Vonnegut, Kurt - Player Piano (v5.0)

by Player Piano [lit]

  "Ilium. Remember? We crossed here before, going the other way."

  "Nakka Takaru tooie," said the Shah, nodding.

  "Eh?"

  "Where the Takaru spit in your face," said Khashdrahr.

  "Oh - that." Halyard smiled. "I hope you don't take that home as your chief recollection of the United States. Perfectly ridiculous incident, isolated, irrational. It certainly isn't any indication of the temperament of the American people. That one neurotic would have to manifest his aggressions in front of you gentlemen. Believe me, you could travel this country for the next hundred years and never see another outburst like that."

  Halyard let none of his bitterness show. With a melancholy spitefulness he continued, for these last days of his career, to perform his job impeccably. "Forget about him," he said, "and remember all the other things you've seen, and try to imagine how your own nation might be transformed."

  The Shah made thoughtful clucking sounds.

  "At no expense whatsoever to you," said Halyard, "America will send engineers and managers, skilled in all fields, to study your resources, blueprint your modernization, get it started, test and classify your people, arrange credit, set up the machinery."

  The Shah shook his head wonderingly. "Prakka-fut takki sihn," he said at last, "souli, sakki EPICAC, siki Kanu pu?"

  "Shah says," said Khashdrahr, " 'Before we take this first step, please, would you ask EPICAC what people are for?' "

  The limousine came to a stop at the head of the bridge on the Homestead side, blocked this time, not by a Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps crew, but by a phalanx of Arabs. They were led, as though the significance of the banners and costumes weren't confusing enough, by two men wearing Indian shirts and war paint.

  "Dinko?" said the Shah.

  "Army?" said Khashdrahr.

  Halyard had his first good chuckle in many weeks. That anyone, even a foreigner, could look on this colorful tangle of banners, sashes, and toy weapons as an effective fighting force! "Just some people having a little fun dressing up."

  "Some of them have guns," said Khashdrahr.

  "Wood, cardboard, and paint," said Halyard. "All make-believe." He picked up the speaking tube and spoke to the driver: "See if you can't ease past them and down a side street, toward the courthouse. Things ought to be quieter down there."

  "Yessir," said the driver uneasily. "I don't know, though, sir. I don't like the way they're looking at us, and all that traffic on the other side looked like they were running away from something. Maybe we should turn around and -"

  "Nonsense. Lock the doors, lean on the horn, and go on through. Things have come to a pretty pass if this sort of monkey business has the right of way over official business."

  The bulletproof windows slithered to the top, the door locks clicked, and the limousine nosed diffidently into the apricot, green, and gold ranks of the Arabs.

  Jeweled dirks and scimitars stabbed and slashed at the limousine's armored sides. Above the howls of the Arabs came crashes of gunfire. Two great pimples appeared suddenly in the side of the car, inches from Halyard's head.

  Halyard, the Shah, and Khashdrahr threw themselves on the floor. The limousine plunged through the raging ranks, and down a side street.

  "Head for the courthouse!" cried Halyard to the driver from the floor, "then out Westinghouse Boulevard!"

  "The hell with you!" said the driver. "I'm bailing out right here. The whole town's going nuts!"

  "Stay at the wheel or I kill you!" said Khashdrahr savagely. He was shielding the Shah's sacred body with his own poor flesh, and he held the point of a golden dagger against the back of the driver's neck.

  Khashdrahr's next words were lost in an explosion nearby, followed by cheers and a hail of rubble on the limousine's top and hood.

  "Here's the courthouse!" said the driver.

  "Good. Turn left!" commanded Halyard.

  "My God!" cried the driver. "Look!"

  "What's the matter?" quavered Halyard, prone with Khashdrahr and the Shah. He could see only sky and building tops and passing skeins of smoke.

  "The Scotchmen," said the driver hollowly. "My God, here come the Scotchmen." The limousine stopped with a shriek of rubber.

  "All right, back up and -"

  "You got radar down there on the floor? Take a look out the back window, then tell me we should back up."

  Halyard raised his head cautiously above the window sill. The limousine was trapped by bagpipers ahead, and, behind, by a squad of gold-epauleted Royal Parmesans, who had sallied from an Automatic Market across the street from the courthouse.

  An explosion hurled the market's conveyers and clips of canned goods through the windows. An automagic cashier rolled into the street, still miraculously upright on its round pedestal. "Did you see our special in Brussels sprouts?" it said, tripped on its own wire, and crashed to the pavement by the limousine, spewing cash from a mortal wound.

  "It isn't us they're after!" called the driver. "Look!"

  The Royal Parmesans, the Scotchmen, and a handful of Indians had joined forces and were ramming the courthouse door with a felled telephone pole.

  The door burst into kindling, and the attackers were carried inside by the ram's momentum.

  A moment later they emerged with a man on their shoulders. In the midst of their frenzied acclamation, he was marionettelike. As though to perfect the impression, bits of wire dangled from his extremities.

  "To the Works!" cried the Indians.

  The host, bearing their hero aloft like another banner beside the Stars and Stripes, followed the Indians toward the bridge across the Iroqois, cheering, skirting, smashing, dynamiting, and beating drums.

  The limousine stayed where it had been trapped by the Royal Parmesans and Scotchmen for an hour, while the dull thunder of explosions walked about the city like the steps of drunken giants, and afternoon turned to twilight under a curtain of smoke. Each time escape seemed possible, and Halyard raised his head to investigate a lull, fresh contingents of vandals and looters sent him to the floor again.

  "All right," he said at last, "I think maybe we're all right now. Let's try to make it to the police station. We can get protection there until this thing plays itself out."

  The driver leaned on the steering wheel and stretched insolently. "You think you've been watching a football game or something? You think maybe everything's going to be just the way it was before?"

  "I don't know what's going on, and neither do you. Now, drive to the police station, do you understand?" said Halyard.

  "You think you can order me around, just because you've got a Ph.D. and I've got nothing but a B.S.?"

  "Do as he says," hissed Khashdrahr, placing the point of his knife in the back of the driver's neck again.

  The limousine moved down the littered, now-deserted streets toward the headquarters of Ilium's keepers of the peace.

  The street before the police station was snow-white, paved with bits of punctured pasteboard: the fifty-thousand-card deck with which the Ilium personnel and crime-prevention machines had played their tireless games - shuffling, dealing, off the bottom, off the top, out of the middle, palming, marking, reading, faster than the human eye could follow, controlling every card, and implacably protecting the interests of the house, always the house, any house.

  The doors of the building had been torn from their hinges, and within were rolling dunes of dumped files.

  Halyard opened his window a crack. "Hello, there," he called, and waited hopefully for a policeman to appear. "I say, hello!" He opened his door cautiously.

  Before he could close it again, two Indians with pistols jerked the door wide open.

  Khashdrahr lunged at them with his knife, and was knocked senseless. He fell on top of the quivering Shah.

  "I say," said Halyard, and was knocked cold, too.

  "To the Works!" ordered the Indians.

  When Halyard regained consciousness he found himself with his aching head on the limousine floor,
halfway out of the open door.

  The car was parked in front of a saloon near the bridge.

  The front of the saloon had been sandbagged, and inside were men operating radios, moving pins on maps, oiling weapons, and watching the clock. By the head of the bridge itself were crude breastworks of sandbags and timbers, facing the pillboxes and turrets of the Ilium Works across the river. Men in every conceivable type of uniform wandered about the fortifications in a holiday spirit, coming and going as they pleased, on missions seemingly best known to themselves.

  The commandeering Indians and the driver were gone, while Khashdrahr and the Shah, bewildered and frightened, were being castigated by a tall, gaunt man who wore an Indian shirt but no war paint.

  "Goddammit!" said the tall man. "The Knights of Kandahar are supposed to be manning the roadblock on Griffin Boulevard. What the hell you doing here?"

  "We -" said Khashdrahr.

  "Haven't got time to listen to excuses. Get back to your organization on the double!"

  "But -"

  "Lubbock!" cried the tall man.

  "Yessir."

  "Give these men transportation to the Griffin Boulevard block, or put 'em under arrest for insubordination."

  "Yessir. Ammo truck's leaving now, sir." Lubbock hustled the Shah and Khashdrahr into the back of a truck, atop cases of handmade grenades.

  "Brouha batouli, nibo. Nibo!" cried the Shah piteously. "Nibo!"

  The truck meshed its gears and disappeared into the smoke.

  "I say," said Halyard thickly.

  "Finnerty!" cried a short, fat man in thick glasses from the door of the saloon. "The state police are trying to break through the Griffin Boulevard roadblock! Who've we got for reinforcements?"

  Finnerty's eyes widened, and he ran his hands through his hair. "Sent back two stragglers, and that's it. The VFW and the Knights of Pythias wandered off, and the Masons never did show up. Tell them we haven't got any reserves!"

  A geyser of flame and shattered masonry spouted from the Ilium Works across the river, and Halyard saw that where the Stars and Stripes had flown over the works manager's office, a white flag now snapped in the smoky wind.

  "For chrissake!" said Finnerty. "Get the Moose and Elks on the radio and tell them to quit it. They're supposed to occupy the Works, not atomize it."

  "Baker Dog Three," said Lasher into a microphone. "Baker Dog Three. Protect all equipment in the Works until decision can be made as to proper disposition. Can you hear me, Baker Dog Three?"

  The crowd by the saloon fell silent, to hear the reply of the Moose and Elks above the shushing noise of the loudspeaker.

  "Baker Dog Three - did you hear me?" shouted Lasher.

  "Zowie!" came a faraway cry in the speaker, and another volcano erupted in the Works.

  "Lubbock!" said Finnerty. "Take over. I'm going over there to teach those babies a little discipline. We'll see who's running this show!" He climbed into a car, and sped across the bridge to the Works.

  "Salt Lake City is ours!" shouted another radio operator inside the saloon.

  "Oakland and Salt Lake and Ilium so far!" said Lasher. "What about Pittsburgh?"

  "No reply."

  "Pittsburgh's the key," said Lasher. "Keep trying." He glanced to the south over his shoulder, and a look of horror crossed his face. "Who set the museum on fire?" He shouted into his microphone desperately, "All posts! All posts! Protect all property! Vandalism and looting will be punished by death. Attention all posts - can you hear me?"

  Silence.

  "Moose? Elks? Knights of Pythias? VFW? Eagles? Hello! Anybody - can you hear me? Hello!"

  Silence.

  "Proteus!" called an Arab, staggering up to the saloon door, brandishing a bottle. "Where'sh Proteus? Give us a word."

  Paul, haggard and aged, appeared beside Lasher in the saloon door. "God help us, gentlemen," he said slowly. "God help us. If we've won, it means that now the hard part begins."

  "Jesus - you'd think we losht," said the Arab. "Shorry now I ashked for a word."

  "Lou!"

  "Right here," said the drunk Arab.

  "Lou, boy - we forgot the bakery. Still poopin' out bread like nobody's business."

  "Can't have it doin' that," said Lou. "Le'sh go knock the crap out of it."

  "Listen, wait," said Paul. "We'll need the bakery."

  "Machine, ain't it?" said Lou.

  "Yes, sure, but there's no sense in - "

  "Then le'sh go knock the crap out of it. And, by God, here'sh ol' Al to go with us. Where you been, y'ol' horse-thief?"

  "Blew up the goddam sewage 'sposal plant," said Al proudly.

  " 'At's the shtuff! Give the friggin' worl' back to the friggin' people."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  "I don't understand about Pittsburgh," said Finnerty. "I knew Seattle and Minneapolis were touch-and-go, but Pittsburgh!"

  "And St. Louis and Chicago," said Paul, shaking his head.

  "And Birmingham and Boston and New York," said Lasher, smiling sadly. He seemed curiously at peace, inexplicably satisfied.

  "Pfft!" said Finnerty.

  "Ilium came off like clockwork, anyway, and Salt Lake and Oakland," said Professor von Neumann. "So I think we can say that the theory of attack was essentially valid. The execution, of course, was something else again."

  "It always is," said Lasher.

  "What makes you so cheery?" said Paul.

  "Would a good cry make you feel better, Doctor?" said Lasher.

  "Now all we have to do is close ranks with Salt Lake City and Oakland, and strangle the country into submission," said Finnerty.

  "I wish now we'd sent one of our Ilium people out to get EPICAC," said von Neumann. "EPICAC was worth three Pittsburghs."

  "Too bad about the Roswell Moose, all right," said Lasher. "D-71 said they were crazy about the idea of getting EPICAC."

  "Too crazy," said Paul.

  "Nitro's tricky enough stuff, without having crazy men trying to get it into Coke bottles," said Finnerty.

  The four thought-chiefs of the Ghost Shirt Society were seated about what had once been Paul's desk, the works manager's desk in the Ilium Works.

  The revolution was not yet a day old. It was early in the morning, before sunrise, but here and there burning buildings made patches of Ilium as bright and hot as tropical noon.

  "I wish they'd attack, and get it over with," said Paul.

  "It'll take them a little while to get their nerve back, after what the Knights of Kandahar did to the state police on Griffin Boulevard," said Finnerty. He sighed. "By God, if only we'd had a few more outfits like that in Pittsburgh -"

  "And St. Louis," said Paul, "and Seattle and Minneapolis and Boston and -"

  "Let's talk about something else," said Finnerty. "How's the arm, Paul?"

  "Not bad," said Paul, stroking the makeshift splint. The Messiah of the Ghost Shirt Society had had his left arm broken by a rock while exercising his magnetism on a crowd interested in seeing the power station blown up. "How's the head, Professor?"

  "Ringing," said von Neumann, adjusting his bandage. He had been struck by the Sacred Mace of The Order of the Aurora Borealis while giving a crowd reasons for not felling a two-hundred-foot radio tower.

  "Glockenspiel or carillon?" said Lasher. "And how are your own contusions and abrasions, Ed?"

  Finnerty twisted his neck and raised his arms experimentally. "Nothing, really. If the pain gets any worse, I can simply kill myself." He had been floored and trampled by stampeding Moose and Elks while explaining that the Works should be kept intact until a cool decision could be made as to which machines should be destroyed, which retained.

  Fire spurted skyward from Homestead.

  "Keeping the map right up to the minute, Professor?" said Lasher.

  Professor von Neumann looked out at the new blaze through field glasses, and made a black X on the map before him. "Post office, most likely."

  The map of the city had been clean and crackling at t
he start of the campaign, with a dozen small red circles indicating the primary objectives of the Ilium Putsch: the police station, the courthouse, communications centers, sites for roadblocks, the Ilium Works. After these objectives were taken, with a minimum of bloodshed and damage, the plan of operations declared, the systematic replacement of automatic control devices by human beings was to begin. The more important of these secondary objectives were circled in green.

  But now the map was smudged and limp. Overlying the scattered constellation of red and green circles was a black, continuous smear of X's that marked what had been taken, and, moreover, destroyed.

  Lasher glanced at his watch. "I've got 4 A.M. That right?"

  "Who knows?" said Finnerty.

  "Can't you see the City Hall clock from there?"

  "They got that hours ago."

  "And they're likely to be after your watch any minute," said Paul. "Better put it back in your pocket."

  "What gets me are the specialists," said Finnerty. "Some guys seem to have it in for just one kind of machine, and leave everything else alone. There's a little colored guy going around town with a shotgun, blasting nothing but those little traffic safety boxes."

  "Lord," said Paul, "I didn't think it'd be like this."

  "You mean losing?" said Lasher.

  "Losing, winning - whatever this mess is."

  "It has all the characteristics of a lynching," said the professor. "It's on such a big scale, though, I suppose genocide is closer. The good die with the bad - the flush toilets with the automatic lathe controls."

  "I wonder if things would have been much different if it hadn't been for the liquor," said Paul.

  "You can't ask men to attack pillboxes cold sober," said Finnerty.

  "And you can't ask them to stop when they're drunk," said Paul.

  "Nobody said it wasn't going to be messy," said Lasher.

  A terrific explosion lifted the floor and dropped it.

  "Boy!" said Luke Lubbock, standing guard in what had been Katharine Finch's office.

  "What was it, Luke?" called Lasher.

  "Gasoline storage tanks. Boy!"

  " 'Ray," said Paul dismally.