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 millepedes—”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 and downs over and over again. He asked if there wasn’t, please, some other reading matter 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, ups 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 the 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 seven 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 if 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 turn 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 lining 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 owner’s waist, but the flaring took place at Billy’s armpits. The Germans found him to be one of the most screamingly funny things they had seen in all of World War Two. 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. There 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 of 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 o cers. 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 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 o cers 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 if 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 God—what 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 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 struck— Alackday, 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 tree-tops. 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 like— 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 fire- bombing 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 lipstick-stained 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 if 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 who was 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 Rose-water. 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 o ces 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 o cer, and all the men sick, I think we can do without the usual
pageantry between o cers 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 Earth-lings 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 tri-focal 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 Why.
“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 Earth 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 killing another one pasted to the television tube. So it goes.
There were no walls in the dome, no 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 Billy’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 five 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 little 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 bamed 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! 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 schoolgirls 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 bamed 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 o ce, his Ilium o ce, 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.”
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 time-travel, 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 in the stern, loving each other and their dreams and the lake. 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, o cial 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 just 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?” “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 into the darkness of the bathroom to take a leak. He groped for the light, realized as he felt the rough walls 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 by 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 shumed 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:
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 1944—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 Billy’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 polka-dotted 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 O cials. 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 it 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. Campbell, Jr., now discussed the uniform of the American enlisted in World War Two: 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 any 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 had 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 tight, 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 Earth- ling 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 o ce 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?”
