The Sirens of Titan

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

  "Fall in!" she said.

  The recruits had not yet had basic military training, so they were incapable of falling in with precision. Painted on the floor were squares within which the recruits were to stand in order to form ranks and files pleasing to the eye. A game resembling musical chairs was now played, with several empty-eyed recruits scuffling for the same square. In time, each found a square of his own.

  "All right," said Bee, "take your plugs and plug up your noses and ears, please."

  The recruits had been carrying the plugs in their clammy fists. They plugged their noses and ears.

  Bee now went from recruit to recruit, making certain that all ears and nostrils were sealed.

  "All right," she said, when her inspection was done. "Very good," she said. She took from the table the roll of adhesive plaster. "Now I am going to prove to you that you don't need to use your lungs at all, as long as you have Combat Respiratory Rations - or, as you'll soon be calling them in the Army, goofballs." She moved through the ranks, snipping off lengths of adhesive, sealing mouths with them. No one objected. When she got through, no one had a suitable aperture through which to issue an objection.

  She noted the time, and again turned on the music. For the next twenty minutes there would be nothing to do but watch the bare bodies for color changes, for the dying spasms in the sealed and useless lungs. Ideally, the bodies would turn blue, then red, then natural again within the twenty minutes - and the rib cages would quake violently, give up, be still.

  When the twenty-minute ordeal was over, every recruit would know how unnecessary lung-breathing was. Ideally, every recruit would be so confident in himself and goofballs, when his course of instruction was over, that he would be ready to spring out of a space ship on the Earthling moon or on the bottom of an Earthling ocean or anywhere, without wondering for a split second what he might be springing into.

  Bee sat on a bench.

  There were dark circles around her fine eyes. The circles had come after she left the hospital, and they had grown more somber with each passing day. At the hospital, they had promised her that she would become more serene and efficient with each passing day. And they had told her that, if through some fluke she should not find this to be the case, she was to report back to the hospital for more help.

  "We all need help from time to time," Dr. Morris N. Castle had said. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. Some day I may need your help, Bee, and I won't hesitate to ask for it."

  She had been sent to the hospital after showing her supervisor this sonnet, which she had written about Schliemann breathing:

  Break every link with air and mist,

  Seal every open vent;

  Make throat as tight as miser's fist,

  Keep life within you pent.

  Breathe out, breathe in, no more, no more,

  For breathing's for the meek;

  And when in deathly space we soar,

  Be careful not to speak.

  If you with grief or joy are rapt,

  Just signal with a tear;

  To soul and heart within you trapped

  Add speech and atmosphere.

  Every man's an island as in

  lifeless space we roam.

  Yes, every man's an island:

  island fortress, island home.

  Bee, who had been sent to the hospital for writing this poem, had a strong face - high cheek-boned and haughty. She looked strikingly like an Indian brave. But whoever said so was under an obligation to add quickly that she was, all the same, quite beautiful.

  Now there was a sharp knock on Bee's door. Bee went to the door and opened it. "Yes?" she said.

  In the deserted corridor stood a red and sweating man in uniform. The uniform had no insignia. Slung on the man's back was a rifle. His eyes were deep-set and furtive. "Messenger," he said gruffly. "Message for Bee."

  "I'm Bee," said Bee uneasily.

  The messenger looked her up and down, made her feel naked. His body threw off heat, and the heat enveloped her suffocatingly.

  "Do you recognize me?" he whispered.

  "No," she said. His question relieved her a little. Apparently she had done business with him before. He and his visit, then, were routine - and, in the hospital, she had simply forgotten the man and his routine.

  "I don't remember you, either," he whispered.

  "I've been in the hospital," she said. "I had to have my memory cleaned."

  "Whisper!" he said sharply.

  "What?" said Bee.

  "Whisper!" he said.

  "Sorry," she whispered. Apparently whispering was part of the routine for dealing with this particular functionary. "I've forgotten so much."

  "We all have!" he whispered angrily. He again looked up and down the corridor. "You are the mother of Chrono, aren't you?" be whispered.

  "Yes," she whispered.

  Now the strange messenger concentrated his gaze on her face. He breathed deeply, sighed, frowned - blinked frequently.

  "What - what's the message?" whispered Bee, "The message is this," whispered the messenger. "I am the father of Chrono. I have just deserted from the Army. My name is Unk. I am going to find some way for you, me, the boy, and my best friend to escape from here. I don't know how yet, but you've got to be ready to go at a moment's notice!" He gave her a hand grenade. "Hide this somewhere," he whispered. "When the time comes, you may need it."

  Excited shouts came from the reception room at the far end of the corridor.

  "He said he was a confidential messenger!" shouted a man.

  "In a pig's eye he's a messenger!" shouted another. "He's a deserter in time of war! Who'd he come to see?"

  "He didn't say. He said it was top secret!"

  A whistle shrilled.

  "Six of you come with me!" shouted a man. "We'll search this place room by room. The rest of you surround the outside!"

  Unk shoved Bee and her hand grenade into the room, shut the door. He unslung his rifle, leveled it at the plugged and taped recruits. "One peep, one funny move out of any of you guys," he said, "and you'll all be dead."

  The recruits, standing rigidly on their assigned squares on the floor, did not respond in any way.

  They were pale blue.

  Their rib cages were quaking.

  The whole awareness of each man was concentrated in the region of a small, white, life-giving pill dissolving in the duodenum.

  "Where can I hide?" said Unk. "How can I get out?" It was unnecessary for Bee to reply. There was no place to hide. There was no way out save through the door to the corridor.

  There was only one thing to do, and Unk did it. He stripped to his lichen-green undershorts, hid his rifle under a bench, put plugs in his ears and nostrils, taped his mouth, and stood among the recruits.

  His head was shaved, just like the heads of the recruits. And, like the recruits, Unk had a strip of adhesive plaster running from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck. He had been such a terrible soldier that the doctors had opened his head up at the hospital to see if he might not be suffering from malfunctioning antenna.

  Bee surveyed the room with enchanted calm. She held the grenade that Unk had given her as though it were a vase with one perfect rose in it. Then she went to the place where Unk had hidden his rifle, and she put the grenade beside it - put it there neatly, with a decent respect for another's property.

  Then she went back to her post at the table.

  She neither stared at Unk nor avoided looking at him. As they told her at the hospital: she had been very, very sick, and she would be very, very sick again if she didn't keep her mind strictly on her work and let other people do the thinking and the worrying. At all costs, she was to keep calm.

  The blustering false alarms of the men making the room-to-room search were approaching slowly.

  Bee refused to worry about anything. Unk, by taking his place among the recruits, had reduced himself to a cipher. Considering him professionally, Bee saw that Unk's body was turning blue-gre
en rather than pure blue. This might mean that he had not taken a goofball for several hours - in which case he would soon keel over

  To have him keel over would certainly be the most peaceful solution to the problem he presented, and Bee wanted peace above all else.

  She didn't doubt that Unk was the father of her child. Life was like that. She didn't remember him, and she didn't bother now to study him in order to recognize him the next time - if there was going to be a next time. She had no use for him.

  She noted that Unk's body was now predominantly green. Her diagnosis had been correct, then. He would keel over at any minute.

  Bee daydreamed. She daydreamed of a little girl in a starched white dress and white gloves and white shoes, and with a white pony all her own. Bee envied that little girl who had kept so clean.

  Bee wondered who the little girl was.

  Unk fell noiselessly, as limp as a bag of eels.

  Unk awoke, found himself on his back in a bunk in a space ship. The cabin lights were dazzling. Unk started to yell, but a sick headache shushed him.

  He struggled to his feet, clung drunkenly to the pipe supports of the bunk. He was all alone. Someone had put his uniform back on him.

  He thought at first that he had been launched into space eternal.

  But then he saw that the airlock was open to the outside, and that outside was solid ground.

  Unk lurched out through the airlock and threw up. He raised his watering eyes, and saw that he was seemingly still on Mars, or on something a lot like Mars.

  It was night time.

  The iron plain was studded with ranks and files of space ships.

  As Unk watched, a file of ships five miles long arose from the formation, sailed melodiously off into space.

  A dog barked, barked with a voice like a great bronze gong.

  And out of the night loped the dog - as big and terrible as a tiger.

  "Kazak!" cried a man in the dark.

  The dog stopped at the command, but he held link at bay, kept Unk flattened against the space ship with the threat of his long, wet fangs.

  The dog's master appeared, the beam of a flashlight dancing before him. When he got within a few yards of Unk, he placed the flashlight under his chin. The contrasting beam and shadows made his face look like the face of a demon.

  "Hello, Unk," he said. He turned the flashlight off, stepped to one side so that he was illuminated by the light spilling from the space ship. He was big, vaguely soft, marvelously self-assured. He wore the bloodred uniform and square-toed boots of a Parachute Ski Marine. He was unarmed save for a black and gold swaggerstick one foot long.

  "Long time no see," he said. He gave a very small, v-shaped smile. His voice was a glottal tenor, a yodel.

  Unk had no recollection of the man, but the man obviously knew Unk well - knew him warmly.

  "Who am I, Unk?" said the man gayly.

  Unk gasped. This had to be Stony Stevenson, had to be Unk's fearless best friend. "Stony?" he whispered.

  "Stony?" said the man. He laughed. "Oh, God - " he said, "many's the time I've wished I was Stony, and many's the time I'll wish it again."

  The ground shook. There was a whirlwind rush in the air. Neighboring space ships on all sides had leaped into the air, were gone.

  Unk's ship now had its sector of the iron plain all to itself. The nearest ships on the ground were perhaps half a mile away.

  "There goes your regiment, Unk," said the man, "and you not with them. Aren't you ashamed?"

  "Who are you?" said Unk.

  "What do names matter in wartime?" said the man. He put his big hand on Unk's shoulder. "Oh, Unk, Unk, Unk," he said, "what a time you've had."

  "Who brought me here?" said Unk.

  "The military police, bless them," said the man.

  Unk shook his head. Tears ran down his cheeks. He was defeated. There was no reason for secrecy any more, even in the presence of someone who might have the power of life and death over him. As to life and death, poor Unk was indifferent. "I - I tried to bring my family together," he said. "That's all."

  "Mars is a very bad place for love, a very bad place for a family man, Unk," said the man.

  The man was, of course, Winston Niles Rumfoord. He was commander-in-chief of everything Martian. He was not actually a practicing Parachute Ski Marine. But he was free to wear any uniform that caught his fancy, regardless of how much hell anybody else had to go through for the privilege.

  "Unk," said Rumfoord, "the very saddest love story I ever hope to hear took place on Mars. Would you like to hear it?"

  "Once upon a time," said Rumfoord, "there was a man being carried from Earth to Mars in a flying saucer. He had volunteered for the Army of Mars, and already wore the dashing uniform of a lieutenant-colonel in the Assault Infantry of that service. He felt elegant, indeed, having been rather underprivileged spiritually on Earth, and assumed, as spiritually underprivileged persons will, that the uniform said lovely things about him.

  "His memory hadn't been cleaned out yet, and his antenna had yet to be installed - but he was so patently a loyal Martian that he was given the. run of the space ship. The recruiters have a saying about a male recruit like that - that he has named his balls Deimos and Phobus," said Rumfoord, "Deimos and Phobus being the two moons of Mars.

  "This lieutenant-colonel, with no military training whatsoever, was having the experience known on Earth as finding himself. Ignorant as he was of the enterprise in which he was ensnarled, he was issuing orders to the other recruits, and having them obeyed."

  Rumfoord held up a finger, and Unk was startled to see that it was quite translucent. "There was one locked stateroom that the man was not permitted to enter," said Rumfoord. "The crew carefully explained to him that the stateroom contained the most beautiful woman ever taken to Mars, and that any man who saw her was certain to fall in love with her. Love, they said, would destroy the value of any but the most professional soldier.

  "The new lieutenant-colonel was offended by the suggestion that he was not a professional soldier, and he regaled the crew with stories of his amatory exploits with gorgeous women - all of which had left his heart absolutely untouched. The crew remained skeptical, pretending to the opinion that the lieutenant-colonel had never, for all his lascivious questing, exposed himself to an intelligent, haughty beauty such as the one in the locked stateroom.

  "The crew's seeming respect for the lieutenant-colonel was now subtly withdrawn. The other recruits sensed this withdrawal, and withdrew their own. The lieutenant-colonel in his gaudy uniform was made to feel like what he really was, after all - a strutting clown. The manner in which he could win back his dignity was never stated, but was obvious to one and all. He could win it back by making a conquest of the beauty locked in the stateroom. He was fully prepared to do this - was desperately prepared -

  "But the crew," said Rumfoord, "continued to protect him from supposed amatory failure and a broken heart. His ego fizzed, it sizzled, it snapped, it crackled, it popped.

  "There was a drinking party in the officers' mess," said Rumfoord, "and the lieutenant-colonel became quite drunk and loud. He bragged again of his heartless lewdnesses on Earth. And then he saw that someone had placed in the bottom of his glass a stateroom key.

  "The lieutenant-colonel sneaked away to the locked stateroom forthwith, let himself in, and closed the door behind him," said Rumfoord. "The stateroom was dark, but the inside of the lieutenant-colonel's head was illuminated by liquor and by the triumphant words of the announcement he would make at breakfast the next morning.

  "He took the woman in the dark easily, for she was weak with terror and sedatives," said Rumfoord. "It was a joyless union, satisfactory to no one but Mother Nature at her most callous.

  "The lieutenant-colonel did not feel marvelous. He felt wretched. Foolishly, he turned on the light, hoping to find in the woman's appearance some cause for pride in his brutishness," said Rumfoord sadly. "Huddled on the bunk was a rather plain woman past thi
rty. Her eyes were red and her face was puffy with weeping, despair.

  "The lieutenant-colonel, moreover, knew her. She was a woman that a fortune teller had promised him would one day bear his child," said Rumfoord. "She bad been so high and proud the last time he saw her, and was now so crushed, that even the heartless lieutenant-colonel was moved.

  "The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves - that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, hilt one of outrageous fortune's cruelest agents as well. The woman had regarded him as a pig when they met before. He had now proved beyond question that he was a pig.

  "As the crew had predicted," said Rumfoord, "the lieutenant-colonel was spoiled forever as a soldier. He became hopelessly engrossed in the intricate tactics of causing less rather than more pain. Proof of his success would be his winning of the woman's forgiveness and understanding.

  "When the space ship reached Mars, he learned from loose talk in the Reception Center Hospital that he was about to have his memory taken away. He thereupon wrote himself the first of a series of letters that listed the things he did not want to forget. The first letter was all about the woman he had wronged.

  "He looked for her after his amnesia treatment, and found that she had no recollection of him. Not only that, she was pregnant, carrying his child. His problem, thereupon, became to win her love, and through her, to win the love of her child.

  "This he attempted to do, Unk," said Rumfoord, "not once, but many times. He was consistently defeated. But it remained the central problem of his life - probably because he himself had come from a shattered family.

  "What defeated him, Unk," said Rumfoord, "was a congenital coldness on the part of the woman, and a system of psychiatry that took the ideals of Martian society as noble common sense. Each time the man wobbled his mate, utterly humorless psychiatry straightened her out - made her an efficient citizen again.

  "Both the man and his mate were frequent visitors. to the psychiatric wards of their respective hospitals. And it is perhaps food for thought," said Rumford, "that this supremely frustrated man was the only Martian to write a philosophy, and that this supremely self-frustrating woman was the only Martian to write a poem."