvre, was arrested in
- the Tuileries Gardens for attempting to sell a gentleman a picture of the woman and the
- pony. That was where Weary bought his picture,, too-in the Tuileries. Le Fèvre argued
- that the picture was fine art, and that his intention was to make Greek mythology come
- alive. He said that columns and the potted palm proved that.
- When asked which myth he meant to represent, Le Fèvre, replied that there were
- thousands of myths like that, with the woman a mortal and the pony a god.
- He was sentenced to six months in prison. He died there of pneumonia. So it goes.
- Billy and the Scouts were skinny people. Roland Weary had fat to burn. He was a
- roaring furnace under all his layers of wool and straps and canvas. He had so much
- energy that he bustled back and forth between Billy and the scouts, delivering dumb
- messages which nobody had sent and which nobody was pleased to receive. He also
- began to suspect, since he was so much busier than anybody else, that he was the leader.
- He was so hot and bundled up, in fact, that he had no sense of danger. His vision of the
- outside world was limited to what he could see through a narrow slit between the rim of
- his helmet and his scarf from home, which concealed his baby face from the bridge of his
- nose on down. He was so snug in there that he was able to pretend that he was safe at
- home, having survived the war, and that he was telling his parents and his sister a true
- war story-whereas the true war story was still going on.
- Weary's version of the true war story went like this: There was a big German attack,
- and Weary and his antitank buddies fought like hell until everybody was killed but
- Weary. So it goes. And then Weary tied in with two scouts, and they became close
- friends immediately, and they decided to fight them way back to their own lines. They
- were going to travel fast. They were damned if they'd surrender. They shook hands all
- around. They called themselves 'The Three Musketeers.'
- But then this damn college kid, who was so weak he shouldn't even have been in the
- army, asked if he could come along. He didn't even have a gun or a knife. He didn't even
- have a helmet or a cap. He couldn't even walk right-kept bobbing up-and down, up-anddown,
- driving everybody crazy, giving their position away. He was pitiful. The Three
- Musketeers pushed and carried and dragged the college kid all the way back to their own
- lines, Weary's story went. They saved his God-damned hide for him.
- In. real life, Weary was retracing his steps, trying to find out what had happened to
- Billy. He had told the scouts to wait while he went back for the college bastard. He
- passed under a low branch now. It hit the top of his helmet with a clonk. Weary didn't
- hear it. Somewhere a big dog was barking. Weary didn't hear that, either. His war story
- was at a very exciting point. An officer was congratulating the Three Musketeers, telling
- them that he was going to put them in for Bronze Stars.
- 'Anything else I can do for you boys?' said the officer.
- 'Yes, sir,' said one of the scouts. 'We'd like to stick together for the rest of the war, sir.
- Is there some way you can fix it so nobody will ever break up the Three Musketeers?'
- Billy Pilgrim had stopped in the forest. He was leaning against a tree with his eyes
- closed. His head was tilted back and his nostrils were flaring. He was like a poet in the
- Parthenon.
- This was when Billy first came unstuck in time. His attention began to swing grandly
- through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light. There wasn't
- anybody else there, or any thing. There was just violet light and a hum.
- And then Billy swung into life again, going backwards until he was in pre-birth, which
- was red light and bubbling sounds. And then he swung into life again and stopped. He
- was a little boy taking a shower with his hairy father at the Ilium Y.M.C.A. He smelled
- chlorine from the swimming pool next door, heard the springboard boom.
- Little Billy was terrified, because his father had said Billy was going to learn to swim
- by the method of sink-or-swim. Ms father was going to throw Billy into the deep end, and
- Billy was going to damn well swim.
- It was like an execution. Billy was numb as his father carried him from the shower
- room to the pool. His eyes were closed. When he opened his eyes, he was on the bottom
- of the pool, and there was beautiful music everywhere. He lost consciousness, but the
- music went on. He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that.
- From there he traveled in time to 1965. He was forty-one years old, and he was visiting
- his decrepit mother at Pine Knoll, an old people's home he had put her in only a month
- before. She had caught pneumonia, and wasn't expected to live. She did live, though, for
- years after that.
- Her voice was nearly gone, so, in order to hear her, Billy had to put his ear right next to
- her papery lips. She evidently had something very important to say.
- 'How ...?' she began, and she stopped. She was too tired. She hoped that she wouldn’t
- have to say the rest of the sentence, and that Billy would finish it for her
- But Billy had no idea what was on her mind. 'How what, Mother?' he prompted.
- She swallowed hard, shed some tears. Then she gathered energy from all over her
- ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At last she bad accumulated enough to
- whisper this complete sentence:
- 'How did I get so old? '
- Billy's antique mother passed out, and Billy was led from the room by a pretty nurse.
- The body of an old man covered by a sheet was wheeled by just as Billy entered the
- corridor. The man had been a famous marathon runner in his day. So it goes. This was
- before Billy had his head broken in an airplane crash, by the way-before he became so
- vocal about flying saucers and traveling in time.
- Billy sat down in a waiting room. He wasn't a widower yet. He sensed something hard
- under the cushion of his overstuffed chair. He dug it out, discovered that it was a book,
- The Execution of Private Slovik, by William Bradford Huie. It was a true account of the
- death before an American fixing squad of private Eddie D. Slovik, 36896415, the only
- American soldier to be shot for cowardice since the Civil War. So it goes.
- Billy read the opinion of a staff judge advocate who reviewed Slovik's case, which
- ended like this: He has directly challenged the authority of the government, and future
- discipline depends upon a resolute reply to this challenge. If the death penalty is ever to
- be imposed for desertion, it should be imposed in this case, not as a punitive measure nor
- as retribution, but to maintain that discipline upon which alone an army can succeed
- against the enemy. There was no recommendation for clemency in the case and none is
- here recommended. So it goes.
- Billy blinked in 1965, traveled in time to 1958. He was at a banquet in honour of a
- Little League team of which his son Robert was a member. The coach, who had never
- been married, was speaking. He was all choked up. 'Honest to God,' he was Saying, 'I'd
- consider it an honor just to be water boy for these kids.'
- Billy blinked in 1958, traveled in time to 1961. It was New Year's Eve, and Billy was
- disgracefully drunk at a party where everybody was in optometry or married to an
- optometrist.
- Billy usually didn't drink much, because the war had ruined his stomach, but he
- certainly had a snootful now, and he was being unfaithful to his wife Valencia for the
- first and only time. He had somehow persuaded a woman to come into the laundry room
- of the house, and then sit up on the gas dryer, which was running.
- The woman was very drunk herself, and she helped Billy get her girdle off. 'What was
- it you wanted to talk about?' she said.
- 'It's all night,' said Billy. He honestly thought it was all right. He couldn't remember the
- name of the woman.
- 'How come they call you Billy instead of William?'
- 'Business reasons,' said Billy. That was true. His father-in-law, who owned the Ilium
- School of Optometry, who had set Billy up in practice, was a genius in his field. He told
- Billy to encourage people to call him Billy-because it would stick in their memories. It
- would also make him seem slightly magical, since there weren't any other grown Billys
- around. It also compelled people to think of him as a friend right away.
- Somewhere in there was an awful scene, with people expressing disgust for Billy and
- the woman, and Billy found himself out in his automobile, trying to find the steering
- wheel.
- The main thing now was to find the steering wheel. At first, Billy windmilled his arms,
- hoping to find it by luck. When that didn't work, he became methodical, working in such
- a way that the wheel could not possibly escape him. He placed himself hard against the
- left-hand door, searched every square inch of the area before him. When he failed to find
- the wheel, he moved over six inches, and searched again. Amazingly, he was eventually
- hard against the right-hand door, without having found the wheel. He concluded that
- somebody had stolen it. This angered him as he passed out.
- He was in the back seat of his car., which was why he couldn't find the steering wheel.
- Now somebody was shaking Billy awake. Billy stiff felt drunk, was still angered by the
- stolen steering wheel. He was back in the Second World War again, behind the German
- lines. The person who was shaking him was Roland Weary. Weary had gathered the front
- of Billy's field jacket into his hands. He banged Billy against a tree, then puffed him
- away from it, flung him in the direction he was supposed to take under his own power.
- Billy stopped, shook his head. 'You go on,' he said.
- 'What? '
- 'You guys go on without me. I'm all right.'
- 'You're what?'
- 'I'm O.K.'
- 'Jesus-I'd hate to see somebody sick,' said Weary, through five layers of humid scarf
- from home. Lilly had never seen Weary's face. He had tried to imagine it one time, had
- imagined a toad in a fishbowl.
- Weary kicked and shoved Billy for a quarter of a mile. The scouts were waiting
- between the banks of a frozen creek. They had heard the dog. They had heard men calling
- back and forth, too-calling like hunters who had a pretty good idea of where their quarry
- was.
- The banks of the creek were high enough to allow the scouts, to stand without being
- seen. Billy staggered down the bank ridiculously. After him came Weary, clanking and
- clinking and tinkling and hot.
- 'Here he is, boys,' said Weary. 'He don't want to live, but he's gonna live anyway.
- When he gets out of this, by God, he's gonna owe his life to the Three Musketeers. '
- Billy Pilgrim, there in the creekbed, thought he, Billy Pilgrim, was turning to steam
- painlessly. If everybody would leave him alone for just a little while, he thought, he
- wouldn't cause anybody any more trouble. He would turn to steam and float up among
- the treetops.
- Somewhere the big dog barked again. With the help of fear and echoes and winter
- silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong.
- Roland Weary, eighteen years old, insinuated himself between the scouts, draped a
- heavy arm around the shoulder of each. 'So what do the Three Musketeers do now?' he
- said.
- Billy Pilgrim was having a delightful hallucination. He was wearing dry, warm, white
- sweatsocks, and he was skating on a ballroom floor. Thousands cheered. This wasn't
- time-travel. it had never happened, never would happen. It was the craziness of a dying
- young man with his shoes full of snow.
- One scout hung his head, let spit fall from his lips. The other did the same. They
- studied the infinitesimal effects of spit on snow and history. They were small, graceful
- people. They had been behind German lines before many times- living like woods
- creatures, living from moment to moment in useful terror, thinking brainlessly with their
- spinal cords.
- Now they twisted out from under Weary's loving arms. They told Weary that he and
- Billy had better find somebody to surrender to. The Scouts weren't going to wait for them
- any more.
- And they ditched Weary and Billy in the creekbed.
- Billy Pilgrim went on skating, doing tricks in sweat-socks, tricks that most people
- would consider impossible-making turns, stopping on a dime and so on. The cheering
- went on, but its tone was altered as the hallucination gave way to time-travel.
- Billy stopped skating, found himself at a lectern in a Chinese restaurant in Ilium, New
- York, on an early afternoon in the autumn of 1957. He was receiving a standing ovation
- from the Lions Club. He had just been elected President, and it was necessary that he
- speak. He was scared stiff, thought a ghastly mistake had been made. AR those
- prosperous, solid men out there would discover now that they had elected a ludicrous
- waif. They would hear his reedy voice, the one he'd had in the war. He swallowed, knew
- that all he -had for a voice box was a little whistle cut from a willow switch. Worse-he
- had nothing to say. The crowd quieted down. Everybody was pink and beaming.
- Billy opened his mouth, and out came a deep, resonant tone. His voice was a gorgeous
- instrument. It told jokes which brought down the house. It grew serious, told jokes again,
- and ended on a note of humility. The explanation of the miracle was this: Billy had taken
- a course in public speaking.
- And then he was back in the bed of the frozen creek again. Roland Weary was about to
- beat the living shit out of him.
- Weary was filled with a tragic wrath. He had been ditched again. He stuffed his pistol
- into its holster. He slipped his knife into its scabbard. Its triangular blade and blood
- gutters on all three faces. And then he shook Billy hard, rattled his skeleton, slammed
- him against a bank.
- Weary barked and whimpered through his layers of scarf from home. He spoke
- unintelligibly of the sacrifices he had made on Billy's behalf. He dilated upon the piety
- and heroism of 'The Three Musketeers,' portrayed, in the most glowing and impassioned
- hues, their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves,
- and the great services they rendered to Christianity,
- It was entirely Billy's fault that this fighting organization no longer existed, Weary felt,
- and Billy was going to pay. Weary socked Billy a good one on the side of the jaw,
- knocked Billy away from the bank and onto the snow-covered ice of the creek. Billy was
- down on all fours on the ice, and Weary kicked him in the ribs, rolled him over on his
- side. Billy tried to form himself into a ball.
- 'You shouldn't even be in the Army,' said Weary.
- Billy was involuntarily making convulsive sounds that were a lot like laughter. 'You
- think it's funny, huh?' Weary inquired. He walked around to Billy's back. Billy's jacket
- and shirt and undershirt had been hauled up around his shoulders by the violence, so his
- back was naked. There, inches from the tips of Weary's combat boots, were the pitiful
- buttons of Billy's spine.
- Weary drew back his right boot, aimed a kick at the spine, at the tube which had so
- many of Billy's important wires in it. Weary was going to break that tube.
- But then Weary saw that he had an audience. Five German soldiers and a police dog on
- a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The soldiers' blue eyes were filled
- with bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so
- far from home, and why the victim should laugh.
- Three
- The Germans and the dog were engaged in a military operation which had an amusingly
- self-explanatory name, a human enterprise which is seldom described in detail, whose
- name alone, when reported as news or history, gives many war enthusiasts a sort of postcoital
- satisfaction. It is, in the imagination of combat's fans, the divinely listless loveplay
- that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called 'mopping up.'
- The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German
- shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her legs. She had been borrowed that
- morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game
- was being played. Her mine was Princess.
- Two of the Germans were boys in their early teens. Two were ramshackle old me
- droolers as toothless as carp. They were irregulars, armed and clothed fragmentarily with
- junk taken from real soldiers who were newly dead. So it goes. They were farmers from
- just across the German border, not far away.
- Their commanander was a middle-aged corporal-red-eyed., scrawny, tough as dried
- beef, sick of war. He had been wounded four times-and patched up, and sent back to war.
- He was a very good soldier-about to quit, about to find somebody to surrender to. His
- bandy legs were thrust into golden cavalry boots which he had taken from a dead
- Hungarian colonel on the Russian front. So it goes.
- Those boots were almost all he owned in this world. They were his home. An
- anecdote: One time a recruit was watching him bone and wax those golden boots, and he
- held one up to the recruit and said, 'If you look in there deeply enough, you'll see Adam
- and Eve.'
- Billy Pilgrim had not heard this anecdote. But, lying on the black ice there, Billy stared
- into the patina of the corporal's boots, saw Adam and Eve in the golden depths. They
- were naked. They were so innocent, so vulnerable, so eager to behave decently. Billy
- Pilgrim loved them.
- Next to the golden boots were a pair of feet which were swaddled in rags. They were
- crisscrossed by canvas straps, were shod with hinged wooden clogs. Billy looked up at
- the face that went with the clogs. It was the face of a blond angel of fifteen-year-old boy.
- The boy was as beautiful as Eve.
- Billy was helped to his feet by the lovely boy, by the heavenly androgyne. And the
- others came forward to dust the snow off Billy., and then they searched him for weapons.
- He didn't have any. The most dangerous thing they found on his person was a two-inch
- pencil stub.
- Three inoffensive bangs came from far away. They came from German rifles. The two
- scouts who had ditched Billy and Weary had just been shot. They had been lying in
- ambush for Germans. They had been discovered and shot from behind. Now they were
- dying in the snow, feeling nothing, turning the snow to the color of raspberry sherbet. So
- it goes. So Roland Weary was the last of the Three Musketeers.
- And Weary, bug-eyed with terror, was being disarmed. The corporal gave Weary's
- pistol to the pretty boy. He marveled at Weary's cruel trench knife, said in German that
- Weary would no doubt like to use the knife on him, to tear his face off with the spiked
- knuckles, to stick the blade into his belly or throat. He spoke no English, and Billy and
- Weary understood no German.
- 'Nice playthings you have, the corporal told Weary, and he handed the knife to an old
- man. 'Isn't that a pretty thing? Hmmm?
- He tore open Weary's overcoat and blouse. Brass buttons flew like popcorn. The
- corporal reached into Weary's gaping bosom as though he meant to tear out his pounding
- heart, but he brought out Weary's bulletproof Bible instead.
- A bullet-proof Bible is a Bible small enough to be slipped into a soldier's breast
- pocket, over his heart. It is sheathed in steel.
- The corporal found the dirty picture of the woman and the pony in Weary's hip pocket.
- 'What a lucky pony, eh?' he said. "Hmmmm? Hmmmm? Don't you wish you were that
- pony?' He handed the picture to the other old man. 'Spoils of war! It's all yours, you lucky
- lad.'
- Then he made Weary sit down in the snow and take off his combat boots, which he
- gave to the beautiful boy. He gave Weary, the boy's clogs. So Weary and Billy were both
- without decent military footwear now' and they had to walk for miles and miles, with
- Weary's clogs clacking, with Billy bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down, crashing into
- Weary from time to time.
- 'Excuse me,' Billy would say, or 'I beg your pardon.'
- They were brought at last to a stone cottage at a fork in the road. It was a collecting
- point for prisoners of war. Billy and Weary were taken inside, where it was warm and
- smoky. There vas a fire sizzling and popping in the fireplace. The fuel was furniture.
- There were about twenty other Americans in there, sitting on the floor with their backs to
- the wall, staring into the flames-thinking whatever there was to think, which was zero.
- Nobody talked. Nobody had any good war stories to tell.
- Billy and Weary found places for themselves, and Billy went to sleep with his head on
- the shoulder of an unprotesting captain. The captain was a chaplain. He was a rabbi. He
- had been shot through the hand.
- Billy traveled in time, opened his eyes, found himself staring into the glass eyes of a
- jade green mechanical owl. The owl was hanging upside down from a rod of stainless
- steel. The owl was Billy's optometer in his office in Ilium. An optometer is an instrument
- for measuring refractive errors in eyes-in order that corrective lenses may be prescribed.
- Billy had fallen asleep while examining a female patient who was m a chair on the
- other side of the owl. He had fallen asleep at work before. It had been funny at first. Now
- Billy was starting to get worried about it, about his mind in general. He tried to remember
- how old he was, couldn't. He tried to remember what year it was. He couldn't remember
- that, either.
- 'Doctor,' said the patient tentatively.
- 'Hm?' he said.
- 'You're so quiet.'
- 'Sorry.'
- 'You were talking away there-and then you got so quiet'
- 'Um.'
- 'You see something terrible?' 'Terrible?'
- 'Some disease in my eyes?'
- 'No, no,' said Billy, wanting to doze again. 'Your eyes are fine. You just need glasses
- for reading.' He told her to go across the corridor-to see the wide selection of frames
- there.
- When she was gone, Billy opened the drapes and was no wiser as to what was outside.
- The view was still blocked by a venetian blind., which he hoisted clatteringly. Bright
- sunlight came crashing in. There were thousands of parked automobiles out there,
- twinkling on a vast lake of blacktop. Billy's office was part of a suburban shopping
- center.
- Right outside the window was Billy's own Cadillac El Dorado Coupe de Ville. He read
- the stickers on the bumper. 'Visit Ausable Chasm,' said one. 'Support Your Police
- Department,' said another. There was a third. 'Impeach Earl Warren it said. The stickers
- about the police and Earl Warren were gifts from Billy's father-in-law, a member of the
- John Birch Society. The date on the license plate was 1967, which would make Billy
- Pilgrim forty-four years old. He asked himself this: 'Where have all the years gone?'
- Billy turned his attention to his desk. There was an open copy of The Review of
- Optometry there. It was opened to an editorial, which Billy now read, his lips moving
- slightly.
- What happens in 1968 will rule the fare of European optometrists for at least 50 years!
- Billy read. With this warning, Jean Thiriart, Secretary of the National Union of Belgium
- Opticians, is pressing for formation of a 'European Optometry Society.' The alternatives,
- he says, will be the obtaining of Professional status, or, by 1971, reduction to the role of
- spectacle-sellers.
- Billy Pilgrim tried hard to care.
- A siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting the Third World War at
- any time. The siren was simply announcing high noon. It was housed in a cupola atop a
- firehouse across the street from Billy's office.
- Billy closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was back in the Second World War
- again. His head was on the wounded rabbi's shoulder. A German was kicking his feet,
- telling him to wake up, that it was time to move on.
- The Americans, with Billy among them, formed a fools' parade on the road outside.
- There was a photographer present, a German war correspondent with a Leica. He took
- pictures of Billy's and Roland Weary's feet. The picture was widely published two days
- later as heartening evidence of how miserably equipped the American Army often was,
- despite its reputation for being rich.
- The photographer wanted something more lively, though, a picture of an actual
- capture. So the guards staged one for him. They threw Billy into shrubbery. When Billy
- came out of the shrubbery, his face wreathed in goofy good will, they menaced him with
- their machine pistols, as though they were capturing him then.
- Billy's smile as he came out of the shrubbery was at least as peculiar as Mona Lisa's,
- for he was simultaneously on foot in Germany in 1944 and riding his Cadillac in 1967.
- Germany dropped away, and 1967 became bright and clear, free of interference from any
- other time. Billy was on his way to a Lions Club luncheon meeting. It was a hot August,
- but Billy's car was air-conditioned. He was stopped by a signal in the middle of Ilium's
- black ghetto. The people who lived here hated it so much that they had burned down a lot
- of it a month before. It was all they had, and they'd wrecked it. The neighborhood
- reminded Billy of some of the towns he had seen in the war. The curbs and sidewalks
- were crushed in many places, showing where the National Guard tanks and half-tracks
- had been.
- 'Blood brother,' said a message written in pink paint on the side of a shattered grocery
- store.
- There was a tap on Billy's car window. A black man was out there. He wanted to talk
- about something. The light had changed. Billy did the simplest thing. He drove on.
- Billy drove through a scene of even greater desolation. It looked like Dresden after it
- was fire-bombed-like the surface of the moon. The house where Billy had grown up used
- to be somewhere in what was so empty now. This was urban renewal. A new Ilium
- Government Center and a Pavilion of the Arts and a Peace Lagoon and high-rise
- apartment buildings were going up here soon.
- That was all right with Billy Pilgrim.
- The speaker at the Lions Club meeting was a major in the Marines. He said that
- Americans had no choice but to keep fighting in Vietnam until they achieved victory or
- until the Communists realized that they could not force their way of life -on weak
- countries. The major had been there on two separate tours of duty. He told of many
- terrible and many wonderful things he had seen. He was in favor of increased bombings,
- of bombing North Vietnam back into the Stone Age, if it refused to see reason.
- Billy was not moved to protest the bombing of North Vietnam-, did not shudder about
- the hideous things he himself had seen bombing do. He was simply having lunch with
- the Lions Club, of which he was past president now.
- Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping
- going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the
- prayer on Billy's wall told him that it helped them to keep going,, too. It went like this
- GOD GRANT ME
- THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT
- THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE
- COURAGE
- TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,
- AND WISDOM ALWAYS
- TO TELL THE
- DIFFERENCE.
- Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present and the
- future.
- Now he was being introduced to the Marine major. The person who was performing
- the introduction was telling the major that Billy was a veteran., and that Billy had a son
- who was a sergeant in the Green Berets-in Vietnam.
- The major told Billy that the Green Berets were doing a great job, and that he should
- be proud of his son.
- 'I am. I certainly am,' said Billy Pilgrim.
- He went home for a nap after lunch. He was under doctor's orders to take a nap every
- day. The doctor hoped that this would relieve a complaint that Billy had: Every so often,
- for no apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping. Nobody had ever
- caught Billy doing it. Only the doctor knew. It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did,
- and not very moist.
- Billy owned a lovely Georgian home in Ilium. He was rich as Croesus, something he
- had never expected to be, not in a million years. He had five other optometrists working
- for him in the shopping plaza location, and netted over sixty thousand dollars a year. In
- addition, he owned a fifth of the new Holiday Inn out on Route 54, and -half of three
- Tastee-Freeze stands. Tastee-Freeze was a sort of frozen custard. It gave all the pleasure
- that ice cream could give, without the stiffness and bitter coldness of ice cream.
- Billy's home was empty. His daughter Barbara was about to get warned, and she and
- his wife had gone downtown to pick out patterns for her crystal and silverware. There
- was a note saying so on the kitchen table. There were no servants. People just weren't
- interested in careers in domestic service anymore. There wasn't a dog, either.
- There used to be a dog named Spot, but he died. So it goes. Billy had liked Spot a lot,
- and Spot had liked him.
- Billy went up the carpeted stairway and into his and his wife's bedroom. The room had
- flowered wallpaper. There was a double bed with a clock-radio on a table beside it. Also
- on the table were controls for the electric blanket, and a switch to turn on a gentle
- vibrator which was bolted to the springs of the box mattress. The trade name of the
- vibrator was 'Magic Fingers.' The vibrator was the doctor's idea, too.
- Billy took off his tri-focals and his coat and his necktie and his shoes, and he closed the
- venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But
- sleep would not come. Tears came instead. They seeped. Billy turned on the Magic
- Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept.
- The doorchimes rang. Billy got off the bed and looked down through a window at the
- front doorstep, to see if somebody important had come to call. There was a crippled man
- down there, as spastic in space as Billy Pilgrim was in time. Convulsions made the man
- dance flappingly all the time, made him change his expressions, too, as though he were
- trying to imitate various famous movie stars.
- Another cripple was ringing a doorbell across the street. He was an crutches. He had
- only one leg. He was so jammed between his crutches that his shoulders hid his ears.
- Billy knew what the cripples were up to: They were selling subscriptions to magazines
- that would never come. People subscribed to them because the salesmen were so pitiful.
- Billy had heard about this racket from a speaker at the Lions Club two weeks before--a
- man from the Better Business Bureau. The man said that anybody who saw cripples
- working a neighbourhood for magazine subscriptions should call the police.
- Billy looked down the street, saw a new, Buick Riviera parked about half a block
- away. There was a man in it, and Billy assumed correctly that he was the man who had
- hired the cripples to do this thing. Billy went on weeping as he contemplated the cripples
- and their boss. His doorchimes clanged hellishly.
- He closed his eyes, and opened them again. lie was still weeping, but he was back in
- Luxembourg again. He was marching with a lot of other prisoners. It was a winter wind
- that was bringing tears to his eyes.
- Ever since Billy had been thrown into shrubbery for the sake of the picture, he had
- been seeing Saint Elmo's fire, a sort of electronic radiance around the heads of his
- companions and captors. It was in the treetops and on the rooftops of Luxembourg, too. It
- was beautiful.
- Billy was marching with his hands on top of his head, and so were all the other
- Americans. Billy was bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down. Now he crashed into Roland
- Weary accidentally. 'I beg your pardon,' he said.
- Weary's eyes were tearful also. Weary was crying because of horrible pains in his feet.
- The hinged clogs were transforming his feet into blood puddings.
- At each road intersection Billy's group was joined by more Americans with their hands
- on top of their haloed heads. Billy had smiled for them all. They were moving like water,
- downhill all the time, and they flowed at last to a main highway on a valley's floor.
- Through the valley flowed a Mississippi of humiliated Americans. Tens of thousands of
- Americans shuffled eastward, their hands clasped on top of their heads. They sighed and
- groaned.
- Billy and his group joined the river of humiliation, and the late afternoon sun came out
- from the clouds. The Americans didn't have the road to themselves. The west-bound lane
- boiled and boomed with vehicles which were rushing German reserves to the front. The
- reserves were violent, windburned, bristly men. They had teeth like piano keys.
- They were festooned with machine-gun belts, smoked cigars, and guzzled booze. They
- took wolfish bites from sausages, patted their horny palms with potato-masher grenades.
- One soldier in black was having a drunk herd's picnic all by himself on top of a tank.
- He spit on the Americans. The spit hit Roland Weary's shoulder, gave Weary a
- fourragière of snot and blutwurst and tobacco juice, and Schnapps.
- Billy found the afternoon stingingly exciting. There was so much to see-dragon's teeth,
- killing machine, corpses with bare feet that were blue and ivory. So it goes.
- Bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down, Billy beamed lovingly at a bright lavender
- farmhouse that had been spattered with machine-gun bullets. Standing in its cock-eyed
- doorway was a German colonel. With him was his unpainted whore.
- Billy crashed into Weary's shoulder, and Weary cried out sobbingly. 'Walk right! Walk
- right!'
- They were climbing a gentle rise now. When they reached the top, they weren't in
- Luxembourg any more. They were in Germany.
- A motion-picture camera was set up at the border-to record the fabulous victory. Two
- civilians in bearskin coats were leaning on the camera when Billy and Weary came by.
- They had run out of film hours ago.
- One of them singled out Billy's face for a moment, then focused at infinity again.
- There was a tiny plume of smoke at infinity. There was a battle there. People were dying
- there. So it goes.
- And the sun went down, and Billy found himself bobbing in place in a railroad yard.
- There were rows and rows of boxcars waiting. They had brought reserves to the front.
- Now they were going to take prisoners into Germany's interior.
- Flashlight beams danced crazily.
- The Germans sorted out the prisoners according to rank. They put sergeants with
- sergeants, majors with majors, and so on. A squad of full colonels was halted near Billy.
- One of them had double pneumonia. He had a high fever and vertigo. As the railroad yard
- dipped and swooped around the colonel, he tried to hold himself steady by staring into
- Billy's eyes.
- The colonel coughed and coughed, and then he said to Billy, 'You one of my boys?'
- This was a man who had lost an entire regiment, about forty-five hundred men-a lot of
- them children, actually. Billy didn't reply. The question made no sense.
- 'What was your outfit?' said the colonel. He coughed and coughed. Every time he
- inhaled his lungs rattled like greasy paper bags.
- Billy couldn't remember the outfit he was from.
- 'You from the Four-fifty-first?'
- 'Four-fifty-first what?' said Billy.
- There was a silence. 'Infantry regiment,' said the colonel at last.
- 'Oh,' said Billy Pilgrim.
- There was another long silence, with the colonel dying and dying, drowning where he
- stood. And then he cited out wetly, 'It's me, boys! It's Wild Bob!' That is what he had
- always wanted his troops to call him: 'Wild Bob.'
- None of the people who could hear him were actually from his regiment, except for
- Roland Weary, and Weary wasn't listening. All Weary could think of was the agony in
- his own feet.
- But the colonel imagined that he was addressing his beloved troops for the last time,
- and he told them that they had nothing to be ashamed of, that there were dead Germans
- all over the battlefield who wished to God that they had never heard of the Four-fiftyfirst.
- He said that after the war he was going to have a regimental reunion in his home
- town, which was Cody, Wyoming. He was going to barbecue whole steers.
- He said all this while staring into Billy's eyes. He made the inside of poor Bill's skull
- echo with balderdash. 'God be with you, boys!' he said, and that echoed and echoed. And
- then he said. 'If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!' I was there. So
- was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare.
- Billy Pilgrim was packed into a boxcar with many other privates. He and Roland
- Weary were separated. Weary was packed into another car in the same train.
- There were narrow ventilators at the comers of the car, under the eaves. Billy stood by
- one of these, and, as the crowd pressed against him, he climbed part way up a diagonal
- comer brace to make more room. 'Ms placed his eyes on a level with the ventilator, so he
- could see another train about ten yards away.
- Germans were writing on the cars with blue chalk-the number of persons in each car,
- their rank, their nationality, the date on which they had been put aboard. Other Germans
- were securing the hasps on the car doors with wire and spikes and other trackside trash.
- Billy could hear somebody writing on his car, too, but he couldn't see who was doing it.
- Most of the privates on Billy's car were very young-at the end of childhood. But
- crammed into the comer with Billy was a former hobo who was forty years old.
- 'I been hungrier than this,' the hobo told Billy. 'I been m worse places than this. This
- ain't so bad.'
- A man in a boxcar across the way called out through the ventilator that a man. had just
- died in there. So it goes. There were four guards who heard him. They weren't excited by
- the news.
- 'Yo, yo,' said one, nodding dreamily. 'Yo, yo.'
- And the guards didn't open the car with the dead man in it. They opened the next car
- instead, and Billy Pilgrim was enchanted by what was in there. It was like heaven. There
- was candlelight, and there were bunks with quilts and blankets heaped on them. There
- was a cannonball stove with a steaming coffeepot on top. There was a table with a bottle
- of wine and a loaf of bread and a sausage on it. There were four bowls of soup.
- There were pictures of castles and lakes and pretty girls on the walls. This was the
- rolling home of the railroad guards, men whose business it was to be forever guarding
- freight rolling from here to there. The four guards went inside and closed the door.
- A little while later they came out smoking cigars, talking contentedly in the mellow
- lower register of the German language. One of them saw Billy's face at the ventilator. He
- wagged a finger at him in affectionate warning, telling him to be a good boy.
- The Americans across the way told the guards again about the dead man on their car.
- The guards got a stretcher out of their own cozy car, opened the dead man's car and went
- inside. The dead man's car wasn't crowded at all. There were just six live colonels in
- there-and one dead one.
- The Germans carried the corpse out. The corpse was Wild Bob. So it goes.
- During the night, some of the locomotives began to tootle to one another, and then to
- move. The locomotive and the last car of each train were marked with a striped banner of
- orange and black, indicating that the train was not fair game for airplanes that it was
- carrying prisoners of war.
- The war was nearly over. The locomotives began to move east in late December. The
- war would end in May. German prisons everywhere were absolutely full, and there was
- no longer any food for the prisoners to eat, and no longer any fuel to keep them warm.
- And yet-here came more prisoners.
- Billy Pilgrim's train, the longest train of all, did not move for two days.
- 'This ain't bad,' the hobo told Billy on the second day. 'This ain't nothing at all.'
- Billy looked out through the ventilator. The railroad yard was a desert now, except for
- a hospital train marked with red crosses-on a siding far, far away. Its locomotive
- whistled. The locomotive of Billy Pilgrim's train whistled back. They were saying,
- 'Hello.'
- Even though Billy's train wasn't moving., its boxcars were kept locked tight. Nobody
- was to get off until the final destination. To the guards who walked up and down outside,
- each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its
- ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and
- loaves of blackbread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language.
- Human beings in there were excreting into steel helmets, which were passed to the
- people at the ventilators, who dumped them. Billy was a dumper. The human beings also
- passed canteens, which guards would fill with water. When food came in, the human
- beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared.
- Human beings in there took turns standing or lying down. The legs of those who stood
- were like fence posts driven into a warm., squirming, fatting, sighing earth. The queer
- earth was a mosaic of sleepers who nestled like spoons.
- Now the train began to creep eastward.
- Somewhere in there was Christmas. Billy Pilgrim nestled like a spoon with the hobo
- on Christmas night, and he fell asleep, and he traveled in time to 1967 again-to the night
- he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from Tralfamadore.
- Four
- Billy Pilgrim could not sleep on his daughters wedding night. He was forty-four. The
- wedding had taken place that afternoon in a gaily striped tent in Billy's backyard. The
- stripes were orange and black.
- Billy and his wife, Valencia, nestled like spoons in their big double bed. They were
- jiggled by Magic Fingers. Valencia didn't need to be jiggled to sleep. Valencia was
- snoring like a bandsaw. The poor woman didn't have ovaries or a uterus any more.
- They had been removed by a surgeon-by one of Billy's partners in the New Holiday
- Inn.
- There was a full moon.
- Billy got out of bed in the moonlight. He felt spooky and luminous felt as though he
- were wrapped in cool fur that was full of static electricity. He looked down at his bare
- feet. They were ivory and blue.
- Billy now shuffled down his upstairs hallway, knowing he was about to be kidnapped
- by a flying saucer. The hallway was zebra-striped with darkness and moonlight. The
- moonlight came into the hallway through doorways of the empty rooms of Billy's two
- children, children no more. They were gone forever. Billy was guided by dread and the
- lack of dread. Dread told him when to stop. Lack of it told him when to move again. He
- stopped.
- He went into his daughter's room. Her drawers were dumped. her closet was empty.
- Heaped in the middle of the room were all the possessions she could not take on a
- honeymoon. She had a Princess telephone extension all her own-on her windowsill Its
- tiny night light stared at Billy. And then it rang.
- Billy answered. There was a drunk on the other end. Billy could almost smell his
- breath-mustard gas and roses. It was a wrong number. Billy hung up. There was a soft
- drink bottle on the windowsill. Its label boasted that it contained no nourishment
- whatsoever.
- Billy Pilgrim padded downstairs on his blue and ivory feet. He went into the kitchen,
- where the moonlight called his attention to a half bottle of champagne on the kitchen
- table, all that was left from the reception in the tent. Somebody had stoppered it again.
- Drink me,' it seemed to say.
- So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn't make a pop. The champagne was dead.
- So it goes.
- Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer
- came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the
- television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then
- forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and
- the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
- American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from
- an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards,
- sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the
- same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards
- to join the formation.
- The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers
- opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires,
- gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of
- the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had
- miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck
- more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded
- Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though,
- German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
- When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks
- and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night
- and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals.
- Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to
- specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide
- them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
- The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler
- turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was
- extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception,
- conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
- Billy saw the war movies backwards then forwards-and then it was time to go out into
- his backyard to meet the flying saucer. Out he went, his blue and ivory feet crushing the
- wet salad of the lawn. He stopped, took a swig, of the dead champagne. It was like 7-Up.
- He would not raise his eyes to the sky, though he knew there was a flying saucer from
- Tralfamadore up there. He would see it soon enough, inside and out, and he would see,
- too, where it came from soon enough-soon enough.
- Overhead he heard the cry of what might have been a melodious owl, but it wasn't a
- melodious owl. It was a flying saucer from Tralfamadore, navigating in both space and
- time, therefore seeming to Billy Pilgrim to have come from nowhere all at once.
- Somewhere a big dog barked.
- The saucer was one hundred feet in diameter, with portholes around its rim. The light
- from the portholes was a pulsing purple. The only noise it made was the owl song. It came
- down to hover over Billy, and to enclose him in a cylinder of pulsing in purple light.
- Now there was the sound of a seeming kiss as an airtight hatch in the bottom of the
- saucer was opened. Down snaked a ladder that was outlined in pretty lights like a Ferris
- wheel.
- Billy's will was paralyzed by a zap gun aimed at him from one of the portholes. It
- became imperative that he take hold of the bottom rung of the sinuous ladder, which he
- did. The rung was electrified, so that Billy's hands locked onto it hard. He was hauled
- into the airlock, and machinery closed the bottom door. Only then did the ladder, wound
- onto a reel in the airlock, let him go. Only then did Billy's brain start working again.
- There were two peepholes inside the airlock-with yellow eyes pressed to them. There
- was a speaker on the wall. The Tralfamadorians had no voice boxes. They communicated
- telepathicary. They were able to talk to Billy by means of a computer and a sort of
- electric organ which made every Earthling speech sound.
- 'Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim,' said the loudspeaker. 'Any questions?'
- Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: 'Why me? '
- That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that
- matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs
- trapped in amber?'
- 'Yes.' Billy in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber
- with three ladybugs embedded in it.
- 'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.'
- They introduced an anesthetic into Billy's atmosphere now, put him to sleep. They
- carded him to a cabin where he was strapped to a yellow Barca-Lounger which they had
- stolen from a Sears & Roebuck warehouse. The hold of the saucer was crammed with
- other stolen merchandise, which would be used to furnish Billy's artificial habitat in a zoo
- on Tralfamadore.
- The terrific acceleration of the saucer as it left Earth twisted Billy's slumbering body,
- distorted his face, dislodged him m time, sent him back to the war.
- When he regained consciousness, he wasn't on the flying saucer. He was in a boxcar
- crossing Germany again.
- Some people were rising from the floor of the car, and others were lying down. Billy
- planned to He down, too. It would be lovely to sleep. It was black in the car, and black
- outside the car, which seemed to be about two miles an hour. The car never seemed to go
- any faster than that. It was a long time between clicks, between joints in the track. There
- would be a click, and then a year would go by, and then there would be another click
- The train often stopped to let really important trains bawl and hurtle by. Another thing
- it did was stop on sidings near prisons, leaving a few cars there. It was creeping across all
- of Germany, growing shorter all the time.
- And Billy let himself down oh so gradually now, hanging onto the diagonal crossbrace
- in the comer in order to make himself seem nearly weightless to those he was
- joining on the floor. He knew it was important that he made himself nearly ghostlike
- when lying down. He had forgotten why, but a reminder soon came.
- 'Pilgrim,' said a person he was about to nestle with, 'is that you?'
- Billy didn't say anything, but nestled very politely, closed his eyes.
- 'God damn it' said the person. 'That is you, isn't it?' He sat up and explored Billy rudely
- with his hands. 'It's you, all right. Get the hell out of here.'
- Now Billy sat up, too-wretched, close to tears.
- 'Get out of here! I want to sleep!'
- 'Shut up,' said somebody else.
- 'I'll shut up when Pilgrim gets away from here.'
- So Billy stood up again, clung to the cross-brace. 'Where can I sleep?' he asked
- quietly.
- 'Not with me.'
- 'Not with me, you son of a bitch,' said somebody else. 'You yell. You kick.'
- 'I do?'
- "You're God damn right you do. And whimper.'
- 'I do?'
- 'Keep the hell away from here., Pilgrim.'
- And now there was an acrimonious madrigal, with parts sung in all quarters of the car.
- Nearly everybody seemingly, had an atrocity story of something Billy Pilgrim had done
- to him in his sleep. Everybody told Billy Pilgrim to keep the hell away.
- So Billy Pilgrim had to sleep standing up, or not sleep at all. And food had stopped
- coming in through the ventilators, and the days and nights were colder all the time.
- On the eighth day, the forty-year-old hobo said to Billy, 'This ain't bad. I can be
- comfortable anywhere.'
- 'You can?' said Billy.
- On the ninth day, the hobo died. So it goes. His last words were, 'You think this is bad?
- This ain't bad.'
- There was something about death and the ninth day. There was a death on the ninth
- day in the car ahead of Billy's too. Roland Weary died-of gangrene that had started in his
- mangled feet. So it goes.
- Weary, in his nearly continuous delirium, told again and again of the Three
- Musketeers, acknowledged that he was dying, gave many messages to be delivered to his
- family in Pittsburgh. Above all, he wanted to be avenged, so he said again and again the
- name of the person who had killed him. Everyone on the car learned the lesson well.
- 'Who killed me?" he would ask.
- And everybody knew the answer., which was this: "Billy Pilgrim.'
- Listen- on the tenth night the peg was pulled out of the hasp on Billy's boxcar door,
- and the door was opened. Billy Pilgrim was lying at an angle on the corner-brace, selfcrucified,
- holding himself there with a blue and ivory claw hooked over the- sill of the
- ventilator. Billy coughed -when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin
- gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac
- Newton. This law tells us that for every action there is a reaction which is equal and
- opposite in direction.
- This can be useful in rocketry.
- The train had arrived on a siding by a prison which was originally constructed as an
- extermination camp for Russian prisoners of war.
- The guards peeked inside Billy's car owlishly, cooed calmingly. They had never dealt
- with Americans before, but they surely understood this general sort of freight. They knew
- that it was essentially a liquid which could be induced to flow slowly toward cooing and
- light. It was nighttime.
- The only light outside came from a single bulb which hung from a pole-high and far
- away. All was quiet outside, except for the guards, who cooed like doves. And the liquid
- began to flow. Gobs of it built up in the doorway, plopped to the ground.
- Billy was the next-to-last human being to reach the door. The hobo was the last. The
- hobo could not flow, could not plop. He wasn't liquid any more. He was stone. So it goes.
- Billy didn't. want to drop from the car to the ground. He sincerely believed that he
- would shatter like glass. So the guards helped him down, cooing still. They set him down
- facing the train. It was such a dinky train now.
- There was a locomotive, a tender, and three little boxcars. The last boxcar was the
- railroad guards' heaven on wheels. Again-in that heaven on wheels-the table was set.
- Dinner was served.
- At the base of the pole from which the light bulb hung were three seeming haystacks.
- The Americans were wheedled and teased over to those three stacks, which weren't hay
- after all. They were overcoats taken from prisoners who were dead. So it goes.
- It was the guards' firmly expressed wish that every American without an overcoat
- should take one. The coats were cemented together with ice, so the guards used their
- bayonets as ice picks, pricking free collars and hems and sleeves and so on, then peeling
- off coats and handing them out at random. The coats were stiff and dome-shaped, having
- conformed to their piles.
- The coat that Billy Pilgrim got had been crumpled and frozen in such a way, and was
- so small, that it appeared to be not a coat but a sort of large black, three-cornered hat.
- There were gummy stains on it, too, like crankcase drainings or old strawberry jam.
- There seemed to be a dead, furry animal frozen to it. The animal was in fact the coat's fur
- collar.
- Billy glanced dully at the coats of his neighbors. Their coats all had brass buttons or
- tinsel or piping or numbers or stripes or eagles or moons or stars dangling from them.
- They were soldiers' coats. Billy was the only one who had a coat from a dead civilian. So
- it goes.
- And Billy and the rest were encouraged to shuffle around their dinky train and into the
- prison camp. There wasn't anything warm or lively to attract them-merely long, low,
- narrow sheds by the thousands, with no lights inside.
- Somewhere a dog barked. With the help of fear and echoes and winter silences, that
- dog had a voice like a big bronze gong.
- Billy and the rest were wooed through gate after gate, and Billy saw his first Russian.
- The man was all alone in the night-a ragbag with a round, flat face that glowed like a
- radium dial.
- Billy passed within a yard of him. There was barbed wire between them. The Russian
- did not wave or speak, but he looked directly into Billy's soul with sweet hopefulness, as
- though Billy might have good news for him-news he might be too stupid to understand,
- but good news all the same.
- Billy blacked out as he walked through gate after gate. He came to what he thought
- might be a building on Tralfamadore. It was shrilly lit and lined with white tiles. It was
- on Earth, though. It was a delousing station through which all new prisoners had to pass.
- Billy did as he was told, took off his clothes. That was the first thing they told him to
- do on Tralfamadore, too.
- A German measured Billy's upper right arm with his thumb and forefinger, asked a
- companion what sort of an army would send a weakling like that to the front. They
- looked at the other American bodies now, pointed out a lot more that were nearly as bad
- as Billy's.
- One of the best bodies belonged to the oldest American by far, a high school teacher
- from Indianapolis. His name was Edgar Derby. He hadn't been in Billy's boxcar. He'd
- been in Roland Weary's car, had cradled Weary's head while he died. So it goes. Derby
- was forty-four years old. He was so old he had a son who was a marine in the Pacific
- theater of war.
- Derby had pulled political wires to get into the army at his age. The subject he had
- taught in Indianapolis was Contemporary Problems in Western Civilization. He also
- coached the tennis team, and took very good care of his body.
- Derby's son would survive the war. Derby wouldn't. That good body of his would be
- filled with holes by a firing squad in Dresden in sixty-eight days. So it goes.
- The worst American body wasn't Billy's. The worst body belonged to a car thief from
- Cicero, Illinois. Ms name was Paul Lazzaro. He was tiny, and not only were his bones
- and teeth rotten, but his skin was disgusting. Lazzaro was polka-dotted all over with
- dime-sized scars. He had had many plagues of boils.
- Lazzaro, too, had been on Roland Weary's boxcar, and had given his word of honor to
- Weary that he would find some way to make Billy Pilgrim pay for Weary's death. He was
- looking around now, wondering which naked human being was Billy.
- The naked Americans took their places under many showerheads along a white-tiled
- wall. There were no faucets they could control. They could only wait for whatever was
- coming. Their penises were shriveled and their balls were retracted. Reproduction was
- not the main business of the evening.
- An unseen hand turned a master valve. Out of the showerheads gushed scalding rain.
- The rain was a blow-torch that did not warm. It jazzed and jangled Billy's skin without
- thawing the ice in the marrow of his long bones.
- The Americans' clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas. Body lice and
- bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions. So it goes.
- And Billy zoomed back in time to his infancy. He was a baby who had just been
- bathed by his mother. Now his mother wrapped him in a towel, carried him into a rosy
- room that was filled with sunshine. She unwrapped him, laid him on the tickling towel,
- powdered him between his legs, joked with him, patted his little jelly belly. Her palm on
- his little jelly belly made potching sounds.
- Billy gurgled and cooed.
- And then Billy was a middle-aged optometrist again, playing hacker's golf this timeon
- a blazing summer Sunday morning. Billy never went to church any more. He was
- hacking with three other optometrists. Billy was on the green in seven strokes, and it was
- his turn to putt.
- It was an eight-foot putt and he made it. He bent over to take the ball out of the cup,
- and the sun went behind a cloud. Billy was momentarily dizzy. When he recovered, he
- wasn't on the golf course any more. He was strapped to a yellow contour chair in a white
- chamber aboard a flying saucer, which was bound for Tralfamadore.
- 'Where am I?' said Billy Pilgrim.
- 'Trapped in another blob of amber, Mr. Pilgrim. We are where we have to be just nowthree
- hundred million miles from Earth, bound for a time warp which will get us to
- Tralfamadore in hours rather than centuries.'
- 'How-how did I get here?'
- 'It would take another Earthling to explain it to you. Earthlings are the great explainers,
- explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved
- or avoided. I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of Rocky
- Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or
- explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all,
- as I've said before, bugs in amber.'
- 'You sound to me as though you don't believe in free will,' said Billy Pilgrim.
- 'If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings,' said the Tralfamadorian, 'I
- wouldn't have any idea what was meant by "free will." I've visited thirty-one inhabited
- plants in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is
- there any talk of free will.'
- Five
- Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the
- creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it
- is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And
- Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them
- as great millipedes with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other,' says
- Billy Pilgrim.
- Billy asked for something to read on the trip to Tralfamadore. His captors had five
- million Earthling books on microfilm, but no way to project them in Billy's cabin. They
- had only one actual book in English, which would be placed in a Tralfamadorian
- museum. It was Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann.
- Billy read it, thought it was pretty good in spots. The people in it certainly had their
- ups-and-downs, ups-and-downs. But Billy didn't want to read about the same ups-anddowns
- over and over again. He asked if there wasn't, please, some other reading matters
- around.
- 'Only Tralfamadorian novels, which I'm afraid you couldn't begin to understand,' said
- the speaker on the wall.
- 'Let me look at one anyway.'
- So they sent him in several. They were little things. A dozen of them might have had
- the bulk of Valley of the Dolls-with all its ups-and-downs, up-and-downs.
- Billy couldn't read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books
- were laid out-in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the
- clumps might be telegrams.
- 'Exactly,' said the voice.
- 'They are telegrams?'
- 'There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of-symbols is a
- brief, urgent message describing a situation, a scene., We Tralfamadorians read them all
- at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the
- messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at
- once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no
- beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we
- love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.'
- Moments after that, the saucer entered a time warp, and Billy was flung back into his
- childhood. He was twelve years old, quaking as he stood with his mother and father on
- Bright Angel Point, at the rim of Grand Canyon. The little human family was staring at
- the floor of the canyon, one mile straight down.
- 'Well,' said Billy's father, manfully kicking a pebble into space, 'there it is.' They had
- come to this famous place by automobile. They had had several blowouts on the way.
- 'It was worth the trip,' said Billy's mother raptly. 'Oh, God was it ever worth it.'
- Billy hated the canyon. He was sure that he was going to fall in. His mother touched
- him, and he wet his pants.
- There were other tourists looking down into the canyon, too, and a ranger was there to
- answer questions. A Frenchman who had come all the way from France asked the ranger
- in broken English ff many people committed suicide by jumping in.
- 'Yes, sir,' said the ranger. 'About three folks a year.' So it goes.
- And Billy took a very short trip through time,, made a peewee jump of only ten days,
- so he was still twelve, still touring the West with his family. Now they were down in
- Carlsbad Caverns, and Billy was praying to God to get him out of there before the ceiling
- fell in.
- A ranger was explaining that the Caverns had been discovered by a cowboy who saw a
- huge cloud of bats come out of a hole in the ground. And then he said that he was going
- to mm out all the lights., and that it would probably be the first time in the lives of most
- people there that they had ever been in darkness that was total.
- Out went the lights. Billy didn't even know whether he was still alive or not. And then
- something ghostly floated in air to his left. It had numbers on it. His father had taken out
- his Pocket watch. The watch had a radium dial.
- Billy went from total dark to total light, found himself back in the war, back in the
- delousing station again. The shower was over. An unseen hand had turned the water off.
- When Billy got his clothes back, they weren't any cleaner, but all the little animals that
- had been living in them were dead. So it goes. And his new overcoat was thawed out and
- limp now. It was much too small for Billy. It had a fur collar and a g of crimson silk, and
- had apparently been made for an impresario about as big as an organ-grinder's monkey. It
- was full of bullet holes.
- Billy Pilgrim dressed himself. He put on the little overcoat, too. It split up the back,
- and, at the shoulders, the sleeves came entirely free. So the coat became a fur-collared
- vest. It was meant to flare at its owners waist, but the flaring took place at Billy's armpits.
- 'Me Germans found him to be one of the most screamingly funny things they had seen in
- all of the Second World War. They laughed and laughed.
- And the Germans told everybody else to form in ranks of five, with Billy as their pivot.
- Then out of doors went the parade, and through gate after gate again. 'Mere were more
- starving Russians with faces like radium dials. The Americans were livelier than before.
- The jazzing with hot water had cheered them up. And they came to a shed where a
- corporal with only one arm and one eye wrote the name and serial number of each
- prisoner in a big, red ledger. Everybody was legally alive now. Before they got their
- names and numbers in that book, they were missing in action and probably dead.
- So it goes.
- As the Americans were waiting to move on, an altercation broke out in their rear-most
- rank. An American had muttered something which a guard did not like. The guard knew
- English, and he hauled the American out of ranks knocked him down.
- The American was astonished. He stood up shakily, spitting blood. He'd had two teeth
- knocked out. He had meant no harm by what he'd said, evidently, had no idea that the
- guard would hear and understand.
- 'Why me?' he asked the guard.
- The guard shoved him back into ranks. 'Vy you? Vy anybody?' he said.
- When Billy Pilgrim's name was inscribed in the ledger of the prison camp, he was
- given a number., too, and an iron dogtag in which that number was stamped. A slave
- laborer from Poland had done the stamping. He was dead now. So it goes.
- Billy was told to hang the tag' around his neck along with his American dogtags, which
- he did. The tag was like a salt cracker, perforated down its middle so that a strong man
- could snap it in two with his bare hands. In case Billy died, which he didn't, half the tag
- would mark his body and half would mark his grave.
- After poor Edgar Derby, the high school teacher, was shot in Dresden later on, a doctor
- pronounced him dead and snapped his dogtag in two. So it goes.
- Properly enrolled and tagged, the Americans were led through gate after gate again. In
- two days' time now their families would learn from the International Red Cross that they
- were alive.
- Next to Billy was little Paul Lazzaro, who had promised to avenge Roland Weary.
- Lazzaro wasn't thinking about vengeance. He was thinking about his terrible bellyache.
- His stomach had shrunk to the size of a walnut. That dry, shriveled pouch was as sore as
- a boil.
- Next to Lazzaro was poor, doomed old Edgar Derby, with his American and German
- dogs displayed like a necklace, on the outside of his clothes. He had expected to become
- a captain, a company commander, because of his wisdom and age. Now here he was on
- the Czechoslovakian border at midnight.
- 'Halt,' said a guard.
- The Americans halted. They stood there quietly in the cold. The sheds they were
- among were outwardly like thousands of other sheds they had passed. There was this
- difference, though: the sheds had tin chimneys, and out of the chimneys whirled
- constellations of sparks.
- A guard knocked on a door.
- The door was flung open from inside. Light leaped out through the door, escaped from
- prison at 186,000 miles per second. Out marched fifty middle-aged Englishmen. They
- were singing "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here' from the Pirates of Penzance'.
- These lusty, ruddy vocalists were among the first English-speaking prisoners to be
- taken in the Second World War. Now they were singing to nearly the last. They had not
- seen a woman or a child for four years or more. They hadn't seen any birds, either. Not
- even sparrows would come into the camp.
- The Englishmen were officers. Each of them had attempted to escape from another
- prison at least once. Now they were here, dead-center in a sea of dying Russians.
- They could tunnel all they pleased. They would inevitably surface within a rectangle of
- barbed wire, would find themselves greeted listlessly by dying Russians who spoke no
- English, who had no food or useful information or escape plans of their own. They could
- scheme all they pleased to hide aboard a vehicle or steal one, but no vehicle ever came
- into their compound. They could feign illness, if they liked, but that wouldn't earn them a
- trip anywhere, either. The only hospital in the camp was a six-bed affair in the British
- compound itself.
- The Englishmen were clean and enthusiastic and decent and strong. They sang
- boomingly well. They had been singing together every night for years.
- The Englishmen had also been lifting weights and chinning themselves for years. Their
- bellies were like washboards. The muscles of their calves and upper arms were like
- cannonballs. They were all masters of checkers and chess and bridge and cribbage and
- dominoes and anagrams and charades and Ping-Pong and billiards, as well.
- They were among the wealthiest people in Europe, in terms of food. A clerical error
- early in the war, when food was still getting through to prisoners, had caused the Red
- Cross to ship them five hundred parcels every month instead of fifty. The Englishmen
- had hoarded these so cunningly that now, as the war was ending, they had three tons of
- sugar, one ton of coffee, eleven hundred pounds of chocolate, seven hundred pounds of
- tobacco, seventeen hundred pounds of tea, two tons of flour, one ton of canned beef,
- twelve hundred pounds of canned butter, sixteen hundred pounds of canned cheese, eight
- hundred pounds of powdered milk., and two tons of orange marmalade.
- They kept all this in a room without windows. They had ratproofed it by lining it with
- flattened tin cans.
- They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what the
- Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun. So the
- Germans let them have four sheds, though one shed would have held them all. And, in
- exchange for coffee or chocolate or tobacco, the Germans gave them paint and lumber
- and nails and cloth for fixing things up.
- The Englishmen had known for twelve hours that American guests were on their way.
- They had never had guests before, and they went to work like darling elves, sweeping,
- mopping, cooking, baking-making mattresses of straw and burlap bags, setting tables,
- putting party favors at each place.
- Now they were singing their welcome to their guests in the winter night. Their clothes
- were aromatic with the feast they had been preparing. They were dressed half for battle,
- half for tennis or croquet. They were so elated by their own hospitality, and by all the
- goodies waiting inside, that they did not take a good look at their guests while they sang.
- And they imagined that they were singing to fellow officers fresh from the fray.
- They wrestled the Americans toward the shed door affectionately, filling the night with
- manly blather and brotherly rodomontades. They called them 'Yank,' told them 'Good
- show,' promised them that 'Jerry was on the run,' and so on.
- Billy Pilgrim wondered dimly who Jerry was.
- Now he was indoors., next to an iron cookstove that was glowing cherry red. Dozens
- of teapots were boiling there. Some of them had whistles. And there was a witches'
- cauldron full of golden soup. The soup was thick. Primeval bubbles surfaced it with
- lethargical majesty as Billy Pilgrim stared.
- There were long tables set for a banquet. At each place was a bowl made from a can
- that had once contained powdered milk. A smaller can was a cup. A taller, more slender
- can was a tumbler. Each tumbler was filled with warm milk.
- At each place was a safety razor, a washcloth, a package of razor blades, a chocolate
- bar, two cigars, a bar of soap,, ten cigarettes, a book of matches, a pencil and a candle.
- Only the candles and the soap were of German origin. They had a ghostly, opalescent
- similarity. The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made
- from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies
- of the State.
- So it goes.
- The banquet hall was illuminated by candlelight. There were heaps of fresh baked
- white bread on the tables, gobs of butter, pots of marmalade. There were platters of sliced
- beef from cans. Soup and scrambled eggs and hot marmalade pie were yet to come.
- And, at the far end of the shed, Billy saw pink arches with azure draperies hanging
- between them, and an enormous clock, and two golden thrones, and a bucket and a mop.
- It was in this setting that the evening's entertainment would take place, a musical version
- of Cinderella, the most popular story ever told.
- Billy Pilgrim was on fire, having stood too close to the glowing stove. The hem of his
- little coat was burning. It was a quiet, patient sort of fire-like the burning of punk.
- Billy wondered ff there was a telephone somewhere. He wanted to call his mother, to
- tell her he was alive and well.
- There was silence now, as the Englishmen looked in astonishment at the frowsy
- creatures they had so lustily waltzed inside. One of the Englishmen saw that Billy was on
- fire. 'You're on fire lad!' he said, and he got Billy away from the stove and beat out the
- sparks with his hands.
- When Billy made no comment on this, the Englishman asked him, 'Can you talk? Can
- you hear?'
- Billy nodded.
- The Englishman touched him exploratorily here and there, filled with pity. 'My Godwhat
- have they done to you, lad? This isn't a man. It's a broken kite.'
- 'Are you really an American?' said the Englishman.
- 'Yes,' said Billy.
- 'And your rank?'
- 'Private.'
- 'What became of your boots, lad?'
- 'I don't remember.'
- 'Is that coat a joke?'
- 'Sir?'
- 'Where did you get such a thing?'
- Billy had to think hard about that. 'They gave it to me,' he said at last.
- 'Jerry gave it to you?'
- 'Who? '
- 'The Germans gave it to you?'
- 'Yes.'
- Billy didn't like the questions. They were fatiguing.
- 'Ohhhh-Yank, Yank, Yank,' said the Englishman, 'that coat was an insult,
- 'Sir? '
- 'It was a deliberate attempt to humiliate you. You mustn't let Jerry do things like that.'
- Billy Pilgrim swooned.
- Billy came to on a chair facing the stage. He I had somehow eaten, and now he was
- watching Cinderella. Some part of him had evidently been enjoying the performance for
- quite a while. Billy was laughing hard.
- The women in the play were really men, of course. The clock had just struck midnight
- and Cinderella was lamenting
- 'Goodness me, the clock has struckAlackaday,
- and fuck my luck.'
- Billy found the couplet so comical that he not only laughed-he shrieked. He went on
- shrieking until he was carried out of the shed and into another, where the hospital was. It
- was a six-bed hospital. There weren't any other patients in there.
- Billy was put to bed and tied down, and given a shot of morphine. Another American
- volunteered to watch over him. This volunteer was Edgar Derby, the high school teacher
- who would be shot to death in Dresden. So it goes.
- Derby sat on a three-legged stool. He was given a book to read. The book was The Red
- Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane. Derby had read it before. Now he read it again
- while Billy Pilgrim entered a morphine paradise.
- Under morphine, Billy had a dream of giraffes in a garden. The giraffes were following
- gravel paths, were pausing to munch sugar pears from treetops. Billy was a giraffe, too.
- He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in
- juicy protest.
- The giraffes accepted Billy as one of their own, as a harmless creature as
- preposterously specialized as themselves. Two approached him from opposite sides,
- leaned against him. They had long, muscular upper lips which they could shape like the
- bells of bugles. They kissed him with these. They were female giraffes-cream and lemon
- yellow. They had horns like doorknobs. The knobs were covered with velvet.
- Why?
- Night came to the garden of the giraffes, and Billy Pilgrim slept without dreaming for a
- while, and then he traveled in time. He woke up with his head under a blanket in a ward
- for nonviolent mental patients in a veterans' hospital near Lake Placid, New York. It was
- springtime in 1948, three years after the end of the war.
- Billy uncovered his head. The windows of the ward were open. Birds were twittering
- outside. 'Poo-tee-weet?' one asked him. The sun was high. There were twenty-nine other
- patients assigned to the ward, but they were all outdoors now, enjoying the day. They
- were free to come and go as they pleased, to go home, even., if they liked-and so was
- Billy Pilgrim. They had come here voluntarily, alarmed by the outside world.
- Billy had committed himself in the middle of his final year at the Ilium School of
- Optometry. Nobody else suspected that he was going crazy. Everybody else thought he
- looked fine and was acting fine. Now he was in the hospital. The doctors agreed: He was
- going crazy.
- They didn't think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure Billy was going to
- pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming
- pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.
- The man assigned to the bed next to Billy's was a former infantry captain named Eliot
- Rosewater. Rosewater was sick and tired of being drunk all the time.
- It was Rosewater who introduced Billy to science fiction, and in particular to the
- writings of Kilgore Trout. Rosewater had a tremendous collection of science-fiction
- paperbacks under his bed. He had brought them to the hospital in a steamer trunk. Those
- beloved, frumpish books gave off a smell that permeated the ward-like flannel pajamas
- that hadn't been changed for a month, or like Irish stew.
- Kilgore Trout became Billy's favorite living author, and science fiction became the
- only sort of tales he could read.
- Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy., but he and Billy were dealing with similar
- crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they
- had seen in war. Rosewater., for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman,
- mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre
- in European history, which was the firebombing of Dresden. So it goes.
- So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a
- big help.
- Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn't science
- fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers
- Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. 'But that isn't enough any more.' said Rosewater.
- Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, 'I think you guys are going to
- have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to
- go on living.'
- There was a still life on Billy's bedside table-two pills, an ashtray with three lipstickstained
- cigarettes in it, one cigarette Still burning, and a glass of water. The water was
- dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of that dead water. Bubbles were clinging to
- the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.
- The cigarettes belonged to Billy's chain-smoking mother. She had sought the ladies'
- room, which was off the ward for WACS and WAVES and SPARS and WAFS who had
- gone bananas. She would be back at any moment now.
- Billy covered his head with his blanket again. He always covered his head when his
- mother came to see him in the mental ward-always got much sicker until she went away.
- It wasn't that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly
- nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high-school education.
- She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and
- ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to
- keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.
- Billy heard Eliot Rosewater come in and lie down. Rosewater's bedsprings talked a lot
- about that. Rosewater was a big man, but not very powerful. He looked as though he
- might be made out of nose putty.
- And then Billy's mother came back from the ladies' room, sat down on a chair between
- Billy's and Rosewater's bed. Rosewater greeted her with melodious warmth, asked how
- she was today. He seemed delighted to hear that she was fine. He was experimenting with
- being ardently sympathetic with everybody he met. He thought that might make the
- world a slightly more pleasant place to live in. He called Billy's mother 'dear.' He was
- experimenting with calling everybody 'dear.'
- Some day' she promised Rosewater., "I'm going to come in here, and Billy is going to
- uncover his head, and do you know what he's going to say?'
- 'What's he going to say, dear?'
- 'He's going to say, "Hello, Mom," and he's going to smile. He's going to say, "Gee, it's
- good to see you, Mom. How have you been?"'
- 'Today could -be the day.'
- 'Every night I pray.'
- 'That's a good thing to do.'
- 'People would be surprised ff they knew how much in this world was due to prayers.'
- 'You never said a truer word, dear.'
- 'Does your mother come to see you often?'
- 'My mother is dead,' said Rosewater. So it goes.
- 'I'm sorry.'
- 'At least she had a happy life as long as it lasted.'
- 'That's a consolation, anyway.'
- 'Yes.'
- 'Billy's father is dead., you know, said Billy's mother. So it goes.
- 'A boy needs a father.'
- And on and on it went-that duet between the dumb, praying lady and the big, hollow
- man so full of loving echoes.
- 'He was at the top of his class when this happened,' said Billy's mother.
- 'Maybe he. was working too hard.' said Rosewater. He held a book he wanted to read,
- but he was much too polite to read and talk, too, easy as it was to give Billy's mother
- satisfactory answers. The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout.
- It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the
- diseases were all in the fourth dimension., and three-dimensional Earthling doctors
- couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them.
- One thing Trout said that Rosewater liked very much was that there really were
- vampires and werewolves and goblins and angels and so on, but that they were in the
- fourth dimension. So was William Blake, Rosewater's favorite poet, according to Trout.
- So were heaven and hell.
- 'He's engaged to a very rich girl,' said Billy's mother.
- 'That’s good,' said Rosewater. 'Money can be a great comfort sometimes.'
- 'It really can.'
- 'Of course it can.'
- 'It isn't much fun if you have to pinch every penny till it screams.
- 'It's nice to have a little breathing room.'
- 'Her father owns the optometry school where Billy was going. He also owns six offices
- around our part of the state. He flies his own plane and has a summer place up on Lake
- George.'
- 'That's a beautiful lake.'
- Billy fell asleep under his blanket. When he woke up again, he was tied to the bed in
- the hospital back in prison. He opened one eye, saw poor old Edgar Derby reading The
- Red Badge of Courage by candlelight.
- Billy closed that one eye saw in his memory of the future poor old Edgar Derby in
- front of a firing squad in the ruins of Dresden. There were only four men in that squad.
- Billy had heard that one man in each firing squad was customarily given a rifle loaded
- with blank cartridge. Billy didn't think there would be a blank cartridge issued in a squad
- that small, in a war that old.
- Now the head Englishman came into the hospital to check on Billy. He was an infantry
- colonel captured at Dunkirk. It was he who had given Billy morphine. There wasn't a real
- doctor in the compound, so the doctoring was up to him. 'How's the patient?' he asked
- Derby.
- 'Dead to the world.'
- 'But not actually dead.'
- 'No.'
- 'How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.'
- Derby now came to lugubrious attention.
- 'No, no-please-as you were. With only two men for each officer, and all the men sick, I
- think we can do without the usual pageantry between officers and men.'
- Derby remained standing. 'You seem older than the rest,' said the colonel.
- Derby told him he was forty-five, which was two years older than the colonel. The
- colonel said that the other Americans had all shaved now, that Billy and Derby were the
- only two still with beards. And he said, 'You know we've had to imagine the war here,
- and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had
- forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was
- a shock "My God, my God-" I said to myself. "It's the Children's Crusade."'
- The colonel asked old Derby how he had been captured, and Derby told a tale of being
- in a clump of trees with about a hundred other frightened soldiers. The battle had been
- going on for five days. The hundred had been driven into the trees by tanks.
- Derby described the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for
- other Earthlings when they don't want those other Earthlings to inhabit Earth any more.
- Shells were bursting in the treetops with terrific bangs, he said, showering down knives
- and needles and razorblades. Little lumps of lead in copper jackets were crisscrossing the
- woods under the shellbursts, zipping along much faster than sound.
- A lot of people were being wounded or killed. So it goes.
- Then the shelling stopped, and a hidden German with a loudspeaker told the
- Americans to put their weapons down and come out of the woods with their hands on the
- top of their heads, or the shelling would start again. It wouldn't stop until everybody in
- there was dead.
- So the Americans put their weapons down, and they came out of the woods with their
- hands on top of their heads, because they wanted to go on living, if they possibly could.
- Billy traveled in time back to the veterans' hospital again. The blanket was over his
- head. It was quiet outside the blanket. "Is my mother gone?' said Billy.
- 'Yes.'
- Billy peeked out from under his blanket. His fiancée was out there now, sitting on the
- visitor's chair. Her name was Valencia Merble. Valencia was the daughter of the owner of
- the Ilium School of Optometry. She was rich. She was as big as a house because she
- couldn't stop eating. She was eating now. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar.
- She was wearing trifocal lenses in harlequin frames, and the frames were trimmed with
- rhinestones. The glitter of the rhinestones was answered by the glitter of the diamond in
- her engagement ring. The diamond was insured for eighteen hundred dollars. Billy had
- found that diamond in Germany. It was booty of war.
- Billy didn't want to marry ugly Valencia. She was one of the symptoms of his disease.
- He knew he was going crazy, when he heard himself proposing marriage to her., when he
- begged her to take the diamond ring and be his companion for life.
- Billy said, 'Hello,' to her, and she asked him if he wanted some candy, and he said, 'No,
- thanks.'
- She asked him how he was, and he said, 'Much better, thanks.' She said that everybody
- at the Optometry School was sorry he was sick and hoped he would be well soon, and
- Billy said, 'When you see 'em, tell 'em, "Hello."'
- She promised she would.
- She asked him if there was anything she could bring him from the outside, and he said,
- 'No. I have just about everything I want.'
- 'What about books?' said Valencia.
- 'I'm right next to one of the biggest private libraries in the world,' said Billy, meaning
- Eliot Rosewater's collection of science fiction.
- Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation,
- asked him what he was reading this time.
- So Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was
- about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian by the way.
- The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could,
- why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble
- was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the
- Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the
- low.
- But the Gospels actually taught this:
- Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.
- The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who
- didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe.
- Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought,
- and Rosewater read out loud again:
- Oh, boy-they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
- And that thought had a brother: 'There are right people to lynch.' Who? People not well
- connected. So it goes.
- The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really
- was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he
- had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
- So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the
- cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought.
- The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again
- and again what a nobody Jesus was.
- And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder
- and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was
- adopting the bum as his son giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the
- Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this From this moment on, He
- will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!
- Billy's fiancée had finished her Three Musketeers Candy Bar. Now she was eating a
- Milky Way.
- 'Forget books,' said Rosewater, throwing that particular book under his bed. 'The hell
- with 'em.'
- 'That sounded like an interesting one,' said Valencia.
- Jesus-if Kilgore Trout could only write!' Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore
- Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.
- 'I don't think Trout has ever been out of the country, ' Rosewater went on. 'My God-he
- writes about Earthlings all the time, and they're all Americans. Practically nobody on is
- an American.'
- 'Where does he live?" Valencia asked.
- 'Nobody knows,' Rosewater replied. 'I'm the only person who ever heard of him, as far
- as I can tell. No two books have the same publisher, and every time I write him in care of
- a publisher, the letter comes back because the publisher has failed.'
- He changed the subject now, congratulated Valencia on her engagement ring.
- 'Thank you,' she said, and held it out so Rosewater could get a close look. 'Billy got
- that diamond in the war.'
- 'That's the attractive thing about war,' said Rosewater. Absolutely everybody gets a
- little something.'
- With regard to the whereabouts of Kilgore Trout: he actually lived in Ilium, Billy's
- hometown, friendless and despised. Billy would meet him by and by.
- 'Billy' said Valencia Merble.
- 'Hm?'
- 'You want to talk about our silver pattern? '
- 'Sure.'
- 'I've got it narrowed down pretty much to either Royal Danish or Rambler Rose.'
- 'Rambler Rose,' said Billy.
- 'It isn't something we should rush into,' she said. 'I mean whatever we decide on, that's
- what we're going to have to live with the rest of our lives.'
- Billy studied the pictures. 'Royal Danish.' he said at last.
- 'Colonial Moonlight is nice, too.'
- 'Yes, it is,' said Billy Pilgrim.
- And Billy traveled in time to the zoo on Tralfamadore. He was forty-four years old, on
- display under a geodesic dome. He was reclining on the lounge chair which had been his
- cradle during his trip through space. He was naked. The Tralfamadorians were
- interested in his body-all of it. There were thousands of them outside, holding up their
- little hands so that their eyes could see him. Billy had been on Tralfamadore for six
- Earthling months now. He was used to the crowd.
- Escape was out of the question. The atmosphere outside the dome was cyanide, and
- Earth was 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles away.
- Billy was displayed there in the zoo in a simulated Earthling habitat. Most of the
- furnishings had been stolen from the Sears & Roebuck warehouse in Iowa City, Iowa.
- There was a color television set and a couch that could be converted into a bed. There
- were end tables with lamps and ashtrays on them by the couch. There was a home bar
- and two stools. There was a little pool table. There was wall-to-wall carpeting in federal
- gold, except in the kitchen and bathroom areas and over the iron manhole cover in the
- center of the floor. There were magazines arranged in a fan on the coffee table in front of
- the couch.
- There was a stereophonic phonograph. The phonograph worked. The television didn't.
- There was a picture Of one cowboy g another one pasted to the television tube. So it
- goes.
- There were no wall in the dome, nor place for Billy to hide. The mint green bathroom
- fixtures were right out in the open. Billy got off his lounge chair now, went into the
- bathroom and took a leak. The crowd went wild.
- Billy brushed his teeth on Tralfamadore, put in his partial denture, and went into his
- kitchen. His bottled-gas range and his refrigerator and his dishwasher were mint green,
- too. There was a picture painted on the door of the refrigerator. The refrigerator had
- come that way. It was a picture of a Gay Nineties couple on a bicycle built for two.
- Billy looked at that picture now, tried to think something about the couple. Nothing
- came to him. There didn't seem to be anything to think about those two people.
- Billy ate a good breakfast from cans. He washed his cup and plate and knife and fork
- and spoon and saucepan, put them away. Then he did exercises he had learned in the
- Army-straddle jumps, deep knee bends, sit-ups and push-ups. Most Tralfamadorians had
- no way of knowing Bill's body and face were not beautiful. They supposed that he was a
- splendid specimen. This had a pleasant effect on Billy, who began to enjoy his body for
- the first time.
- He showered after his exercises and trimmed his toenails. He shaved and sprayed
- deodorant under his arms, while a zoo guide on a raised platform outside explained what
- Billy was doing-and why. The guide was lecturing telepathically, simply standing there,
- sending out thought waves to the crowd. On the platform with him was the little
- keyboard instrument with which he would relay questions to Billy from the crowd.
- Now the first question came-from the speaker on the television set: 'Are you happy here?'
- 'About as happy as I was on Earth,' said Billy Pilgrim, which was true.
- There were fives sexes on Tralfamadore, each of them performing a step necessary in
- the creation of a new individual. They looked identical to Billy-because their sex
- differences were all in the fourth dimension.
- One of the biggest moral bombshells handed to Billy by the Tralfamadorians,
- incidentally, had to do with sex on Earth. They said their flying-saucer crews had
- identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction. Again:
- Billy couldn't possibly imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making
- of a baby, since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension.
- The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him imagine sex in the
- invisible dimension. They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male
- homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn't be
- babies without women over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over
- sixty-five. There couldn't be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less
- after birth. And so on.
- It was gibberish to Billy.
- There was a lot that Billy said that was gibberish to the Tralfamadorians, too. They
- couldn't imagine what time looked like to him. Billy had given up on explaining that.
- The guide outside had to explain as best he could.
- The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a
- mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak
- or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind
- them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel
- sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he
- could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.
- This was only the beginning of Billy's miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped
- to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, And there was no way he could
- turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also
- bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the dot at the end of the pipe. He didn't
- know he was on a flatcar, didn't even know there was anything peculiar about his
- situation.
- The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped-went
- uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through
- the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, 'That's life.'
- Billy expected the Tralfamadorians to be baffled and alarmed by all the wars and other
- forms of murder on Earth. He expected them to fear that the Earthling combination of
- ferocity and spectacular weaponry might eventually destroy part or maybe all of the
- innocent Universe. Science fiction had led him to expect that.
- But the subject of war never came up until Billy brought it up himself. Somebody in
- the zoo crowd asked him through the lecturer what the most valuable thing he had
- learned on Tralfamadore was so far, and Billy replied, 'How the inhabitants of a whole
- planet can live in peace I As you know, I am from a planet that has been engaged in
- senseless slaughter since the beginning of time. I myself have seen the bodies of
- schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were
- proud of fighting pure evil at the time. ' This was true. Billy saw the boiled bodies in
- Dresden. 'And I have lit my way in a prison at night with candles from the fat of human
- beings who were butchered by the brothers and fathers of those school girls who were
- boiled. Earthlings must be the terrors of the Universe! If other planets aren't now in
- danger from Earth, they soon will be. So tell me the secret so I can take it back to Earth
- and save us all: How can a planet live at peace?'
- Billy felt that he had spoken soaringly. He was baffled when he saw the
- Tralfamadorians close their little hands on their eyes. He knew from past experience
- what this meant: He was being stupid.
- 'Would-would you mind telling me,' he said to the guide, much deflated, 'what was so
- stupid about that?'
- 'We know how the Universe ends,' said the guide, 'and Earth has nothing to do with it,
- except that it gets wiped out, too.'
- 'How-how does the Universe end?' said Billy.
- 'We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A
- Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.' So
- it goes.
- "If You know this," said Billy, 'isn't there some way you can prevent it? Can't you
- keep the pilot from pressing the button?'
- 'He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will
- let him. The moment is structured that way.'
- 'So,' said Billy gropingly, I suppose that the idea of, preventing war on Earth is stupid,
- too. '
- 'Of course.'
- 'But you do have a peaceful planet here.'
- 'Today we do. On other days we have wars as horrible as any you've ever seen or read
- about. There isn't anything we can do about them, so we simply don't look at them. We
- ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments-like today at the zoo. Isn't
- this a nice moment?'
- 'Yes.'
- 'That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the
- awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.'
- 'Um,' said Billy Pilgrim.
- Shortly after he went to sleep that night, Billy traveled in time to another moment
- which was quite nice, his wedding night with the former Valencia Merble. He had been
- out of the veterans' hospital for six months. He was all well. He had graduated from the
- Ilium School of Optometry-third in his class of forty-seven.
- Now he was in bed with Valencia in a delightful studio apartment which was built on
- the end of a wharf on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Across the water were the lights of
- Gloucester. Billy was on top of Valencia, making love to her. One result of this act
- would be the birth of Robert Pilgrim, who would become a problem in high school, but
- who would then straighten out as a member of the famous Green Berets.
- Valencia wasn't a time-traveler, but she did have a lively imagination. While Billy was
- making love to her, she imagined that she was a famous woman in history. She was being
- Queen Elizabeth the First of England, and Billy was supposedly Christopher Columbus.
- Billy made a noise like a small, rusty hinge. He had just emptied his seminal vesicles
- into Valencia, had contributed his share of the Green Beret According to the
- Tralfamadorians, of course, the Green Beret would have seven parents in all.
- Now he rolled off his huge wife, whose rapt expression did not change when he
- departed. He lay with the buttons of his spine along the edge of the mattress, folded his
- hands behind his head. He was rich now. He had been rewarded for marrying a girl
- nobody in his right mind would have married. His father-in-law had given him a new
- Buick Roadmaster, an all-electric home, and had made him manager of his most
- prosperous office, his Ilium office, where Billy could expect to make at least thirty
- thousand dollars a year. That was good. His father had been only a barber.
- As his mother said, "The Pilgrims are coming up in the world,'
- The honeymoon was taking place in the bittersweet mysteries of Indian summer in
- New England. The lovers' apartment had one romantic wall which was all French doors.
- They opened onto a balcony and the oily harbor beyond.
- A green and orange dragger, black in the night, grumbled and drummed past their
- balcony, not thirty feet from their wedding bed. It was going to sea with only its running
- lights on. Its empty holds were resonant, made the song of the engines rich and loud.
- The wharf began to sing the same song, and then the honeymooners' headboard sang, too.
- And it continued to sing long after the dragger was gone.
- 'Thank you,' said Valencia at last. The headboard was singing a mosquito song.
- 'You're welcome.'
- 'It was nice.'
- 'I'm glad.'
- Then she began to cry.
- 'What's the matter?'
- 'I'm so happy.'
- 'Good.'
- 'I never thought anybody would marry me.'
- 'Um,' said Billy Pilgrim.
- I'm going to lose weight for you,' she said.
- 'What?'
- 'I'm going to go on a diet. I'm going to become beautiful for you.'
- 'I like you just the way you are.'
- 'Do you really?'
- 'Really,' said Billy Pilgrim. He had already seen a lot of their marriage, thanks to timetravel,
- knew that it was going to be at least bearable all the way.
- A great motor yacht named the Scheherezade now slid past the marriage bed. The
- song its engines sang was a very low organ note. All her lights were on.
- Two beautiful people, a young man and a young woman in evening clothes, were at the
- rail hi the stem, loving each other and their dreams and the wake. They were
- honeymooning, too. They were Lance Rumfoord., of Newport, Rhode Island, and his
- bride,, the former Cynthia Landry., who had been a childhood sweetheart of John F.
- Kennedy in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
- There was a slight coincidence here. Billy Pilgrim would later share a hospital room
- with Rumfoord's uncle, Professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord of Harvard, official
- Historian of the United States Air Force.
- When the beautiful people were past, Valencia questioned her funny-looking husband
- about war. It was a simple-minded thing for a female Earthling to do, to associate sex
- and glamor with war.
- 'Do you ever think about the war?' she said, laying a hand on his thigh.
- 'Sometimes,' said Billy Pilgrim.
- 'I look at you sometimes,' said Valencia, 'and I get a funny feeling that you're full of
- secrets.'
- 'I'm not,' said Billy. This was a lie, of course. He hadn't told anybody about all the
- time traveling he'd done, about Tralfamadore and so on.
- 'You must have secrets about the war. Or, not secrets, I guess, but things you don't
- want to talk about.'
- 'No.'
- 'I'm proud you were a soldier. Do you know that?'
- 'Good.'
- 'Was it awful?'
- 'Sometimes.' A crazy thought now occurred to Billy. The truth of it startled him. It
- would make a good epitaph for Billy Pilgrim-and for me, too.
- 'Would you talk about the war now, if I wanted you to?' said Valencia. In a tiny cavity
- in her great body she was assembling the materials for a Green Beret.
- 'It would sound like a dream,', said Billy. 'Other people's dreams aren't very interesting
- usually.'
- 'I heard you tell Father one time about a German firing squad.' She was referring to the
- execution of poor old Edgar Derby.
- 'Um.'
- 'You had to bury him? '
- 'Yes.'
- Did he see you with your shovels before he was shot?'
- 'Yes.'
- 'Did he say anything?'
- EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL, AND NOTHING HURT
- 'No.'
- 'Was he scared?'
- 'They had him doped up. He was sort of glassy-eyed.'
- And they pinned a target to him?'
- A piece of paper,' said Billy. He got out of bed, said, 'Excuse me, ' went to the
- darkness of the bathroom to take a leak. He groped for the light, realized as he felt the
- rough wall that he had traveled back to 1944, to the prison hospital again.
- The candle in the hospital had gone out. Poor old Edgar Derby had fallen asleep on the
- cot next to Billy's. Billy was out of bed, groping along a wall, trying to find a way out
- because he had to take a leak so badly.
- He suddenly found a door, which opened, let him reel out into the prison night. Billy
- was loony with time-travel and morphine. He delivered himself to a barbed-wire fence
- which snagged him in a dozen places. Billy tried to back away from it but the barbs
- wouldn't let go. So Billy did a silly little dance with the fence, taking a step this way,
- then that way, then returning to the beginning again.
- A Russian, himself out in the night to take a leak, saw Billy dancing-from the other
- side of the fence. He came over to the curious scarecrow, tried to talk with it gently,
- asked it what country it was from. The scarecrow paid no attention, went on dancing. So
- the Russian undid the snags one b y one, and the scarecrow danced off into the night
- again without a word of thanks.
- The Russian waved to him, and called after him in Russian, 'Good-bye.'
- Billy took his pecker out, there in the prison night, and peed and peed on the ground.
- Then he put it away again, more or less, and contemplated a new problem: Where had he
- come from, and where should he go now?
- Somewhere in the night there were cries of grief. With nothing better to do, Billy
- shuffled in their direction. He wondered what tragedy so many had found to lament out
- of doors.
- Billy was approaching, without knowing it, the back of the latrine. It consisted of a
- one-rail fence with twelve buckets underneath it. The fence was sheltered on three sides
- by a screen of scrap lumber and flattened tin cans. The open side faced the black tarpaper
- wall of the shed where the feast had, taken place.
- Billy moved along the screen and reached a point where he could see a message
- freshly painted on the tarpaper wall. The words were written with the same pink paint
- which had brightened the set for Cinderella. Billy's perceptions were so unreliable that
- he saw the words as hanging in air, painted on a transparent curtain, perhaps. And there
- were lovely silver dots on the curtain, too. These were really nailheads holding the
- tarpaper to the shed. Billy could not imagine how the curtain was supported in
- nothingness, and he supposed that the magic curtain and the theatrical grief were part of
- some religious ceremony he knew nothing about.
- Here is what the message said:
- PLEASE LEAVE
- THIS LATRINE AS
- TIDY AS YOU
- FOUND IT!
- Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there. The place was
- crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The welcome feast had made
- them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full or had been kicked over.
- An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains.
- Moments later he said, 'There they go, there they go.' He meant his brains.
- That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.
- Billy reeled away from his vision of Hell. He passed three Englishmen who were
- watching the excrement festival from a distance. They were catatonic with disgust.
- 'Button your pants!' said one as Billy went by.
- So Billy buttoned his pants. He came to the door of the little hospital by accident. He
- went through the door,, and found himself honeymooning again, going from the
- bathroom back to bed with his bride on Cape Ann.
- 'I missed you' said Valencia.
- 'I missed you,' said Billy Pilgrim.
- Billy and Valencia went to sleep nestled like spoons, and Billy traveled in time back to
- the train ride he had taken in 194 4 from maneuvers in South Carolina to his father's
- funeral in Ilium. He hadn't seen Europe or combat yet. This was still in the days of steam
- locomotives.
- Billy had to change trains a lot. All the trains were slow. The coaches stunk of coal
- smoke and rationed tobacco and rationed booze and the farts of people eating wartime
- food. The upholstery of the iron seats was bristly, and Billy couldn't sleep much. He got
- to sleep soundly when he was only three hours from Ilium, with his legs splayed toward
- the entrance of the busy dining car.
- The porter woke him up when the train reached Ilium. Billy staggered off with his
- duffel bag, and then he stood on the station platform next to the porter, trying to wake up.
- 'Have a good nap, did you?' said the porter.
- 'Yes,' said Billy.
- 'Man,' said the porter, 'you sure had a hard-on.'
- At three in the morning on Bill's morphine night in prison, a new patient was carried
- into the hospital by two lusty Englishmen. He was tiny. He was Paul Lazzaro, the polkadotted
- car thief from Cicero, Illinois. He had been caught stealing cigarettes from under
- the pillow of an Englishman. The Englishman, half asleep, had broken Lazzaro's right
- arm and knocked him unconscious.
- The Englishman who had done this was helping to carry Lazzaro in now. He had fiery
- red hair and no eyebrows. He had been Cinderella's Blue Fairy Godmother in the play.
- Now he supported his half of Lazzaro with one hand while he closed the door behind
- himself with the other. 'Doesn't weigh as much as a chicken,' he said.
- The Englishman with Lazzaro's feet was the colonel who had given Billy his knock-out
- shot.
- The Blue Fairy Godmother was embarrassed, and angry, too. 'If I'd known I was
- fighting a chicken,' he said, 'I wouldn't have fought so hard.'
- 'Um.'
- The Blue Fairy Godmother spoke frankly about how disgusting all the Americans
- were. 'Weak, smelly, self-pitying-a pack of sniveling, dirty, thieving bastards,' he said.
- 'They're worse than the bleeding Russians.'
- 'Do seem a scruffy lot,' the colonel agreed.
- A German major came in now. He considered the Englishmen as close friends. He
- visited them nearly every day, played games with them, lectured to them on German
- history, played their piano, gave them lessons in conversational German. He told them
- often that, if it weren't for their civilized company, he would go mad. His English was
- splendid.
- He was apologetic about the Englishmen's having to put up with the American enlisted
- men. He promised them that they would not be inconvenienced for more than a day or
- two, that the Americans would soon be shipped to Dresden as contract labor. He had a
- monograph with him, published by the German Association of Prison Officials. It was a
- report on the behavior in Germany of American enlisted men as prisoners of war. It was
- written by a former American who had risen high in the German Ministry of Propaganda.
- His name was Howard W. Campbell, Jr. He would later hang himself while awaiting trial
- as a war criminal.
- So it goes.
- While the British colonel set Lazzaro's broken arm and mixed plaster for the cast, the
- German major translated out loud passages from Howard W. Campbell, Jr.'s monograph.
- Campbell had been a fairly well-known playwright at one time. His opening line was this
- one:
- America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor
- Americans are urged to hate themselves To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard,
- 'It ain't no disgrace to be poor, but might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American
- to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk
- traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more
- estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American
- poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking
- establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its
- wall asking this cruel question: 'If you're so smart, why ain't You rich? ' There will also
- be an American flag no larger than a child's hand-glued to a lollipop stick and, flying
- from the cash register.
- The author of the monograph, a native of Schenectady, New York, was said by some to
- have had the highest I.Q. of all the war criminals who were made to face a death by
- hanging. So it goes.
- Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously
- untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for
- any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to
- come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame
- themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have
- had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say,
- Napoleonic times.
- Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without
- precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do
- not love themselves. Once this is understood the disagreeable behavior of American
- enlisted men in German prisons ceases to be a mystery.
- Howard W. Cambell, Jr., now discussed the uniform of the American enlisted in the
- Second World War: Every other army in history, prosperous or not, has attempted to
- clothe even its lowliest soldiers so as to make them impressive to themselves and others
- as stylish experts in drinking and copulation and looting and sudden death. The American
- Army, however, sends its enlisted men out to fight and die in a modified business suit
- quite evidently made for another man, a sterilized but unpressed gift from a nose-holding
- charity which passes out clothing to drunks in the slums.
- When a dashingly-clad officer addresses such a frumpishly dressed bum, he scolds
- him, as an officer in an army must. But the officer's contempt is not, as in 'other armies,
- avuncular theatricality. It is a genuine expression of hatred for the poor, who have no one
- to blame for their misery but themselves.
- A prison administrator dealing with captured American enlisted men for the first time
- should be warned: Expect no brotherly love, even between brothers. There will be no
- cohesion between the individuals. Each will be a sulky child who often wishes he were
- dead
- Campbell told what the German experience with captured American enlisted men had
- been. They were known everywhere to be the most self-pitying, least fraternal and dirtiest
- of all prisoners of war, said Campbell. They were incapable of concerted action on their
- own behalf. They despised any leader from among their own number, refused to follow
- or even listen to him, on the grounds that he was no better than they were, that he should
- stop putting on airs.
- And so on. Billy Pilgrim went to sleep, woke up as a widower in his empty home in
- Ilium. His daughter Barbara was reproaching him for writing ridiculous letters to the
- newspapers.
- 'Did you hear what I said?' Barbara inquired. It was 1968 again.
- 'Of course.' He had been dozing.
- 'If you're going to act like a child, maybe we'll just have to treat you like a child.'
- 'That isn't what happens next,' said Billy.
- 'We'll see what happens next.' Big Barbara now embraced herself. 'It's awfully cold in
- here. Is the heat on?'
- 'The heat? '
- 'The furnace-the thing in the basement, the thing that makes hot air that comes out of
- these registers. I don't think it's working.'
- 'Maybe not.'
- 'Aren't you cold?'
- 'I hadn't noticed.'
- 'Oh my God, you are a child. If we leave you alone here, you'll freeze to death, you'll
- starve to death.' And so on. It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the
- name of love.
- Barbara called the oil-burner man, and she made Billy go to bed, made him promise to
- stay under the electric blanket until the heat came on. She set the control of the blanket at
- the highest notch, which soon made Billy's bed hot enough to bake bread in.
- When Barbara left, slamming the door behind her, Billy traveled in time to the zoo on
- Tralfamadore again. A mate has just been brought to him from Earth. She was Montana
- Wildhack, a motion picture star.
- Montana was under heavy sedation. Tralfamadorians wearing gas masks brought her
- in, put her on Billy's yellow lounge chair; withdrew through his airlock. The vast crowd
- outside was delighted. All attendance records for the zoo were broken. Everybody on the
- planet wanted to see the Earthlings mate.
- Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang,
- incidentally. You never know who'll get one.
- Now she fluttered her eyelids. Her lashes were like buggy whips. 'Where am I?' she
- said.
- 'Everything is all right,' said Billy gently. 'Please don't be afraid.
- Montana had been unconscious during her trip from Earth. The Tralfamadorians
- hadn't talked to her, hadn't shown themselves to her. The last thing she remembered was
- sunning herself by a swimming pool in Palm Springs, California. Montana was only
- twenty years old. Around her neck was a silver chain with a heart-shaped locket hanging
- from it-between her breasts.
- Now she turned her head to see the myriads of Tralfamadorians outside the dome.
- They were applauding her by opening and closing their little green hands quickly.
- Montana screamed and screamed.
- All the little green hands closed fight, because Montana's terror was so unpleasant to
- see. The head zoo keeper ordered a crane operator, who was standing by, to drop a navy
- blue canopy over the dome, thus simulating Earthling night inside. Real night came to the
- zoo for only one Earthling hour out of every sixty-two.
- Billy switched on a floor lamp. The light from the single source threw the baroque
- detailing of Montana's body into sharp relief. Billy was reminded of fantastic architecture
- in Dresden, before it was bombed.
- In time, Montana came to love and trust Billy Pilgrim. He did not touch her until she
- made it clear that she wanted him to. After she had been on Tralfamadore for what would
- have been an Earthling week, she asked him shyly if he wouldn't sleep with her. Which
- he did. It was heavenly.
- And Billy traveled in time from that delightful bed to a bed in 1968. It was his bed in
- Ilium, and the electric blanket was turned up high. He was drenched in sweat,
- remembered groggily that his daughter had put him to bed, had told him to stay there
- until the oil burner was repaired.
- Somebody was knocking on his bedroom door.
- 'Yes?' said Billy.
- 'Oil-burner man.'
- 'Yes?'
- 'It’s running good now. Heat's coming up.'
- 'Good.'
- 'Mouse ate through a wire from the thermostat'
- 'I'll be darned.'
- Billy sniffed. His hot bed smelled like a mushroom cellar. He had had a wet dream
- about Montana Wildhack.
- On the morning after that wet dream, Billy decided to go back to work in his office in
- the shopping plaza. Business was booming as usual. His assistants were keeping up with
- it nicely. They were startled to see him. They had been told by his daughter that he might
- never practice again.
- But Billy went into his examining room briskly, asked that the first patient be sent in.
- So they sent him one-a twelve-year old boy who was accompanied by his-widowed
- mother. They were strangers, new in town. Billy asked them a little about themselves,
- learned that the boy's father had been killed in Vietnam-in the famous five-day battle for
- Hill 875 near Dakto. So it goes.
- While he examined the boy's eyes, Billy told him matter-of-factly about his adventures
- on Tralfamadore, assured the fatherless boy that his father was very much alive still in
- moments the boy would see again and again.
- 'Isn't that comforting?' Billy asked.
- And somewhere in there, the boy's mother went out and told the receptionist that Billy
- was evidently going crazy. Billy was taken home. His daughter asked him again, 'Father,
- Father, Father-what are we going to do with you?'
- Six
- Listen:
- Billy Pilgrim says he went to Dresden Germany, on the day after his morphine night in
- the British compound in the center of the extermination camp for Russian prisoners of
- war. Billy woke up at dawn on that day in January. There were no windows in the little
- hospital, and the ghostly candles had gone out. So the only light came from pin-prick
- holes in the walls, and from a sketchy rectangle that outlined the imperfectly fitted door.
- Little Paul Lazzaro, with a broken arm, snored on one bed. Edgar Derby, the high school
- teacher who would eventually he shot, snored on another.
- Billy sat up in bed. He had no idea what year it was or what planet he was on.
- Whatever the planet's name was, it was cold. But it wasn't the cold that had awakened
- Billy. It was animal magnetism which was making him shiver and itch. It gave him
- profound aches in his musculature, as though he had been exercising hard.
- The animal magnetism was coming from behind him. If Billy had had to guess as to
- the source, he would have said that there was a vampire bat hanging upside down on the
- wall behind him.
- Billy moved down toward the foot of his cot before turning to look at whatever it was.
- He didn't want the animal to drop into his face and maybe claw his eyes out or bite off his
- big nose. Then he turned. The source of the magnetism really did resemble a bat. It was
- Billy's impresario's coat with the fur collar. It was hanging from a nail.
- Billy now backed toward it again, looking at it over his shoulder, feeling the
- magnetism increase. Then he faced it, kneeling on his cot, dared to touch it here and
- there. He was seeking the exact source of the radiations.
- He found two small sources, two lumps an inch apart and hidden in the lining. One was
- shaped like a pea. The other was shaped like a tiny horseshoe. Billy received a message
- carried by the radiations. He was told not to find out what the lumps were. He was
- advised to be content with knowing that they could work miracles for him, provided he
- did not insist on learning their nature. That was all right with Billy Pilgrim. He was
- grateful. He was glad.
- Billy dozed, awakened in the prison hospital again. The sun was high. Outside were
- Golgotha sounds of strong men digging holes for upright timbers in hard, hard ground.
- Englishmen were building themselves a new latrine. They had abandoned their old latrine
- to the American d their theater the place where the feast had been held, too.
- Six Englishmen staggered through a hospital with a pool table on which several
- mattresses were piled. They were transferring it to living quarters attached to the hospital.
- They were followed by an Englishman dragging his mattress and carrying a dartboard.
- The man with the dartboard was the Blue Fairy Godmother who had injured little Paul
- Lazzaro. He stopped by Lazzaro's bed, asked Lazzaro how he was.
- Lazzaro told him he was going to have him killed after the war.
- 'Oh? '
- 'You made a big mistake,' said Lazzaro. 'Anybody touches me, he better kill me, or I'm
- gonna have him killed.'
- The Blue Fairy Godmother knew something about killing. He gave Lazzaro a careful
- smile. 'There is still time for me to kill you,' he said, 'if you really persuade me that it's
- the sensible thing to do.'
- 'Why don't you go fuck yourself?'
- 'Don't think I haven't tried,' the Blue Fairy Godmother answered.
- The Blue Fairy Godmother left, amused and patronizing. When he was gone, Lazzaro
- promised Billy and poor old Edgar Derby that he was going to have revenge, and that
- revenge was sweet.
- 'It's the sweetest thing there is,' said Lazzaro. 'People fuck with me,' he said, 'and Jesus
- Christ are they ever fucking sorry. I laugh like hell. I don't care if it's a guy or a dame. If
- the President of the United States fucked around with me, I'd fix him good. You should
- have seen what I did to a dog one time.'
- 'A dog?' said Billy.
- 'Son of a bitch bit me. So 1 got me some steak, and I got me the spring out of a clock. I
- cut that spring up in little pieces. I put points on the ends of the pieces. They were sharp
- as razor blades. I stuck 'em into the steak-way inside. And I went past where they had the
- dog tied up. He wanted to bite me again. I said to him, 'Come on., doggie-let's be friends.
- Let's not be enemies any more. I'm not mad." He believed me.'
- 'He did?'
- 'I threw him the steak. He swallowed it down in one big gulp. I waited around for ten
- minutes.' Now Lazzaro's eyes twinkled. 'Blood started coming out of his mouth. He
- started crying, and he rolled on the ground, as though the knives were on the outside of
- him instead of on the inside of him. Then he tried to bite out his own insides. I laughed,
- and I said to him, "You got the right idea now. Tear your own guts out, boy. That's me in
- there with all those knives."' So it goes.
- 'Anybody ever asks you what the sweetest thing in life is-' said Lazzaro, 'it's revenge.'
- When Dresden was destroyed later on, incidentally, Lazzaro did not exult. He didn't
- have anything against the Germans, he said. Also, he said he liked to take his enemies
- one at a time. He was proud of never having hurt an innocent bystander. 'Nobody ever
- got it from Lazzaro,' he said, 'who didn't have it coming.'
- Poor old Edgar Derby, the high school teacher, got into the conversation now. He
- asked Lazzaro if he planned to feed the Blue Fairy Godmother clock springs and steak.
- 'Shit,' said Lazzaro.
- 'He's a pretty big man,' said Derby, who, of course, was a pretty big man himself.
- 'Size don't mean a thing.'
- 'You're going to shoot him?'
- 'I'm gonna have him shot,' said Lazzaro. 'He'll get home after the war. He'll be a big
- hero. The dames'll be climbing all over him. He'll settle down. A couple of years'll go by.
- And then one day there'll be a knock on his door. He'll answer the door, and there'll be a
- stranger out there. The stranger'll ask him if he's so-and-so. When he says he is, the
- stranger'll say, "Paul Lazzaro sent me." And he'll pull out a gun and shoot his pecker off.
- The stranger'll let him think a couple of seconds about who Paul Lazzaro is and what
- life's gonna be like without a pecker. Then he'll shoot him once in the guts and walk
- away.' So it goes.
- Lazzaro said that he could have anybody in the world killed for a thousand dollars plus
- traveling expenses. He had a list in his head, he said.
- Derby asked him who all was on the list, and Lazzaro said, 'Just make fucking sure you
- don't get on it. just don't cross me, that's all.' There was a silence, and then he added, 'And
- don't cross my friends.'
- 'You have friends?' Derby wanted to know.
- 'In the war?' said Lazzaro. 'Yeah-I had a friend in the war. He's dead.' So it goes.
- 'That's too bad.'
- Lazzaro's eyes were twinkling again. 'Yeah. He was my buddy on the boxcar. His
- name was Roland Weary. He died in my arms.' Now he pointed to Billy with his one
- mobile hand. 'He died on account of this silly cocksucker here. So I promised him
- I'd have this silly cocksucker shot after the war.'
- Lazzaro erased with his hand anything Billy Pilgrim might be about to say. 'Just forget
- about it, kid,' he said. 'Enjoy life while you can. Nothing's gonna happen for maybe five,
- ten, fifteen, twenty years. But lemme give you a piece of advice: Whenever the doorbell
- rings, have somebody else answer the door.'
- Billy Pilgrim says now that this really is the way he is going to die, too. As a timetraveler,
- he has seen his own death many times, has described it to a tape recorder. The
- tape is locked up with his will and some other valuables in his safe-deposit box at the
- Ilium Merchants National Bank and Trust, he says.
- I, Billy Pilgrim, the tape begins, will die, have died and always will die on February
- thirteenth, 1976.
- At the time of his death, he says, he is in Chicago to address a large crowd on the
- subject of flying saucers and the true nature of time. His home is still in Ilium. He has had
- to cross three international boundaries in order to reach Chicago. The United States of
- America has been Balkanized, has been divided into twenty petty nations so that it will
- never again be a threat to world peace. Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by Angry
- Chinamen. So it goes. It is all brand new.
- Billy is speaking before a capacity audience in a baseball park, which is covered by a
- geodesic dome. The flag of the country is behind him. It is a Hereford Bull on a field of
- green. Billy predicts his own death within an hour. He laughed about it, invites the crowd
- to laugh with him. 'It is high time I was dead..' he says. 'Many years ago.' he said, 'a
- certain man promised to have me killed. He is an old man now, living not far from here.
- He has read all the publicity associated with my appearance in your fair city. He is
- insane. Tonight he will keep his promise.'
- There are protests from the crowd.
- Billy Pilgrim rebukes them. 'If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing,
- then you have not understood a word I've said.' Now he closes his speech as he closes
- every speech with these words: 'Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.'
- There are police around him as he leaves the stage. They are there to protect him from
- the crush of popularity. No threats on his life have been made since 1945. The police
- offer to stay with him. They are floridly willing to stand in a circle around him all night,
- with their zap guns drawn.
- 'No, no,' says Billy serenely. 'It is time for you to go home to your wives and children,
- and it is time for me to be dead for a little while-and then live again.' At that moment,
- Billy's high forehead is in the cross hairs of a high-powered laser gun. It is aimed at him
- from the darkened press box. In the next moment, Billy Pilgrim is dead. So it goes.
- So Billy experiences death for a while. It is simply violet light and a hum. There isn't
- anybody else there. Not even Billy Pilgrim is there.
- Then he swings back into life again, all the way back to an hour after his life was
- threatened by Lazzaro-in 1945. He has been told to get out of his hospital bed and dress,
- that he is well. He and Lazzaro and poor old Edgar Derby are to join their fellows in the
- theater. There they will choose a leader for themselves by secret ballot in a free election.
- Billy and Lazzaro and poor old Edgar Derby crossed the prison yard to the theater
- now. Billy was carrying his little coat as though it were a lady's muff. It was wrapped
- around and round his hands. He was the central clown in an unconscious travesty of that
- famous oil painting, 'The Spirit of '76.'
- Edgar Derby was writing letters home in his head, telling his Wife that he was alive
- and well, that she shouldn't worry, that the war was. nearly over, that he would soon be
- home.
- Lazzaro was talking to himself about people he was going to have killed after the war,
- and rackets he was going to work, and women he was going to make fuck Mm, whether
- they wanted to or not. If he had been a dog in a city, a policeman would have shot him
- and sent his head to a laboratory, to see if he had rabies. So it goes.
- As they neared the theater, they came upon an Englishman who was hacking a groove
- in the Earth with the heel of his boot. He was marking the boundary between the
- American and English sections of the compound. Billy and Lazzaro and Derby didn't
- have to ask what the line meant. It was a familiar symbol from childhood.
- The theater was paved with American bodies that nestled like spoons. Most of the
- Americans were in stupors or asleep. Their guts were fluttering, dry.
- 'Close the fucking door,' somebody said to Billy. 'Were you born I'm a barn?'
- Billy closed it., took a hand from his muff, touched a stove. It was as cold as ice. The
- stage was still set for Cinderella. Azure curtains hung from the arches which were
- shocking pink. There were golden thrones and the dummy clock, whose hands were set at
- midnight. Cinderella's slippers, which were a man's boots painted silver, were capsized
- side by side under a golden throne.
- Billy and poor old Edgar Derby and Lazzaro had been in the hospital when the British
- passed out blankets and mattresses, so they had none. They had to improvise. The only
- space open to them was up on the stage, and they went up there, pulled the azure curtains
- down, made nests.
- Billy, curled in his azure nest., found himself staring at Cinderella's silver boots under
- a throne. And then he remembered that his shoes were ruined, that he needed boots. He
- hated to get out of his nest., but he forced himself to do it. He crawled to the boots on all
- fours, sat, tried them on.
- The boots fit perfectly. Billy Pilgrim was Cinderella, and Cinderella was Billy Pilgrim.
- Somewhere in there was a lecture on personal hygiene by the head Englishman., and
- then a free election. At least half the Americans went on snoozing through it all. The
- Englishman' got up on the stage, and he rapped on the arm of a throne with
- a swagger stick, called, 'Lads, lads, lad I have your attention, please?' And so on.
- What the Englishman. said about survival was this 'If you stop taking pride 'm your
- appearance, you will very soon die.' He said that he had seen several men die in the
- following way: They ceased to stand up straight, then ceased to shave or wash, then
- ceased to get out of bed, then ceased to talk, then died. There is this much to be said for
- it: it is evidently a very easy and painless way to go.' So it goes.
- The Englishman said that he, when captured, had made and kept the following vows to
- himself: To brush his teeth twice a day, to shave once a day, to wash his face and hands
- before every meal and after going to the latrine, to polish his shoes once a day, to
- exercise for at least half an hour each morning and then move his bowels, and to look into
- a mirror frequently, frankly evaluating his appearance, particularly with respect to
- posture.
- Billy Pilgrim heard all this while lying in his nest. He looked not at the Englishman's
- face but his ankles.
- 'I envy you lads,' said the Englishman.
- Somebody laughed. Billy wondered what the joke was.
- 'You lads are leaving this afternoon for Dresden-a beautiful city., I'm told. You won't
- be cooped up like us. You'll be out where the life is, and the food is certain to be more
- plentiful than here. If I may inject a personal note: It has been five years now since I have
- seen a tree or flower or woman or child-or a dog or a cat or a place of entertainment, or a
- human being doing useful work of any kind.
- 'You needn't worry about bombs, by the way. Dresden is an open city. It is undefended,
- and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any importance.'
- Somewhere in there, old Edgar Derby was elected head American. The Englishman
- called for nominations from the floor, and there weren't any. So he nominated Derby,
- praising him for his maturity and long experience in dealing with people. There were no
- further nominations, so the nominations were closed.
- 'All in favor?'
- Two or three people said, 'Aye.'
- Then poor old Derby made a speech. He thanked the Englishman for his good advice,
- said he meant to follow it exactly. He said he was sure that all the other Americans would
- do the mm. He said that his primary responsibility now was to make damn well sure that
- everybody got home safely.
- 'Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut,' murmured Paul Lazzaro in his azure nest.
- 'Go take a flying fuck at the moon.'
- The temperature climbed startlingly that day. The noontime was balmy. The Germans
- brought soup and bread in two-wheeled carts which were pulled by Russians. The
- Englishmen sent over real coffee and sugar and marmalade and cigarettes and cigars, and
- the doors of the theater were left open, so the warmth could get in.
- The Americans began to feel much better. They were able to hold their food. And then
- it was time to go to Dresden. The Americans marched fairly stylishly out of the British
- compound. Billy Pilgrim again led the parade. He had silver boots now, and a muff, and a
- piece of azure curtain which he wore like a toga. Billy still had a beard. So did poor old
- Edgar Derby, who was beside him. Derby was imagining letters to home, his lips
- working tremulously.
- Dear Margaret-We are leaving for Dresden today. Don t worry. It will never be
- bombed. It is an open city. There was an election at noon, and guess what? And so on.
- They came to the prison railroad yard again. They had arrived on only two cars. They
- would depart far more comfortably on four. They saw the dead hobo again. He was
- frozen stiff in the weeds beside the track. He was in a fetal position, trying even in death
- to nestle like a spoon with others. There were no others now. He was nestling within thin
- air and cinders. Somebody had taken his boots. His bare feet were blue and ivory. It was
- all right, somehow, his being dead. So it goes.
- The trip to Dresden was a lark. It took only two hours. Shriveled little bellies were full.
- Sunlight and cold air came in through the ventilators. There were plenty of smokes from
- the Englishmen.
- The Americans arrived in Dresden at five in the afternoon. The boxcar doors were
- opened, and the doorways framed the loveliest city that most of the Americans had ever
- seen. The skyline was intricate and voluptuous and enchanted and absurd. It looked like a
- Sunday school picture of Heaven to Billy Pilgrim.
- Somebody behind him in the boxcar said, 'Oz.' That was I. That was me. The only
- other city I'd ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana.
- Every other big city in Germany had been bombed and burned ferociously. Dresden
- had not suffered so much as a cracked windowpane. Sirens went off every day, screamed
- like hell, and people went down into cellars and listened to radios there. The planes were
- always bound for someplace else-Leipzig, Chemnitz, Plauen, places like that. So it goes.
- Steam radiators still whistled cheerily in Dresden. Street-cars clanged. Telephones rang
- and were answered. Lights went on and off when switches were clicked. There were
- theaters and restaurants. There was a zoo. The principal enterprises of the city were
- medicine and food-processing and the making of cigarettes.
- People were going home from work now in the late afternoon. They were tired.
- Eight Dresdeners crossed the steel spaghetti of the railroad yard. They were wearing
- new uniforms. They had been sworn into the army the day before. They were boys and
- men past middle age, and two veterans who had been shot to pieces in Russia. Their
- assignment was to guard one hundred American prisoners of war, who would work as
- contract labor. A grandfather and his grandson were in the squad. The grandfather was an
- architect.
- The eight were grim as they approached the boxcars containing their wards. They
- knew what sick and foolish soldiers they themselves appeared to be. One of them actually
- had an artificial leg, and carried not only a loaded rifle but a cane. Still they were
- expected to earn obedience and respect from tall cocky, murderous American
- infantrymen who had just come from all the killing of the front.
- And then they saw bearded Billy Pilgrim in his blue toga and silver shoes, with his
- hands in a muff. He looked at least sixty years old. Next to Billy was little Paul Lazzaro
- with a broken arm. He was fizzing with rabies. Next to Lazzaro was the poor old high
- school teacher, Edgar Derby, mournfully pregnant with patriotism and middle age and
- imaginary wisdom. And so on.
- The eight ridiculous Dresdeners ascertained that these hundred ridiculous creatures
- really were American fighting men fresh from the front. They smiled, and then they
- laughed. Their terror evaporated. There was nothing to be afraid of. Here were more
- crippled human beings, more fools like themselves. Here was light opera.
- So out of the gate of the railroad yard and into the streets of Dresden marched the light
- opera. Billy Pilgrim was the star. He led the parade. Thousands of people were on the
- sidewalks, going home from work. They were watery and putty-colored, having eaten
- mostly potatoes during the past two years. They had expected no blessings beyond the
- mildness of the day. Suddenly-here was fun.
- Billy did not meet many of the eyes that found him so entertaining. He was enchanted
- by the architecture of the city. Merry amoretti wove garlands above windows. Roguish
- fauns and naked nymphs peeked down at Billy from festooned cornices. Stone monkeys
- frisked among scrolls and seashells and bamboo.
- Billy, with his memories of the future, knew that the city would be smashed to
- smithereens and then burned-in about thirty more days. He knew, too, that most of the
- people watching him would soon be dead. So it goes.
- And Billy worked his hands in his muff as he marched. His fingertips, working there in
- the hot darkness of the muff, wanted to know what the two lumps in the lining of the little
- impresario's coat were. The fingertips got inside the lining. They palpated the lumps, the
- pea-shaped thing and the horseshoe-shaped thing. The parade had to halt by a busy
- corner. The traffic light was red.
- There at the comer, in the front rank of pedestrians, was a surgeon who had been
- operating all day. He was a civilian, but his posture was military. He had served in two
- world wars. The sight of Billy offended him, especially after he learned from the guards
- that Billy was an American. It seemed to Wm that Billy was in abominable taste,
- supposed that Billy had gone to a lot of silly trouble to costume himself just so.
- The surgeon spoke English, and he said to Billy, 'I take it you find war a very comical
- thing.'
- Billy looked at him vaguely. Billy had lost track momentarily of where he was or how
- he had gotten there. He had no idea that people thought he was clowning. It was Fate, of
- course, which had costumed him-Fate, and a feeble will to survive.
- 'Did you expect us to laugh?' the surgeon asked him.
- The surgeon was demanding some sort of satisfaction. Billy was mystified. Billy
- wanted to be friendly, to help, if he could, but his resources were meager. His fingers
- now held the two objects from the lining of the coat. Billy decided to show the surgeon
- what they were.
- 'You thought we would enjoy being mocked?' the surgeon said. 'And do you feel proud
- to represent America as you do?' Billy withdrew a hand from his muff, held it under the
- surgeon's nose. On his palm rested a two-carat diamond and a partial denture. The
- denture was an obscene little artifact-silver and pearl and tangerine. Billy smiled.
- The parade pranced, staggered and reeled to the gate of the Dresden slaughterhouse,
- and then it went inside. The slaughterhouse wasn't a busy place any more. Almost all the
- hooved animals in Germany had been killed and eaten and excreted by human beings,
- mostly soldiers. So it goes.
- The Americans were taken to the fifth building inside the gate. It was a one-story
- cement-block cube with sliding doors in front and back. It had been built as a shelter for
- pigs about to be butchered. Now it was going to serve as a home away from home for one
- hundred American prisoners of war. There were bunks in there, and two potbellied stoves
- and a water tap. Behind it was a latrine, which was a one-rail fence with buckets under it.
- There was a big number over the door of the building. The number was five. Before
- the Americans could go inside, their only English-speaking guard told them to memorize
- their simple address, in case they got lost in the big city. Their address was this:
- 'Schlachthöf-funf.' Schlachthöf meant slaughterhouse. Funf was good old five.
- Seven
- Billy Pilgrim got onto a chartered airplane in Ilium twenty-five years after that. He knew
- he was going to crash, but he didn't want to make a fool of himself by saying so. It was
- supposed to carry Billy and twenty-eight other optometrists to a convention in Montreal.
- His wife, Valencia, was outside, and his father-in-law, Lionel Merble, was strapped to
- the seat beside him.
- Lionel Merble was a machine. Tralfamadorians, of course, say that every creature and
- plant in the Universe is a machine. It amuses them that so many Earthlings are offended
- by the idea of being machines.
- Outside the plane, the machine named Valencia Merble Pilgrim was eating a Peter Paul
- Mound Bar and waving bye-bye.
- The plane took off without incident. The moment was structured that way. There was a
- barbershop quartet on board. They were optometrists, too. They called themselves 'The
- Febs,' which was an acronym for 'Four-eyed Bastards.'
- When the plane was safely aloft, the machine that was Bill's father-in-law asked the
- quartet to sing his favorite song. They knew what song he meant, and they sang it, and it
- went like this:
- In my prison cell I sit,
- With my britches full of shit,
- And my balls are bouncing gently on the floor.
- And I see the bloody snag
- When she bit me in the bag.
- Oh, I'll never fuck a Polack any more.
- Billy's father-in-law laughed and laughed at that, and he begged the quartet to sing the
- other Polish song he liked so much. So they sang a song from the Pennsylvania coal
- mines that began:
- Me, and Mike, ve vork in mine.
- Holy shit, ve have good time.
- Vunce a veek ve get our pay.
- Holy shit, no vork next day.
- Speaking of people from Poland: Billy- Pilgrim accidentally saw a Pole hanged in
- public, about three days after Billy got to Dresden. Billy just happened to be walking to
- work with some others shortly after sunrise, and they came to a gallows and a small
- crowd in front of a soccer stadium. The Pole was a farm laborer who was being hanged
- for having had sexual intercourse with a German woman. So it goes.
- Billy, knowing the plane was going to crash pretty soon, closed his eyes, traveled in
- time back to 1944. He was back in the forest in Luxembourg again-with the Three
- Musketeers. Roland Weary was shaking him, bonking his head against a tree. 'You guys
- go on without me,' said Billy Pilgrim.
- The barbershop quartet on the airplane was singing 'Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nelly,'
- when the plane smacked into the top of Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont. Everybody was
- killed but Billy and the copilot. So it goes.
- The people who first got to the crash scene were young Austrian ski instructors from
- the famous ski resort below. They spoke to each other in German as they went from body
- to body. They wore black wind masks with two holes for their eyes and a red topknot.
- They looked like golliwogs, like white people pretending to be black for the laughs they
- could get.
- Billy had a fractured skull, but he was still conscious. He didn't know where he was.
- His lips were working, and one of the golliwogs put his ear close to them to hear what
- might be his dying words.
- Billy thought the golliwog had something to do with the Second World War, and he
- whispered to him his address: 'Schlachthöf-funf.'
- Billy was brought down Sugarbush Mountain on a toboggan. The golliwogs controlled
- it with ropes and yodeled melodiously for right-of-way. Near the bottom, the trail
- swooped around the pylons of a chair lift. Billy looked up at all the young people in
- bright elastic clothing and enormous boots and goggles, bombed out of their skulls with
- snow, swinging through the sky in yellow chairs. He supposed that they were part of an
- amazing new phase of the Second World War. It was all right with him. Everything was
- pretty much all right with Billy.
- He was taken to a small private hospital. A famous brain surgeon came up from Boston
- and operated on him for three hours. Billy was unconscious for two days after that, and
- he dreamed millions of things, some of them true. The true things were time-travel.
- One of the true things was his first evening in the slaughterhouse. He and poor old
- Edgar Derby were pushing an empty two-wheeled cart down a dirt lane between empty
- pens for animals. They were going to a communal kitchen for supper for all. They were
- guarded by a sixteen-year-old German named Werner Gluck. The axles of the cart were
- greased with the fat of dead animals. So it goes.
- The sun had just gone down, and its afterglow was backlighting the city, which formed
- low cliffs around the bucolic void to the idle stockyards. The city was blacked out
- because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden do one of the most
- cheerful things a city is capable of doing when the sun goes down, which is to wink its
- lights on one by one.
- There was a broad river to reflect those lights, which would have made their nighttime
- winkings very pretty indeed. It was the Elbe.
- Werner Gluck, the young guard, was a Dresden boy. He had never been in the
- slaughterhouse before, so he wasn't sure where the kitchen was. He was tall and weak
- like Billy, might have been a younger brother of his. They were, in fact, distant cousins,
- something they never found out. Gluck was armed with an incredibly heavy musket, a
- single-shot museum piece with an octagonal barrel and a smooth bore. He had fixed his
- bayonet. It was like a long knitting needle. It had no blood gutters.
- Gluck led the way to a building that he thought might contain the kitchen, and he
- opened the sliding doors in its side. There wasn't a kitchen in there, though. There was a
- dressing room adjacent to a communal shower, and there was a lot of steam. In the steam
- were about thirty teen-age girls with no clothes on. They were German refugees from
- Breslau, which had been tremendously bombed. They had just arrived in Dresden, too.
- Dresden was jammed with refugees.
- There those girls were with all their private parts bare, for anybody to see. And there in
- the doorway were Gluck and Derby and Pilgrim-the childish soldier and the poor old high
- school teacher and the clown in his toga and silver shoes-staring. The girls screamed.
- They covered themselves with their hands and turned their backs and so on, and made
- themselves utterly beautiful.
- Werner Gluck, who had never seen a naked woman before, closed the door. Bill had
- never seen one, either. It was nothing new to Derby.
- When the three fools found the communal kitchen, whose main job was to make lunch
- for workers in the slaughterhouse, everybody had gone home but one woman who had
- been waiting for them impatiently. She was a war widow. So it goes. She had her hat and
- coat on. She wanted to go home, too, even though there wasn't anybody there. Her white
- gloves were laid out side by side on the zinc counter top.
- She had two big cans of soup for the Americans. It was simmering over low fires on
- the gas range. She had stacks of loaves of black bread, too.
- She asked Gluck if he wasn't awfully young to be in the army. He admitted that he
- was.
- She asked Edgar Derby if he wasn't awfully old to be in the army. He said he was.
- She asked Billy Pilgrim what he was supposed to be. Billy said he didn't know. He was
- just trying to keep warm.
- 'All the real soldiers are dead,' she said. It was true. So it goes.
- Another true thing that Billy saw while he was unconscious in Vermont was the work
- that he and the others had to do in Dresden during the month before the city was
- destroyed. They washed windows and swept floors and cleaned lavatories and put jars
- into boxes and sealed cardboard boxes in a factory that made malt syrup. The syrup was
- enriched with vitamins and minerals. The syrup was for pregnant women.
- The syrup tasted like thin honey laced with hickory smoke, and everybody who
- worked in the factory secretly spooned it all day long. They weren't pregnant, but they
- needed vitamins and minerals, too. Billy didn't spoon syrup on his first day at work, but
- lots of other Americans did.
- Billy spooned it on his second day. There were spoons hidden all over the factory, on
- rafters, in drawers, behind radiators, and so on. They had been hidden in haste by persons
- who had been spooning syrup, who had heard somebody else coming. Spooning was a
- crime.
- On his second day, Billy was cleaning behind a radiator and he found a spoon. To his
- back was a vat of syrup that was cooling. The only other person who could see Billy and
- his spoon was poor old Edgar Derby, who was washing a window outside. The spoon
- was a tablespoon. Billy thrust it into the vat, turned it around and around, making a gooey
- lollipop. He thrust it into his mouth.
- A moment went by, and then every cell in Billy's body shook him with ravenous
- gratitude and applause.
- There were diffident raps at the factory window. Derby was out there, having seen all.
- He wanted some syrup, too.
- So Billy made a lollipop for him. He opened the window. He stuck the lollipop into
- poor old Derby's gaping mouth. A moment passed, and then Derby burst into tears. Billy
- closed the window and hid the sticky spoon. Somebody was coming.
- Eight
- The Americans in the slaughterhouse had a very interesting visitor two days before
- Dresden was destroyed. He was Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American who had become
- a Nazi. Campbell was the one who had written the monograph about the shabby behavior
- of American prisoners of war. He wasn't doing more research about prisoners now. He
- had come to the slaughter house to recruit men for a German military unit called 'The
- Free American Corps.' Campbell was the inventor and commander of the unit, which was
- supposed to fight only on the Russian front.
- Campbell was an ordinary looking man, but he was extravagantly costumed in a
- uniform of his own design. He wore a white ten-gallon hat and black cowboy boots
- decorated with swastikas and stars. He was sheathed in a blue body stocking which had
- yellow stripes running from his armpits to his ankles. His shoulder patch was a silhouette
- of Abraham Lincoln's profile on a field of pale green. He had a broad armband which was
- red, with a blue swastika in a circle of white.
- He was explaining this armband now in the cement-block hog barn.
- Billy Pilgrim had a boiling case of heartburn, since he had been spooning malt syrup
- all day long at work. The heartburn brought tears to his eves, so that his image of
- Campbell was distorted by jiggling lenses of salt water.
- 'Blue is for the American sky,' Campbell was saying. 'White is for the race that
- pioneered the continent, drained the swamps and cleared the forests and built the roads
- and bridges. Red is for the blood of American patriots which was shed so gladly in years
- gone by.'
- Campbell's audience was sleepy. It had worked hard at the syrup factory, and then it
- had marched a long way home in the cold. It was skinny and hollow-eyed. Its skins were
- beginning to blossom with small sores. So were its mouths and throats and intestines. The
- malt syrup it spooned at the factory contained only a few of the vitamins and minerals
- every Earthling needs.
- Campbell offered the Americans food now, steaks and mashed potatoes and gravy and
- mince pie, if they would join the Free Corps. 'Once the Russians are defeated,' he went
- on, you will be repatriated through Switzerland.'
- There was no response.
- 'You're going to have to fight the Communists sooner or later,' said Campbell. "Why
- not get it over with now?'
- And then it developed that Campbell was not going to go unanswered after all. Poor
- old Derby, the doomed high school teacher, lumbered to his feet for what was probably
- the finest moment in his life. 'Mere are almost no characters in this story, and almost no
- dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the
- listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after an, is that
- people are discouraged from being characters. But old Derby was a character now.
- His stance was that of a punch-drunk fighter. His head was down, his fists were out
- front, waiting for information and battle plan. Derby raised his head, called Campbell a
- snake. He corrected that. He said that snakes couldn't help being snakes, and that
- Campbell, who could help being what he was, was something much lower than a snake or
- a rat-or even a blood-filled tick.
- Campbell smiled.
- Derby spoke movingly of the American form of government, with freedom and justice
- and opportunities and fair play for all. He said there wasn't a man there who wouldn't
- gladly die for those ideals.
- He spoke of the brotherhood between the American and the Russian people, and how
- those two nations were going to crush the disease of Nazism, which wanted to infect the
- whole world.
- The air-raid sirens of Dresden howled mournfully.
- The Americans and their guards and Campbell took shelter in an echoing meat locker
- which was hollowed in living rock under the slaughterhouse. There was an iron staircase
- with iron doors at the top and bottom.
- Down in the locker were a few cattle and sheep and pigs, and horses hanging from iron
- hooks. So it goes. The locker had empty hooks for thousands more. It was naturally cool.
- There was no refrigeration. There was candlelight. The locker was whitewashed and
- smelled of carbolic acid. There were benches along a wall. The Americans went to these,
- brushing away flakes of whitewash before they sat down.
- Howard W. Campbell. Jr., remained standing, like the guards. He talked to the guards
- in excellent German. He had written many popular German plays and poems in his time,
- and had married a famous German actress named Resi North. She was dead now, had
- been killed while entertaining troops in the Crimea. So it goes.
- Nothing happened that night. It was the next night that about one hundred and thirty
- thousand people in Dresden would die. So it goes. Billy dozed in the meat locker. He
- found himself engaged again, word for word, gesture for gesture, in the argument with
- his daughter with which this tale begun.
- 'Father,' she said, 'What are we going to do with you?'
- And so on. 'You know who I could just kill?' she asked.
- 'Who could you kill?' said Billy.
- 'That Kilgore Trout.'
- Kilgore Trout was and is a science-fiction writer, of course. Billy has not only read
- dozens of books by Trout-he has also become a friend of Trout, who is a bitter man.
- Trout lives in a rented basement in Ilium, about two miles from Billy's nice white
- home. He himself has no idea how many novels he has written-possibly seventy-five of
- the things. Not one of them has made money. So Trout keeps body and soul together as a
- circulation man for the Ilium Gazette, manages newspaper delivery boys, bullies and
- flatters and cheats little kids.
- Billy met him for the first time in 1964. Billy drove his Cadillac down a back alley in
- Ilium and he found his way blocked by dozens of boys and their bicycles. A meeting was
- in progress. The boys were harangued by a man in a full beard. He was cowardly and
- dangerous, and obviously very good at his job. Trout was sixty-two years old back then.
- He was telling the kids to get off their dead butts and get their daily customers to
- subscribe to the fucking Sunday edition, too. He said that whoever sold the most Sunday
- subscriptions during the next two months would get a free trip for himself and his parents
- to 's fucking Vineyard for a week, all expenses paid.
- And so on.
- One of the newspaper boys was actually a newspaper girl. She was electrified.
- Trout's paranoid face was terribly familiar to Billy, who had seen it on the jackets of so
- many books. But., coming upon that face suddenly in a home-town alley, Billy could not
- guess why the face was familiar. Billy thought maybe he had known this cracked messiah
- in Dresden somewhere. Trout certainly looked like a prisoner of war.
- And then the newspaper girl held up her hand. 'Mr. Trout,' she said, 'if I win, can I take
- my sister, too?'
- 'Hell no,' said Kilgore Trout. 'You think money grows on trees?'
- Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills
- for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human
- beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
- So it goes.
- Billy Pilgrim parked his Cadillac in the alley, and waited for the meeting to end. When
- the meeting broke up, there was still one boy Trout had to deal with. The boy wanted to
- quit because the work was so hard and the hours were so long and the pay was so small.
- Trout was concerned, because, if the boy really quit, Trout would have to deliver the
- boy's route himself, until he could find another sucker.
- 'What are you?' Trout asked the boy scornfully. 'Some kind of gutless wonder?'
- This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot
- who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made
- the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread
- use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings.
- It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no
- conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to
- the people on the ground.
- 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. But then he cleared that up, and he was
- welcomed to the human race.
- Trout lost his argument with the boy who wanted to quit. He told the boy about all the
- millionaires who had carried newspapers as boys, and the boy replied: 'Yeah-but I bet
- they quit after a week, it's such a royal screwing.'
- And the boy left his full newspaper bag at Trout's feet, with the customer book on top.
- It was up to Trout to deliver these papers. He didn't have a car. He didn't even have a
- bicycle, and he was scared to death of dogs.
- Somewhere a big dog barked.
- As Trout lugubriously slung the bag from his shoulder, Billy Pilgrim approached him.
- 'Mr. Trout-'
- 'Yes?'
- "Are-are you Kilgore Trout?
- 'Yes.' Trout supposed that Billy had some complaint about the way his newspapers
- were being delivered. He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that
- the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.
- 'The-the writer?' said Billy.
- 'The what?'
- Billy was certain that he had made a mistake. 'There's a writer named Kilgore Trout.'
- 'There is?' Trout looked foolish and dazed.
- 'You never heard of him?'
- Trout shook his head. 'Nobody-nobody ever did.'
- Billy helped Trout deliver his papers, driving him from house to house in the Cadillac.
- Billy was the responsible one, finding the houses, checking them off. Trout's mind was
- blown. He had never met a fan before, and Billy was such an avid fan.
- Trout told him that he had never seen a book of his advertised, reviewed, or on sale.
- 'All these years' he said, 'I've been opening the window and making love to the world.'
- 'You must surely have gotten letters,' said Billy. 'I've felt like writing you letters many
- times.'
- Trout held up a single finger. 'One.'
- 'Was it enthusiastic?'
- 'It was insane. The writer said I should be President of the World.'
- It turned out that the person who had written this letter was Elliot Rosewater, Billy's
- friend in the veterans' hospital near Lake Placid. Billy told Trout about Rosewater.
- 'My God-I thought he was about fourteen years old,' said Trout.
- "A full grown man-a captain in the war.'
- 'The writes like a fourteen-year-old,' said Kilgore Trout.
- Billy invited Trout to his eighteenth wedding anniversary which was only two days
- hence. Now the party was in progress.
- Trout was in Billy's dining room, gobbling canapés. He was talking with a mouthful of
- Philadelphia cream cheese and salmon roe to an optometrist's wife. Everybody at the
- party was associated with optometry in some way, except Trout. And he alone was
- without glasses. He was making a great hit. Everybody was ed to have a real author at the
- party, even though they had never read his books.
- Trout was talking to a Maggie White, who had given up being a dental assistant to
- become a homemaker for an optometrist. She was very pretty. The last book she had read
- was Ivanhoe.
- Billy Pilgrim stood nearby, listening. He was palpating something in his pocket. It was
- a present he was about to give his Wife, a white satin box containing a star sapphire
- cocktail ring. The ring was worth eight hundred dollars.
- The adulation that Trout was receiving, mindless and illiterate as it was, affected Trout
- like marijuana. He was happy and loud and impudent.
- 'I'm afraid I don't read as much as I ought to,' said Maggie.
- 'We're all afraid of something,' Trout replied. 'I'm afraid of cancer and rats and
- Doberman pinschers.'
- 'I should know, but I don't, so I have to ask,' said Maggie, 'what's the most famous
- thing you ever wrote?'
- 'It was about a funeral for a great French chef.'
- 'That sounds interesting.'
- 'All the great chefs in the world are there. It's a beautiful ceremony.' Trout was making
- this up as he went along. 'Just before the casket is closed, the mourners sprinkle parsley
- and paprika on the deceased.' So it goes.
- 'Did that really happen?' said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but a sensational
- invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right
- away. She hadn't had even one baby yet. She used birth control.
- 'Of course it happened,' Trout told her. 'If I wrote something that hadn't really
- happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That's fraud!'
- Maggie believed him. 'I'd never thought about that before.'
- 'Think about it now.'
- 'It's like advertising. You have to tell the truth in advertising, or you get in trouble.'
- 'Exactly. The same body of laws applies.'
- 'Do you think you might put us in a book sometime?'
- 'I put everything that happens to me in books.'
- 'I guess I better be careful what I say.'
- 'That's right. And I'm not the only one who's listening. God is listening, too. And on
- Judgment Day he's going to tell you all the things you said and did. If it turns out they're
- bad things instead of good things, that's too bad for you, because you'll bum forever and
- ever. The burning never stops hurting.'
- Poor Maggie turned gray. She believed that too, and was petrified.
- Kilgore Trout laughed uproariously. A salmon egg flew out of his mouth and landed in
- Maggie's cleavage.
- Now an optometrist called for attention. He proposed a toast to Billy and Valencia,
- whose anniversary it was. According to plan, the barbershop quartet of optometrists, 'The
- Febs,' sang while people drank and Billy and Valencia put their arms around each other,
- just glowed. Everybody's eyes were shining. The song was 'That Old Gang of Mine.'
- Gee, that song went, but I'd give the world to see that old gang of mine. And so on. A
- little later it said. So long forever, old fellows and gals, so long forever old sweethearts
- and pals-God bless 'em-And so on.
- Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the occasion. He had
- never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway, as the quartet
- made slow, agonized experiments with chords-chords intentionally sour, sourer still,
- unbearably sour, and then a chord that was suffocatingly sweet, and then some sour ones
- again. Billy had powerful psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth
- filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really were
- being stretched on the torture engine called the rack.
- He looked so peculiar that several people commented on it solicitously when the song
- was done. They thought he might have been having a heart attack, and Billy seemed to
- confirm this by going to a chair and sitting down haggardly.
- There was silence.
- 'Oh my God,' said Valencia, leaning over him, 'Billy-are you all right?'
- 'Yes.'
- 'You look so awful.'
- 'Really-I'm O.K.' And he was, too, except that he could find no explanation for why the
- song had affected him so grotesquely. He had supposed for years that he had no secrets
- from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he
- could not imagine what it was.
- People drifted away now, seeing the color return to Billy's cheeks, seeing him smile.
- Valencia stayed with him, and Kilgore Trout, who had been on the fringe of the crowd,
- came closer, interested, shrewd.
- 'You looked as though you'd seen a ghost,' said Valencia.
- 'No,' said Billy. He hadn't seen anything but what was really before him-the faces of
- the four singers, those four ordinary men, cow-eyed and mindless and anguished as they
- went from sweetness to sourness to sweetness again.
- 'Can I make a guess?' said Kilgore Trout 'You saw through a time window.'
- 'A what?' said Valencia.
- 'He suddenly saw the past or the future. Am I right?'
- 'No,' said Billy Pilgrim. He got up, put a hand into his pocket, found the box containing
- the ring in there. He took out the box, gave it absently to Valencia. He had meant to give
- it to her at the end of the song, while everybody was watching. Only Kilgore Trout was
- there to see.
- 'For me?' said Valencia.
- 'Yes'
- "Oh my God, she said. Then she said it louder, so other people heard. They gathered
- around, and she opened it, and she almost screamed when she saw the sapphire with a
- star in it. 'Oh my God,' she said. She gave Billy a big kiss. She said, 'Thank you, thank
- you, thank you.'
- There was a lot of talk about what wonderful jewelry Billy had given to Valencia over
- the years. 'My God,' said Maggie White, 'she's already got the biggest diamond I ever saw
- outside of a movie.' She was talking about the diamond Billy had brought back from the
- war.
- The partial denture he had found inside his little impresario's coat, incidentally, was in
- his cufflinks box in his dresser drawer. Billy had a wonderful collection of cufflinks. It
- was the custom of the family to give him cufflinks on every Father's Day. He was
- wearing Father's Day cufflinks now. They had cost over one hundred dollars. They were
- made out of ancient Roman coins. He had one pair of cufflinks upstairs which were little
- roulette wheels that really worked. He had another pair which had a real thermometer in
- one and a real compass in the other.
- Billy now moved about the party-outwardly normal. Kilgore Trout was shadowing
- him, keen to know what Billy had suspected or seen. Most of Trout's novels, after all,
- dealt with time warps and extrasensory perception and other unexpected things. Trout
- believed in things like that, was greedy to have their existence proved.
- 'You ever put a full-length mirror on the floor, and then have a dog stand on it?' Trout
- asked Billy.
- 'No.'
- 'The dog will look down, and all of a sudden he'll realize there's nothing under him. He
- thinks he's standing on thin air. He'll jump a mile.'
- 'He will?'
- That's how you looked-as though you all of a sudden realized you were standing on
- thin air.'
- The barbershop quartet sang again. Billy was emotionally racked again. The
- experience was definitely associated with those four men and not what they sang.
- Here is what they sang, while Billy was pulled apart inside:
- 'Leven cent cotton, forty cent meat,
- How in the world can a poor man eat?
- Pray for the sunshine, 'cause it will rain.
- Things gettin' worse, drivin' all insane;
- Built a nice bar, painted it brown
- Lightnin' came along and burnt it down:
- No use talkin' any man's beat,
- With 'leven cent cotton and forty cent meat.
- 'Leven cent cotton, a car-load of tax,
- The load's too heavy for our poor backs…
- And so on.
- Billy fled upstairs in his nice white home.
- Trout would have come upstairs with him if Billy hadn't told him not to. Then Billy
- went into the upstairs bathroom, which was dark He closed and locked the door. He left it
- dark, and gradually became aware that he was not alone. His son was in there.
- 'Dad?' his son said in the dark. Robert, the future Green Beret, was seventeen then.
- Billy liked him, but didn't know him very well. Billy couldn't help suspecting that there
- wasn't much to know about Robert.
- Billy flicked on the light. Robert was sitting on the toilet with his pajama bottoms
- around his ankles. He was wearing an electric guitar, slung around his neck on a strap. He
- had just bought the guitar that day. He couldn't play it yet and, in fact, never learned to
- play it. It was a nacreous pink.
- 'Hello, son,' said Billy Pilgrim.
- Billy went into his bedroom, even though there were guests to be entertained
- downstairs. He lay down on his bed, turned on the Magic Fingers. The mattress trembled,
- drove a dog out from under the bed. The dog was Spot. Good old Spot was still alive in
- those days. Spot lay down again in a corner.
- Billy thought hard about the effect the quartet had had on him, and then found an
- association with an experience he had had long ago. He did not travel in time to the
- experience. He remembered it shimmeringly-as follows:
- He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were
- sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants
- walked and walked. The meat locker was a very safe shelter. All that happened down
- there was an occasional shower of calcimine. The Americans and four of their guards and
- a few dressed carcasses were down there, and nobody else. The rest of the guards had,
- before the raid began, gone to the comforts of their own homes in Dresden. They were all
- being killed with their families.
- So it goes.
- The girls that Billy had seen naked were all being killed, too, in a much shallower
- shelter in another part of the stockyards.
- So it goes.
- A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like
- outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guards. There was a firestorm
- out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic,
- everything that would burn.
- It wasn't safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans
- and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little
- pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now nothing but minerals. The stones were hot.
- Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.
- So it goes.
- The guards drew together instinctively, rolled their eyes. They experimented with one
- expression and then another, said nothing, though their mouths were often open. They
- looked like a silent film of a barbershop quartet.
- 'So long forever,' they might have been singing, 'old fellows and pals; So long forever,
- old sweethearts and pals-God bless 'em-'
- 'Tell me a story,' Montana Wildhack said to Billy Pilgrim in the Tralfamadorian zoo
- one time. They were in bed side by side. They had privacy. The canopy covered the
- dome. Montana was six months pregnant now, big and rosy, lazily demanding small
- favors from Billy from time to time. She couldn't send Billy out for ice cream or
- strawberries, since the atmosphere outside the dome was cyanide, and the nearest
- strawberries and ice cream were millions of light years away.
- She could send him to the refrigerator, which was decorated with the blank couple on
- the bicycle built for two-or, as now she could wheedle, 'Tell me a story, Billy boy.'
- 'Dresden was destroyed on the night of February 13, 1945,' Billy Pilgrim began. 'We
- came out of our shelter the next day.' He told Montana about the four guards who, in their
- astonishment and grief, resembled a barber-shop quartet. He told her about the stockyards
- with all the fenceposts gone, with roofs and windows gone-told her about seeing little
- logs lying around. These were people who had been caught in the firestorm. So it goes.
- Billy told her what had happened to the buildings that used to form cliffs around the
- stockyards. They had collapsed. Their wood had been consumed, and their stones had
- crashed down, had tumbled against one another until they locked at last in low and
- graceful curves.
- 'It was like the moon,' said Billy Pilgrim.
- The guards told the Americans to form in ranks of four, which they did. Then they had
- them march back to the hog barn which had, been their home. Its wars still stood, but its
- windows and roof were gone, and there was nothing inside but ashes and dollops of
- melted glass. It was realized then that there was no food or water, and that the survivors,
- if they were going to continue to survive, were going to have to climb over curve after
- curve on the face of the moon.
- Which they did.
- The curves were smooth only when seen from a distance. The people climbing them
- learned that they were treacherous, jagged things-hot to the touch, often unstable eager,
- should certain important rocks be disturbed, to tumble some more, to form lower, more
- solid curves.
- Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing
- appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed
- to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a
- flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all.
- American fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything was moving. They
- saw Billy and the rest moving down there. The planes sprayed them with machine-gun
- bullets, but the bullets missed. Then they saw some other people moving down by the
- riverside and they shot at them. They hit some of them. So it goes.
- The idea was to hasten the end of the war.
- Billy's story ended very curiously in a suburb untouched by fire and explosions. The
- guards and the Americans came at nightfall to an inn which was open for business. There
- was candlelight. There were fires in three fireplaces downstairs. There were empty tables
- and chairs waiting for anyone who might come, and empty beds with covers turned down
- upstairs.
- There was a blind innkeeper and his sighted wife, who was the cook, and their two
- young daughters, who worked as waitresses and maids. This family knew that Dresden
- was gone. Those with eyes had seen it bum and bum, understood that they were on the
- edge of a desert now. Still-they had opened for business, had polished the glasses and
- wound the clocks and stirred the fires, and waited and waited to see who would come.
- There was no great flow of refugees from Dresden. The clocks ticked on, the crackled,
- the translucent candles dripped. And then there was a knock on the door, and in came
- four guards and one hundred American prisoners of war.
- The innkeeper asked the guards if they had come from the city.
- 'Yes.'
- Are there more people coming?'
- And the guards said that, on the difficult route they had chosen, they had not seen
- another living soul.
- The blind innkeeper said that the Americans could sleep in his stable that night, and he
- gave them soup and ersatz coffee and a little beer. Then he came out to the stable to listen
- to them bedding down in the straw.
- 'Good night, Americans,' he said in German. 'Sleep well.'
- Nine
- Here is how Billy Pilgrim lost his wife, Valencia.
- He was unconscious in the hospital in Vermont, after the airplane crash on Sugarbush
- Mountain, and Valencia, having heard about the crash, was driving from Ilium to the
- hospital in the family Cadillac El Dorado Coupe de Ville. Valencia was hysterical,
- because she had been told frankly that Billy might die, or that, if he lived, he might be a
- vegetable.
- Valencia adored Billy. She was crying and yelping so hard as she drove that she
- missed the correct turnoff from the throughway. She applied her power brakes, and a
- Mercedes slammed into her from behind. Nobody was hurt, thank God, because both
- drivers were wearing seat belts. Thank God, thank God. The Mercedes lost only a
- headlight. But the rear end of the Cadillac was a body-and-fender man's wet dream. The
- trunk and fenders were collapsed. The gaping trunk looked like the mouth of a village
- idiot who 'was explaining that he didn't know anything about anything. The fenders
- shrugged. The bumper was at a high port arms. 'Reagan for President!' a sticker on the
- bumper said. The back window was veined with cracks. The exhaust system rested on the
- pavement.
- The driver of the Mercedes got out and went to Valencia, to find out if she was all
- right. She blabbed hysterically about Billy and the airplane crash, and then she put her car
- in gear and crossed the median divider, leaving her exhaust system behind.
- When she arrived at the hospital, people rushed to the windows to see what all the
- noise was. The Cadillac, with both mufflers gone, sounded like a heavy bomber coming
- in on a wing and a prayer. Valencia turned off the engine, but then she slumped against
- the steering wheel, and the horn brayed steadily. A doctor and a nurse ran out to find out
- what the trouble was. Poor Valencia was unconscious, overcome by carbon monoxide.
- She was a heavenly azure.
- One hour later she was dead. So it goes.
- Billy knew nothing about it. He, dreamed on, and traveled in time and so forth. The
- hospital was so crowded that Billy couldn't have a room to himself. He shared a room
- with a Harvard history professor named Bertram Copeland Rumfoord. Rumfoord didn't
- have to look at Billy, because Billy was surrounded by white linen screens on rubber
- wheels. But Rumfoord could hear Billy talking to himself from time to time.
- Rumfoord's left leg was in traction. He had broken it while skiing. He was seventy
- years old, but had the body and spirit of a man half that age. He had been honeymooning
- with his fifth wife when he broke his leg. Her name was Lily. Lily was twenty-three.
- Just about the time poor Valencia was pronounced dead, Lily came into Billy's and
- Rumfoord's room with an armload of books. Rumfoord had sent her down to Boston to
- get them. He was working on a one-volume history of the United States Army Air Corps
- in the Second World War. The books were about bombings and sky battles that had
- happened before Lily was even born.
- 'You guys go on without me,' said Billy Pilgrim deliriously, as pretty little Lily came
- in. She had been an a-go-go girl when Rumfoord saw her and resolved to make her his
- own. She was a high school dropout. Her I.Q. was 103. 'He scares me,' she whispered to
- her husband about Billy Pilgrim.
- 'He bores the hell out of me!' Rumfoord replied boomingly. 'All he does in his sleep is
- quit and surrender and apologize and ask to be left alone.' Rumfoord was a retired
- brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve, the official Air Force Historian, a fun
- professor, the author of twenty-six books, a multimillionaire since birth, and one of the
- great competitive sailors of all time. His most popular book was about sex and strenuous
- athletics for men over sixty-five. Now he quoted Theodore Roosevelt whom he
- resembled a lot:
- "'I could carve a better man out of a banana."'
- One of the things Rumfoord had told Lily to get in Boston was a copy of President
- Harry S. Truman's announcement to the world that an atomic bomb had been dropped on
- Hiroshima. She had a Xerox of it, and Rumfoord asked her if she had read it.
- 'No.' She didn't read well, which was one of the reasons she had dropped out of high
- school.
- Rumfoord ordered her to sit down and read the Truman statement now. He didn't know
- that she couldn't read much. He knew very little about her, except that she was one more
- public demonstration that he was a superman.
- So Lily sat down and pretended to read the Truman thing, which went like this:
- Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an
- important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It
- had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British 'Grand Slam' which is
- the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.
- The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid manyfold.
- And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary
- increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their
- present form these bombs are now in production, and even more powerful forms are in
- development.
- It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force
- from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the
- Far East.
- Before 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to
- release atomic energy. But nobody knew any practical method of doing it. By 1942,
- however, we knew that the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic
- energy to all the other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world. But
- they failed. We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans got the V-1's and V-2's
- late and in limited quantities and even more grateful that they did not get the atomic
- bomb at all.
- The battle of the laboratories held-fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air,
- land and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the
- other battles.
- We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive
- enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city, said Harry Truman. We shall
- destroy their docks, their factories and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we
- shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war. It was to spare-
- And so on.
- One of the books that Lily had brought Rumfoord was The Destruction of Dresden by
- an Englishman named David Irving. It was an American edition, published by Holt.,
- Rinehart and Winston in 1964. What Rumfoord wanted from it were. portions of the
- forewords by his friends Ira C. Eaker, Lieutenant General, U.S.A.F., retired, and British
- Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, K.C.B., K.B.E., M.C., D.F.C., A.F.C.
- I find it difficult to understand Englishmen or Americans .who weep about enemy
- civilians who were killed but who have not shed a tear for our gallant crews lost in
- combat with a cruel enemy, wrote his friend General Eaker in part. I think it would have
- been well for Mr. Irving to have remembered, when he was drawing the frightful picture
- of the civilian killed at Dresden, that V-1's and V-2's were at that very time failing on
- England, killing civilian men, women and children indiscriminately, as they were
- designed and launched to do. It might be well to remember Buchenwald and Coventry,
- too
- Eaker's foreword ended this way
- I deeply regret that British and U.S. bombers killed 135,000 people in the attack on
- Dresden, but I remember who started the last war and I regret even more the -loss of
- more than 5,000,000, Allied lives in the necessary effort to completely defeat and utterly
- destroy nazism.
- So it goes.
- What Air Marshal Saundby said, among other things, was this
- That the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. That it was really a
- military necessity few, after reading this book, will believe. It was one of those terrible
- things that sometimes happen in wartime, brought about by an unfortunate combination
- of circumstances. Those who approved it were neither wicked no?, cruel, though it may
- well be that they were too remote from the harsh realities of war to understand fully the
- appalling destructive power of air bombardment in the spring of 1945
- The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their
- aim., war would become tolerable and decent. They would do well to read this book and
- ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an at attack with
- conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, 1945, an air attack on Tokyo by
- American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the death
- of 83,793 people. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71,379 people.
- So it goes.
- 'If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming,' said Billy Pilgrim behind his white linen screens,
- 'just ask for Wild Bob.'
- Lily Rumfoord shuddered, went on pretending to read the Harry Truman thing.
- Billy's daughter Barbara came in later that day. She was all doped up, had the same
- glassy-eyed look that poor old Edgar Derby wore just before he was shot in Dresden.
- Doctors had given her pills so she could continue to function, even though her father was
- broken and her mother was dead.
- So it goes.
- She was accompanied by a doctor and a nurse. Her brother Robert was flying home
- from a battlefield in Vietnam. 'Daddy,' she said tentatively. 'Daddy? '
- But Billy was ten years away, back in 1958. He was examining the eyes of a young
- male Mongolian idiot in order to prescribe corrective lenses. The idiot's mother was
- there, acting as an interpreter.
- 'How many dots do you see?' Billy Pilgrim asked him.
- And then Billy traveled in time to when he was sixteen years old, in the waiting room
- of a doctor. Billy had an infected thumb. There was only one other patient waiting-an old,
- old man. The old man was in agony because of gas. He farted tremendously, and then he
- belched.
- 'Excuse me,' he said to Billy. Then he did it again. 'Oh God he said, 'I knew it was
- going to be bad getting old.' He shook his head. 'I didn't know it was going to be this bad.'
- Billy Pilgrim opened his eyes in the hospital in Vermont, did not know where he was.
- Watching him was his son Robert. Robert was wearing the uniform of the famous Green
- Berets. Robert's hair was short, was wheat-colored bristles. Robert was clean and neat.
- He was decorated with a Purple Heart and a Silver Star and a Bronze Star with two
- clusters.
- This was a boy who had flunked out of high school, who had been an alcoholic at
- sixteen, who had run with a rotten bunch of kids, who had been arrested for tipping over
- hundreds of tombstones in a Catholic cemetery one time. He was all straightened out
- now. His posture was wonderful and his shoes were shined and his trousers were pressed,
- and he was a leader of men.
- 'Dad?'
- Billy Pilgrim closed his eyes again.
- Billy had to miss his wife's funeral because he was still so sick. He was conscious,
- though, while Valencia was being put into the ground in Ilium. Billy hadn't said much
- since regaining consciousness, hadn't responded very elaborately to the news of
- Valencia's death and Robert's coming home from the war and so on-so it was generally
- believed that he was a vegetable. There was talk of performing an operation on him later,
- one which might improve the circulation of blood to his brain.
- Actually, Billy's outward listlessness was a screen. The listlessness concealed a mind
- which was fizzing and flashing thrillingly. It was preparing letters and lectures about the
- flying saucers, the negligibility of death and the true nature of time.
- Professor Rumfoord said frightful things about Billy within Billy's hearing, confident
- that Billy no longer had any brain at all. 'Why don't they let him die?' he asked Lily.
- 'I don't know, she said.
- 'That's not a human being anymore. Doctors are for human beings. They should turn
- him over to a veterinarian or a tree surgeon. They'd know what to do. Look at him! That's
- life, according to the medical profession. Isn't life wonderful?'
- 'I don't know,' said Lily.
- Rumfoord talked to Lily about the bombing of Dresden one time, and Billy heard it all.
- Rumfoord had a problem about Dresden. His one-volume history of the Army Air Force
- in the Second World War was supposed to be a readable condensation of the twentyseven-volume
- Official History of the Army Air Force in World War Two. The thing was,
- though, there was almost nothing in the twenty-seven volumes about the Dresden raid,
- even though it had been such a howling success. The extent of the success had been kept
- a secret for many years after the war-a secret from the American people. It was no secret
- from the Germans, of course, or from the Russians, who occupied Dresden after the war,
- who are in Dresden still.
- 'Americans have finally heard about Dresden.,' said Rumfoord, twenty-three years after
- the raid. 'A lot of them know now how much worse it was than Hiroshima. So I've got to
- put something about it in my book. From the official Air Force standpoint., it'll all be
- new.'
- 'Why would they keep it a secret so long?' said Lily.
- 'For fear that a lot of bleeding hearts' said Rumfoord, 'might not think it was such a
- wonderful thing to do.'
- It was now that Billy Pilgrim spoke up intelligently. 'I was there' he said.
- It was difficult for Rumfoord to take Billy seriously, since Rumfoord, had so long
- considered Billy a repulsive non-person who would be much better off dead. Now, with
- Billy speaking clearly and to the point, Rumfoord's ears wanted to treat the words as a
- foreign language that was not worth learning. did he say?' said Rumfoord.
- Lily had to serve as an 'interpreter. 'He said he was there.' she explained.
- 'He was where?
- 'I don't know,' said Lily. 'Where were you?' she asked Billy.
- 'Dresden' said Billy.
- 'Dresden,' Lily told Rumfoord.
- 'He's simply echoing things we say,' said Rumfoord.
- 'Oh, ' said Lily.
- 'He's got echolalia now.'
- 'Oh.'
- Echolalia is a mental disease which makes people immediately repeat things that well
- people around them say. But Billy didn't really have it. Rumfoord simply insisted, for his
- own comfort, that Billy had it. Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an
- inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons,
- was suffering from a repulsive disease.
- Rumfoord went on insisting for several hours that Billy had echolalia-told nurses and a
- doctor that Billy had echolalia now. Some experiments were performed on Billy. Doctors
- and nurses tried to get Billy to echo something, but Billy wouldn't make a sound for
- them.
- 'He isn't doing it now,' said Rumfoord peevishly. 'The minute you go away, he'll start
- doing it again.'
- Nobody took Rumfoord's diagnosis seriously. The staff thought Rumfoord was a
- hateful old man, conceited and cruel. He often said to them, in one way or another, that
- people who were weak deserved to die. Whereas the staff, of course, was devoted to the
- idea that weak people should be helped as much as possible, that nobody should die.
- There in the hospital, Billy was having an adventure very common among people
- without power in time of war: He was trying to prove to a wilfully deaf and blind enemy
- that he was interesting to hear and see. He kept silent until the lights went' out at night,
- and then, when there had been a long silence containing nothing to echo, he said to
- Rumfoord, 'I was in Dresden when it was bombed. I was a prisoner of war.' Rumfoord
- sighed impatiently.
- 'Word of honor.,' said Billy Pilgrim. 'Do you believe me?'
- 'Must we talk about it now?' said Rumfoord. He had heard. He didn't believe.
- 'We don't ever have to talk about it,' said Billy. 'I just want you to know: I was there.'
- Nothing more was said about Dresden that night, and Billy closed his eyes, traveled in
- time to a May afternoon, two days after the end of the Second World War in Europe.
- Billy and five other American prisoners were riding in a coffin-shaped green wagon,
- which they had found abandoned complete with two horses, in a suburb of Dresden. Now
- they were being drawn by the clop-clop-clopping horses down narrow lanes which had
- been cleared through the moonlike ruins. They were going back to the slaughterhouse for
- souvenirs of the war. Billy was reminded of the sounds of milkmen's horses early in the
- morning in Ilium, when he was a boy.
- Billy sat in the back of the jiggling coffin. His head was tilted back and his nostrils
- were flaring. He was happy. He was warm. There was food in the wagon, and wine-and a
- camera, and a stamp collection, and a stuffed owl, and a mantel clock that ran on changes
- of barometric pressure. The Americans had gone into empty houses in the suburb where
- they had been imprisoned, and they had taken these and many other things.
- The owners, hearing that the Russians were coming, killing and robbing and raping
- and burning, had fled.
- But the Russians hadn't come yet, even two days after the war. It was peaceful in the
- ruins. Billy saw only one other person on the way to the slaughterhouse. It was an old
- man pushing a baby buggy. In the buggy were pots and cups and an umbrella frame, and
- other things he had found.
- Billy stayed in the wagon when it reached the slaughterhouse, sunning himself. The
- others went looking for souvenirs. Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise
- Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones-to
- stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by. If this sort of selectivity had been
- possible for Billy, he might have chosen as his happiest moment his sun-drenched snooze
- in the back of the wagon.
- Billy Pilgrim was armed as he snoozed. It was the first time he had been armed since
- basic training. His companions had insisted that he arm himself, since God only knew
- what sorts of killers might be in burrows on the face of the moon-wild dogs, packs of rats
- fattened on corpses, escaped maniacs and murderers, soldiers who would never quit
- killing until they themselves were killed.
- Billy had a tremendous cavalry pistol in his belt. It was a relic of the First World War.
- It had a ring in its butt. It was loaded with bullets the size of robins' eggs. Billy had found
- it in the bedside table in a house. That was one of the things about the end of the war:
- Absolutely anybody who wanted a weapon could have one. They were lying all around.
- Billy had a saber, too. It was a Luftwaffe ceremonial saber. Its hilt was stamped with a
- screaming eagle. The eagle was carrying a swastika and looking down. Billy found it
- stuck into a telephone pole. He had pulled it out of the pole as the wagon went by.
- Now his snoozing became shallower as be heard a man and a woman speaking German
- in pitying tones. The speakers were commiserating with somebody lyrically. Before Billy
- opened his eyes, it seemed to him that the tones might have been those used by the
- friends of Jesus when they took His ruined body down from His cross. So it goes.
- Billy opened his eyes. A middle-aged man and wife were crooning to the horses. They
- were noticing what the Americans had not noticed-that the horses' mouths were bleeding,
- gashed by the bits, that the horses' hooves were broken, so that every step meant agony,
- that the horses were insane with thirst. The Americans had treated their form of
- transportation as though it were no more sensitive than a six-cylinder Chevrolet.
- These two horse pitiers moved back along the wagon to where they could gaze in
- patronizing reproach at Billy-at Billy Pilgrim, who was so long and weak, so ridiculous in
- his azure toga and silver shoes. They weren't afraid of him. They weren't afraid of
- anything. They were doctors, both obstetricians. They had been delivering babies until
- the hospitals were all burned down. Now they were picnicking near where their
- apartment used to be.
- The woman was softly beautiful, translucent from having eaten potatoes for so long.
- The man wore a business suit, necktie and all. Potatoes had made him gaunt. He was as
- tall as Billy, wore steel-rimmed tri-focals. This couple, so involved with babies, had
- never reproduced themselves, though they could have. This was an interesting comment
- on the whole idea of reproduction.
- They had nine languages between them. They tried Polish on Billy Pilgrim first, since
- he was dressed so clownishly, since the wretched Poles were the involuntary clowns of
- the Second World War.
- Billy asked them in English what it was they wanted, and they at once scolded him in
- English for the condition of the horses. They made Billy get out of the wagon and come
- look at the horses. When Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst
- into tears. He hadn't cried about anything else in the war.
- Later on, as a middle-aged optometrist, he would weep quietly and privately
- sometimes, but never make loud boo-hoo-ing noises.
- Which is why the epigraph of this book is the quatrain from the famous Christmas
- carol. Billy cried very little, though he often saw things worth crying about, and in that
- respect, at least, he resembled the Christ of the Carol:
- The cattle are lowing,
- The Baby awakes.
- But the little Lord Jesus
- No crying He makes.
- Billy traveled in time back to the hospital in Vermont. Breakfast had been eaten and
- cleared away and Professor Rumfoord was reluctantly becoming interested in Billy as a
- human being. Rumfoord questioned Billy gruffly, satisfied himself that Billy really had
- been in Dresden. He asked Billy what it had been like, and Billy told him about the
- horses and the couple picnicking on the moon.
- The story ended this way,. Billy and the doctors unharnessed the horses, but the horses
- wouldn't go anywhere. Their feet hurt too much. And then Russians came on
- motorcycles, and they arrested everybody but the horses.
- Two days after that, Billy was turned over to the Americans, who shipped him home
- on a very slow freighter called the Lucretia A. Mott. Lucretia A. Mott was a famous
- American suffragette. She was dead. So it goes.
- 'It had to be done,' Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden.
- 'I know,' said Billy.
- 'That's war.'
- 'I know. I'm not complaining.'
- 'It must have been hell on the ground.'
- 'It was,' said Billy Pilgrim.
- Pity the men who had to do it.'
- "I do.'
- 'You must have had mixed feelings, there on the ground.'
- "It was all right.,' said Billy. 'Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly
- what he does. -I learned that on Tralfamadore.'
- Billy Pilgrim's daughter took him home later that day, put him to bed in his house,
- turned the Magic Fingers on. There was a practical nurse there. Billy wasn't supposed to
- work or even leave the house for a while, at least. He was under observation.
- But Billy sneaked out while the nurse wasn't watching and he drove to New York City,
- where he hoped to appear on television. He was going to tell the world about the lessons
- of Tralfamadore.
- Billy Pilgrim checked into the Royalton Hotel on Forty-fourth Street in New York. He
- by chance was given a room which had once been the home of George Jean Nathan, the
- critic and editor. Nathan, according to the Earthling concept of time, had died back in
- 1958. According to the Tralfamadorian concept, of course. Nathan was still alive
- somewhere and always would be.
- The room was small and simple, except that it was on the top floor, and had French
- doors which opened onto a terrace as large as the room. And beyond the parapet of the
- terrace was the air space over Forty-fourth Street. Billy now leaned over that parapet,
- looked down at all the people moving hither and yon. They were jerky little scissors.
- They were a lot of fun.
- It was a chilly night, and Billy came indoors after a while, closed the French doors.
- Closing those doors reminded him of his honeymoon. There had been French doors on
- the Cape Ann love nest of his honeymoon, still were, always would be.
- Billy turned on his television set checking its channel selector around and around. He
- was looking for programs on which he might be allowed to appear. But it was too early in
- the evening for programs that allowed people with peculiar opinions to speak out. It was
- only a little after eight o'clock, so all the shows were about silliness or murder. So it goes.
- Billy left his room, went down the slow elevator, walked over to Times Square, looked
- into the window of a tawdry bookstore. In the window were hundreds of books about
- fucking and buggery and murder, and a street guide to New York City, and a model of
- the Statue of Liberty with a thermometer on it. Also in the window, speckled with soot
- and fly shit, were four paperback novels by Billy's friend, Kilgore Trout.
- The news of the day, meanwhile, was being written in a ribbon of lights on a building
- to Billy's back. The window reflected the news. It was about power and sports and anger
- and death. So it goes.
- Billy went into the bookstore.
- A sign in there said that adults only were allowed in the back. There were peep shows
- in the back that showed movies of young women and men with no clothes on. It cost a
- quarter to look into a machine for one minute. There were still photographs of naked
- young people for sale back there, too. You could take those home. The stills were a lot
- more Tralfamadorian than the movies, since you could look at them whenever you
- wanted to, and they wouldn't change. Twenty years in the future, those girls would still
- be young, would still be smiling or smoldering or simply looking stupid, with their legs
- wide open. Some of them were eating lollipops or bananas. They would still be eating
- those. And the peckers of the young men would still be semi-erect, and their muscles
- would be bulging like cannonballs.
- But Billy Pilgrim wasn't beguiled by the back of the store. He was thrilled by the
- Kilgore Trout novels in the front. The tides were all new to him, or he thought they were.
- Now he opened one. It seemed all right for him to do that. Everybody else in the store
- was pawing things. The name of the book was The Big Board. He got a few paragraphs
- into it, and then realized that he had read it before-years ago, in the veterans' hospital. 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 commodity 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 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.
- 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 bookstore was run by seeming quintuplets, by five short, bald men chewing unfit
- cigars that were sopping wet. They never smiled, and each one had a stool to perch on.
- They were making money running a paper-and-celluloid whorehouse.
- They didn't have hard-ons. Neither did Billy Pilgrim. Everybody else did. It was a
- ridiculous store, all about love and babies.
- The clerks occasionally told somebody to buy or get out, not to just look and look and
- look and paw and paw. Some of the people were looking at each other instead of the
- merchandise.
- A clerk came up to Billy and told him the good stuff was in the back, that the books
- Billy was reading were window dressing. 'That ain't what you want, for Christ's sake,' he
- told Billy 'What you want's in back.'
- So Billy moved a little farther back, but not as far as the part for adults only. He moved
- because of absentminded politeness, taking a Trout book with him-the one about Jesus
- and the time machine.
- The time-traveler 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-traveler 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 as dead as
- a doornail.
- So it goes.
- The time-traveler, whose name was Lance Corwin, also got to measure the length of
- Jesus, but not to weigh him. Jesus was five feet and three and a half inches long.
- Another clerk came up to Billy and asked him if he was going to buy the book or not,
- and Billy said that he wanted to buy it, please. He had his back to a rack of paperback
- books about oral-genital contacts from ancient Egypt to the present and so on, and the
- clerk supposed Billy was reading one of these. So he was startled when he saw what
- Billy's book was. He said, 'Jesus Christ, where did you find this thing?' and so on, and he
- had to tell the other clerks about the pervert who wanted to buy the window dressing. The
- other clerks already knew about Billy. They had been watching him, too.
- The cash register where Billy waited for his change was near a bin of old girly
- magazines. Billy looked at one out of the corner of his eye, and he saw this question on
- its cover: What really became of Montana Wildhack?
- So Billy read it. He knew where Montana Wildhack really was, of course. She was
- back on Tralfamadore, taking care of the baby, but the magazine, which was called
- Midnight Pussycats, promised that she was wearing a cement overcoat under fathoms of
- saltwater in San Pedro Bay.
- So it goes.
- Billy wanted to laugh. The magazine., which was published for lonesome men to jerk
- off to, ran the story so it could print pictures taken from blue movies which Montana had
- made as a teenagers Billy did not look closely at these. They were grainy things, soot and
- chalk. They could have been anybody.
- Billy was again directed to the back of the store and he went this time. A jaded sailor
- stepped away from a movie machine while the film was still running. Billy looked in, and
- there was Montana Wildhack alone on a bed, peeling a banana. The picture clicked off.
- Billy did not want to see what happened next, and a clerk importuned him to come over
- and see some really hot stuff they kept under the counter for connoisseurs.
- Billy was mildly curious as to what could possibly have been kept hidden in such a
- place. The clerk leered and showed him. It was a photograph of a woman and a Shetland
- pony. They were attempting to have sexual intercourse between two Doric columns, in
- front of velvet draperies which were fringed with deedlee-balls.
- Billy didn't get onto television in New York that night., but he did get onto a radio talk
- show. There was a radio station right next to Billy's hotel. He saw its call letters over the
- entrance of an office building, so he went in. He went up to the studio on an automatic
- elevator, and there were other people up there, waiting to go in. They were literary critics,
- and they thought Billy was one, too. They were going to discuss whether the novel was
- dead or not. So it goes.
- Billy took his seat with the others around a golden oak table, with a microphone all his
- own. The master of ceremonies asked him his name and what paper he was from. Billy
- said he was from the Ilium Gazette.
- He was nervous and happy. 'If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming,' he told himself, 'just
- ask for Wild Bob.'
- Billy put his hand up at the very first part of the program but he wasn't called on right
- away. Others got in ahead of him. One of them said that it would be a nice time to bury
- the novel, now that a Virginian, one hundred years after Appomattox, had written Uncle
- Tom's Cabin. Another one said that people couldn't read well enough anymore to turn
- print into exciting situations in their skulls, so that authors had to do what Norman Mailer
- did, which was to perform in public what he had written. The master of ceremonies asked
- people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modem society, and
- one critic said, 'To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white wars.' Another one
- said, 'To describe blow-jobs artistically.' Another one said, 'To teach wives of junior
- executives what to buy next and how to act in a French restaurant.'
- And then Billy was allowed to speak. Off he went, in that beautifully trained voice of
- his, telling about the flying saucers and Montana Wildhack and so on.
- He was gently expelled from the studio during a commercial. He went back to his hotel
- room, put a quarter into the Magic Fingers machine connected to his bed, and he went to
- sleep. He traveled in time back to Tralfamadore.
- 'Time-traveling again?' said Montana. It was artificial evening in the dome. She was
- breast-feeding their child.
- 'Hmm?' said Billy.
- 'You've been time-traveling again. I can always tell.'
- 'Um.'
- 'Where did you go this time? It wasn't the war. I can tell that, too. '
- 'New York.'
- 'The Big Apple.'
- 'Hm?'
- 'That's what they used to call New York.'
- "Oh.'
- 'You see any plays or movies?'
- 'No-I walked around Times Square some, bought a book by Kilgore Trout.'
- 'Lucky you.' She did not share his enthusiasm for Kilgore Trout.
- Billy mentioned casually that he had seen part of a blue movie she had made. Her
- response was no less casual. It was Tralfamadorian and guilt-free:
- 'Yes-' she said, 'and I've heard about you in the war, about what a clown you were. And
- I've heard about the high school teacher who was shot. He made a blue movie with a
- firing squad.' She moved the baby from one breast to the other, because the moment was
- so structured that she had to do so.
- There was a silence.
- 'They're playing with the clocks again,' said Montana, rising, preparing to put the baby
- into its crib. She meant that their keepers were making the electric clocks in the dome go
- fast, then slow, then fast again., and watching the little Earthling family through
- peepholes.
- There was a silver chain around Montana Wildhack's neck. Hanging from it, between
- her breasts, was a locket containing a photograph of her alcoholic mother-grainy thing,
- soot and chalk. It could have been anybody. Engraved on the outside of the locket were
- these words:
- GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY
- TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I
- CANNOT CHANGE, COURAGE
- TO CHANGE THE THINGS
- I CAN, AND WISDOM
- ALWAYS TO TELL THE
- DIFFERENCE.
- Ten
- Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year
- round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
- Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.
- And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science
- in Vietnam. So it goes.
- My father died many years ago now-of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man.
- He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.
- On Tralfamadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn't much interest in Jesus Christ. The
- Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles
- Darwin-who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements.
- So it goes.
- The same general idea appears in The Big Board by Kilgore Trout. The flying saucer
- creatures who capture Trout's hem ask him about Darwin. They also ask him about golf.
- If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live
- forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still-if I
- am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of
- those moments are nice.
- One of the nicest ones in recent times was on my trip back to Dresden with my old war
- buddy, O'Hare.
- We took a Hungarian Airlines plane from East Berlin. The pilot had a handlebar
- mustache. He looked like Adolph Menjou. He smoked a Cuban cigar while the plane was
- being fueled. When we took off, there was no talk of fastening seat belts.
- When we were up in the air, a young steward served us rye bread and salami and butter
- and cheese and white wine. The folding tray in front of me would not open out. The
- steward went into the cockpit for a tool, came back with a beer-can opener. He used it to
- pry out the tray.
- There were only six other passengers. They spoke many languages. They were having
- nice times, too. East Germany was down below, and the lights were on. I imagined
- dropping bombs on those lights, those villages and cities and towns.
- O'Hare and I had never expected to make any money-and here we were now,
- extremely well-to-do.
- 'If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming,' I said to him lazily, 'just ask for Wild Bob.'
- O'Hare had a little notebook with him, and printed in the back of it were postal rates
- and airline distances and the altitudes of famous mountains and other key facts about the
- world. He was looking up the population of Dresden, which wasn't in the notebook, when
- he came across this, which he gave me to read:
- On an average, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day. During that
- same day, 10,000 persons, in an average, will have starved to death or died from
- malnutrition. So it goes. In addition, 123,000 persons will die for other reasons. So it
- goes. This leaves a net gain of about 191,000 each day in the world. The Population
- Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000
- before the year 2000.
- 'I suppose they will all want dignity,' I said.
- 'I suppose,' said O'Hare.
- Billy Pilgrim was meanwhile traveling back to Dresden, too, but not in the present. He
- was going back there in 1945, two days after the city was destroyed. Now Billy and the
- rest were being marched into the ruins by their guards. I was there. O'Hare was there. We
- had spent the past two nights in the blind innkeeper's stable. Authorities had found us
- there. They told us what to do. We were to borrow picks and shovels and crowbars and
- wheelbarrows from our neighbors. We were to march with these implements to such and
- such a place in the ruins, ready to go to work.
- There were cades on the main roads leading into the ruins. Germans were stopped
- there. They were not permitted to explore the moon.
- Prisoners of war from many lands came together that morning at such and such a place
- in Dresden. It had been decreed that here was where the digging for bodies was to begin.
- So the digging began.
- Billy found himself paired as a digger with a Maori, who had been captured at Tobruk.
- The Maori was chocolate brown. He had whirlpools tattooed on his forehead and his
- cheeks. Billy and the Maori dug into the inert, unpromising gravel of the moon. The
- materials were loose, so there were constant little avalanches.
- Many holes were dug at once. Nobody knew yet what there was to find. Most holes
- came to nothing-to pavement, or to boulders so huge they would not move. There was no
- machinery. Not even horses or mules or oxen could cross the moonscape.
- And Billy and the Maori and others helping them with their particular hole came at last
- to a membrane of timbers laced over rocks which had wedged together to form an
- accidental dome. They made a hole in the membrane. There was darkness and space
- under there.
- A German soldier with a flashlight went down into the darkness, was gone a long time.
- When he finally came back, he told a superior on the rim of the hole that there were
- dozens of bodies down there. They were sitting on benches. They were unmarked.
- So it goes.
- The superior said that the opening in the membrane should be enlarged, and that a
- ladder should be put in the hole, so that bodies could be carried out. Thus began the first
- corpse mine in Dresden.
- There were hundreds of corpse mines operating by and by. They didn't smell bad at
- first, were wax museums. But then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like
- roses and mustard gas.
- So it goes.
- The Maori Billy had worked with died of the dry heaves, after having been ordered to
- go down in that stink and work. He tore himself to pieces, throwing up and throwing up.
- So it goes.
- So a new technique was devised. Bodies weren't brought up any more. They were
- cremated by soldiers with flamethrowers right where they were. The soldiers. stood
- outside the shelters, simply sent the fire in.
- Somewhere in there the poor old high school teacher, Edgar Derby, was caught with a
- teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested for plundering. He was tried
- and shot.
- So it goes.
- And somewhere in there was springtime. The corpse mines were closed down. The
- soldiers all left to fight the Russians. In the suburbs, the women and children dug rifle
- pits. Billy and the rest of his group were locked up in the stable in the suburbs. And then,
- one morning, they got up to discover that the door was unlocked. The Second World War
- in Europe was over.
- Billy and the rest wandered out onto the shady street. The trees were leafing out. There
- was nothing going on out there, no traffic of any kind. There was only one vehicle, an
- abandoned wagon drawn by two horses. The wagon was green and coffin-shaped.
- Birds were talking.
- One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, 'Poo-tee-weet?'
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