The Sirens of Titan

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

  It is worth stopping the narrative at this point to say that this cock-and-bull story told to Beatrice is one of the few known instances of Winston Niles Rumfoord's having told a lie.

  This much of Rumfoord's story was true: The Whale was going to be renamed and fired on Tuesday, and the President of the United States was announcing a New Age of Space.

  Some of the President's comments at the time bear repeating - and it should be remembered that the President gave the word "progress" a special flavor by pronouncing it prog-erse. He also flavored the words "chair" and "warehouse," pronouncing them cheer and wirehouse.

  "Now, some people are going around saying the American economy is old and sick," said the President, "and I frankly can't understand how they can say such a thing, because there is now more opportunity for progerse on all fronts than at any time in human history.

  "And there is one frontier we can make particular progerse on and that is the great frontier of space. We have been turned back by space once, but it isn't the American way to take no for an answer where progerse is concerned.

  "Now, people of faint heart come to see me every day at the White House," said the President, "and they weep and wail and say, 'Oh, Mr. President, the wirehouses are all full of automobiles and airplanes and kitchen appliances and various other products,' and they say, 'Oh, Mr. President, there is nothing more that anybody wants the factories to make because everybody already has two, three, and four of everything.'

  "One man in particular, I remember, was a cheer manufacturer, and he had way overproduced, and all he could think about was all those cheers in the wirehouse. And I said to him, 'In the next twenty years, the population of the world is going to double, and all those billions of new people are going to need things to sit down on, so you just hang on to those cheers. Meanwhile, why don't you forget about those cheers in the wirehouse and think about progerse in space?'

  "I said to him and I say to you and I say to everybody, 'Space can absorb the productivity of a trillion planets the size of earth. We could build and fire rockets forever, and never fill up space and never learn all there is to know about it.

  "Now, these same people who like to weep and wail so much say, 'Oh, but Mr. President, what about the chrono-synclastic infundibula and what about this and what about that?' And I say to them, 'If people listened to people like you, there wouldn't ever be any progerse. There wouldn't be the telephone or anything. And besides,' I tell them and I tell you and I tell everybody, 'we don't have to put people in the rocket ships. We will use the lower animals only.'"

  There was more to the speech.

  Malachi Constant of Hollywood, California, came out of the rhinestone phone booth cold sober. His eyes felt like cinders. His mouth tasted like horseblanket purée.

  He was positive that he had never seen the beautiful blond woman before.

  He asked her one of the standard questions for times of violent change. "Where is everybody?" he said.

  "You threw 'em all out," said the woman.

  "I did?" said Constant

  "Yah," said the woman. "You mean you drew a blank?"

  Constant nodded weakly. During the fifty-six-day party he had reached a point where he could draw almost nothing else. His aim had been to make himself unworthy of any destiny - incapable of any mission - far too ill to travel. He had succeeded to a shocking degree.

  "Oh, it was quite a show," said the woman. "You were having as good a time as anybody, helping shove the piano in the pool. Then, when it finally went in, you got this big crying jag."

  "Crying jag," echoed Constant. That was something new.

  "Yah," said the woman. "You said you had a very unhappy childhood, and made everybody listen to how unhappy it was. How your father never even threw a ball to you once - any kind of ball. Half the time nobody could understand you, but every time somebody could understand you, it was about how there never was any kind of ball.

  "Then you talked about your mother," said the woman, "and you said if she was a whore, then you were proud to be a son of a whore, if that's what a whore was. Then you said you'd give an oil well to any woman who'd come up to you and shake your hand and say real loud, so everybody could hear, 'I'm a whore, just like your mother was.'"

  "What happened then?" said Constant.

  "You gave an oil well to every woman at the party," said the woman. "And then you started crying worse than ever, and you picked me out, and you told everybody I was the only person in the whole Solar System you could trust. You said everybody else was just waiting for you to fall asleep, so they could put you on a rocket ship and shoot you at Mars. Then you made everybody go home but me. Servants and everybody.

  "Then we flew down to Mexico and got married, and then we came back here," she said. "Now I find out you haven't got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. You better go down to the office and find out what the hell is going on, on account of my boyfriend is a gangster, and he'll kill you if I tell him you aren't providing for me right.

  "Hell," she said, "I had an unhappier childhood than you did. My mother was a whore and my father never came home, either - but we were poor besides. At least you had billions of dollars."

  In Newport, Beatrice Rumfoord turned her back to her husband. She stood on the threshold of Skip's Museum, facing the corridor. Down the corridor came the sound of the butler's voice. The butler was standing in the front doorway, calling to Kazak, the hound of space.

  "I know a little something about roller coasters, too," Beatrice said.

  "That's good," said Rumfoord emptily.

  "When I was ten years old," said Beatrice, "my father got it into his head that it would be fun for me to ride a roller coaster. We were summering on Cape Cod, and we drove over to an amusement park outside of Fall River.

  "He bought two tickets on the roller coaster. He was going to ride with me.

  "I took one look at the roller coaster," said Beatrice, "and it looked silly and dirty and dangerous, and I simply refused to get on. My own father couldn't make me get on," said Beatrice, "even though he was Chairman of the Board of the New York Central Railroad.

  "We turned around and came home," said Beatrice proudly. Her eyes glittered, and she nodded abruptly. "That's the way to treat roller coasters," she said.

  She stalked out of Skip's Museum, went to the foyer to await the arrival of Kazak.

  In a moment, she felt the electric presence of her husband behind her.

  "Bea - " he said, "if I seem indifferent to your misfortunes, it's only because I know how well things are going to turn out in the end. If it seems crude of me not to hate the idea of your pairing off with Constant, it's only an humble admission on my part that he's going to make you a far better husband than I ever was or will be.

  "Look forward to being really in love for the first time, Bea," said Rumford. "Look forward to behaving aristocratically without any outward proofs of your aristocracy. Look forward to having nothing but the dignity and intelligence and tenderness that God gave you - look forward to taking those materials and nothing else, and making something exquisite with them."

  Rumfoord groaned tinnily. He was becoming insubstantial. "Oh, God - " he said, "you talk about roller coasters -

  "Stop and think sometime about the roller coaster I'm on. Some day on Titan, it will be revealed to you just how ruthlessly I've been used, and by whom, and to what disgustingly paltry ends."

  Kazak now flung himself into the house, flews flapping. He landed skidding on the polished floor.

  He ran in place, trying to make a right-angle turn in Beatrice's direction. Faster and faster he ran, and still he could get no traction.

  He became translucent.

  He began to shrink, to fizz crazily on the foyer floor like a ping-pong ball in a frying pan

  Then he disappeared.

  There was no dog any more.

  Without looking behind, Beatrice knew that her husband had disappeared, too.

  "Kazak?" she said faintl
y. She snapped her fingers, as though to attract a dog. Her fingers were too weak to make a sound.

  "Nice doggy," she whispered.

  3. UNITED HOTCAKE PREFERRED

  "Son - they say there isn't any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose."

  - NOEL CONSTANT

  Magnum Opus, the Los Angeles Corporation that managed Malachi Constant's financial affairs, was founded by Malachi's father. It had a thirty-one-story building for its home. While Magnum Opus owned the whole building, it used only the top three floors, renting out the rest to corporations it controlled.

  Some of these corporations, having been sold recently by Magnum Opus, were moving out. Others, having been bought recently by Magnum Opus, were moving in.

  Among the tenants were Galactic Spacecraft, Moon-Mist Tobacco, Fandango Petroleum, Lennox Mono - rail, Fry-Kwik, Sani-Maid Pharmaceuticals, Lewis and Marvin Sulfur, Dupree Electronics, Universal Piezoelectric, Psychokinesis Unlimited, Ed Muir Associates, Max-Mor Machine Tools, Wilkinson Paint and Varnish, American Levitation, Flo-Fast, King O'Leisure Shirts, and the Emblem Supreme Casualty and Life Assurance Company of California.

  The Magnum Opus Building was a slender, prismatic, twelve-sided shaft, faced on all twelve sides with blue-green glass that shaded to rose at the base. The twelve sides were said by the architect to represent the twelve great religions of the world. So far, no one had asked the architect to name them.

  That was lucky, because he couldn't have done it.

  There was a private heliport on top.

  The shadow and flutter of Constant's helicopter settling to the heliport seemed to many of the people below to be like the shadow and flutter of the Bright Angel of Death. It seemed that way because of the stock-market crash, because money and jobs were so scarce -

  And it seemed especially that way to them because the things that had crashed the hardest, that had pulled everything down with them, were the enterprises of Malachi Constant.

  Constant was flying his own helicopter, since all his servants had quit the night before. Constant was flying it badly. He set it down with a crash that sent shivers through the building.

  He was arriving for a conference with Ransom K. Fern, President of Magnum Opus.

  Fern waited for Constant on the thirty-first floor - a single, vast room that was Constant's office.

  The office was spookily furnished, since none of the furniture had legs. Everything was suspended magnetically at the proper height. The tables and the desk and the bar and the couches were floating slabs. The chairs were tilted, floating bowls. And most eerie of all, pencils and pads were scattered at random through the air, ready to be snatched by anyone who had an idea worth writing down.

  The carpet was as green as grass for. the simple reason that it was grass - living grass as lush as any putting green.

  Malachi Constant sank from the heliport deck to his office in a private elevator. When the elevator door whispered open, Constant was startled by the legless furnishings, by the floating pencils and pads. He had not been in his office for eight weeks. Somebody had refurnished the place.

  Ransom K. Fern, aging President of Magnum Opus, stood at a floor-to-ceiling window, looking out over the city. He wore his black Homburg hat and his black Chesterfield coat. He carried his whangee walking stick at port arms. He was exceedingly thin - always had been.

  "A butt like two beebees," Malachi Constant's father Noel had said of Fern. "Ransom K. Fern is like a camel who has burned up both his humps, and now he's burning up everything else but his hair and eyeballs."

  According to figures released by the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Fern was the highest-paid executive in the country. He had a salary of a flat million dollars a year - plus stock-option plans and cost-of-living adjustments.

  He had joined Magnum Opus when he was twenty-two years old. He was sixty now.

  "Some - somebody's changed all the furniture," said Constant.

  "Yes," said Fern, still looking out over the city, "somebody changed it."

  "You?" said Constant.

  Fern sniffed, took his time about answering. "I thought we ought to demonstrate our loyalty to some of our own products."

  "I - I never saw anything like it," said Constant. "No legs - just floating in air."

  "Magnetism, you know," said Fern.

  "Why - why I think it looks wonderful, now that I'm getting used to it," said Constant. "And some company we own makes this stuff?"

  "American Levitation Company," said Fern. "You said to buy it, so we bought it."

  Ransom K. Fern turned away from the window. His face was a troubling combination of youth and age. There was no sign in the face of any intermediate stages in the aging process, no hint of the man of thirty or forty or fifty who had been left behind. Only adolescence and the age of sixty were represented. It was as though a seventeen-year-old had been withered and bleached by a blast of heat.

  Fern read two books a day. It has been said that Aristotle was the last man to be familiar with the whole of his own culture. Ransom K. Fern had made an impressive attempt to equal Aristotle's achievement. He had been somewhat less successful than Aristotle in perceiving patterns in what he knew.

  The intellectual mountain had labored to produce a philosophical mouse - and Fern was the first to admit that it was a mouse, and a mangy mouse at that. As Fern expressed the philosophy conversationally, in its simplest terms:

  "You go up to a man, and you say, 'How are things going, Joe?' And he says, 'Oh, fine, fine - couldn't be better.' And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn't be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much."

  This philosophy did not sadden him. It did not make him brood.

  It made him heartlessly watchful.

  It helped in business, too - for it let Fern assume automatically that the other fellow was far weaker and. far more bored than he seemed.

  Sometimes, too, people with strong stomachs, found Fern's murmured asides funny.

  His situation, working for Noel Constant and then Malachi, conspired nicely to make almost anything he might say bitterly funny - for he was superior to Constant pére and fils in every respect but one, and the respect excepted was the only one that really mattered. The Constants - ignorant, vulgar, and brash - had copious quantities of dumb luck.

  Or had had up to now.

  Malachi Constant had still to get it through his head that his luck was gone - every bit of it. He had still to get it through his head, despite the hideous news Fern had given him on the telephone.

  "Gee," said Constant ingenuously, "the more I look at this furniture, the more I like it. This stuff should sell like hotcakes." There was something pathetic and repellent about Malachi Constant's talking business. It had been the same with his father. Old Noel Constant had never known anything about business, and neither had his son - and what little charm the Constants had evaporated the instant they pretended that their successes depended on their knowing their elbows from third base.

  There was something obscene about a billionaire's being optimistic and aggressive and cunning.

  "If you ask me," said Constant, "that was a pretty sound investment - a company that makes furniture like this."

  "United Hotcake preferred," said Fern. United Hotcake preferred was a favorite joke of his. Whenever people came to him, begging for investment advice that would double their money in six weeks, he advised them gravely to invest in this fictitious stock. Some people actually tried to follow his advice.

  "Sitting on an American Levitation couch is harder than standing up in a birchbark canoe," said Fern dryly. "Throw yourself into one of these so-called chairs, and it will bounce you off the wall like a stone Out of a slingshot. Sit on the edge of your desk, and it will waltz you around the r
oom like a Wright brother at Kitty Hawk."

  Constant touched his desk ever so lightly. It shuddered nervously.

  "Well - they still haven't got all of the bugs out of it, that's all," said Constant.

  "Truer words were never spoken," said Fern.

  Constant now made a plea that he had never had to make before. "A guy is entitled to a mistake now and then," he said.

  "Now and then?" said Fern, raising his eyebrows. "For three months you have made nothing but wrong decisions, and you've done what I would have said was impossible. You've succeeded in more than wiping out the results of almost forty years of inspired guessing."

  Ransom K. Fern took a pencil from the air and broke it in two. "Magnum Opus is no more. You and I are the last two people in the building. Everyone else has been paid off and sent home."

  He bowed and moved toward the door. "The switchboard has been arranged so that all incoming calls will come directly to your desk here. And when you leave, Mr. Constant, sir, remember to turn out the lights and lock the front door."

  A history of Magnum Opus, Inc., is perhaps in order at this point.

  Magnum Opus began as an idea in the head of a Yankee traveling salesman of copper-bottomed cookware. That Yankee was Noel Constant, a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was the father of Malachi.

  The father of Noel, in turn, was Sylvanus Constant, a loom fixer in the New Bedford Mills of the Nattaweena Division of the Grand Republic Woolen Company. He was an anarchist, though he never got into any trouble about it, except with his wife.

  The family could trace its line back through an illegitimacy to Benjamin Constant, who was a tribune under Napoleon from 1799 to 1801, and a lover of Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de Stael-Holstein, wife of the then Swedish ambassador to France.