Vonnegut, Kurt - Player Piano (v5.0)

by Player Piano [lit]

  Paul shook his head slightly as he listened to the sergeant's absurd tale. That, then, was the war he had been so eager to get into at one time, the opportunity for basic, hot-tempered, hard-muscled heroism he regretted having missed. There had been plenty of death, plenty of pain, all right, and plenty of tooth-grinding stoicism and nerve. But men had been called upon chiefly to endure by the side of the machines, the terrible engines that fought with their own kind for the right to gorge themselves on men. Horatio on the bridge had become a radio-guided rocket with an atomic warhead and a proximity fuse. Roland and Oliver had become a pair of jet-driven computers hurtling toward each other far faster than the flight of a man's scream. The great tradition of the American rifleman survived only symbolically, in volleys fired into the skies over the dead in thousands of military cemeteries. Those in the graves, the front-line dead, were heirs to another American tradition as old as that of the rifleman, but once a peaceful tradition - that of the American tinker.

  "Gosh! Sarge, how come you never went after a commission?"

  "Me go back to college at my age? I'm not the school kind, sonny. Gettin' that B.S. was enough for me. Two more years and an M.A. for a pair of lousy gold bars? Naaaaaah! - And a queen, and no help, and a jack, and no help, and a five, and no help, and dealer gets a - what do you know? Three deuces. Looks like my lucky day, boys."

  "Middleville. The stop is Middleville. Next station, Herkimer."

  "Sarge, d'ya mind talkin' about your wound stripes?"

  "Hmmm? No - guess not. This 'un's for a dose of Gamma rays at Kiukiang. This 'un's - lemme see - radioactive dust in the bronchial tubes at Afyon Karahisar. And this little bastard - uh - trenchfoot at Kransystav."

  "Sarge, what was the best piece you ever had?"

  "A little redheaded half-Swede, half-Egyptian in Farafangana," said the Sarge without hesitation.

  "Boy! I hope that's where they send me."

  That much of a fine old American military tradition, Paul supposed, would always be alive - send me where the tail is.

  "Herkimer. The stop is Herkimer. Next station, Little Falls."

  "Say, Sarge, is this train a local?"

  "You might call it that. How's about a round of cold hands for the odd change?" said the sergeant.

  "O.K. with me. Oops. Lousy trey. A queen for Charley. An eight for Lou. And, I'll be go to hell, the Sarge catches a bullet."

  "Say, Sarge, hear Pfc. Elmo Hacketts is shipping out."

  "Yep. Been asking for overseas ever since he joined the outfit. Pair of treys for Ed, nothing for Charley, jack for Lou, and dealer catches a - I'll be damned."

  "Ace!"

  "Little Falls. The stop is Little Falls. Next station, Johnsonville."

  "Here we go around again, and - What you know about that?" said the sergeant. "Ed's got three treys. Yep - hate to see Hacketts go. With a coupla years seasoning, I could see him as a helluva fine guidon bearer. But, if he wants to throw all that over, that's his business. Nothing for Charley, and Lou gets my ace. Three treys got it so far."

  "Where's Hacketts going? You know?"

  "And no help, and help, and no help, and no help," said the sergeant. "Yeah, his orders came through today. Last time around, boys. No help, no help, no help, and -"

  "Jesus!"

  "Sorry about that third ace, Ed. Guess that one's mine too. Yeah, Hacketts gets his overseas duty all right. Shipping out for Tamanrasset tomorrow morning."

  "Tamanrasset?"

  "The Sahara Desert, you dumb bastard. Don't you know any geography?" He grinned wolfishly. "How about a little blackjack for laughs?"

  Paul sighed for Hacketts, born into a spiritual desert, now being shipped to where the earth was sterile, too.

  "Johnsonville . . . Ft. Plain . . . Fonda . . . Ft. Johnson . . . Amsterdam . . . Schenectady . . . Cohoes . . . Watervliet . . . Albany . . . Rensselaer . . . Ilium, the stop is Ilium."

  Bleary-eyed, Paul shuffled to the door, inserted his ticket, and stepped onto the Ilium station platform.

  The door on the baggage compartment clattered open, a coffin slid onto a waiting freight elevator and was taken into the refrigerated bowels of the station.

  No cabs had bothered to meet the unpromising train. Paul phoned the cab company, but no one answered. He looked helplessly at the automatic ticket vendor, the automatic nylon vendor, the automatic coffee vendor, the automatic gum vendor, the automatic book vendor, the automatic newspaper vendor, the automatic toothbrush vendor, the automatic Coke vendor, the automatic shoeshine machine, the automatic photo studio, and walked out into the deserted streets on the Homestead side of the river.

  It was eight miles through Homestead, across the bridge, and up the other side of the river to home. Not home, Paul thought, but the house where his bed was.

  He felt dull, mushy inside, with an outer glaze of bright heat - sleepy yet sleepless, assailed by thoughts yet thoughtless.

  His footsteps echoed against Homestead's gray façades, and lifeless neon tubes, proclaiming one thing and another of no importance at this hour, were empty, cold glass for want of the magic of electrons in flight through inert gas.

  "Lonesome?"

  "Huh?"

  A young woman, with bosoms like balloon spinnakers before the wind, looked down from a second-story window. "I said, are you lonesome?"

  "Yes," said Paul simply.

  "Come on up."

  "Well," Paul heard himself saying, "all right, I will."

  "The door next to the Automagic Market."

  He climbed the long, dark stairway, each riser of which proclaimed Doctor Harry Friedmann to be a painless dentist, licensed under the National Security and Health Plan. "Why," asked Friedmann rhetorically, "settle for less than a D-006?"

  The door on the hallway, next to Doctor Friedmann's, was open, the woman waiting.

  "What's your name, honey?"

  "Proteus."

  "Any relation to the big cheese across the river?"

  "My half-brother."

  "You the black sheep, honey?"

  "Yup."

  "Screw your brother."

  "Please," said Paul.

  He awoke once during the remainder of the night with her, awoke from a dream in which he saw his father glowering at him from the foot of the bed.

  She mumbled in her sleep.

  As Paul dropped off once more, he murmured an automatic reply. "And I love you, Anita."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Doctor Paul Proteus had been his own man, alone in his own house for a week. He'd been expecting some sort of communication from Anita, but nothing came. There was nothing more, he realized wonderingly, to be said. She was still at the Mainland, probably. The Meadows session had another week to run. After that would come the muddle of her separating her effects from his - and divorce. He wondered on what grounds she would divorce him. Extreme mental cruelty amused him, and he supposed it was close enough to the truth. Any variation from any norm pained her terribly. She'd have to leave New York State, of course, since the only grounds for divorce there were adultery, and incitement to conspire to advocate sabotage. A case could be made for either, he supposed, but not with dignity.

  Paul had gone to his farm once, and, in the manner of a man dedicating his life to God, he'd asked Mr. Haycox to put him to work, guiding the hand of Nature. The hand he grasped so fervently, he soon discovered, was coarse and sluggish, hot and wet and smelly. And the charming little cottage he'd taken as a symbol of the good life of a farmer was as irrelevant as a statue of Venus at the gate of a sewage-disposal plant. He hadn't gone back.

  He'd been to the Works once. The machinery had been shut off during the Meadows session, and only the guards were on duty. Four of them, now officious and scornful, had telephoned to Kroner at the Meadows for instructions. Then they'd escorted him to what had been his desk, where he'd picked up a few personal effects. They'd made a list of what he'd taken, and questioned his claim to each item. Then they'd marched him back into the ou
tside world, and shut the gates against him forever and ever.

  Paul was in the kitchen now, before the laundry console, seated on a stool, watching television. It was late afternoon, and, for the unadorned hell of it, he was doing his own laundry.

  "Urdle-urdle-urdle," went the console. "Urdle-urdle-ur dull! Znick. Bazz-wap!" Chimes sounded. "Azzzzzzzzzz. Fromp!" Up came the anticlimactic offering: three pairs of socks, three pairs of shorts, and the blue Meadow's T-shirts, which he was using for pajamas.

  On the television screen, a middle-aged woman was counseling her teen-age son, whose hair and clothes were disordered and soiled.

  "Fightin' don't help, Jimmy," she was saying sadly. "Lord knows nobody ever brought any more sunshine into the world by bloodyin' somebody's nose, or by havin' his own nose bloodied."

  "I know - but he said my I.Q. was 59, Ma!" The boy was on the point of tears, he was so furious and hurt. "And he said Pop was a 53!"

  "Now, now - that's just child's talk. Don't you pay it no mind, Jimmy."

  "But it's true," said the boy brokenly. "Ma, it's true. I went down to the police station and looked it up! Fifty-nine, Ma! and poor Pop with a 53." He turned his back, and his voice was a bitter whisper: "And you with a 47, Ma. A 47."

  She bit her lip and looked heartbroken, then, seeming to draw strength miraculously from somewhere above eye level, she gripped the kitchen table. "Jimmy, look at your mother."

  He turned slowly.

  "Jimmy, I.Q. isn't everything. Some of the unhappiest people in this world are the smartest ones."

  Since the start of his week of idleness at home, Paul had learned that this, with variations, was the basic problem situation in afternoon dramas, with diseases and injuries of the optic nerve and locomotor apparatus close seconds. One program was an interminable exploration of the question: can a woman with a low I.Q. be happily married to a man with a high one? The answer seemed to be yes and no.

  "Jimmy, boy, son - I.Q. won't get you happiness, and St. Peter don't give I.Q. tests before he lets you in those Pearly Gates. The wickedest people that ever lived was the smartest."

  Jimmy looked suspicious, then surprised, then guardedly willing to be convinced. "You mean - plain fellow like me, just another guy, folks like us, Ma, you mean we're as good as, as, as, well, Doctor Garson, the Works Manager?"

  "Doctor Garson, with his 169 I.Q.? Doctor Garson, with his Ph.D., D.Sc., and his Ph. and D. I-don't-know-what-else? Him?"

  "Yeah, Ma. Him."

  "Him? Doctor Garson? Jimmy, son, boy - have you seen the bags under his eyes? Have you seen the lines in his face? He's carryin' the world around on his shoulders, Jimmy. That's what a high I.Q. got him, Doctor Garson. Do you know how old he is?"

  "An awful old man, Ma."

  "He's ten years younger than your Pa, Jimmy. That's what brains got him."

  Pa came in at that moment, wearing the brassard of a Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps Asphalt Leveler, First Class. He was cheery, pink, in first-rate health. "Hi, there, folks," he said. "Everything hunky-dory in my little old home, eh?"

  Jimmy exchanged glances with his mother, and smiled oddly. "Yessir, reckon it is. I mean, you're darn right it is!"

  In came the organ music, the announcer, and the washless, rinseless wash powder, and Paul turned down the volume.

  The door chimes were ringing, and Paul wondered how long they'd been at it. He might have turned on the televiewer, to see if the bell ringer was worth opening the door for, but he was hungry for companionship - just about any kind - and he went to the door gladly, gratefully.

  A policeman looked at him coldly. "Doctor Proteus?"

  "Yes?"

  "I'm from the police."

  "So I see."

  "You haven't registered."

  "Oh." Paul smiled. "Oh - I've been meaning to do that." And he had meant to do it, too.

  The policeman did not smile. "Then why haven't you?"

  "I haven't found the time."

  "You better start looking for it, hard, Doc."

  Paul was annoyed by this rude young man, and he was inclined, as he had been inclined with the bartender at the Meadows, to put him in his place. But he thought better of it this time. "All right. I'll be down to register tomorrow morning."

  "You'll be down to register in an hour, today, Doc." The honorific Doc, Paul was learning, could be spoken in such a way as to make a man wish to God he'd never come within ten miles of a university.

  "Yes - all right, whatever you say."

  "And your industrial identification card - you've failed to turn that in."

  "Sorry. I'll do that."

  "And your firearms and ammunition permit."

  "I'll bring that."

  "And your club membership card."

  "I'll find it."

  "And your airline pass."

  "All right."

  "And your executive security and health policy. You'll have to get a regular one."

  "Whatever you say."

  "I think that's all. If anything else comes up, I'll let you know."

  "I'm sure you will."

  The young policeman's expression softened suddenly, and he shook his head. "Lo! How the mighty are fallen, eh, Doc?"

  "Lo! indeed," said Paul.

  And an hour later Paul reported politely at the police station, with a shoebox full of revoked privileges.

  While he waited for someone to notice him, he interested himself in the radiophoto machine behind glass in one corner, which was fashioning a portrait of a fugitive, and noting beside it a brief biography. The portrait emerged from a slit in the top of the machine bit by bit - first the hair, then the brows, on line with the word WANTED, and then, on line with the large, fey eyes, the name: Edgar Rice Burroughs Hagstrohm, R&R-131313. Hagstrohm's sordid tale emerged along with his nose: "Hagstrohm cut up his M-17 home in Chicago with a blow-torch, went naked to the home of Mrs. Marion Frascati, the widow of an old friend, and demanded that she come to the woods with him. Mrs. Frascati refused, and he disappeared into the bird sanctuary bordering the housing development. There he eluded police, and is believed to have made his escape dropping from a tree onto a passing freight -"

  "You!" said the desk sergeant. "Proteus!"

  Registration involved the filling out of a long, annoyingly complicated form that started with his name and highest classification number, investigated his reasons for having fallen from grace, asked for the names of his closest friends and relatives, and ended with an oath of allegiance to the United States of America. Paul signed the document in the presence of two witnesses, and watched a coding clerk translate it, on a keyboard, into terms the machines could understand. Out came a card, freshly nicked and punched.

  "That's all," said the police sergeant. He dropped the card into a slot, and the card went racing through a system of switches and sidings, until it came to rest against a thick pile of similar cards.

  "What does that mean?" said Paul.

  The sergeant looked at the pile without interest. "Potential saboteurs."

  "Wait a minute - what's going on here? Who says I am?"

  "No reflection on you," said the sergeant patiently. "Nobody's said you are. It's all automatic. The machines do it."

  "What right have they got to say that about me?"

  "Oh, they know, they know," said the sergeant. "They've been around. They do that with anybody who's got more'n four years of college and no job." He studied Paul through narrowed lids. "And you'd be surprised, Doc, how right they are."

  A detective walked in, perspiring and discouraged.

  "Any break on the Freeman case, Sid?" said the sergeant, losing interest in Paul.

  "Nah. All the good suspects came off clean as a whistle on the lie detector."

  "Did you check the tubes?"

  "Sure. We put in a whole new set, had the circuits checked. Same thing. Innocent, every damn one of 'em. Not that every damn one of 'em wouldn't of liked to of knocked him off." He shrugged. "Well, more leg work. W
e've got one lead: the sister says she saw a strange man around the back of Freeman's house a half-hour before he got it."

  "Got a description?"

  "Partial." He turned to the coding clerk. "Ready, Mac?"

  "All set. Shoot."

  "Medium height. Black shoes, blue suit. No tie. Wedding ring. Black hair, combed straight back. Clean-shaven. Warts on hands and back of neck. Slight limp."

  The clerk, expressionless, punched keys as he talked.

  "Dinga-dinga-dinga-ding!" went the machine, and out came a card.

  "Herbert J. van Antwerp," said Mac. "Forty-nine fifty-six Collester Boulevard."

  "Nice work," said the sergeant. He picked up a microphone. "Car 57, car 57 - proceed to . . ."

  As Paul walked into the bright sunlight of the street, a Black Maria, its siren silent, its tires humming the song of new rubber on hot tar, turned into the alleyway that ran behind the station house.

  Paul peered curiously at it as it stopped by a barred door.

  A policeman dismounted from the back of the shiny black vehicle and waved a riot gun at Paul. "All right, all right, no loitering there!"

  Paul started to move on, lingering an instant longer for a glimpse of the prisoner, who sat deep in the wagon's dark interior, misty, futile, between two more men with riot guns.

  "Go on, beat it!" shouted the policeman at Paul again.

  Paul couldn't believe that the man would actually loose his terrible hail of buckshot on a loiterer, and so loitered a moment longer. His awe of the riot gun's yawning bore was tempered by his eagerness to see someone who had made a worse botch of getting along in society than he had.

  The iron door of the station house clanged open, and three more armed policemen waited to receive the desperado. The prospect of his being at large in the alley for even a few seconds was so harrowing, seemingly, that the policeman who had been badgering Paul now gave his full attention to covering the eight or ten square feet the prisoner would cross in an instant. Paul saw his thumb release the safety catch by the trigger guard.