The Sirens of Titan

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr

  The Rumfoord mansion was an hilariously impressive expression of the concept: People of substance. It was surely one of the greatest essays on density since the Great Pyramid of Khufu. In a way it was a better essay on permanence than the Great Pyramid, since the Great Pyramid tapered to nothingness as it approached heaven. Nothing about the Rumfoord mansion diminished as it approached heaven. Turned upside down, it would have looked exactly the same.

  The density and permanence of the mansion were, of course, at ironic variance with the fact that the quondam master of the house, except for one hour in every fifty-nine days, was no more substantial than a moonbeam.

  Constant climbed down from the fountain, stepping onto the rims of bowls of ever-increasing sizes. When he got to the bottom, he was filled with a strong wish to see the fountain go. He thought of the crowd outside, thought of how they, too, would enjoy seeing the fountain go. They would be enthralled—watching the teeny-weeny bowl at the tippy-tippy top brimming over into the next little bowl… and the next little bowl’s brimming over into the next little bowl… and the next little bowl’s brimming over into the next bowl… and on and on and on, a rhapsody of brimming, each bowl singing its own merry water song. And yawning under all those bowls was the upturned mouth of the biggest bowl of them all… a regular Beelzebub of a bowl, bone dry and insatiable… waiting, waiting, waiting for that first sweet drop.

  Constant was rapt, imagining that the fountain was running. The fountain was very much like an hallucination—and hallucinations, usually drug-induced, were almost all that could surprise and entertain Constant any more.

  Time passed quickly. Constant did not move.

  Somewhere on the estate a mastiff bayed. The baying sounded like the blows of a maul on a great bronze gong.

  Constant awoke from his contemplation of the fountain. The baying could only be that of Kazak, the hound of space. Kazak had materialized. Kazak smelled the blood of a parvenu.

  Constant sprinted the remainder of the distance to the house.

  An ancient butler in knee breeches opened the door for Malachi Constant of Hollywood. The butler was weeping for joy. He was pointing into a room that Constant could not see. The butler was trying to describe the thing that made him so happy and full of tears. He could not speak. His jaw was palsied, and all he could say to Constant was, “Putt putt—putt putt putt.”

  The floor of the foyer was a mosaic, showing the signs of the zodiac encircling a golden sun.

  Winston Niles Rumfoord, who had materialized only a minute before, came into the foyer and stood on the sun. He was much taller and heavier than Malachi Constant—and he was the first person who had ever made Constant think that there might actually be a person superior to himself. Winston Niles Rumfoord extended his soft hand, greeted Constant familiarly, almost singing his greeting in a glottal Groton tenor.

  “Delighted, delighted, delighted, Mr. Constant,” said Rumfoord. “How nice of you to commmmmmmmme.”

  “My pleasure,” said Constant.

  “They tell me you are possibly the luckiest man who ever lived.”

  “That might be putting it a little too strong,” said Constant.

  “You won’t deny you’ve had fantastically good luck financially,” said Rumfoord.

  Constant shook his head. “No. That would be hard to deny,” he said.

  “And to what do you attribute this wonderful luck of yours?” said Rumfoord.

  Constant shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “I guess somebody up there likes me,” he said.

  Rumfoord looked up at the ceiling. “What a charming concept—someone’s liking you up there.”

  Constant, who had been shaking hands with Rumfoord during the conversation, thought of his own hand, suddenly, as small and clawlike.

  Rumfoord’s palm was callused, but not horny like the palm of a man doomed to a single trade for all of his days. The calluses were perfectly even, made by the thousand happy labors of an active leisure class.

  For a moment, Constant forgot that the man whose hand he shook was simply one aspect, one node of a wave phenomenon extending all the way from the Sun to Betelgeuse. The handshake reminded Constant what it was that he was touching—for his hand tingled with a small but unmistakable electrical flow.

  Constant had not been bullied into feeling inferior by the tone of Mrs. Rumfoord’s invitation to the materialization. Constant was a male and Mrs. Rumfoord was a female, and Constant imagined that he had the means of demonstrating, if given the opportunity, his unquestionable superiority.

  Winston Niles Rumfoord was something else again—morally, spatially, socially, sexually, and electrically. Winston Niles Rumfoord’s smile and handshake dismantled Constant’s high opinion of himself as efficiently as carnival roustabouts might dismantle a Ferris wheel.

  Constant, who had offered his services to God as a messenger, now panicked before the very moderate greatness of Rumfoord. Constant ransacked his memory for past proofs of his own greatness. He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man’s billfold. Constant found his memory stuffed with rumpled, overexposed snapshots of all the women he had had, with preposterous credentials testifying to his ownership of even more preposterous enterprises, with testimonials that attributed to him virtues and strengths that only three billion dollars could have. There was even a silver medal with a red ribbon-awarded to Constant for placing second in the hop, skip, and jump in an intramural track meet at the University of Virginia.

  Rumfoord’s smile went on and on.

  To follow the analogy of the thief who is going through another man’s billfold: Constant ripped open the seams of his memory, hoping to find a secret compartment with something of value in it. There was no secret compartment—nothing of value. All that remained to Constant were the husks of his memory-unstitched, flaccid flaps.

  The ancient butler looked adoringly at Rumfoord, went through the cringing contortions of an ugly old woman posing for a painting of the Madonna. “The mah-stuh—” he bleated. “The young mah-stuh.”

  “I can read your mind, you know,” said Rumfoord.

  “Can you?” said Constant humbly.

  “Easiest thing in the world,” said Rumford. His eyes twinkled. “You’re not a bad sort, you know—” he said, “particularly when you forget who you are.” He touched Constant lightly on the arm. It was a politician’s gesture—a vulgar public gesture by a man who in private, among his own kind, would take wincing pains never to touch anyone.

  “If it’s really so important to you, at this stage of our relationship, to feel superior to me in some way,” he said to Constant pleasantly, “think of this: You can reproduce and I cannot.”

  He now turned his broad back to Constant, led the way through a series of very grand chambers.

  He paused in one, insisted that Constant admire a huge oil painting of a little girl holding the reins of a pure white pony. The little girl wore a white bonnet, a white, starched dress, white gloves, white socks, and white shoes.

  She was the cleanest, most frozen little girl that Malachi Constant had ever seen. There was a strange expression on her face, and Constant decided that she was worried about getting the least bit dirty.

  “Nice picture,” said Constant.

  “Wouldn’t it be too bad if she fell into a mud puddle?” said Rumfoord.

  Constant smiled uncertainly.

  “My wife as a child,” said Rumfoord abruptly, and he led the way out of the room.

  He led the way down a back corridor and into a tiny room hardly larger than a big broom closet. It was ten feet long, six feet wide, and had a ceiling, like the rest of the rooms in the mansion, twenty feet high. The room was like a chimney. There were two wing chairs in it.

  “An architectural accident—” said Rumfoord, closing the door and looking up at the ceiling.

  “Pardon me?” said Constant.

  “This room,” said Rumfoord. With a limp right hand, he made the magical sign for spiral staircase. “It
was one of the few things in life I ever really wanted with all my heart when I was a boy—this little room.”

  He nodded at shelves that ran six feet up the window wall. The shelves were beautifully made. Over the shelves was a driftwood plank that had written on it in blue paint: SKIP’S MUSEUM.

  Skip’s Museum was a museum of mortal remains—of endoskeletons and exoskeletons—of shells, coral, bone, cartilage, and chiton—of dottles and orts and residua of souls long gone. Most of the specimens were those that a child—presumably Skip—could find easily on the beaches and in the woods of Newport. Some were obviously expensive presents to a child extraordinarily interested in the science of biology.

  Chief among these presents was the complete skeleton of an adult human male.

  There was also the empty suit of armor of an armadillo, a stuffed dodo, and the long spiral tusk of a narwhal, playfully labeled by Skip, Unicorn Horn.

  “Who is Skip?” said Constant.

  “I am Skip,” said Rumfoord. “Was.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Constant.

  “Just in the family, of course,” said Rumfoord.

  “Um,” said Constant.

  Rumfoord sat down in one of the wing chairs, motioned Constant to the other.

  “Angels can’t either, you know,” said Rumfoord.

  “Can’t what?” said Constant.

  “Reproduce,” said Rumfoord. He offered Constant a cigarette, took one himself, and placed it in a long, bone cigarette holder. “I’m sorry my wife was too indisposed to come downstairs—to meet you,” he said. “It isn’t you she’s avoiding—it’s me.”

  “You?” said Constant.

  “That’s correct,” said Rumfoord. “She hasn’t seen me since my first materialization.” He chuckled ruefully. “Once was enough.”

  “I—I’m sorry,” said Constant. “I don’t understand.”

  “She didn’t like my fortunetelling,” said Rumfoord. “She found it very upsetting, what little I told her about her future. She doesn’t care to hear more.” He sat back in his wing chair, inhaled deeply. “I tell you, Mr. Constant,” he said genially, “it’s a thankless job, telling people it’s a hard, hard Universe they’re in.”

  “She said you’d told her to invite me,” said Constant.

  “She got the message from the butler,” said Rumfoord. “I dared her to invite you, or she wouldn’t have done it. You might keep that in mind: the only way to get her to do anything is to tell her she hasn’t got the courage to do it. Of course, it isn’t an infallible technique. I could send her a message now, telling her that she doesn’t have the courage to face the future, and she would send me back a message saying I was right.”

  “You—you really can see into the future?” said Constant. The skin of his face tightened, felt parched. His palms perspired.

  “In a punctual way of speaking—yes,” said Rumfoord. “When I ran my space ship into the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, it came to me in a flash that everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.” He chuckled again. “Knowing that rather takes the glamour out of fortunetelling—makes it the simplest, most obvious thing imaginable.”

  “You told your wife everything that was going to happen to her?” said Constant. This was a glancing question. Constant had no interest in what was going to happen to Rumfoord’s wife. He was ravenous for news of himself. In asking about Rumfoord’s wife, he was being coy.

  “Well—not everything,” said Rumfoord. “She wouldn’t let me tell her everything. What little I did tell her quite spoiled her appetite for more.”

  “I—I see,” said Constant, not seeing at all.

  “Yes,” said Rumfoord genially, “I told her that you and she were to be married on Mars.” He shrugged. “Not married exactly—” he said, “but bred by the Martians—like farm animals.”

  Winston Niles Rumfoord was a member of the one true American class. The class was a true one because its limits had been clearly defined for at least two centuries—clearly defined for anyone with an eye for definitions. From Rumfoord’s small class had come a tenth of America’s presidents, a quarter of its explorers, a third of its Eastern Seaboard governors, a half of its full-time ornithologists, three-quarters of its great yachtsmen, and virtually all of its underwriters of the deficits of grand opera. It was a class singularly free of quacks, with the notable exception of political quacks. The political quackery was a means of gaining office—and was never carried into private life. Once in office, members of the class became, almost without exception, magnificently responsible.

  If Rumfoord accused the Martians of breeding people as though people were no better than farm animals, he was accusing the Martians of doing no more than his own class had done. The strength of his class depended to some extent on sound money management—but depended to a much larger extent on marriages based cynically on the sorts of children likely to be produced.

  Healthy, charming, wise children were the desiderata.

  The most competent, if humorless, analysis of Rumfoord’s class is, beyond question, Waltham Kittredge’s The American Philosopher Kings. It was Kittredge who proved that the class was in fact a family, with its loose ends neatly turned back into a hard core of consanguinity through the agency of cousin marriages. Rumfoord and his wife, for instance, were third cousins, and detested each other.

  And when Rumfoord’s class was diagramed by Kittredge, it resembled nothing so much as the hard, ball-like knot known as a monkey’s fist.

  Waltham Kittredge often floundered in his The American Philosopher Kings, trying to translate the atmosphere of Rumfoord’s class into words. Like the college professor he was, Kittredge groped only for big words, and, finding no apt ones, he coined a lot of untranslatable new ones.

  Of all Kittredge’s jargon, only one term has ever found its way into conversation. The term is un-neurotic courage.

  It was that sort of courage, of course, that carried Winston Niles Rumfoord out into space. It was pure courage—not only pure of lusts for fame and money, but pure of any drives that smack of the misfit or screwball.

  There are, incidentally, two strong, common words that would have served handsomely, one or the other, in place of all of Kittredge’s jargon. The words are style and gallantry.

  When Rumfoord became the first person to own a private space ship, paying fifty-eight million dollars out of his own pocket for it—that was style.

  When the governments of the earth suspended all space exploration because of the chrono-synclastic infundibula, and Rumfoord announced that he was going to Mars—that was style.

  When Rumfoord announced that he was taking a perfectly tremendous dog along, as though a space ship were nothing more than a sophisticated sports car, as though a trip to Mars were little more than a spin down the Connecticut Turnpike—that was style.

  When it was unknown what would happen if a space ship went into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, and Rumfoord steered a course straight for the middle of one—that was gallantry indeed.

  To contrast Malachi Constant of Hollywood with Winston Niles Rumfoord of Newport and Eternity:

  Everything Rumfoord did he did with style, making all mankind look good.

  Everything Constant did he did in style—aggressively, loudly, childishly, wastefully—making himself and mankind look bad.

  Constant bristled with courage—but it was anything but un-neurotic. Every courageous thing he had ever done had been motivated by spitefulness and by goads from childhood that made fear seem puny indeed.

  Constant, having just heard from Rumfoord that he was to be mated to Rumfoord’s wife on Mars, looked away from Rumfoord to the museum of remains along one wall. Constant’s hands were clasped together, tightening on each other pulsingly.

  Constant cleared his throat several times. Then he whistled thinly between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. In all, he was behaving like a man who was waiting for a terrible pain to pass. He close
d his eyes and sucked in air between his teeth. “Loo dee doo, Mr. Rumfoord,” he said softly. He opened his eyes. “Mars?” he said.

  “Mars,” said Rumfoord. “Of course, that isn’t your ultimate destination—or Mercury either.”

  “Mercury?” said Constant. He made an unbecoming quack of that lovely name.

  “Your destination is Titan,” said Rumfoord, “but you visit Mars, Mercury, and Earth again before you get there.”

  It is crucial to understand at what point in the history of punctual space exploration it was that Malachi Constant received the news of his prospective visits to Mars, Mercury, Earth, and Titan. The state of mind on Earth with regard to space exploration was much like the state of mind in Europe with regard to exploration of the Atlantic before Christopher Columbus set out.

  There were these important differences, however: the monsters between space explorers and their goals were not imaginary, but numerous, hideous, various, and uniformly cataclysmic; the cost of even a small expedition was enough to ruin most nations; and it was a virtual certainty that no expedition could increase the wealth of its sponsors.

  In short, on the basis of horse sense and the best scientific information, there was nothing good to be said for the exploration of space.

  The time was long past when one nation could seem more glorious than another by hurling some heavy object into nothingness. Galactic Spacecraft, a corporation controlled by Malachi Constant, had, as a matter of fact, received the very last order for such a showpiece, a rocket three hundred feet high and thirty-six feet in diameter. It had actually been built, but the fire order had never come.

  The ship was called simply The Whale, and was fitted with living quarters for five passengers.

  What had brought everything to such an abrupt halt was the discovery of the chrono-synclastic infundibula. They had been discovered mathematically, on the basis of bizarre flight patterns of unmanned ships sent out, supposedly, in advance of men.

  The discovery of the chrono-synclastic infundibula said to mankind in effect: “What makes you think you’re going anywhere?”

  It was a situation made to order for American fundamentalist preachers. They were quicker than philosophers or historians or anybody to talk sense about the truncated Age of Space. Two hours after the firing of The Whale was called off indefinitely, the Reverend Bobby Denton shouted at his Love Crusade in Wheeling, West Virginia: