The Sirens of Titan

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

  "Mist' Rowley, suh - ?" said the chauffeur, as Constant stepped out of the limousine.

  "Yes?" said Constant.

  "Wasn't you scared, suh?" said the chauffeur.

  "Scared?" said Constant, sincerely puzzled by the question. "Of what?"

  "Of what?" said the chauffeur incredulously. "Why, of all them crazy people who liked to lynch us."

  Constant smiled and shook his head. Not once in the midst of the violence had he expected to be hurt. "It hardly helps to panic, do you think?" he said. In his own words he recognized Rumfoord's phrasing - even a little of Rumfoord's aristocratic yodel.

  "Man - you must have some kind of guardian angel - lets you keep cool as a cucumber, no matter what," said the chauffeur admiringly.

  This comment interested Constant, for it described well his attitude in the midst of the mob. He took the comment at first as an analogy - as a poetic description of his mood. A man who had a guardian angel would certainly have felt just as Constant had - "Yes, suh!" said the chauffeur. "Sumpin' sure must be lookin' out for you!"

  Then it hit Constant: This was exactly the case.

  Until that moment of truth, Constant had looked upon his Newport adventure as one more drug-induced hallucination - as one more peyotl party - vivid, novel, entertaining, and of no consequence whatsoever.

  The little door had been a dreamy touch . . . the dry fountain another . . . and the huge painting of the all white touch-me-not little girl with the all white pony . . . and the chimney-like room under the spiral staircase . . . and the photograph of the three sirens on Titan . . . and Rumfoord's prophecies . . . and the discomfiture of Beatrice Rumfoord at the top of the stairs . . .

  Malachi Constant broke into a cold sweat. His knees threatened to buckle and his eyelids came unhinged. He was finally understanding that every bit of it had been real! He had been calm in the midst of the mob because he knew he Wasn't going to die on Earth.

  Something was looking out for him, all right.

  And whatever it was, it was saving his skin for -

  Constant quaked as he counted on his fingers the points of interest on the itinerary Rumfoord had promised him.

  Mars.

  Then Mercury.

  Then Earth again.

  Then Titan.

  Since the itinerary ended on Titan, presumably that was where Malachi Constant was going to die. He was going to die there!

  What had Rumfoord been so cheerful about?

  Constant shuffled over to the helicopter, rocked the great, ramshackle bird as he climbed inside.

  "You Rowley?" said the pilot.

  "That's right," said Constant.

  "Unusual first name you got, Mr. Rowley," said the pilot.

  "Beg your pardon?" said Constant nauseously. He was looking through the plastic dome of the cockpit cover - looking up into the evening sky. He was wondering if there could possibly be eyes up there, eyes that could see everything he did. And if there were eyes up there, and they wanted him to do certain things, go certain places - how could they make him?

  Oh God - but it looked thin and cold up there!

  "I said you've got an unusual first name," said the pilot.

  "What name's that?" said Constant, who had forgotten the foolish first name he had chosen for his disguise.

  "Jonah," said the pilot.

  Fifty-nine days later, Winston Niles Rumfoord and his loyal dog Kazak materialized again. A lot had happened since their last visit.

  For one thing, Malachi Constant had sold out all his holdings in Galactic Spacecraft, the corporation that had the custody of the great rocket ship called The Whale. He had done this to destroy every connection between himself and the only known means of getting to Mars. He had put the proceeds of the sale into MoonMist Tobacco.

  For another thing, Beatrice Rumfoord had liquidated her diversified portfolio of securities, and had put the proceeds into shares of Galactic Spacecraft, intending thereby to get a leather-lunged voice in whatever was done with The Whale.

  For another thing, Malachi Constant had taken to writing Beatrice Rumford offensive letters, in order to keep her away - in order to make himself absolutely and permanently intolerable to her. To see one of these letters was to see them all. The most recent one went like this, written on stationery of Magnum Opus, Inc., the corporation whose sole purpose was to manage the financial affairs of Malachi Constant.

  Hello from sunny California, Space Baby! Gee, I am sure looking forward to jazzing a high-class dame like you under the twin moons of Mars. You're the only kind of dame I never had, and I'll bet your kind is the greatest. Love and kisses for a starter. Mal.

  For another thing, Beatrice had bought a capsule of cyanide - more deadly, surely, than Cleopatra's asp. It was Beatrice's intention to swallow it if ever she had to share so much as the same time zone with Malachi Constant.

  For another thing, the stock market had crashed, wiping out Beatrice Rumford, among others. She had bought Galactic Spacecraft shares at prices ranging from 1511/2 to 169. The stock had fallen to 6 in ten trading sessions, and now lay there, trembling fractional points. Since Beatrice had bought on margin as well as for cash, she had lost everything, including her Newport home. She had nothing left but her clothes, her good name, and her finishing school education.

  For another thing, Malachi Constant had thrown a party two days after returning to Hollywood - and only now, fifty-six days later, was it petering out.

  For another thing, a genuinely bearded young man named Martin Koradubian had identified himself as the bearded stranger who had been invited into the Rumford estate to see a materialization. He was a repairer of solar watches in Boston, and a charming liar.

  A magazine had bought his story for three thousand dollars,

  Sitting in Skip's Museum under the spiral staircase, Winston Niles Rumfoord read Koradubian's magazine story with delight and admiration. Koradubian claimed in his story that Rumfoord had told him about the year Ten Million A.D.

  In the year Ten Million, according to Koradubian, there would be a tremendous house-cleaning. All records relating to the period between the death of Christ and the year One Million A.D. would be hauled to dumps and burned. This would be done, said Koradubian, because museums and archives would be crowding the living right off the earth.

  The million-year period to which the burned junk related would be summed up in history books in one sentence, according to Koradubian: Following the death of Jesus Christ, there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years.

  Winston Niles Rumfoord laughed and laid Koradubian's article aside. Rumford loved nothing more than a thumping good fraud. "Ten Million A.D. - " he said out loud, "a great year for fireworks and parades and world's fairs. A merry time for cracking open cornerstones and digging up time capsules."

  Rumfoord wasn't talking to himself. There was someone else in Skip's Museum with him.

  The other person was his wife Beatrice.

  Beatrice was sitting in the facing wing chair. She had come downstairs to ask her husband's help in a time of great need.

  Rumfoord blandly changed the subject.

  Beatrice, already ghostly in a white peignoir, turned the color of lead.

  "What an optimistic animal man is!" said Rumfoord rosily. "Imagine expecting the species to last for ten million more years - as though people were as well-designed as turtles!" He shrugged. "Well - who knows - maybe human beings will last that long, just on the basis of pure cussedness. What's your guess?"

  "What?" said Beatrice.

  "Guess how long the human race will be around," said Rumfoord.

  From between Beatrice's clenched teeth came a frail, keen, sustained note so high as to be almost above the range of the human ear. The sound bore the same ghastly promise as the whistle of fins on a falling bomb.

  Then the explosion came. Beatrice capsized her chair, attacked the skeleton, threw it crashing into a corner. She cleaned off the shelves of Skip's Museum, bo
uncing specimens off the walls, trampling them on the floor.

  Rumfoord was flabbergasted. "Good God - " he said, "what made you do that?"

  "Don't you know everything?" said Beatrice hysterically. "Does anybody have to tell you anything? Just read my mind!"

  Rumfoord put his palms to his temples, his eyes wide. "Static - all I get is static," he said.

  "What else would there be but static!" said Beatrice. "I'm going to be thrown right out in the street, without even the price of a meal - and my husband laughs and wants me to play guessing games!"

  "It wasn't any ordinary guessing game," said Rumford. "It was about how long the human race was going to last. I thought that might sort of give you more perspective about your own problems."

  "The hell with the human race!" said Beatrice.

  "You're a member of it, you know," said Rumfoord.

  "Then I'd like to put in for a transfer to the chimpanzees!" said Beatrice. "No chimpanzee husband would stand by while his wife lost all her coconuts. No chimpanzee husband would try to make his wife into a space whore for Malachi Constant of Hollywood, California!"

  Having said this ghastly thing, Beatrice subsided some. She wagged her head tiredly. "How long is the human race going to be around, Master?"

  "I don't know," said Rumfoord.

  "I thought you knew everything," said Beatrice. "Just take a look at the future."

  "I look at the future," said Rumfoord, "and I find that I shall not be in the Solar System when the human race dies out. So the end is as much a mystery to me as to you."

  In Hollywood, California, the chimes of the blue telephone in the rhinestone phone booth by Malachi Constant's swimming pool were ringing.

  It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!

  Malachi Constant lay in the wide gutter of his kidney-shaped swimming pool, sleeping the sleep of a drunkard. There was a quarter of an inch of warm water in the gutter. Constant was fully dressed in blue-green evening shorts and a dinner jacket of gold brocade. His clothes were soaked,

  He was all alone.

  The pool had once been covered uniformly by an undulating blanket of gardenias. But a persistent morning breeze had moved the blooms to one end of the pool, as though folding a blanket to the foot of a bed. In folding back the blanket, the breeze revealed a pool bottom paved with broken glass, cherries, twists of lemon peel, peyotl buttons, slices of orange, stuffed olives, sour onions, a television set, a hypodermic syringe, and the ruins of a white grand piano. Cigar butts and cigarette butts, some of them marijuana, littered the surface.

  The swimming pool looked less like a facility for sport than like a punchbowl in hell.

  One of Constant's arms dangled in the pool itself. From the wrist underwater came the glint of his solar watch. The watch had stopped.

  The telephone's chimes persisted.

  Constant mumbled but did not move.

  The chimes stopped. Then, after twenty seconds, the chimes began again.

  Constant groaned, sat up, groaned.

  From the inside of the house came a brisk, efficient sound, high heels on a tile floor. A ravishing, brassy blond woman crossed from the house to the phone booth, giving Constant a look of haughty contempt.

  She was chewing gum.

  "Yah?" she said into the telephone. "Oh - it's you again. Yah - he's awake. Hey!" she yelled at Constant. She had a voice like a grackle. "Hey, space cadet!" she yelled.

  "Hm?" said Constant.

  "The guy who's president of that company you own wants to talk to you."

  "Which company?" said Constant.

  "Which company you president of?" said the woman into the telephone. She got her answer. "Magnum Opus," she said. "Ransom K. Fern of Magnum Opus," she said.

  "Tell him - tell him I'll call him back," said Constant.

  The woman told Fern, got another message to relay to Constant. "He says he's quitting."

  Constant stood unsteadily, rubbing his face with his hands. "Quitting?" he said dully. "Old Ransom K. Fern quitting?"

  "Yah," said the woman. She smiled hatefully. "He says you can't afford to pay his salary any more. He says you better come in and talk to him before he goes home." She laughed. "He says you're broke."

  Back in Newport, the racket of Beatrice Rumfoord's outburst had attracted Moncrief the butler to Skip's Museum. "You called, Mum?" he said.

  "It was more of a scream, Moncrief," said Beatrice.

  "She doesn't want anything, thank you," said Rumfoord. "We were simply having a spirited discussion."

  "How dare you say whether I want something or not?" said Beatrice hotly to Rumfoord. "I'm beginning to catch on that you're not nearly as omniscient as you pretend to be. It so happens I want something very much. I want a number of things very much."

  "Mum?" said the butler.

  "I'd like you to let the dog in, please," said Beatrice. "I'd like to pet him before he goes. I would like to find out if a chrono-synclastic infundibula kills love in a dog the way it kills love in a man."

  The butler bowed and left.

  "That was a pretty scene to play before a servant," said Rumfoord.

  "By and large," said Beatrice, "my contribution to the dignity of the family has been somewhat greater than yours."

  Rumfoord hung his head. "I've failed you in some way? Is that what you're saying?"

  "In some way?" said Beatrice. "In every way!"

  "What would you have me do?" said Rumfoord.

  "You could have told me this stock-market crash was coming!" said Beatrice. "You could have spared me what I'm going through now."

  Rumfoord's hands worked in air, unhappily trying on various lines of argument for size.

  "Well?" said Beatrice.

  "I just wish we could go out to the chrono-synclastic infundibula together," said Rumfoord. "So you could see for once what I was talking about. All I can say is that my failure to warn you about the stock-market crash is as much a part of the natural order as Halley's Comet - and it makes an equal amount of sense to rage against either one."

  "You're saying you have no character, and no sense of responsibility toward me," said Beatrice. "I'm sorry to put it that way, but it's the truth."

  Rumfoord rocked his head back and forth. "A truth - but, oh God, what a punctual truth," he said.

  Rumfoord retreated into his magazine again. The magazine opened naturally to the center spread, which was a color ad for MoonMist Cigarettes. MoonMist Tobacco, Ltd., had been bought recently by Malachi Constant.

  Pleasure in Depth! said the headline on the ad. The picture that went with it was the picture of the three sirens of Titan. There they were - the white girl, the golden girl, and the brown girl.

  The fingers of the golden girl were fortuitously spread as they rested on her left breast, permitting an artist to paint in a MoonMist Cigarette between two of them. The smoke from her cigarette passed beneath the nostrils of the brown and white girls, and their space-annihilating concupiscence seemed centered on mentholated smoke alone.

  Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant's father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" at any price. The old man had punished Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories. It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand.

  Rumfoord made a buzzing sound on his lips, which was a sound he made when he approached compassion. The compassion he approached was for Malachi Constant, who was having a far worse time of it than Beatrice.

  "Have I heard your whole defense?" said Beatrice, coming behind Rumford's chair. Her arms were folded, and Rumfoord, reading her mind, knew that she thought of her sharp, projected elbows as bullfighter's swords.

  "I beg your pardon?" said Rumfoord.

  "This silence
- this hiding in the magazine - this is the sum and total of your rebuttal?" said Beatrice.

  "Rebuttal - a punctual word if there ever was one," said Rumfoord. "I say this, and then you rebut me, then I rebut you, then somebody else comes in and rebuts us both." He shuddered. "What a nightmare where everybody gets in line to rebut each other."

  "Couldn't you, this very moment," said Beatrice, "give me stock-market tips that would enable me to gain back everything I lost and more? If you had one shred of concern for me, couldn't you tell me exactly how Malachi Constant of Hollywood is going to try to trick me into going to Mars, so I could outwit him?"

  "Look," said Rumfoord, "life for a punctual person is like a roller coaster." He turned to shiver his hands in her face. "All kinds of things are going to happen to you! Sure," he said, "I can see the whole roller coaster you're on. And sure - I could give you a piece of paper that would tell you about every dip and turn, warn you about every bogeyman that was going to pop out at you in the tunnels. But that wouldn't help you any."

  "I don't see why not," said Beatrice.

  "Because you'd still have to take the roller-coaster ride," said Rumford. "I didn't design the roller coaster, I don't own it, and I don't say who rides and who doesn't. I just know what it's shaped like."

  "And Malachi Constant is part of the roller coaster?" said Beatrice.

  "Yes," said Rumfoord.

  "And there's no avoiding him?" said Beatrice.

  "No," said Rumfoord.

  "Well - suppose you tell me then, just what steps bring us together," said Beatrice, "and let me do what little I can."

  Rumfoord shrugged. "All right - if you wish," he said. "If it would make you feel better -

  "At this very moment," he said, "the President of the United States is announcing a New Age of Space to relieve unemployment. Billions of dollars are going to be spent on unmanned space ships, just to make work. The opening episode in this New Age of Space will be the firing of The Whale next Tuesday. The Whale will be renamed The Rumfoord in my honor, will be loaded with organ-grinder monkeys, and will be fired in the general direction of Mars. You and Constant will both take part in the ceremonies. You will go on board for a ceremonial inspection, and a faulty switch will send you on your way with the monkeys."