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Title: Slaughterhouse-Five
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Date: March 31, 1969
Language: en
Topics: fiction, World War II, Germany, anti-war, pacifist, science fiction
Source: Retrieved on 2020-07-21 from https://libcom.org/library/slaughterhouse-five-kurt-vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five

One

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much

true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that

wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal

enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I’ve changed

all the names.

I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in

1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton

has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.

I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare, and we made

friends with a taxi driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we

had been locked up at night as prisoner of war. His name was Gerhard

Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while.

We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was

terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because

there wasn’t much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much

better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was

getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the

Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.

He sent O’Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and here is what it said:

‘I wish you and your family also as to your friend Merry Christmas and a

happy New Year and I hope that we’ll meet again in a world of peace and

freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will.’

I like that very much: ‘If the accident will.’

I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money

and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War

twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about

the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to

report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a

masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so

big.

But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then-not enough of

them to make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I

have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his

sons full grown. I think of how useless the Dresden -part of my memory

has been, and yet how tempting Dresden has been to write about, and I am

reminded of the famous limerick:

Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on,

and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised

his eyebrows and inquired, ‘Is it an anti-war book?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I guess.’

‘You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war

books?’

‘No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?’

‘I say, “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”’

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they

were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too.

And, even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be

plain old death.

When I was somewhat younger, working on my famous Dresden book, I asked

an old war buddy named Bernard V. O’Hare if I could come to see him. He

was a district attorney in Pennsylvania. I was a writer on Cape Cod. We

had been privates in the war, infantry scouts. We had never expected to

make any money after the war, but we were doing quite well.

I had the Bell Telephone Company find him for me. They are wonderful

that way. I have this, disease late at night sometimes, involving

alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a

breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and

elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect

me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.

I got O’Hare on the line in this way. He is short and I am tall. We were

Mutt and Jeff in the war. We were captured together in the war. I told

him who I was on the telephone. He had no trouble believing it. He was

up. He was reading. Everybody else in his house was asleep.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’m writing this book about Dresden. I’d like some

help remembering stuff. I wonder if I could come down and see you, and

we could drink and talk and remember.’

He was unenthusiastic. He said he couldn’t remember much. He told me,

though, to come ahead.

‘I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar

Derby,’ I said. ‘The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down,

and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one

American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And

he’s given a regular trial, and then he’s shot by a firing squad.’

‘Um,’ said O’Hare.

‘Don’t you think that’s really where the climax should come?’ ‘I don’t

know anything about it,’ he said. ‘That’s your trade, not mine.’

As a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and

wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations, I had outlined the

Dresden story many times. The best outline I ever made, or anyway the

prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper.

I used my daughter’s crayons, a different color for each main character.

One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other

end was the end, and then there was all that middle part, which was the

middle. And the blue line met the red line and then the yellow line, and

the yellow line stopped because the character represented by the yellow

line was dead. And so on. The destruction of Dresden was represented by

a vertical band of orange cross-hatching, and all the lines that were

still alive passed through it, came out the other side.

The end, where all the lines stopped, was a beetfield on the Elbe,

outside of Halle. The rain was coming down. The war in Europe had been

over for a couple of weeks. We were formed in ranks, with Russian

soldiers guarding us-Englishmen, Americans, Dutchmen, Belgians,

Frenchmen, Canadians, South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians,

thousands of us about to stop being prisoners of war.

And on the other side of the field were thousands of Russians and Poles

and Yugoslavians and so on guarded by American soldiers. An exchange was

made there in the rain-one for one. O’Hare and I climbed into the back

of an American truck with a lot of others. O’Hare didn’t have any

souvenirs. Almost everybody else did. I had a ceremonial Luftwaffe

saber, still do. The rabid little American I call Paul Lazzaro in this

book had about a quart of diamonds and emeralds and rubies and so on’ He

had taken these from dead people in the cellars of Dresden.’ So it goes.

An idiotic Englishman, who had lost all his teeth somewhere had his

souvenir in a canvas bag. The bag was resting on my insteps. He would

peek into the bag every now and then, and he would roll his eyes and

swivel his scrawny neck,, trying to catch people looking covetously at

his bag. And he would bounce the bag on my insteps.

I thought this bouncing was accidental. But I was mistaken. He had to

show somebody what was in the bag, and he had decided he could trust me.

He caught my eye, winked, opened the bag. There was a plaster model of

the Eiffel Tower in there. It was painted gold. It had a clock in it.

‘There’s a smashin’ thing,’ he said.

And we were flown to a rest camp in France, where we were fed chocolate

malted milkshakes and other rich foods until we were all covered with

baby fat. Then we were sent home, and I married a pretty girl who was

covered with baby fat, too.

And we had babies.

And they’re all grown up now, and I’m an old fart with his memories and

his Pall Malls. My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a

lumbermill there.

Sometimes I try to call up old girl friends on the telephone late at

night, after my wife has gone to bed. ‘Operator, I wonder if you could

give me the number of a Mrs. So-and-So. I think she lives at

such-and-such.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. There is no such listing.’

‘Thanks, Operator. Thanks just the same.’

And I let the dog out or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know

I like him, and he lets me know he likes me. He doesn’t mind the smell

of mustard gas and roses.

‘You’re all right, Sandy, I’ll say to the dog. ‘You know that, Sandy?

You’re O.K.’

Sometimes I’ll turn on the radio and listen to a talk program from

Boston or New York. I can’t stand recorded music if I’ve been drinking a

good deal.

Sooner or later I go to bed, and my wife asks me what time it is. She

always has to know the time. Sometimes I don’t know, and I say, ‘Search

me.’

I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of

Chicago for a while after the Second World War. I was a student in the

Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there

was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that

still.

Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or

disgusting. Shortly before my father died, he said to me, ‘You know-you

never wrote a story with a villain in it.’

I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the

war.

While I was studying to be an anthropologist, I was also working as a

police reporter for the famous Chicago City News Bureau for twenty-eight

dollars a week. One time they switched me from the night shift to the

day shift., so I worked sixteen hours straight. We were supported by all

the newspapers in town, and the AP and the UP and all that. And we would

cover the courts and the police stations and the Fire Department and the

Coast Guard out on Lake Michigan and all that. We were connected to the

institutions that supported us by means of pneumatic tubes which ran

under the streets of Chicago.

Reporters would telephone in stories to writers wearing headphones, and

the writers would stencil the stories on mimeograph sheets. The stories

were mimeographed and stuffed into the brass and velvet cartridges which

the pneumatic tubes ate. The very toughest reporters and writers were

women who had taken over the jobs of men who’d gone to war.

And the first story I covered I had to dictate over the telephone to one

of those beastly girls. It was about a young veteran who had taken a job

running an old-fashioned elevator in an office building. The elevator

door on the first floor was ornamental iron lace. Iron ivy snaked in and

out of the holes. There was an iron twig with two iron lovebirds perched

upon it.

This veteran decided to take his car into the basement, and he closed

the door and started down, but his wedding ring Was caught in all the

ornaments. So he was hoisted into the air and the floor of the car went

down, dropped out from under him, and the top of the car squashed him.

So it goes.

So I phoned this in, and the woman who was going to cut the stencil

asked me. ‘What did his wife say?’

‘She doesn’t know yet,’ I said. ‘It just happened.’

‘Call her up and get a statement.’

‘What?’

‘Tell her you’re Captain Finn of the Police Department. Say you have

some sad news. Give her the news, and see what she says.’

So I did. She said about what you would expect her to say. There was a

baby. And so on.

When I got back to the office, the woman writer asked me, just for her

own information, what the squashed guy had looked Eke when he was

squashed.

I told her.

‘Did it bother you?’ she said. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy

Bar.

‘Heck no, Nancy,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen lots worse than that in the war.’

Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn’t a

famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much

worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn’t know that,

either. There hadn’t been much publicity.

I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party

about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a

member of a thing called The Committee on Social Thought. And he told me

about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made soap

and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on.

All could say was, ‘I know, I know. I know.’

The Second World War had certainly made everybody very tough. And I

became a public relations man for General Electric in Schenectady, New

York, and a volunteer fireman in the Village of Alplaus, where I bought

my first home. My boss there was one of the toughest guys I ever hope to

meet. He had been a lieutenant colonel in public relations in Baltimore.

While I was in Schenectady he joined the Dutch Reformed Church, which is

a very tough church, indeed.

He used to ask me sneeringly sometimes why I hadn’t been an officer,, as

though I’d done something wrong.

My wife and I had lost our baby fat. Those were our scrawny years. We

had a lot of scrawny veterans and their scrawny wives for friends. The

nicest veterans in Schenectady,, I thought,, the kindest and funniest

ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really

fought.

I wrote the Air Force back then, asking for details about the raid on

Dresden, who ordered it, how many planes did it, why they did it, what

desirable results there had been and so on. I was answered by a man who,

like myself, was in public relations. He said that he was sorry, but

that the information was top secret still.

I read the letter out loud to my wife, and I said, ‘Secret? My God-from

whom?’

We were United World Federalists back then. I don’t know what we are

now. Telephoners, I guess. We telephone a lot-or I do, anyway, late at

night.

A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V.

O’Hare, I really did go to see him. That must have been in 1964 or

so-whatever the last year was for the New York World’s Fair. Eheu,

fugaces labuntur anni. My name is Yon Yonson. There was a young man from

Stamboul.

I took two little girls with me, my daughter, Nanny, and her best

friend, Allison Mitchell. They had never been off Cape Cod before. When

we saw a river, we had to stop so they could stand by it and think about

it for a while. They had never seen water in that long and narrow,

unsalted form before. The river was the Hudson. There were carp in there

and we saw them. They were as big as atomic submarines.

We saw waterfalls, too, streams jumping off cliffs into the valley of

the Delaware. There were lots of things to stop and see-and then it was

time to go, always time to go. The little girls were wearing white party

dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice

they were. ‘Time to go, girls,’ I’d say. And we would go.

And the sun went down, and we had supper in an Italian place, and then I

knocked on the front door of the beautiful stone house of Bernard V.

O’Hare. I was carrying a bottle of Irish whiskey like a dinner bell.

I met his nice wife, Mary, to whom I dedicate this book. I dedicate it

to Gerhard Müller, the Dresden taxi driver, too. Mary O’Hare is a

trained nurse, which is a lovely thing for a woman to be.

Mary admired the two little girls I’d brought, mixed them in with her

own children, sent them all upstairs to play games and watch television.

It was only after the children were gone that I sensed that Mary didn’t

like me or didn’t like something about the night. She was polite but

chilly.

‘It’s a nice cozy house you have here,’ I said, and it really was.

‘I’ve fixed up a place where you can talk and not be bothered,’ she

said.

‘Good,’ I said, and I imagined two leather chairs near a fire in a

paneled room, where two old soldiers could drink and talk. But she took

us into the kitchen. She had put two straight-backed chairs at a kitchen

table with a white porcelain top. That table top was screaming with

reflected light from a two-hundred-watt bulb overhead. Mary had prepared

an operating room. She put only one glass on it, which was for me. She

explained that O’Hare couldn’t drink the hard stuff since the war.

So we sat down. O’Hare was embarrassed, but he wouldn’t tell me what was

wrong. I couldn’t imagine what it was about me that could bum up Mary

so. I was a family man. I’d been married only once. I wasn’t a drunk. I

hadn’t done her husband any dirt in the war.

She fixed herself a Coca-Cola, made a lot of noise banging the ice-cube

tray in the stainless steel sink. Then she went into another part of the

house. But she wouldn’t sit still. She was moving all over the house,

opening and shutting doors, even moving furniture around to work off

anger.

I asked O’Hare what I’d said or done to make her act that way.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t have

anything to do with you.’ That was kind of him. He was lying. It had

everything to do with me.

So we tried to ignore Mary and remember the war. I took a couple of

belts of the booze I’d brought. We would chuckle or grin sometimes, as

though war stories were coming back, but neither one of us could

remember anything good. O’Hare remembered one guy who got into a lot of

wine in Dresden, before it was bombed, and we had to take him home in a

wheelbarrow.

It wasn’t much to write a book about. I remembered two Russian soldiers

who had looted a clock factory. They had a horse-drawn wagon full of

clocks. They were happy and drunk. They were smoking huge cigarettes

they had rolled in newspaper.

That was about it for memories, and Mary was still making noise. She

finally came out in the kitchen again for another Coke. She took another

tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator, banged it in the sink, even

though there was already plenty of ice out.

Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger

was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a

fragment of a much larger conversation. “You were just babies then!’ she

said.

‘What?” I said.

‘You were just babies in the war-like the ones upstairs! ’

I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war,

right at the end of childhood.

‘But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.’ This wasn’t a

question. It was an accusation.

‘I-I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Well, I know,’ she said. ‘You’ll pretend you were men instead of

babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John

Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And

war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And

they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.’

So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want

her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars

were partly encouraged by books and movies.

So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise ‘Mary,’ I said, ‘I

don’t think this book is ever going to be finished. I must have written

five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do

finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part

for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.

‘I tell you what,’ I said, ‘I’ll call it The Children’s Crusade.’

She was my friend after that.

O’Hare and I gave up on remembering, went into the living room, talked

about other things. We became curious about the real Children’s Crusade,

so O’Hare looked it up in a book he had, Extraordinary Popular Delusions

and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, LL.D. It was first

published in London in 1841.

Mackay had a low opinion of all Crusades. The Children’s Crusade struck

him as only slightly more sordid than the ten Crusades for grown-ups.

O’Hare read this handsome passage out loud:

History in her solemn page informs us that the Crusaders were but

ignorant and savage men, that their motives were those of bigotry

unmitigated, and that their pathway was one of blood and rears. Romance,

on the other hand, dilates upon their piety and heroism, and portrays,

in her most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity,

the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves, and the great

services they rendered to Christianity.

And then O’Hare read this: Now what was the grand result of all these

struggles? Europe expended millions of her treasures, and the blood of

two million of her people; and a handful of quarrelsome knights retained

possession of Palestine for about one hundred years!

Mackay told us that the Children’s Crusade started in 1213, when two

monks got the idea of raising armies of children in Germany and France,

and selling them in North Africa as slaves. Thirty thousand children

volunteered, thinking they were going to Palestine. They were no doubt

idle and deserted children who generally swarm in great cities, nurtured

on vice and daring, said Mackay, and ready for anything.

Pope Innocent the Third thought they were going to Palestine, too, and

he was thrilled. ‘These children are awake while we are asleep!’ he

said.

Most of the children were shipped out of Marseilles, and about half of

them drowned in shipwrecks. The other half got to North Africa where

they were sold.

Through a misunderstanding, some children reported for duty at Genoa,

where no slave ships were waiting. They were fed and sheltered and

questioned kindly by good people there-then given a little money and a

lot of advice and sent back home.

‘Hooray for the good people of Genoa,’ said Mary O’Hare.

I slept that night in one of the children’s bedrooms. O’Hare had put a

book for me on the bedside table. It was Dresden, History, Stage and

Gallery, by Mary Endell. It was published in 1908, and its introduction

began

It is hoped that this little book will make itself useful. It attempts

to give to an English-reading public a bird’s-eye view of how Dresden

came to look as it does, architecturally; of how it expanded musically,

through the genius of a few men, to its present bloom; and it calls

attention to certain permanent landmarks in art that make its Gallery

the resort of those seeking lasting impressions.

I read some history further on

Now, in 1760, Dresden underwent siege by the Prussians. On the fifteenth

of July began the cannonade. The Picture-Gallery took fire. Many of the

paintings had been transported to -the Konigstein, but some were

seriously injured by splinters of bombshells-notably Francia’s ‘Baptism

of Christ.’ Furthermore, the stately Kreuzkirche tower, from which the

enemy’s movements had been watched day and night, stood in flames. It

later succumbed. In sturdy contrast with the pitiful fate of the

Kreuzkirche, stood the Frauenkirche, from the curves of whose stone dome

the Prussian bombs -rebounded like rain. Friederich was obliged finally

to give up the siege, because he learned of the fall of Glatz, the

critical point of his new conquests. ‘We must be off to Silesia, so that

we do not lose everything.’

The devastation of Dresden was boundless. When Goethe as a young student

visited the city, he still found sad ruins ‘Von der Kuppel der

Frauenkirche sah ich these leidigen Trümmer zwischen die schone

stddtische Ordnung hineingesät; da rühmte mir der Kiister die Kunst des

Baumeisters, welcher Kirche und Kuppel auf einen so unerüinschten Fall

schon eingeyichtet und bombenfest erbaut hatte. Der gute Sakristan

deutete mir alsdann auf Ruinen nach allen Seiten und sagte bedenklich

lakonisch: Das hat her Feind Gethan!’

The two little girls and I crossed the Delaware River where George

Washington had crossed it, the next morning. We went to the New York

World’s Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford

Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like,

according to General Motors.

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was,

how much was mine to keep.

I taught creative writing in the famous Writers Workshop at the

University of Iowa for a couple of years after that. I got into some

perfectly beautiful trouble, got out of it again. I taught in the

afternoons. In the mornings I wrote. I was not be disturbed. I was

working on my famous book about Dresden.

And somewhere in there a nice man named Seymour Lawrence gave me a

three-book contract, and I said, ‘O.K., the first of the three will be

my famous book about Dresden.’

The friends of Seymour Lawrence call him ‘Sam.’ And I say to Sam now:

‘Sam-here’s the book.’

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing

intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead,

to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is

supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for

the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things

like ‘Poo-tee-weet?’

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take

part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to

fill them with satisfaction or glee.

I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre

machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need

machinery like that.

As I’ve said I recently went back to Dresden with my friend O’Hare. We

had a million laughs in Hamburg and West Berlin and East Berlin and

Vienna and Salzburg and Helsinki, and in Leningrad, too. It was very

good for me, because I saw a lot of authentic backgrounds for made-up

stories which I will write later on. One of them will be Russian Baroque

and another will be No Kissing and another will be Dollar Bar and

another will be If the Accident Will, and so on.

And so on.

There was a Lufthansa plane that was supposed to fly from Philadelphia

to Boston to Frankfurt. O’Hare was supposed to get on in Philadelphia

and I was supposed to get on in Boston, and off we’d go. But Boston was

socked in, so the plane flew straight to Frankfurt from Philadelphia.

And I became a non-person in the Boston Fog, and Lufthansa put me in a

limousine with some other non-persons and sent us to a motel for a

non-night.

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not

only with the electric clocks, but the wind-up kind, too. The second

hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it

would twitch again.

There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling., I had to

believe whatever clocks said-and calendars.

I had two books with me, which I’d meant to read on the plane. One was

Words for the Wind, by Theodore Roethke, and this is what I found in

there:

My other book was Erika Ostrovsky’s Céline and His Vision. Céline was a

brave French soldier in the First World War-until his skull was cracked.

After that he couldn’t sleep, and there were noises in his head. He

became a doctor, and he treated poor people in the daytime, and he wrote

grotesque novels all night. No art is possible without a dance with

death, he wrote.

The truth is death, he wrote. I’ve fought nicely against it as long as I

could ... danced with it, festooned it, waltzed it around ... decorated

it with streamers, titillated it...

Time obsessed him. Miss Ostrovsky reminded me of the amazing scene in

Death on the Installment Plan where Céline wants to stop the bustling of

a street crowd. He screams on paper, Make them stop ... don’t let them

move anymore at all ... There, make them freeze ... once and for all!

... So that they won’t disappear anymore!

I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great

destruction. The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into

Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah

brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those

cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and

that which grew upon the ground.

So it goes.

Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world

was better off without them.

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those

people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her

for that, because it was so human.

She was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it

anymore.

I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.

This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar

of salt. It begins like this:

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

It ends like this:

Poo-tee-weet?

Two

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding

day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in

1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has

seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to

all the events in between.

He says.

Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next,

and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is ‘m a constant state of stage

fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is

going to have to act in next.

Billy was bon in 1922 in Ilium, New York, the only child of a barber

there. He was a funny-looking child who became a funny-looking

youth-tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola. He graduated

from Ilium High School in the upper third of his class, and attended

night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before

being drafted for military service in the Second World War. His father

died in a hunting accident during the war. So it goes.

Billy saw service with the infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by

the Germans. After his honorable discharge from the Army in 1945, Billy

again enrolled in the Ilium School of Optometry. During his senior year

there, he became engaged to the daughter of the founder and owner of the

school, and then suffered a mild nervous collapse.

He was treated in a veterans’ hospital near Lake Placid, and was given

shock treatments and released. He married his fiancée, finished his

education, and was set up in business in Ilium by his father-in-law.

Ilium is a particularly good city for optometrists because the General

Forge and Foundry Company is there. Every employee is required to own a

pair of safety glasses, and to wear them in areas where manufacturing is

going on. GF&F has sixty-eight thousand employees in Ilium. That calls

for a lot of lenses and a lot of frames.

Frames are where the money is.

Bill became rich. He had two children, Barbara and Robert. In time, his

daughter Barbara married another optometrist., and Billy set him up in

business. Billy’s son Robert had a lot of trouble in high school, but

then he joined the famous Green Berets. He straightened out, became a

fine Young man, and he fought in Vietnam.

Early in 1968, a group of optometrists, with Billy among them, chartered

an airplane to fly them from Ilium to an international convention of

optometrists in Montreal. The plane crashed on top of Sugarbush

Mountain, in Vermont. Everybody was killed but Billy. So it goes.

While Billy was recuperating in a hospital in Vermont, his wife died

accidentally of carbon-monoxide poisoning. So it goes.

When Billy finally got home to Ilium after the airplane crash, he was

quiet for a while. He had a terrible scar across the top Of his skull.

He didn’t resume practice. He had a housekeeper. His daughter came over

almost every day.

And then, without any warning, Billy went to New York City, and got on

an all-night radio program devoted to talk. He told about having come

unstuck in time. He said, too, that he had been kidnapped by a flying

saucer in 1967. The saucer was from the planet Tralfamadore, he said. He

was taken to Tralfamadore, where he was displayed naked in a zoo, he

said. He was mated there with a former Earthling movie star named

Montana Wildhack.

Some night owls in Ilium heard Billy on the radio, and one of them

called Billy’s daughter Barbara. Barbara was upset. She and her husband

went down to New York and brought Billy home. Billy insisted mildly that

everything he had said on the radio was true. He said he had been

kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians on the night of his daughter’s wedding.

He hadn’t been missed, he said, because the Tralfamadorians had taken

him through a time warp, so that he could be on Tralfamadore for years,

and still be away from Earth for only a microsecond.

Another month went by without incident, and then Billy wrote a letter to

the Ilium News Leader, which the paper published. It described the

creatures from Tralfamadore.

The letter said that they were two feet high, and green., and shaped

like plumber’s friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their

shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At

the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm.

The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They

pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many

wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time. Billy

promised to tell what some of those wonderful things were in his next

letter.

Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was

published. The second letter started out like this:

‘The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a

person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the

past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments,

past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The

Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we

can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see

how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that

interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one

moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a

moment is gone it is gone forever.

‘When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead

person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the

same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself

hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the

Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”’

And so on.

Billy was working on this letter in the basement rumpus room of his

empty house. It was his housekeeper’s day off. There was an old

typewriter in the rumpus room. It was a beast. It weighed as much as a

storage battery. Billy couldn’t carry it very far very easily, which was

why he was writing in the rumpus room instead of somewhere else.

The oil burner had quit. A mouse had eaten through the insulation of a

wire leading to the thermostat. The temperature in the house was down to

fifty degrees, but Billy hadn’t noticed. He wasn’t warmly dressed,

either. He was barefoot, and still in his pajamas and a bathrobe, though

it was late afternoon. His bare feet were blue and ivory.

The cockles of Billy’s heart, at any rate, were glowing coals. What made

them so hot was Billy’s belief that he was going to comfort so many

people with the truth about time. His door chimes upstairs had been

ringing and ringing. It was his daughter Barbara up there wanting in.

Now she let herself in with a key, crossed the floor over his head

calling, ‘Father? Daddy, where are you?’ And so on.

Billy didn’t answer her, so she was nearly hysterical, expecting to find

his corpse. And then she looked into the very last place there was to

look-which was the rumpus room.

‘Why didn’t you answer me when I called?’ Barbara wanted to know,

standing there in the door of the rumpus room. She had the afternoon

paper with her, the one in which Billy described his friends from

Tralfamadore.

‘I didn’t hear you,’ said Billy.

The orchestration of the moment was this: Barbara was only twenty-one

years old, but she thought her father was senile, even though he was

only forty-six-senile because of damage to his brain in the airplane

crash. She also thought that she was head of the family, since she had

had to manage her mother’s funeral, since she had to get a housekeeper

for Billy, and all that. Also, Barbara and her husband were having to

look after Billy’s business interests, which were considerable, since

Billy didn’t seem to give a damn for business any more. All this

responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet.

And Billy, meanwhile, was trying to hang onto his dignity, to persuade

Barbara and everybody else that he was far from senile, that, on the

contrary, he was devoting himself to a calling much higher than mere

business.

He was doing nothing less now, he thought, then prescribing corrective

lenses for Earthling souls. So many of those souls were lost and

wretched, Billy believed, because they could not see as well as Ws

little green friends on Tralfamadore.

‘Don’t lie to me, Father,’ said Barbara. ‘I know perfectly well you

heard me when I called.’ This was a fairly pretty girl, except that she

had legs like an Edwardian grand piano. Now she raised hell with him

about the letter in the paper. She said he was making a laughing stock

of himself and everybody associated with him.

‘Father, Father, Father,’ said Barbara, ‘what are we going to do with

you? Are you going to force us to put you where your mother is?’ Billy’s

mother was still alive. She was in bed in an old people’s home called

Pine Knoll on the edge of Ilium.

‘What is it about my letter that makes you so mad?’ Billy wanted to

know.

‘It’s all just crazy. None of it’s true! ’

‘It’s all true. ‘ Bill’s anger was not going to rise with hers. He never

got mad at anything. He was wonderful that way.

‘There is no such planet as Tralfamadore.’

‘It can’t be detected from Earth, if that’s what you mean,’ said Billy.

‘Earth can’t be detected from Tralfamadore, as far as that goes. They’re

both very small. They’re very far apart.’

‘Where did you get a crazy name like “Tralfamadore?”’

‘That’s what the creatures who live there call it.

‘Oh God,’ said Barbara, and she turned her back on him. She celebrated

frustration by clapping her hands. ‘May I ask you a simple question?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why is it you never mentioned any of this before the airplane crash?’

‘I didn’t think the time was ripe.’

And so on. Billy says that he first came unstuck in time in 1944, long

before his trip to Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians didn’t have

anything to do with his coming unstuck They were simply able to give him

insights into what was really going on.

Billy first came unstuck while the Second World War was in progress.

Billy was a chaplain’s assistant in the war. A chaplain’s assistant is

customarily a figure of fun in the American Army. Billy was no

exception. He was powerless to harm the enemy or to help his friends. In

fact, he had no friends. He was a valet to a preacher, expected no

promotions or medals, bore no arms, and had a meek faith in a loving

Jesus which most soldiers found putrid.

While on maneuvers in South Carolina, Billy played hymns he knew from

childhood, played them on a little black organ which was waterproof. It

had thirty-nine keys and two stops- vox humana and vox celeste. Billy

also had charge of a portable altar, an olive-drab attaché case with

telescoping legs. It was lined with crimson plush, and nestled in that

passionate plush were an anodized aluminum cross and a Bible.

The altar and the organ were made by a vacuum-cleaner company in Camden,

New Jersey-and said so.

One time on maneuvers Billy was playing ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,’

with music by Johann Sebastian Bach and words by Martin Luther. It was

Sunday morning. Billy and his chaplain had gathered a congregatation of

about fifty soldiers on a Carolina hillside. An umpire appeared. There

were umpires everywhere, men who said who was winning or losing the

theoretical battle, who was alive and who was dead.

The umpire had comical news. The congregation had been theoretically

spotted from the air by a theoretical enemy. They Were all theoretically

dead now. The theoretical corpses laughed and ate a hearty noontime

meal.

Remembering this incident years later, Billy was struck by what a

Tralfamadorian adventure with death that had been, to be dead and to eat

at the same time.

Toward the end of maneuvers., Billy was given an emergency furlough home

because his father, a barber in Ilium, New York, was shot dead by a

friend while they were out hunting deer. So it goes.

When Billy got back from his furlough., there were orders for him to go

overseas. He was needed in the headquarters company of an infantry

regiment fighting in Luxembourg. The regimental chaplain’s assistant had

been killed in action. So it goes.

When Billy joined the regiment, it was in the process of being destroyed

by the Germans in the famous Battle of the Bulge. Billy never even got

to meet the chaplain he was supposed to assist, was never even issued a

steel helmet and combat boots. This was in December of 1944, during the

last mighty German attack of the war.

Billy survived, but he was a dazed wanderer far behind the new German

lines. Three other wanderers, not quite so dazed, allowed Billy to tag

along. Two of them were scouts, and one was an antitank gunner. They

were without food or maps. Avoiding Germans they were delivering

themselves into rural silences ever more profound. They ate snow.

They went Indian file. First came the scouts, clever, graceful quiet.

They had rifles. Next came the antitank gunner, clumsy and dense,

warning Germans away with a Colt .45 automatic in one hand and a trench

knife in the other.

Last came Billy Pilgrim, empty-handed, bleakly ready for death. Billy

was Preposterous-six feet and three inches tall, with a chest and

shoulders like a box of kitchen matches. He had no helmet, no overcoat,

no weapon and no boots. On his feet were cheap, low-cut civilian shoes

which he had bought for his father’s funeral. Billy had lost a heel,

which made him bob up-and-down, up-and-down. The involuntary dancing up

and down, up and down, made his hip joints sore.

Billy was wearing a thin field jacket, a shirt and trousers of scratchy

wool, and long underwear that was soaked with sweat. He was the only one

of the four who had a beard. It was a random, bristly beard, and some of

the bristles were white, even though Billy was only twenty-one years

old. He was also going bald. Wind and cold and violent exercise had

turned his face crimson.

He didn’t look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.

And on the third day of wandering, somebody shot at the four from far

away-shot four times as they crossed a narrow brick road. One shot was

for the scouts. The next one was for the antitank gunner, whose name was

Roland Weary.

The third bullet was for the filthy flamingo, who stopped dead center in

the road when the lethal bee buzzed past his ear. Billy stood there

politely, giving the marksman another chance. It was his addled

understanding of the rules of warfare that the marksman should be given

a second chance. The next shot missed Billy’s kneecaps by inches, going

end-on-end, from the sound of it.

Roland Weary and the scouts were safe in a ditch, and Weary growled at

Billy, ‘Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker.’ The last word was

still a novelty in the speech of white people in 1944. It was fresh and

astonishing to Billy, who had never fucked anybody-and it did its job.

It woke him up and got him off the road.

‘Saved your life again, you dumb bastard,’ Weary said to Billy in the

ditch. He had been saving Billy’s fife for days, cursing him, kicking

him, slapping him, making him move. It was absolutely necessary that

cruelty be used, because Billy wouldn’t do anything to save himself.

Billy wanted to quit. He was cold, hungry, embarrassed, incompetent. He

could scarcely distinguish between sleep and wakefulness now, on the

third day, found no important differences either, between walking and

standing still.

He wished everybody would leave him alone. ‘You guys go on without me,’

he said again and again.

Weary was as new to war as Billy. He was a replacement, too. As a part

of a gun crew, he had helped to fire one shot in anger-from a

57-millimeter antitank gun. The gun made a ripping sound like the

opening of a zipper on the fly of God Almighty. The gun lapped up snow

and vegetation with a blowtorch feet long. The flame left a black arrow

on the ground, showing the Germans exactly where the gun was hidden. The

shot was a miss.

What had been missed was a Tiger tank. It swiveled its 88-millimeter

snout around sniffingly, saw the arrow on the ground. It fired. It

killed everybody on the gun crew but Weary. So it goes.

Roland Weary was only eighteen, was at the end of an unhappy childhood

spent mostly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He had been unpopular in

Pittsburgh. He had been unpopular because he was stupid and fat and

mean, and smelled like bacon no matter how much he washed. He was always

being ditched in Pittsburgh by people who did not want him with them.

It made Weary sick to be ditched. When Weary was ditched, le would find

somebody who was even more unpopular than himself, and he would horse

around with that person for a while, pretending to be friendly. And then

he would find some pretext for beating the shit out of him.

It was a pattern. It was a crazy, sexy, murderous relationship Weary

entered into with people he eventually beat up. He told hem about his

father’s collection of guns and swords and torture instruments and leg

irons and so on. Weary’s father, who was a plumber, actually did collect

such things, and his collection was insured for four thousand dollars.

He wasn’t alone. He belonged to a big club composed of people who

collected things like that.

Weary’s father once gave Weary’s mother a Spanish thumbscrew in —

working condition-for a kitchen paperweight. Another time he gave her a

table lamp whose base was a model one foot high of the famous ‘Iron

Maiden of Nuremburg.’ The real Iron Maiden was a medieval torture

instrument, a sort of boiler which was shaped like a woman on the

outside-and lined with spikes. The front of the woman was composed of

two hinged doors. The idea was to put a criminal inside and then close

the doors slowly. There were two special spikes where his eyes would be.

There was a drain in the bottom to let out all the blood.

So it goes.

Weary had told Billy Pilgrim about the Iron Maiden, about the drain in

the bottom-and what that was for. He had talked to Billy about dum-dums.

He told him about his father’s Derringer pistol, which could be carried

in a vest pocket, which was yet capable of making a hole in a man ‘which

a bull bat could fly through without touching either wing.’

Weary scornfully bet Billy one time that he didn’t even know what a

blood gutter was. Billy guessed that it was the drain in the bottom of

the Iron Maiden, but that was wrong. A blood gutter, Billy learned, was

the shallow groove in the side of the blade of a sword or bayonet.

Weary told Billy about neat tortures he’d read about or seen in the

movies or heard on the radio-about other neat tortures he himself had

invented. One of the inventions was sticking a dentist’s drill into a

guy’s ear. He asked Billy what he thought the worst form of execution

was. Billy had no opinion. The correct answer turned out to be this:

‘You stake a guy out on an anthill in the desert-see? He’s face upward,

and you put honey all over his balls and pecker, and you cut off his

eyelids so he has to stare at the sun till he dies.’ So it goes.

Now, lying in the ditch with Billy and the scouts after having been shot

at, Weary made Billy take a very close look at his trench knife. It

wasn’t government issue. It was a present from his father. It had a

ten-inch blade that was triangular ‘in ‘cross section. Its grip

consisted of brass knuckles, was a chain of rings through which Weary

slipped his stubby fingers. The rings weren’t simple. They bristled with

spikes.

Weary laid the spikes along Billy’s cheek, roweled the cheek with

savagely affectionate restraint. ‘How’d you-like to be hit with this-hm?

Hmmmmmmmmm?’ he wanted to know.

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Billy.

‘Know why the blade’s triangular?’

‘No.’

‘Makes a wound that won’t close up.’

‘Oh.’

��Makes a three-sided hole in a guy. You stick an ordinary knife in a

guy-makes a slit. Right? A slit closes right up. Right?

‘Right.’

‘Shit. What do you know? What the hell they teach you in college?’

‘I wasn’t there very long.’ said Billy, which was true. He had had only

six months of college and the college hadn’t been a regular college,

either. It had been the night school of the Ilium School of Optometry.

“Joe College,’ said Weary scathingly.

Billy shrugged.

‘There’s more to life than what you read in books.’ said Weary. ‘You’ll

find that out.’

Billy made no reply to this, either, there in the ditch, since he didn’t

want the conversation to go on any longer than necessary. He was dimly

tempted to say, though, that he knew a thing or two about gore. Billy,

after all, had contemplated torture and hideous wounds at the beginning

and the end of nearly every day of his childhood. Billy had an extremely

gruesome crucifix hanging on the wall of his little bedroom in Ilium. A

military surgeon would have admired the clinical fidelity of the

artist’s rendition of all Christ’s wounds-the spear wound, the thorn

wounds, the holes that were made by the iron spikes. Billy’s Christ died

horribly. He was pitiful.

So it goes.

Billy wasn’t a Catholic, even though he grew up with a ghastly crucifix

on the wall. His father had no religion. His mother was a substitute

organist for several churches around town. She took Billy with her

whenever she played, taught him to play a little, too. She said she was

going to join a church as soon as she decided which one was right.

She never did decide. She did develop a terrific hankering for a

crucifix, though. And she bought one from a Sante Fé gift shop during a

trip the little family made out West during the Great Depression. Like

so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense

from things she found in gift shops.

And the crucifix went up on the wall of Billy Pilgrim.

The two scouts, loving the walnut stocks of their rifles in the ditch,

whispered that it was time to move out again. Ten minutes had gone by

without anybody’s coming to see if they were hit or not, to finish them

off. Whoever had shot was evidently far away and all alone.

And the four crawled out of the ditch without drawing any more fire.

They crawled into a forest like the big, unlucky mammals they were. Then

they stood up and began to walk quickly. The forest was dark and cold.

The pines were planted in ranks and files. There was no undergrowth.

Four inches of unmarked snow blanketed the ground. The Americans had no

choice but to leave trails in the show as unambiguous as diagrams in a

book on ballroom dancing-step, slide, rest-step, slide,-rest.

‘Close it up and keep it closed!’ Roland Weary warned Billy Pilgrim as

they moved out. Weary looked like Tweedledum or Tweedledee, all bundled

up for battle. He was short and thick.

He had every piece of equipment he had ever been issued, every present

he’d received from home: helmet, helmet liner, wool cap, scarf, gloves,

cotton undershirt, woolen undershirt, wool shirt, sweater, blouse,

jacket, overcoat, cotton underpants, woolen underpants, woolen trousers,

cotton socks, woolen socks, combat boots, gas mask, canteen, mess kit,

first-aid kit, trench knife, blanket, shelter-half , raincoat,

bulletproof Bible, a pamphlet entitled ‘Know Your Enemy,’ another

pamphlet entitled ‘Why We Fight’ and another pamphlet of German phrases

rendered in English phonetics,, which would enable Weary to ask Germans

questions such as ‘Where is your headquarters?’ and ‘How many howitzers

have you?’ Or to tell them, ‘Surrender. Your situation is hopeless,’ and

so on.

Weary had a block of balsa wood which was supposed to be a foxhole

pillow. He had a prophylactic kit containing two tough condoms ‘For the

Prevention of Disease Only!’ He had a whistle he wasn’t going to show

anybody until he got promoted to corporal. He had a dirty picture of a

woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony. He had made

Billy Pilgrim admire that picture several times.

The woman and the pony were posed before velvet draperies which were

fringed with deedlee-balls. They were flanked by Doric columns. In front

of one column was a potted palm. The Picture that Weary had was a print

of the first dirty photograph in history. The word photography was first

used in 1839, and it was in that year, too, that Louis J. M. Daguerre

revealed to the French Academy that an image formed on a silvered metal

plate covered with a thin film of silver iodide could be developed in

the presence of mercury vapor.

In 1841, only two years later, an assistant to Daguerre, André Le Fèvre,

was arrested in the Tuileries Gardens for attempting to sell a gentleman

a picture of the woman and the pony. That was where Weary bought his

picture,, too-in the Tuileries. Le Fèvre argued that the picture was

fine art, and that his intention was to make Greek mythology come alive.

He said that columns and the potted palm proved that.

When asked which myth he meant to represent, Le Fèvre, replied that

there were thousands of myths like that, with the woman a mortal and the

pony a god.

He was sentenced to six months in prison. He died there of pneumonia. So

it goes.

Billy and the Scouts were skinny people. Roland Weary had fat to burn.

He was a roaring furnace under all his layers of wool and straps and

canvas. He had so much energy that he bustled back and forth between

Billy and the scouts, delivering dumb messages which nobody had sent and

which nobody was pleased to receive. He also began to suspect, since he

was so much busier than anybody else, that he was the leader.

He was so hot and bundled up, in fact, that he had no sense of danger.

His vision of the outside world was limited to what he could see through

a narrow slit between the rim of his helmet and his scarf from home,

which concealed his baby face from the bridge of his nose on down. He

was so snug in there that he was able to pretend that he was safe at

home, having survived the war, and that he was telling his parents and

his sister a true war story-whereas the true war story was still going

on.

Weary’s version of the true war story went like this: There was a big

German attack, and Weary and his antitank buddies fought like hell until

everybody was killed but Weary. So it goes. And then Weary tied in with

two scouts, and they became close friends immediately, and they decided

to fight them way back to their own lines. They were going to travel

fast. They were damned if they’d surrender. They shook hands all around.

They called themselves ‘The Three Musketeers.’

But then this damn college kid, who was so weak he shouldn’t even have

been in the army, asked if he could come along. He didn’t even have a

gun or a knife. He didn’t even have a helmet or a cap. He couldn’t even

walk right-kept bobbing up-and down, up-and-down, driving everybody

crazy, giving their position away. He was pitiful. The Three Musketeers

pushed and carried and dragged the college kid all the way back to their

own lines, Weary’s story went. They saved his God-damned hide for him.

In. real life, Weary was retracing his steps, trying to find out what

had happened to Billy. He had told the scouts to wait while he went back

for the college bastard. He passed under a low branch now. It hit the

top of his helmet with a clonk. Weary didn’t hear it. Somewhere a big

dog was barking. Weary didn’t hear that, either. His war story was at a

very exciting point. An officer was congratulating the Three Musketeers,

telling them that he was going to put them in for Bronze Stars.

‘Anything else I can do for you boys?’ said the officer.

‘Yes, sir,’ said one of the scouts. ‘We’d like to stick together for the

rest of the war, sir. Is there some way you can fix it so nobody will

ever break up the Three Musketeers?’

Billy Pilgrim had stopped in the forest. He was leaning against a tree

with his eyes closed. His head was tilted back and his nostrils were

flaring. He was like a poet in the Parthenon.

This was when Billy first came unstuck in time. His attention began to

swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death,

which was violet light. There wasn’t anybody else there, or any thing.

There was just violet light and a hum.

And then Billy swung into life again, going backwards until he was in

pre-birth, which was red light and bubbling sounds. And then he swung

into life again and stopped. He was a little boy taking a shower with

his hairy father at the Ilium Y.M.C.A. He smelled chlorine from the

swimming pool next door, heard the springboard boom.

Little Billy was terrified, because his father had said Billy was going

to learn to swim by the method of sink-or-swim. Ms father was going to

throw Billy into the deep end, and Billy was going to damn well swim.

It was like an execution. Billy was numb as his father carried him from

the shower room to the pool. His eyes were closed. When he opened his

eyes, he was on the bottom of the pool, and there was beautiful music

everywhere. He lost consciousness, but the music went on. He dimly

sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that.

From there he traveled in time to 1965. He was forty-one years old, and

he was visiting his decrepit mother at Pine Knoll, an old people’s home

he had put her in only a month before. She had caught pneumonia, and

wasn’t expected to live. She did live, though, for years after that.

Her voice was nearly gone, so, in order to hear her, Billy had to put

his ear right next to her papery lips. She evidently had something very

important to say.

‘How ...?’ she began, and she stopped. She was too tired. She hoped that

she wouldn’t have to say the rest of the sentence, and that Billy would

finish it for her

But Billy had no idea what was on her mind. ‘How what, Mother?’ he

prompted.

She swallowed hard, shed some tears. Then she gathered energy from all

over her ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At last she bad

accumulated enough to whisper this complete sentence:

‘How did I get so old?’

Billy’s antique mother passed out, and Billy was led from the room by a

pretty nurse. The body of an old man covered by a sheet was wheeled by

just as Billy entered the corridor. The man had been a famous marathon

runner in his day. So it goes. This was before Billy had his head broken

in an airplane crash, by the way-before he became so vocal about flying

saucers and traveling in time.

Billy sat down in a waiting room. He wasn’t a widower yet. He sensed

something hard under the cushion of his overstuffed chair. He dug it

out, discovered that it was a book, The Execution of Private Slovik, by

William Bradford Huie. It was a true account of the death before an

American fixing squad of private Eddie D. Slovik, 36896415, the only

American soldier to be shot for cowardice since the Civil War. So it

goes.

Billy read the opinion of a staff judge advocate who reviewed Slovik’s

case, which ended like this: He has directly challenged the authority of

the government, and future discipline depends upon a resolute reply to

this challenge. If the death penalty is ever to be imposed for

desertion, it should be imposed in this case, not as a punitive measure

nor as retribution, but to maintain that discipline upon which alone an

army can succeed against the enemy. There was no recommendation for

clemency in the case and none is here recommended. So it goes.

Billy blinked in 1965, traveled in time to 1958. He was at a banquet in

honour of a Little League team of which his son Robert was a member. The

coach, who had never been married, was speaking. He was all choked up.

‘Honest to God,’ he was Saying, ‘I’d consider it an honor just to be

water boy for these kids.’

Billy blinked in 1958, traveled in time to 1961. It was New Year’s Eve,

and Billy was disgracefully drunk at a party where everybody was in

optometry or married to an optometrist.

Billy usually didn’t drink much, because the war had ruined his stomach,

but he certainly had a snootful now, and he was being unfaithful to his

wife Valencia for the first and only time. He had somehow persuaded a

woman to come into the laundry room of the house, and then sit up on the

gas dryer, which was running.

The woman was very drunk herself, and she helped Billy get her girdle

off. ‘What was it you wanted to talk about?’ she said.

‘It’s all night,’ said Billy. He honestly thought it was all right. He

couldn’t remember the name of the woman.

‘How come they call you Billy instead of William?’

‘Business reasons,’ said Billy. That was true. His father-in-law, who

owned the Ilium School of Optometry, who had set Billy up in practice,

was a genius in his field. He told Billy to encourage people to call him

Billy-because it would stick in their memories. It would also make him

seem slightly magical, since there weren’t any other grown Billys

around. It also compelled people to think of him as a friend right away.

Somewhere in there was an awful scene, with people expressing disgust

for Billy and the woman, and Billy found himself out in his automobile,

trying to find the steering wheel.

The main thing now was to find the steering wheel. At first, Billy

windmilled his arms, hoping to find it by luck. When that didn’t work,

he became methodical, working in such a way that the wheel could not

possibly escape him. He placed himself hard against the left-hand door,

searched every square inch of the area before him. When he failed to

find the wheel, he moved over six inches, and searched again. Amazingly,

he was eventually hard against the right-hand door, without having found

the wheel. He concluded that somebody had stolen it. This angered him as

he passed out.

He was in the back seat of his car., which was why he couldn’t find the

steering wheel.

Now somebody was shaking Billy awake. Billy stiff felt drunk, was still

angered by the stolen steering wheel. He was back in the Second World

War again, behind the German lines. The person who was shaking him was

Roland Weary. Weary had gathered the front of Billy’s field jacket into

his hands. He banged Billy against a tree, then puffed him away from it,

flung him in the direction he was supposed to take under his own power.

Billy stopped, shook his head. ‘You go on,’ he said.

‘What? ’

‘You guys go on without me. I’m all right.’

‘You’re what?’

‘I’m O.K.’

‘Jesus-I’d hate to see somebody sick,’ said Weary, through five layers

of humid scarf from home. Lilly had never seen Weary’s face. He had

tried to imagine it one time, had imagined a toad in a fishbowl.

Weary kicked and shoved Billy for a quarter of a mile. The scouts were

waiting between the banks of a frozen creek. They had heard the dog.

They had heard men calling back and forth, too-calling like hunters who

had a pretty good idea of where their quarry was.

The banks of the creek were high enough to allow the scouts, to stand

without being seen. Billy staggered down the bank ridiculously. After

him came Weary, clanking and clinking and tinkling and hot.

‘Here he is, boys,’ said Weary. ‘He don’t want to live, but he’s gonna

live anyway. When he gets out of this, by God, he’s gonna owe his life

to the Three Musketeers. ’

Billy Pilgrim, there in the creekbed, thought he, Billy Pilgrim, was

turning to steam painlessly. If everybody would leave him alone for just

a little while, he thought, he wouldn’t cause anybody any more trouble.

He would turn to steam and float up among the treetops.

Somewhere the big dog barked again. With the help of fear and echoes and

winter silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong.

Roland Weary, eighteen years old, insinuated himself between the scouts,

draped a heavy arm around the shoulder of each. ‘So what do the Three

Musketeers do now?’ he said.

Billy Pilgrim was having a delightful hallucination. He was wearing dry,

warm, white sweatsocks, and he was skating on a ballroom floor.

Thousands cheered. This wasn’t time-travel. it had never happened, never

would happen. It was the craziness of a dying young man with his shoes

full of snow.

One scout hung his head, let spit fall from his lips. The other did the

same. They studied the infinitesimal effects of spit on snow and

history. They were small, graceful people. They had been behind German

lines before many times- living like woods creatures, living from moment

to moment in useful terror, thinking brainlessly with their spinal

cords.

Now they twisted out from under Weary’s loving arms. They told Weary

that he and Billy had better find somebody to surrender to. The Scouts

weren’t going to wait for them any more.

And they ditched Weary and Billy in the creekbed.

Billy Pilgrim went on skating, doing tricks in sweat-socks, tricks that

most people would consider impossible-making turns, stopping on a dime

and so on. The cheering went on, but its tone was altered as the

hallucination gave way to time-travel.

Billy stopped skating, found himself at a lectern in a Chinese

restaurant in Ilium, New York, on an early afternoon in the autumn of

1957. He was receiving a standing ovation from the Lions Club. He had

just been elected President, and it was necessary that he speak. He was

scared stiff, thought a ghastly mistake had been made. AR those

prosperous, solid men out there would discover now that they had elected

a ludicrous waif. They would hear his reedy voice, the one he’d had in

the war. He swallowed, knew that all he -had for a voice box was a

little whistle cut from a willow switch. Worse-he had nothing to say.

The crowd quieted down. Everybody was pink and beaming.

Billy opened his mouth, and out came a deep, resonant tone. His voice

was a gorgeous instrument. It told jokes which brought down the house.

It grew serious, told jokes again, and ended on a note of humility. The

explanation of the miracle was this: Billy had taken a course in public

speaking.

And then he was back in the bed of the frozen creek again. Roland Weary

was about to beat the living shit out of him.

Weary was filled with a tragic wrath. He had been ditched again. He

stuffed his pistol into its holster. He slipped his knife into its

scabbard. Its triangular blade and blood gutters on all three faces. And

then he shook Billy hard, rattled his skeleton, slammed him against a

bank.

Weary barked and whimpered through his layers of scarf from home. He

spoke unintelligibly of the sacrifices he had made on Billy’s behalf. He

dilated upon the piety and heroism of ‘The Three Musketeers,’ portrayed,

in the most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity,

the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves, and the great

services they rendered to Christianity,

It was entirely Billy’s fault that this fighting organization no longer

existed, Weary felt, and Billy was going to pay. Weary socked Billy a

good one on the side of the jaw, knocked Billy away from the bank and

onto the snow-covered ice of the creek. Billy was down on all fours on

the ice, and Weary kicked him in the ribs, rolled him over on his side.

Billy tried to form himself into a ball.

‘You shouldn’t even be in the Army,’ said Weary.

Billy was involuntarily making convulsive sounds that were a lot like

laughter. ‘You think it’s funny, huh?’ Weary inquired. He walked around

to Billy’s back. Billy’s jacket and shirt and undershirt had been hauled

up around his shoulders by the violence, so his back was naked. There,

inches from the tips of Weary’s combat boots, were the pitiful buttons

of Billy’s spine.

Weary drew back his right boot, aimed a kick at the spine, at the tube

which had so many of Billy’s important wires in it. Weary was going to

break that tube.

But then Weary saw that he had an audience. Five German soldiers and a

police dog on a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The

soldiers’ blue eyes were filled with bleary civilian curiosity as to why

one American would try to murder another one so far from home, and why

the victim should laugh.

Three

The Germans and the dog were engaged in a military operation which had

an amusingly self-explanatory name, a human enterprise which is seldom

described in detail, whose name alone, when reported as news or history,

gives many war enthusiasts a sort of post-coital satisfaction. It is, in

the imagination of combat’s fans, the divinely listless loveplay that

follows the orgasm of victory. It is called ‘mopping up.’

The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a

female German shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her

legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never

been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played. Her mine

was Princess.

Two of the Germans were boys in their early teens. Two were ramshackle

old me droolers as toothless as carp. They were irregulars, armed and

clothed fragmentarily with junk taken from real soldiers who were newly

dead. So it goes. They were farmers from just across the German border,

not far away.

Their commanander was a middle-aged corporal-red-eyed., scrawny, tough

as dried beef, sick of war. He had been wounded four times-and patched

up, and sent back to war. He was a very good soldier-about to quit,

about to find somebody to surrender to. His bandy legs were thrust into

golden cavalry boots which he had taken from a dead Hungarian colonel on

the Russian front. So it goes.

Those boots were almost all he owned in this world. They were his home.

An anecdote: One time a recruit was watching him bone and wax those

golden boots, and he held one up to the recruit and said, ‘If you look

in there deeply enough, you’ll see Adam and Eve.’

Billy Pilgrim had not heard this anecdote. But, lying on the black ice

there, Billy stared into the patina of the corporal’s boots, saw Adam

and Eve in the golden depths. They were naked. They were so innocent, so

vulnerable, so eager to behave decently. Billy Pilgrim loved them.

Next to the golden boots were a pair of feet which were swaddled in

rags. They were crisscrossed by canvas straps, were shod with hinged

wooden clogs. Billy looked up at the face that went with the clogs. It

was the face of a blond angel of fifteen-year-old boy.

The boy was as beautiful as Eve.

Billy was helped to his feet by the lovely boy, by the heavenly

androgyne. And the others came forward to dust the snow off Billy., and

then they searched him for weapons. He didn’t have any. The most

dangerous thing they found on his person was a two-inch pencil stub.

Three inoffensive bangs came from far away. They came from German

rifles. The two scouts who had ditched Billy and Weary had just been

shot. They had been lying in ambush for Germans. They had been

discovered and shot from behind. Now they were dying in the snow,

feeling nothing, turning the snow to the color of raspberry sherbet. So

it goes. So Roland Weary was the last of the Three Musketeers.

And Weary, bug-eyed with terror, was being disarmed. The corporal gave

Weary’s pistol to the pretty boy. He marveled at Weary’s cruel trench

knife, said in German that Weary would no doubt like to use the knife on

him, to tear his face off with the spiked knuckles, to stick the blade

into his belly or throat. He spoke no English, and Billy and Weary

understood no German.

‘Nice playthings you have, the corporal told Weary, and he handed the

knife to an old man. ‘Isn’t that a pretty thing? Hmmm?

He tore open Weary’s overcoat and blouse. Brass buttons flew like

popcorn. The corporal reached into Weary’s gaping bosom as though he

meant to tear out his pounding heart, but he brought out Weary’s

bulletproof Bible instead.

A bullet-proof Bible is a Bible small enough to be slipped into a

soldier’s breast pocket, over his heart. It is sheathed in steel.

The corporal found the dirty picture of the woman and the pony in

Weary’s hip pocket. ‘What a lucky pony, eh?’ he said. “Hmmmm? Hmmmm?

Don’t you wish you were that pony?’ He handed the picture to the other

old man. ‘Spoils of war! It’s all yours, you lucky lad.’

Then he made Weary sit down in the snow and take off his combat boots,

which he gave to the beautiful boy. He gave Weary, the boy’s clogs. So

Weary and Billy were both without decent military footwear now’ and they

had to walk for miles and miles, with Weary’s clogs clacking, with Billy

bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down, crashing into Weary from time to time.

‘Excuse me,’ Billy would say, or ‘I beg your pardon.’

They were brought at last to a stone cottage at a fork in the road. It

was a collecting point for prisoners of war. Billy and Weary were taken

inside, where it was warm and smoky. There vas a fire sizzling and

popping in the fireplace. The fuel was furniture. There were about

twenty other Americans in there, sitting on the floor with their backs

to the wall, staring into the flames-thinking whatever there was to

think, which was zero.

Nobody talked. Nobody had any good war stories to tell.

Billy and Weary found places for themselves, and Billy went to sleep

with his head on the shoulder of an unprotesting captain. The captain

was a chaplain. He was a rabbi. He had been shot through the hand.

Billy traveled in time, opened his eyes, found himself staring into the

glass eyes of a jade green mechanical owl. The owl was hanging upside

down from a rod of stainless steel. The owl was Billy’s optometer in his

office in Ilium. An optometer is an instrument for measuring refractive

errors in eyes-in order that corrective lenses may be prescribed.

Billy had fallen asleep while examining a female patient who was m a

chair on the other side of the owl. He had fallen asleep at work before.

It had been funny at first. Now Billy was starting to get worried about

it, about his mind in general. He tried to remember how old he was,

couldn’t. He tried to remember what year it was. He couldn’t remember

that, either.

‘Doctor,’ said the patient tentatively.

‘Hm?’ he said.

‘You’re so quiet.’

‘Sorry.’

‘You were talking away there-and then you got so quiet’

‘Um.’

‘You see something terrible?’ ‘Terrible?’

‘Some disease in my eyes?’

‘No, no,’ said Billy, wanting to doze again. ‘Your eyes are fine. You

just need glasses for reading.’ He told her to go across the corridor-to

see the wide selection of frames there.

When she was gone, Billy opened the drapes and was no wiser as to what

was outside. The view was still blocked by a venetian blind., which he

hoisted clatteringly. Bright sunlight came crashing in. There were

thousands of parked automobiles out there, twinkling on a vast lake of

blacktop. Billy’s office was part of a suburban shopping center.

Right outside the window was Billy’s own Cadillac El Dorado Coupe de

Ville. He read the stickers on the bumper. ‘Visit Ausable Chasm,’ said

one. ‘Support Your Police Department,’ said another. There was a third.

‘Impeach Earl Warren it said. The stickers about the police and Earl

Warren were gifts from Billy’s father-in-law, a member of the John Birch

Society. The date on the license plate was 1967, which would make Billy

Pilgrim forty-four years old. He asked himself this: ‘Where have all the

years gone?’

Billy turned his attention to his desk. There was an open copy of The

Review of Optometry there. It was opened to an editorial, which Billy

now read, his lips moving slightly.

What happens in 1968 will rule the fare of European optometrists for at

least 50 years! Billy read. With this warning, Jean Thiriart, Secretary

of the National Union of Belgium Opticians, is pressing for formation of

a ‘European Optometry Society.’ The alternatives, he says, will be the

obtaining of Professional status, or, by 1971, reduction to the role of

spectacle-sellers.

Billy Pilgrim tried hard to care.

A siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting the Third

World War at any time. The siren was simply announcing high noon. It was

housed in a cupola atop a firehouse across the street from Billy’s

office.

Billy closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was back in the Second

World War again. His head was on the wounded rabbi’s shoulder. A German

was kicking his feet, telling him to wake up, that it was time to move

on.

The Americans, with Billy among them, formed a fools’ parade on the road

outside.

There was a photographer present, a German war correspondent with a

Leica. He took pictures of Billy’s and Roland Weary’s feet. The picture

was widely published two days later as heartening evidence of how

miserably equipped the American Army often was, despite its reputation

for being rich.

The photographer wanted something more lively, though, a picture of an

actual capture. So the guards staged one for him. They threw Billy into

shrubbery. When Billy came out of the shrubbery, his face wreathed in

goofy good will, they menaced him with their machine pistols, as though

they were capturing him then.

Billy’s smile as he came out of the shrubbery was at least as peculiar

as Mona Lisa’s, for he was simultaneously on foot in Germany in 1944 and

riding his Cadillac in 1967. Germany dropped away, and 1967 became

bright and clear, free of interference from any other time. Billy was on

his way to a Lions Club luncheon meeting. It was a hot August, but

Billy’s car was air-conditioned. He was stopped by a signal in the

middle of Ilium’s black ghetto. The people who lived here hated it so

much that they had burned down a lot of it a month before. It was all

they had, and they’d wrecked it. The neighborhood reminded Billy of some

of the towns he had seen in the war. The curbs and sidewalks were

crushed in many places, showing where the National Guard tanks and

half-tracks had been.

‘Blood brother,’ said a message written in pink paint on the side of a

shattered grocery store.

There was a tap on Billy’s car window. A black man was out there. He

wanted to talk about something. The light had changed. Billy did the

simplest thing. He drove on.

Billy drove through a scene of even greater desolation. It looked like

Dresden after it was fire-bombed-like the surface of the moon. The house

where Billy had grown up used to be somewhere in what was so empty now.

This was urban renewal. A new Ilium Government Center and a Pavilion of

the Arts and a Peace Lagoon and high-rise apartment buildings were going

up here soon.

That was all right with Billy Pilgrim.

The speaker at the Lions Club meeting was a major in the Marines. He

said that Americans had no choice but to keep fighting in Vietnam until

they achieved victory or until the Communists realized that they could

not force their way of life -on weak countries. The major had been there

on two separate tours of duty. He told of many terrible and many

wonderful things he had seen. He was in favor of increased bombings, of

bombing North Vietnam back into the Stone Age, if it refused to see

reason.

Billy was not moved to protest the bombing of North Vietnam-, did not

shudder about the hideous things he himself had seen bombing do. He was

simply having lunch with the Lions Club, of which he was past president

now.

Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method

for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot

of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that it helped

them to keep going,, too. It went like this

GOD GRANT ME

THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT

THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE

COURAGE

TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,

AND WISDOM ALWAYS

TO TELL THE

DIFFERENCE.

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the

present and the future.

Now he was being introduced to the Marine major. The person who was

performing the introduction was telling the major that Billy was a

veteran., and that Billy had a son who was a sergeant in the Green

Berets-in Vietnam.

The major told Billy that the Green Berets were doing a great job, and

that he should be proud of his son.

‘I am. I certainly am,’ said Billy Pilgrim.

He went home for a nap after lunch. He was under doctor’s orders to take

a nap every day. The doctor hoped that this would relieve a complaint

that Billy had: Every so often, for no apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim

would find himself weeping. Nobody had ever caught Billy doing it. Only

the doctor knew. It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did, and not very

moist.

Billy owned a lovely Georgian home in Ilium. He was rich as Croesus,

something he had never expected to be, not in a million years. He had

five other optometrists working for him in the shopping plaza location,

and netted over sixty thousand dollars a year. In addition, he owned a

fifth of the new Holiday Inn out on Route 54, and -half of three

Tastee-Freeze stands. Tastee-Freeze was a sort of frozen custard. It

gave all the pleasure that ice cream could give, without the stiffness

and bitter coldness of ice cream.

Billy’s home was empty. His daughter Barbara was about to get warned,

and she and his wife had gone downtown to pick out patterns for her

crystal and silverware. There was a note saying so on the kitchen table.

There were no servants. People just weren’t interested in careers in

domestic service anymore. There wasn’t a dog, either.

There used to be a dog named Spot, but he died. So it goes. Billy had

liked Spot a lot, and Spot had liked him.

Billy went up the carpeted stairway and into his and his wife’s bedroom.

The room had flowered wallpaper. There was a double bed with a

clock-radio on a table beside it. Also on the table were controls for

the electric blanket, and a switch to turn on a gentle vibrator which

was bolted to the springs of the box mattress. The trade name of the

vibrator was ‘Magic Fingers.’ The vibrator was the doctor’s idea, too.

Billy took off his tri-focals and his coat and his necktie and his

shoes, and he closed the venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay

down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears

came instead. They seeped. Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was

jiggled as he wept.

The doorchimes rang. Billy got off the bed and looked down through a

window at the front doorstep, to see if somebody important had come to

call. There was a crippled man down there, as spastic in space as Billy

Pilgrim was in time. Convulsions made the man dance flappingly all the

time, made him change his expressions, too, as though he were trying to

imitate various famous movie stars.

Another cripple was ringing a doorbell across the street. He was an

crutches. He had only one leg. He was so jammed between his crutches

that his shoulders hid his ears.

Billy knew what the cripples were up to: They were selling subscriptions

to magazines that would never come. People subscribed to them because

the salesmen were so pitiful. Billy had heard about this racket from a

speaker at the Lions Club two weeks before--a man from the Better

Business Bureau. The man said that anybody who saw cripples working a

neighbourhood for magazine subscriptions should call the police.

Billy looked down the street, saw a new, Buick Riviera parked about half

a block away. There was a man in it, and Billy assumed correctly that he

was the man who had hired the cripples to do this thing. Billy went on

weeping as he contemplated the cripples and their boss. His doorchimes

clanged hellishly.

He closed his eyes, and opened them again. lie was still weeping, but he

was back in Luxembourg again. He was marching with a lot of other

prisoners. It was a winter wind that was bringing tears to his eyes.

Ever since Billy had been thrown into shrubbery for the sake of the

picture, he had been seeing Saint Elmo’s fire, a sort of electronic

radiance around the heads of his companions and captors. It was in the

treetops and on the rooftops of Luxembourg, too. It was beautiful.

Billy was marching with his hands on top of his head, and so were all

the other Americans. Billy was bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down. Now he

crashed into Roland Weary accidentally. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said.

Weary’s eyes were tearful also. Weary was crying because of horrible

pains in his feet. The hinged clogs were transforming his feet into

blood puddings.

At each road intersection Billy’s group was joined by more Americans

with their hands on top of their haloed heads. Billy had smiled for them

all. They were moving like water, downhill all the time, and they flowed

at last to a main highway on a valley’s floor. Through the valley flowed

a Mississippi of humiliated Americans. Tens of thousands of Americans

shuffled eastward, their hands clasped on top of their heads. They

sighed and groaned.

Billy and his group joined the river of humiliation, and the late

afternoon sun came out from the clouds. The Americans didn’t have the

road to themselves. The west-bound lane boiled and boomed with vehicles

which were rushing German reserves to the front. The reserves were

violent, windburned, bristly men. They had teeth like piano keys.

They were festooned with machine-gun belts, smoked cigars, and guzzled

booze. They took wolfish bites from sausages, patted their horny palms

with potato-masher grenades.

One soldier in black was having a drunk herd’s picnic all by himself on

top of a tank. He spit on the Americans. The spit hit Roland Weary’s

shoulder, gave Weary a fourragière of snot and blutwurst and tobacco

juice, and Schnapps.

Billy found the afternoon stingingly exciting. There was so much to

see-dragon’s teeth, killing machine, corpses with bare feet that were

blue and ivory. So it goes.

Bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down, Billy beamed lovingly at a bright

lavender farmhouse that had been spattered with machine-gun bullets.

Standing in its cock-eyed doorway was a German colonel. With him was his

unpainted whore.

Billy crashed into Weary’s shoulder, and Weary cried out sobbingly.

‘Walk right! Walk right!’

They were climbing a gentle rise now. When they reached the top, they

weren’t in Luxembourg any more. They were in Germany.

A motion-picture camera was set up at the border-to record the fabulous

victory. Two civilians in bearskin coats were leaning on the camera when

Billy and Weary came by. They had run out of film hours ago.

One of them singled out Billy’s face for a moment, then focused at

infinity again. There was a tiny plume of smoke at infinity. There was a

battle there. People were dying there. So it goes.

And the sun went down, and Billy found himself bobbing in place in a

railroad yard. There were rows and rows of boxcars waiting. They had

brought reserves to the front. Now they were going to take prisoners

into Germany’s interior.

Flashlight beams danced crazily.

The Germans sorted out the prisoners according to rank. They put

sergeants with sergeants, majors with majors, and so on. A squad of full

colonels was halted near Billy. One of them had double pneumonia. He had

a high fever and vertigo. As the railroad yard dipped and swooped around

the colonel, he tried to hold himself steady by staring into Billy’s

eyes.

The colonel coughed and coughed, and then he said to Billy, ‘You one of

my boys?’ This was a man who had lost an entire regiment, about

forty-five hundred men-a lot of them children, actually. Billy didn’t

reply. The question made no sense.

‘What was your outfit?’ said the colonel. He coughed and coughed. Every

time he inhaled his lungs rattled like greasy paper bags.

Billy couldn’t remember the outfit he was from.

‘You from the Four-fifty-first?’

‘Four-fifty-first what?’ said Billy.

There was a silence. ‘Infantry regiment,’ said the colonel at last.

‘Oh,’ said Billy Pilgrim.

There was another long silence, with the colonel dying and dying,

drowning where he stood. And then he cited out wetly, ‘It’s me, boys!

It’s Wild Bob!’ That is what he had always wanted his troops to call

him: ‘Wild Bob.’

None of the people who could hear him were actually from his regiment,

except for Roland Weary, and Weary wasn’t listening. All Weary could

think of was the agony in his own feet.

But the colonel imagined that he was addressing his beloved troops for

the last time, and he told them that they had nothing to be ashamed of,

that there were dead Germans all over the battlefield who wished to God

that they had never heard of the Four-fifty-first. He said that after

the war he was going to have a regimental reunion in his home town,

which was Cody, Wyoming. He was going to barbecue whole steers.

He said all this while staring into Billy’s eyes. He made the inside of

poor Bill’s skull echo with balderdash. ‘God be with you, boys!’ he

said, and that echoed and echoed. And then he said. ‘If you’re ever in

Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!’ I was there. So was my old war

buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare.

Billy Pilgrim was packed into a boxcar with many other privates. He and

Roland Weary were separated. Weary was packed into another car in the

same train.

There were narrow ventilators at the comers of the car, under the eaves.

Billy stood by one of these, and, as the crowd pressed against him, he

climbed part way up a diagonal comer brace to make more room. ‘Ms placed

his eyes on a level with the ventilator, so he could see another train

about ten yards away.

Germans were writing on the cars with blue chalk-the number of persons

in each car, their rank, their nationality, the date on which they had

been put aboard. Other Germans were securing the hasps on the car doors

with wire and spikes and other trackside trash. Billy could hear

somebody writing on his car, too, but he couldn’t see who was doing it.

Most of the privates on Billy’s car were very young-at the end of

childhood. But crammed into the comer with Billy was a former hobo who

was forty years old.

‘I been hungrier than this,’ the hobo told Billy. ‘I been m worse places

than this. This ain’t so bad.’

A man in a boxcar across the way called out through the ventilator that

a man. had just died in there. So it goes. There were four guards who

heard him. They weren’t excited by the news.

‘Yo, yo,’ said one, nodding dreamily. ‘Yo, yo.’

And the guards didn’t open the car with the dead man in it. They opened

the next car instead, and Billy Pilgrim was enchanted by what was in

there. It was like heaven. There was candlelight, and there were bunks

with quilts and blankets heaped on them. There was a cannonball stove

with a steaming coffeepot on top. There was a table with a bottle of

wine and a loaf of bread and a sausage on it. There were four bowls of

soup.

There were pictures of castles and lakes and pretty girls on the walls.

This was the rolling home of the railroad guards, men whose business it

was to be forever guarding freight rolling from here to there. The four

guards went inside and closed the door.

A little while later they came out smoking cigars, talking contentedly

in the mellow lower register of the German language. One of them saw

Billy’s face at the ventilator. He wagged a finger at him in

affectionate warning, telling him to be a good boy.

The Americans across the way told the guards again about the dead man on

their car. The guards got a stretcher out of their own cozy car, opened

the dead man’s car and went inside. The dead man’s car wasn’t crowded at

all. There were just six live colonels in there-and one dead one.

The Germans carried the corpse out. The corpse was Wild Bob. So it goes.

During the night, some of the locomotives began to tootle to one

another, and then to move. The locomotive and the last car of each train

were marked with a striped banner of orange and black, indicating that

the train was not fair game for airplanes that it was carrying prisoners

of war.

The war was nearly over. The locomotives began to move east in late

December. The war would end in May. German prisons everywhere were

absolutely full, and there was no longer any food for the prisoners to

eat, and no longer any fuel to keep them warm. And yet-here came more

prisoners.

Billy Pilgrim’s train, the longest train of all, did not move for two

days.

‘This ain’t bad,’ the hobo told Billy on the second day. ‘This ain’t

nothing at all.’

Billy looked out through the ventilator. The railroad yard was a desert

now, except for a hospital train marked with red crosses-on a siding

far, far away. Its locomotive whistled. The locomotive of Billy

Pilgrim’s train whistled back. They were saying, ‘Hello.’

Even though Billy’s train wasn’t moving., its boxcars were kept locked

tight. Nobody was to get off until the final destination. To the guards

who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which

ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or

sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves

of blackbread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and

language.

Human beings in there were excreting into steel helmets, which were

passed to the people at the ventilators, who dumped them. Billy was a

dumper. The human beings also passed canteens, which guards would fill

with water. When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting

and beautiful. They shared.

Human beings in there took turns standing or lying down. The legs of

those who stood were like fence posts driven into a warm., squirming,

fatting, sighing earth. The queer earth was a mosaic of sleepers who

nestled like spoons.

Now the train began to creep eastward.

Somewhere in there was Christmas. Billy Pilgrim nestled like a spoon

with the hobo on Christmas night, and he fell asleep, and he traveled in

time to 1967 again-to the night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from

Tralfamadore.

Four

Billy Pilgrim could not sleep on his daughters wedding night. He was

forty-four. The wedding had taken place that afternoon in a gaily

striped tent in Billy’s backyard. The stripes were orange and black.

Billy and his wife, Valencia, nestled like spoons in their big double

bed. They were jiggled by Magic Fingers. Valencia didn’t need to be

jiggled to sleep. Valencia was snoring like a bandsaw. The poor woman

didn’t have ovaries or a uterus any more.

They had been removed by a surgeon-by one of Billy’s partners in the New

Holiday Inn.

There was a full moon.

Billy got out of bed in the moonlight. He felt spooky and luminous felt

as though he were wrapped in cool fur that was full of static

electricity. He looked down at his bare feet. They were ivory and blue.

Billy now shuffled down his upstairs hallway, knowing he was about to be

kidnapped by a flying saucer. The hallway was zebra-striped with

darkness and moonlight. The moonlight came into the hallway through

doorways of the empty rooms of Billy’s two children, children no more.

They were gone forever. Billy was guided by dread and the lack of dread.

Dread told him when to stop. Lack of it told him when to move again. He

stopped.

He went into his daughter’s room. Her drawers were dumped. her closet

was empty. Heaped in the middle of the room were all the possessions she

could not take on a honeymoon. She had a Princess telephone extension

all her own-on her windowsill Its tiny night light stared at Billy. And

then it rang.

Billy answered. There was a drunk on the other end. Billy could almost

smell his breath-mustard gas and roses. It was a wrong number. Billy

hung up. There was a soft drink bottle on the windowsill. Its label

boasted that it contained no nourishment whatsoever.

Billy Pilgrim padded downstairs on his blue and ivory feet. He went into

the kitchen, where the moonlight called his attention to a half bottle

of champagne on the kitchen table, all that was left from the reception

in the tent. Somebody had stoppered it again. Drink me,’ it seemed to

say.

So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn’t make a pop. The

champagne was dead. So it goes.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill

before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the

bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly

unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It

was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the

gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like

this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off

backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter

planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from

some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American

bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the

formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The

bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism

which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers,

and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers

were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of

their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more

fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few

wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair.

Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and

everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken

from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where

factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders,

separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was

mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to

specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the

ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever

again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids.

And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in

the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and

all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two

perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

Billy saw the war movies backwards then forwards-and then it was time to

go out into his backyard to meet the flying saucer. Out he went, his

blue and ivory feet crushing the wet salad of the lawn. He stopped, took

a swig, of the dead champagne. It was like 7-Up. He would not raise his

eyes to the sky, though he knew there was a flying saucer from

Tralfamadore up there. He would see it soon enough, inside and out, and

he would see, too, where it came from soon enough-soon enough.

Overhead he heard the cry of what might have been a melodious owl, but

it wasn’t a melodious owl. It was a flying saucer from Tralfamadore,

navigating in both space and time, therefore seeming to Billy Pilgrim to

have come from nowhere all at once. Somewhere a big dog barked.

The saucer was one hundred feet in diameter, with portholes around its

rim. The light from the portholes was a pulsing purple. The only noise

it made was the owl song. It ca-me down to hover over Billy, and to

enclose him in a cylinder of pulsing in purple light. Now there was the

sound of a seeming kiss as an airtight hatch in the bottom of the saucer

was opened. Down snaked a ladder that was outlined in pretty lights like

a Ferris wheel.

Billy’s will was paralyzed by a zap gun aimed at him from one of the

portholes. It became imperative that he take hold of the bottom rung of

the sinuous ladder, which he did. The rung was electrified, so that

Billy’s hands locked onto it hard. He was hauled into the airlock, and

machinery closed the bottom door. Only then did the ladder, wound onto a

reel in the airlock, let him go. Only then did Billy’s brain start

working again.

There were two peepholes inside the airlock-with yellow eyes pressed to

them. There was a speaker on the wall. The Tralfamadorians had no voice

boxes. They communicated telepathicary. They were able to talk to Billy

by means of a computer and a sort of electric organ which made every

Earthling speech sound.

‘Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim,’ said the loudspeaker. ‘Any questions?’

Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: ‘Why me? ’

That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us

for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you

ever seen bugs trapped in amber?’

‘Yes.’ Billy in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob

of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.

‘Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment.

There is no why.’

They introduced an anesthetic into Billy’s atmosphere now, put him to

sleep. They carded him to a cabin where he was strapped to a yellow

Barca-Lounger which they had stolen from a Sears & Roebuck warehouse.

The hold of the saucer was crammed with other stolen merchandise, which

would be used to furnish Billy’s artificial habitat in a zoo on

Tralfamadore.

The terrific acceleration of the saucer as it left Earth twisted Billy’s

slumbering body, distorted his face, dislodged him m time, sent him back

to the war.

When he regained consciousness, he wasn’t on the flying saucer. He was

in a boxcar crossing Germany again.

Some people were rising from the floor of the car, and others were lying

down. Billy planned to He down, too. It would be lovely to sleep. It was

black in the car, and black outside the car, which seemed to be about

two miles an hour. The car never seemed to go any faster than that. It

was a long time between clicks, between joints in the track. There would

be a click, and then a year would go by, and then there would be another

click

The train often stopped to let really important trains bawl and hurtle

by. Another thing it did was stop on sidings near prisons, leaving a few

cars there. It was creeping across all of Germany, growing shorter all

the time.

And Billy let himself down oh so gradually now, hanging onto the

diagonal cross-brace in the comer in order to make himself seem nearly

weightless to those he was joining on the floor. He knew it was

important that he made himself nearly ghostlike when lying down. He had

forgotten why, but a reminder soon came.

‘Pilgrim,’ said a person he was about to nestle with, ‘is that you?’

Billy didn’t say anything, but nestled very politely, closed his eyes.

‘God damn it’ said the person. ‘That is you, isn’t it?’ He sat up and

explored Billy rudely with his hands. ‘It’s you, all right. Get the hell

out of here.’

Now Billy sat up, too-wretched, close to tears.

‘Get out of here! I want to sleep!’

‘Shut up,’ said somebody else.

‘I’ll shut up when Pilgrim gets away from here.’

So Billy stood up again, clung to the cross-brace. ‘Where can I sleep?’

he asked quietly.

‘Not with me.’

‘Not with me, you son of a bitch,’ said somebody else. ‘You yell. You

kick.’

‘I do?’

“You’re God damn right you do. And whimper.’

‘I do?’

‘Keep the hell away from here., Pilgrim.’

And now there was an acrimonious madrigal, with parts sung in all

quarters of the car. Nearly everybody seemingly, had an atrocity story

of something Billy Pilgrim had done to him in his sleep. Everybody told

Billy Pilgrim to keep the hell away.

So Billy Pilgrim had to sleep standing up, or not sleep at all. And food

had stopped coming in through the ventilators, and the days and nights

were colder all the time.

On the eighth day, the forty-year-old hobo said to Billy, ‘This ain’t

bad. I can be comfortable anywhere.’

‘You can?’ said Billy.

On the ninth day, the hobo died. So it goes. His last words were, ‘You

think this is bad? This ain’t bad.’

There was something about death and the ninth day. There was a death on

the ninth day in the car ahead of Billy’s too. Roland Weary died-of

gangrene that had started in his mangled feet. So it goes.

Weary, in his nearly continuous delirium, told again and again of the

Three Musketeers, acknowledged that he was dying, gave many messages to

be delivered to his family in Pittsburgh. Above all, he wanted to be

avenged, so he said again and again the name of the person who had

killed him. Everyone on the car learned the lesson well.

‘Who killed me?” he would ask.

And everybody knew the answer., which was this: “Billy Pilgrim.’

Listen- on the tenth night the peg was pulled out of the hasp on Billy’s

boxcar door, and the door was opened. Billy Pilgrim was lying at an

angle on the corner-brace, self-crucified, holding himself there with a

blue and ivory claw hooked over the- sill of the ventilator. Billy

coughed -when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin

gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to

Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for every action there is a

reaction which is equal and opposite in direction.

This can be useful in rocketry.

The train had arrived on a siding by a prison which was originally

constructed as an extermination camp for Russian prisoners of war.

The guards peeked inside Billy’s car owlishly, cooed calmingly. They had

never dealt with Americans before, but they surely understood this

general sort of freight. They knew that it was essentially a liquid

which could be induced to flow slowly toward cooing and light. It was

nighttime.

The only light outside came from a single bulb which hung from a

pole-high and far away. All was quiet outside, except for the guards,

who cooed like doves. And the liquid began to flow. Gobs of it built up

in the doorway, plopped to the ground.

Billy was the next-to-last human being to reach the door. The hobo was

the last. The hobo could not flow, could not plop. He wasn’t liquid any

more. He was stone. So it goes.

Billy didn’t. want to drop from the car to the ground. He sincerely

believed that he would shatter like glass. So the guards helped him

down, cooing still. They set him down facing the train. It was such a

dinky train now.

There was a locomotive, a tender, and three little boxcars. The last

boxcar was the railroad guards’ heaven on wheels. Again-in that heaven

on wheels-the table was set. Dinner was served.

At the base of the pole from which the light bulb hung were three

seeming haystacks. The Americans were wheedled and teased over to those

three stacks, which weren’t hay after all. They were overcoats taken

from prisoners who were dead. So it goes.

It was the guards’ firmly expressed wish that every American without an

overcoat should take one. The coats were cemented together with ice, so

the guards used their bayonets as ice picks, pricking free collars and

hems and sleeves and so on, then peeling off coats and handing them out

at random. The coats were stiff and dome-shaped, having conformed to

their piles.

The coat that Billy Pilgrim got had been crumpled and frozen in such a

way, and was so small, that it appeared to be not a coat but a sort of

large black, three-cornered hat. There were gummy stains on it, too,

like crankcase drainings or old strawberry jam. There seemed to be a

dead, furry animal frozen to it. The animal was in fact the coat’s fur

collar.

Billy glanced dully at the coats of his neighbors. Their coats all had

brass buttons or tinsel or piping or numbers or stripes or eagles or

moons or stars dangling from them. They were soldiers’ coats. Billy was

the only one who had a coat from a dead civilian. So it goes.

And Billy and the rest were encouraged to shuffle around their dinky

train and into the prison camp. There wasn’t anything warm or lively to

attract them-merely long, low, narrow sheds by the thousands, with no

lights inside.

Somewhere a dog barked. With the help of fear and echoes and winter

silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong.

Billy and the rest were wooed through gate after gate, and Billy saw his

first Russian. The man was all alone in the night-a ragbag with a round,

flat face that glowed like a radium dial.

Billy passed within a yard of him. There was barbed wire between them.

The Russian did not wave or speak, but he looked directly into Billy’s

soul with sweet hopefulness, as though Billy might have good news for

him-news he might be too stupid to understand, but good news all the

same.

Billy blacked out as he walked through gate after gate. He came to what

he thought might be a building on Tralfamadore. It was shrilly lit and

lined with white tiles. It was on Earth, though. It was a delousing

station through which all new prisoners had to pass.

Billy did as he was told, took off his clothes. That was the first thing

they told him to do on Tralfamadore, too.

A German measured Billy’s upper right arm with his thumb and forefinger,

asked a companion what sort of an army would send a weakling like that

to the front. They looked at the other American bodies now, pointed out

a lot more that were nearly as bad as Billy’s.

One of the best bodies belonged to the oldest American by far, a high

school teacher from Indianapolis. His name was Edgar Derby. He hadn’t

been in Billy’s boxcar. He’d been in Roland Weary’s car, had cradled

Weary’s head while he died. So it goes. Derby was forty-four years old.

He was so old he had a son who was a marine in the Pacific theater of

war.

Derby had pulled political wires to get into the army at his age. The

subject he had taught in Indianapolis was Contemporary Problems in

Western Civilization. He also coached the tennis team, and took very

good care of his body.

Derby’s son would survive the war. Derby wouldn’t. That good body of his

would be filled with holes by a firing squad in Dresden in sixty-eight

days. So it goes.

The worst American body wasn’t Billy’s. The worst body belonged to a car

thief from Cicero, Illinois. Ms name was Paul Lazzaro. He was tiny, and

not only were his bones and teeth rotten, but his skin was disgusting.

Lazzaro was polka-dotted all over with dime-sized scars. He had had many

plagues of boils.

Lazzaro, too, had been on Roland Weary’s boxcar, and had given his word

of honor to Weary that he would find some way to make Billy Pilgrim pay

for Weary’s death. He was looking around now, wondering which naked

human being was Billy.

The naked Americans took their places under many showerheads along a

white-tiled wall. There were no faucets they could control. They could

only wait for whatever was coming. Their penises were shriveled and

their balls were retracted. Reproduction was not the main business of

the evening.

An unseen hand turned a master valve. Out of the showerheads gushed

scalding rain. The rain was a blow-torch that did not warm. It jazzed

and jangled Billy’s skin without thawing the ice in the marrow of his

long bones.

The Americans’ clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas. Body

lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions. So it goes.

And Billy zoomed back in time to his infancy. He was a baby who had just

been bathed by his mother. Now his mother wrapped him in a towel,

carried him into a rosy room that was filled with sunshine. She

unwrapped him, laid him on the tickling towel, powdered him between his

legs, joked with him, patted his little jelly belly. Her palm on his

little jelly belly made potching sounds.

Billy gurgled and cooed.

And then Billy was a middle-aged optometrist again, playing hacker’s

golf this time- on a blazing summer Sunday morning. Billy never went to

church any more. He was hacking with three other optometrists. Billy was

on the green in seven strokes, and it was his turn to putt.

It was an eight-foot putt and he made it. He bent over to take the ball

out of the cup, and the sun went behind a cloud. Billy was momentarily

dizzy. When he recovered, he wasn’t on the golf course any more. He was

strapped to a yellow contour chair in a white chamber aboard a flying

saucer, which was bound for Tralfamadore.

‘Where am I?’ said Billy Pilgrim.

‘Trapped in another blob of amber, Mr. Pilgrim. We are where we have to

be just now-three hundred million miles from Earth, bound for a time

warp which will get us to Tralfamadore in hours rather than centuries.’

‘How-how did I get here?’

‘It would take another Earthling to explain it to you. Earthlings are

the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is,

telling how other events may be achieved or avoided. I am a

Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of Rocky

Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend

itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by

moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in

amber.’

‘You sound to me as though you don’t believe in free will,’ said Billy

Pilgrim.

‘If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,’ said the

Tralfamadorian, ‘I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by “free will.”

I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited plants in the universe, and I have

studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of

free will.’

Five

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright

little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see

where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are

filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don’t see

human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great

millipedes with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the

other,’ says Billy Pilgrim.

Billy asked for something to read on the trip to Tralfamadore. His

captors had five million Earthling books on microfilm, but no way to

project them in Billy’s cabin. They had only one actual book in English,

which would be placed in a Tralfamadorian museum. It was Valley of the

Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann.

Billy read it, thought it was pretty good in spots. The people in it

certainly had their ups-and-downs, ups-and-downs. But Billy didn’t want

to read about the same ups-and-downs over and over again. He asked if

there wasn’t, please, some other reading matters around.

‘Only Tralfamadorian novels, which I’m afraid you couldn’t begin to

understand,’ said the speaker on the wall.

‘Let me look at one anyway.’

So they sent him in several. They were little things. A dozen of them

might have had the bulk of Valley of the Dolls-with all its

ups-and-downs, up-and-downs.

Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see

how the books were laid out-in brief clumps of symbols separated by

stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams.

‘Exactly,’ said the voice.

‘They are telegrams?’

‘There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump

of-symbols is a brief, urgent message describing a situation, a scene.,

We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There

isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that

the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once,

they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no

causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many

marvelous moments seen all at one time.’

Moments after that, the saucer entered a time warp, and Billy was flung

back into his childhood. He was twelve years old, quaking as he stood

with his mother and father on Bright Angel Point, at the rim of Grand

Canyon. The little human family was staring at the floor of the canyon,

one mile straight down.

‘Well,’ said Billy’s father, manfully kicking a pebble into space,

‘there it is.’ They had come to this famous place by automobile. They

had had several blowouts on the way.

‘It was worth the trip,’ said Billy’s mother raptly. ‘Oh, God was it

ever worth it.’

Billy hated the canyon. He was sure that he was going to fall in. His

mother touched him, and he wet his pants.

There were other tourists looking down into the canyon, too, and a

ranger was there to answer questions. A Frenchman who had come all the

way from France asked the ranger in broken English ff many people

committed suicide by jumping in.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the ranger. ‘About three folks a year.’ So it goes.

And Billy took a very short trip through time,, made a peewee jump of

only ten days, so he was still twelve, still touring the West with his

family. Now they were down in Carlsbad Caverns, and Billy was praying to

God to get him out of there before the ceiling fell in.

A ranger was explaining that the Caverns had been discovered by a cowboy

who saw a huge cloud of bats come out of a hole in the ground. And then

he said that he was going to mm out all the lights., and that it would

probably be the first time in the lives of most people there that they

had ever been in darkness that was total.

Out went the lights. Billy didn’t even know whether he was still alive

or not. And then something ghostly floated in air to his left. It had

numbers on it. His father had taken out his Pocket watch. The watch had

a radium dial.

Billy went from total dark to total light, found himself back in the

war, back in the delousing station again. The shower was over. An unseen

hand had turned the water off.

When Billy got his clothes back, they weren’t any cleaner, but all the

little animals that had been living in them were dead. So it goes. And

his new overcoat was thawed out and limp now. It was much too small for

Billy. It had a fur collar and a g of crimson silk, and had apparently

been made for an impresario about as big as an organ-grinder’s monkey.

It was full of bullet holes.

Billy Pilgrim dressed himself. He put on the little overcoat, too. It

split up the back, and, at the shoulders, the sleeves came entirely

free. So the coat became a fur-collared vest. It was meant to flare at

its owners waist, but the flaring took place at Billy’s armpits. ‘Me

Germans found him to be one of the most screamingly funny things they

had seen in all of the Second World War. They laughed and laughed.

And the Germans told everybody else to form in ranks of five, with Billy

as their pivot. Then out of doors went the parade, and through gate

after gate again. ‘Mere were more starving Russians with faces like

radium dials. The Americans were livelier than before. The jazzing with

hot water had cheered them up. And they came to a shed where a corporal

with only one arm and one eye wrote the name and serial number of each

prisoner in a big, red ledger. Everybody was legally alive now. Before

they got their names and numbers in that book, they were missing in

action and probably dead.

So it goes.

As the Americans were waiting to move on, an altercation broke out in

their rear-most rank. An American had muttered something which a guard

did not like. The guard knew English, and he hauled the American out of

ranks knocked him down.

The American was astonished. He stood up shakily, spitting blood. He’d

had two teeth knocked out. He had meant no harm by what he’d said,

evidently, had no idea that the guard would hear and understand.

‘Why me?’ he asked the guard.

The guard shoved him back into ranks. ‘Vy you? Vy anybody?’ he said.

When Billy Pilgrim’s name was inscribed in the ledger of the prison

camp, he was given a number., too, and an iron dogtag in which that

number was stamped. A slave laborer from Poland had done the stamping.

He was dead now. So it goes.

Billy was told to hang the tag’ around his neck along with his American

dogtags, which he did. The tag was like a salt cracker, perforated down

its middle so that a strong man could snap it in two with his bare

hands. In case Billy died, which he didn’t, half the tag would mark his

body and half would mark his grave.

After poor Edgar Derby, the high school teacher, was shot in Dresden

later on, a doctor pronounced him dead and snapped his dogtag in two. So

it goes.

Properly enrolled and tagged, the Americans were led through gate after

gate again. In two days’ time now their families would learn from the

International Red Cross that they were alive.

Next to Billy was little Paul Lazzaro, who had promised to avenge Roland

Weary. Lazzaro wasn’t thinking about vengeance. He was thinking about

his terrible bellyache. His stomach had shrunk to the size of a walnut.

That dry, shriveled pouch was as sore as a boil.

Next to Lazzaro was poor, doomed old Edgar Derby, with his American and

German dogs displayed like a necklace, on the outside of his clothes. He

had expected to become a captain, a company commander, because of his

wisdom and age. Now here he was on the Czechoslovakian border at

midnight.

‘Halt,’ said a guard.

The Americans halted. They stood there quietly in the cold. The sheds

they were among were outwardly like thousands of other sheds they had

passed. There was this difference, though: the sheds had tin chimneys,

and out of the chimneys whirled constellations of sparks.

A guard knocked on a door.

The door was flung open from inside. Light leaped out through the door,

escaped from prison at 186,000 miles per second. Out marched fifty

middle-aged Englishmen. They were singing “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All

Here’ from the Pirates of Penzance’.

These lusty, ruddy vocalists were among the first English-speaking

prisoners to be taken in the Second World War. Now they were singing to

nearly the last. They had not seen a woman or a child for four years or

more. They hadn’t seen any birds, either. Not even sparrows would come

into the camp.

The Englishmen were officers. Each of them had attempted to escape from

another prison at least once. Now they were here, dead-center in a sea

of dying Russians.

They could tunnel all they pleased. They would inevitably surface within

a rectangle of barbed wire, would find themselves greeted listlessly by

dying Russians who spoke no English, who had no food or useful

information or escape plans of their own. They could scheme all they

pleased to hide aboard a vehicle or steal one, but no vehicle ever came

into their compound. They could feign illness, if they liked, but that

wouldn’t earn them a trip anywhere, either. The only hospital in the

camp was a six-bed affair in the British compound itself.

The Englishmen were clean and enthusiastic and decent and strong. They

sang boomingly well. They had been singing together every night for

years.

The Englishmen had also been lifting weights and chinning themselves for

years. Their bellies were like washboards. The muscles of their calves

and upper arms were like cannonballs. They were all masters of checkers

and chess and bridge and cribbage and dominoes and anagrams and charades

and Ping-Pong and billiards, as well.

They were among the wealthiest people in Europe, in terms of food. A

clerical error early in the war, when food was still getting through to

prisoners, had caused the Red Cross to ship them five hundred parcels

every month instead of fifty. The Englishmen had hoarded these so

cunningly that now, as the war was ending, they had three tons of sugar,

one ton of coffee, eleven hundred pounds of chocolate, seven hundred

pounds of tobacco, seventeen hundred pounds of tea, two tons of flour,

one ton of canned beef, twelve hundred pounds of canned butter, sixteen

hundred pounds of canned cheese, eight hundred pounds of powdered milk.,

and two tons of orange marmalade.

They kept all this in a room without windows. They had ratproofed it by

lining it with flattened tin cans.

They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what the

Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and

fun. So the Germans let them have four sheds, though one shed would have

held them all. And, in exchange for coffee or chocolate or tobacco, the

Germans gave them paint and lumber and nails and cloth for fixing things

up.

The Englishmen had known for twelve hours that American guests were on

their way. They had never had guests before, and they went to work like

darling elves, sweeping, mopping, cooking, baking-making mattresses of

straw and burlap bags, setting tables, putting party favors at each

place.

Now they were singing their welcome to their guests in the winter night.

Their clothes were aromatic with the feast they had been preparing. They

were dressed half for battle, half for tennis or croquet. They were so

elated by their own hospitality, and by all the goodies waiting inside,

that they did not take a good look at their guests while they sang. And

they imagined that they were singing to fellow officers fresh from the

fray.

They wrestled the Americans toward the shed door affectionately, filling

the night with manly blather and brotherly rodomontades. They called

them ‘Yank,’ told them ‘Good show,’ promised them that ‘Jerry was on the

run,’ and so on.

Billy Pilgrim wondered dimly who Jerry was.

Now he was indoors., next to an iron cookstove that was glowing cherry

red. Dozens of teapots were boiling there. Some of them had whistles.

And there was a witches’ cauldron full of golden soup. The soup was

thick. Primeval bubbles surfaced it with lethargical majesty as Billy

Pilgrim stared.

There were long tables set for a banquet. At each place was a bowl made

from a can that had once contained powdered milk. A smaller can was a

cup. A taller, more slender can was a tumbler. Each tumbler was filled

with warm milk.

At each place was a safety razor, a washcloth, a package of razor

blades, a chocolate bar, two cigars, a bar of soap,, ten cigarettes, a

book of matches, a pencil and a candle.

Only the candles and the soap were of German origin. They had a ghostly,

opalescent similarity. The British had no way of knowing it, but the

candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies

and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State.

So it goes.

The banquet hall was illuminated by candlelight. There were heaps of

fresh baked white bread on the tables, gobs of butter, pots of

marmalade. There were platters of sliced beef from cans. Soup and

scrambled eggs and hot marmalade pie were yet to come.

And, at the far end of the shed, Billy saw pink arches with azure

draperies hanging between them, and an enormous clock, and two golden

thrones, and a bucket and a mop. It was in this setting that the

evening’s entertainment would take place, a musical version of

Cinderella, the most popular story ever told.

Billy Pilgrim was on fire, having stood too close to the glowing stove.

The hem of his little coat was burning. It was a quiet, patient sort of

fire-like the burning of punk.

Billy wondered ff there was a telephone somewhere. He wanted to call his

mother, to tell her he was alive and well.

There was silence now, as the Englishmen looked in astonishment at the

frowsy creatures they had so lustily waltzed inside. One of the

Englishmen saw that Billy was on fire. ‘You’re on fire lad!’ he said,

and he got Billy away from the stove and beat out the sparks with his

hands.

When Billy made no comment on this, the Englishman asked him, ‘Can you

talk? Can you hear?’

Billy nodded.

The Englishman touched him exploratorily here and there, filled with

pity. ‘My God-what have they done to you, lad? This isn’t a man. It’s a

broken kite.’

‘Are you really an American?’ said the Englishman.

‘Yes,’ said Billy.

‘And your rank?’

‘Private.’

‘What became of your boots, lad?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Is that coat a joke?’

‘Sir?’

‘Where did you get such a thing?’

Billy had to think hard about that. ‘They gave it to me,’ he said at

last.

‘Jerry gave it to you?’

‘Who? ’

‘The Germans gave it to you?’

‘Yes.’

Billy didn’t like the questions. They were fatiguing.

‘Ohhhh-Yank, Yank, Yank,’ said the Englishman, ‘that coat was an insult,

‘Sir? ’

‘It was a deliberate attempt to humiliate you. You mustn’t let Jerry do

things like that.’

Billy Pilgrim swooned.

Billy came to on a chair facing the stage. He I had somehow eaten, and

now he was watching Cinderella. Some part of him had evidently been

enjoying the performance for quite a while. Billy was laughing hard.

The women in the play were really men, of course. The clock had just

struck midnight and Cinderella was lamenting

‘Goodness me, the clock has struck-

Alackaday, and fuck my luck.’

Billy found the couplet so comical that he not only laughed-he shrieked.

He went on shrieking until he was carried out of the shed and into

another, where the hospital was. It was a six-bed hospital. There

weren’t any other patients in there.

Billy was put to bed and tied down, and given a shot of morphine.

Another American volunteered to watch over him. This volunteer was Edgar

Derby, the high school teacher who would be shot to death in Dresden. So

it goes.

Derby sat on a three-legged stool. He was given a book to read. The book

was The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane. Derby had read it

before. Now he read it again while Billy Pilgrim entered a morphine

paradise.

Under morphine, Billy had a dream of giraffes in a garden. The giraffes

were following gravel paths, were pausing to munch sugar pears from

treetops. Billy was a giraffe, too. He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It

fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest.

The giraffes accepted Billy as one of their own, as a harmless creature

as preposterously specialized as themselves. Two approached him from

opposite sides, leaned against him. They had long, muscular upper lips

which they could shape like the bells of bugles. They kissed him with

these. They were female giraffes-cream and lemon yellow. They had horns

like doorknobs. The knobs were covered with velvet.

Why?

Night came to the garden of the giraffes, and Billy Pilgrim slept

without dreaming for a while, and then he traveled in time. He woke up

with his head under a blanket in a ward for nonviolent mental patients

in a veterans’ hospital near Lake Placid, New York. It was springtime in

1948, three years after the end of the war.

Billy uncovered his head. The windows of the ward were open. Birds were

twittering outside. ‘Poo-tee-weet?’ one asked him. The sun was high.

There were twenty-nine other patients assigned to the ward, but they

were all outdoors now, enjoying the day. They were free to come and go

as they pleased, to go home, even., if they liked-and so was Billy

Pilgrim. They had come here voluntarily, alarmed by the outside world.

Billy had committed himself in the middle of his final year at the Ilium

School of Optometry. Nobody else suspected that he was going crazy.

Everybody else thought he looked fine and was acting fine. Now he was in

the hospital. The doctors agreed: He was going crazy.

They didn’t think it had anything to do with the war. They were sure

Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the

deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had

then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.

The man assigned to the bed next to Billy’s was a former infantry

captain named Eliot Rosewater. Rosewater was sick and tired of being

drunk all the time.

It was Rosewater who introduced Billy to science fiction, and in

particular to the writings of Kilgore Trout. Rosewater had a tremendous

collection of science-fiction paperbacks under his bed. He had brought

them to the hospital in a steamer trunk. Those beloved, frumpish books

gave off a smell that permeated the ward-like flannel pajamas that

hadn’t been changed for a month, or like Irish stew.

Kilgore Trout became Billy’s favorite living author, and science fiction

became the only sort of tales he could read.

Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy., but he and Billy were dealing

with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life

meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater.,

for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a

German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in

European history, which was the firebombing of Dresden. So it goes.

So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science

fiction was a big help.

Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that

wasn’t science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about

life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. ‘But that

isn’t enough any more.’ said Rosewater.

Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, ‘I think you

guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or

people just aren’t going to want to go on living.’

There was a still life on Billy’s bedside table-two pills, an ashtray

with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette Still

burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was

trying to get out of that dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls

of the glass, too weak to climb out.

The cigarettes belonged to Billy’s chain-smoking mother. She had sought

the ladies’ room, which was off the ward for WACS and WAVES and SPARS

and WAFS who had gone bananas. She would be back at any moment now.

Billy covered his head with his blanket again. He always covered his

head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward-always got much

sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad

breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue,

brown-haired, white woman with a high-school education.

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel

embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much

trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t

really like life at all.

Billy heard Eliot Rosewater come in and lie down. Rosewater’s bedsprings

talked a lot about that. Rosewater was a big man, but not very powerful.

He looked as though he might be made out of nose putty.

And then Billy’s mother came back from the ladies’ room, sat down on a

chair between Billy’s and Rosewater’s bed. Rosewater greeted her with

melodious warmth, asked how she was today. He seemed delighted to hear

that she was fine. He was experimenting with being ardently sympathetic

with everybody he met. He thought that might make the world a slightly

more pleasant place to live in. He called Billy’s mother ‘dear.’ He was

experimenting with calling everybody ‘dear.’

Some day’ she promised Rosewater., “I’m going to come in here, and Billy

is going to uncover his head, and do you know what he’s going to say?’

‘What’s he going to say, dear?’

‘He’s going to say, “Hello, Mom,” and he’s going to smile. He’s going to

say, “Gee, it’s good to see you, Mom. How have you been?”’

‘Today could -be the day.’

‘Every night I pray.’

‘That’s a good thing to do.’

‘People would be surprised ff they knew how much in this world was due

to prayers.’

‘You never said a truer word, dear.’

‘Does your mother come to see you often?’

‘My mother is dead,’ said Rosewater. So it goes.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘At least she had a happy life as long as it lasted.’

‘That’s a consolation, anyway.’

‘Yes.’

‘Billy’s father is dead., you know, said Billy’s mother. So it goes.

‘A boy needs a father.’

And on and on it went-that duet between the dumb, praying lady and the

big, hollow man so full of loving echoes.

‘He was at the top of his class when this happened,’ said Billy’s

mother.

‘Maybe he. was working too hard.’ said Rosewater. He held a book he

wanted to read, but he was much too polite to read and talk, too, easy

as it was to give Billy’s mother satisfactory answers. The book was

Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people

whose mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the

diseases were all in the fourth dimension., and three-dimensional

Earthling doctors couldn’t see those causes at all, or even imagine

them.

One thing Trout said that Rosewater liked very much was that there

really were vampires and werewolves and goblins and angels and so on,

but that they were in the fourth dimension. So was William Blake,

Rosewater’s favorite poet, according to Trout. So were heaven and hell.

‘He’s engaged to a very rich girl,’ said Billy’s mother.

‘That’s good,’ said Rosewater. ‘Money can be a great comfort sometimes.’

‘It really can.’

‘Of course it can.’

‘It isn’t much fun if you have to pinch every penny till it screams.

‘It’s nice to have a little breathing room.’

‘Her father owns the optometry school where Billy was going. He also

owns six offices around our part of the state. He flies his own plane

and has a summer place up on Lake George.’

‘That’s a beautiful lake.’

Billy fell asleep under his blanket. When he woke up again, he was tied

to the bed in the hospital back in prison. He opened one eye, saw poor

old Edgar Derby reading The Red Badge of Courage by candlelight.

Billy closed that one eye saw in his memory of the future poor old Edgar

Derby in front of a firing squad in the ruins of Dresden. There were

only four men in that squad. Billy had heard that one man in each firing

squad was customarily given a rifle loaded with blank cartridge. Billy

didn’t think there would be a blank cartridge issued in a squad that

small, in a war that old.

Now the head Englishman came into the hospital to check on Billy. He was

an infantry colonel captured at Dunkirk. It was he who had given Billy

morphine. There wasn’t a real doctor in the compound, so the doctoring

was up to him. ‘How’s the patient?’ he asked Derby.

‘Dead to the world.’

‘But not actually dead.’

‘No.’

‘How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.’

Derby now came to lugubrious attention.

‘No, no-please-as you were. With only two men for each officer, and all

the men sick, I think we can do without the usual pageantry between

officers and men.’

Derby remained standing. ‘You seem older than the rest,’ said the

colonel.

Derby told him he was forty-five, which was two years older than the

colonel. The colonel said that the other Americans had all shaved now,

that Billy and Derby were the only two still with beards. And he said,

‘You know we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that

it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that

wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it

was a shock “My God, my God-” I said to myself. “It’s the Children’s

Crusade.”’

The colonel asked old Derby how he had been captured, and Derby told a

tale of being in a clump of trees with about a hundred other frightened

soldiers. The battle had been going on for five days. The hundred had

been driven into the trees by tanks.

Derby described the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings

sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don’t want those other

Earthlings to inhabit Earth any more. Shells were bursting in the

treetops with terrific bangs, he said, showering down knives and needles

and razorblades. Little lumps of lead in copper jackets were

crisscrossing the woods under the shellbursts, zipping along much faster

than sound.

A lot of people were being wounded or killed. So it goes.

Then the shelling stopped, and a hidden German with a loudspeaker told

the Americans to put their weapons down and come out of the woods with

their hands on the top of their heads, or the shelling would start

again. It wouldn’t stop until everybody in there was dead.

So the Americans put their weapons down, and they came out of the woods

with their hands on top of their heads, because they wanted to go on

living, if they possibly could.

Billy traveled in time back to the veterans’ hospital again. The blanket

was over his head. It was quiet outside the blanket. “Is my mother

gone?’ said Billy.

‘Yes.’

Billy peeked out from under his blanket. His fiancée was out there now,

sitting on the visitor’s chair. Her name was Valencia Merble. Valencia

was the daughter of the owner of the Ilium School of Optometry. She was

rich. She was as big as a house because she couldn’t stop eating. She

was eating now. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar. She was

wearing trifocal lenses in harlequin frames, and the frames were trimmed

with rhinestones. The glitter of the rhinestones was answered by the

glitter of the diamond in her engagement ring. The diamond was insured

for eighteen hundred dollars. Billy had found that diamond in Germany.

It was booty of war.

Billy didn’t want to marry ugly Valencia. She was one of the symptoms of

his disease. He knew he was going crazy, when he heard himself proposing

marriage to her., when he begged her to take the diamond ring and be his

companion for life.

Billy said, ‘Hello,’ to her, and she asked him if he wanted some candy,

and he said, ‘No, thanks.’

She asked him how he was, and he said, ‘Much better, thanks.’ She said

that everybody at the Optometry School was sorry he was sick and hoped

he would be well soon, and Billy said, ‘When you see ‘em, tell ‘em,

“Hello.”’

She promised she would.

She asked him if there was anything she could bring him from the

outside, and he said, ‘No. I have just about everything I want.’

‘What about books?’ said Valencia.

‘I’m right next to one of the biggest private libraries in the world,’

said Billy, meaning Eliot Rosewater’s collection of science fiction.

Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the

conversation, asked him what he was reading this time.

So Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore

Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a

Tralfamadorian by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious

study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so

easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was

slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent

of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful,

even to the lowest of the low.

But the Gospels actually taught this:

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected.

So it goes.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was

that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most

Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they

came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out

loud again:

Oh, boy-they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!

And that thought had a brother: ‘There are right people to lynch.’ Who?

People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In

it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people

with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely

and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.

So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and

planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any

repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think

that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a

nobody Jesus was.

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there

was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told

the people that he was adopting the bum as his son giving him the full

powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe

throughout all eternity. God said this From this moment on, He will

punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

Billy’s fiancée had finished her Three Musketeers Candy Bar. Now she was

eating a Milky Way.

‘Forget books,’ said Rosewater, throwing that particular book under his

bed. ‘The hell with ‘em.’

‘That sounded like an interesting one,’ said Valencia.

Jesus-if Kilgore Trout could only write!’ Rosewater exclaimed. He had a

point: Kilgore Trout’s unpopularity was deserved. His prose was

frightful. Only his ideas were good.

‘I don’t think Trout has ever been out of the country, ‘ Rosewater went

on. ‘My God-he writes about Earthlings all the time, and they’re all

Americans. Practically nobody on is an American.’

‘Where does he live?” Valencia asked.

‘Nobody knows,’ Rosewater replied. ‘I’m the only person who ever heard

of him, as far as I can tell. No two books have the same publisher, and

every time I write him in care of a publisher, the letter comes back

because the publisher has failed.’

He changed the subject now, congratulated Valencia on her engagement

ring.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and held it out so Rosewater could get a close

look. ‘Billy got that diamond in the war.’

‘That’s the attractive thing about war,’ said Rosewater. Absolutely

everybody gets a little something.’

With regard to the whereabouts of Kilgore Trout: he actually lived in

Ilium, Billy’s hometown, friendless and despised. Billy would meet him

by and by.

‘Billy’ said Valencia Merble.

‘Hm?’

‘You want to talk about our silver pattern? ’

‘Sure.’

‘I’ve got it narrowed down pretty much to either Royal Danish or Rambler

Rose.’

‘Rambler Rose,’ said Billy.

‘It isn’t something we should rush into,’ she said. ‘I mean whatever we

decide on, that’s what we’re going to have to live with the rest of our

lives.’

Billy studied the pictures. ‘Royal Danish.’ he said at last.

‘Colonial Moonlight is nice, too.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Billy Pilgrim.

And Billy traveled in time to the zoo on Tralfamadore. He was forty-four

years old, on display under a geodesic dome. He was reclining on the

lounge chair which had been his cradle during his trip through space. He

was naked. The Tralfamadorians were interested in his body-all of it.

There were thousands of them outside, holding up their little hands so

that their eyes could see him. Billy had been on Tralfamadore for six

Earthling months now. He was used to the crowd.

Escape was out of the question. The atmosphere outside the dome was

cyanide, and Earth was 446,120,000,000,000,000 miles away.

Billy was displayed there in the zoo in a simulated Earthling habitat.

Most of the furnishings had been stolen from the Sears & Roebuck

warehouse in Iowa City, Iowa. There was a color television set and a

couch that could be converted into a bed. There were end tables with

lamps and ashtrays on them by the couch. There was a home bar and two

stools. There was a little pool table. There was wall-to-wall carpeting

in federal gold, except in the kitchen and bathroom areas and over the

iron manhole cover in the center of the floor. There were magazines

arranged in a fan on the coffee table in front of the couch.

There was a stereophonic phonograph. The phonograph worked. The

television didn’t. There was a picture Of one cowboy g another one

pasted to the television tube. So it goes.

There were no wall in the dome, nor place for Billy to hide. The mint

green bathroom fixtures were right out in the open. Billy got off his

lounge chair now, went into the bathroom and took a leak. The crowd went

wild.

Billy brushed his teeth on Tralfamadore, put in his partial denture, and

went into his kitchen. His bottled-gas range and his refrigerator and

his dishwasher were mint green, too. There was a picture painted on the

door of the refrigerator. The refrigerator had come that way. It was a

picture of a Gay Nineties couple on a bicycle built for two.

Billy looked at that picture now, tried to think something about the

couple. Nothing came to him. There didn’t seem to be anything to think

about those two people.

Billy ate a good breakfast from cans. He washed his cup and plate and

knife and fork and spoon and saucepan, put them away. Then he did

exercises he had learned in the Army-straddle jumps, deep knee bends,

sit-ups and push-ups. Most Tralfamadorians had no way of knowing Bill’s

body and face were not beautiful. They supposed that he was a splendid

specimen. This had a pleasant effect on Billy, who began to enjoy his

body for the first time.

He showered after his exercises and trimmed his toenails. He shaved and

sprayed deodorant under his arms, while a zoo guide on a raised platform

outside explained what Billy was doing-and why. The guide was lecturing

telepathically, simply standing there, sending out thought waves to the

crowd. On the platform with him was the little keyboard instrument with

which he would relay questions to Billy from the crowd.

Now the first question came-from the speaker on the television set: ‘Are

you happy here?’

‘About as happy as I was on Earth,’ said Billy Pilgrim, which was true.

There were fives sexes on Tralfamadore, each of them performing a step

necessary in the creation of a new individual. They looked identical to

Billy-because their sex differences were all in the fourth dimension.

One of the biggest moral bombshells handed to Billy by the

Tralfamadorians, incidentally, had to do with sex on Earth. They said

their flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on

Earth, each essential to reproduction. Again: Billy couldn’t possibly

imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a

baby, since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension.

The Tralfamadorians tried to give Billy clues that would help him

imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him that there could

be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies

without female homosexuals. There couldn’t be babies without women over

sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five.

There couldn’t be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or

less after birth. And so on.

It was gibberish to Billy.

There was a lot that Billy said that was gibberish to the

Tralfamadorians, too. They couldn’t imagine what time looked like to

him. Billy had given up on explaining that. The guide outside had to

explain as best he could.

The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a

desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear.

They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in

front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them

was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere

which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which

he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.

This was only the beginning of Billy’s miseries in the metaphor. He was

also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails,

And there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far

end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar.

All Billy could see was the dot at the end of the pipe. He didn’t know

he was on a flatcar, didn’t even know there was anything peculiar about

his situation.

The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often

stopped-went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways.

Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to

himself, ‘That’s life.’

Billy expected the Tralfamadorians to be baffled and alarmed by all the

wars and other forms of murder on Earth. He expected them to fear that

the Earthling combination of ferocity and spectacular weaponry might

eventually destroy part or maybe all of the innocent Universe. Science

fiction had led him to expect that.

But the subject of war never came up until Billy brought it up himself.

Somebody in the zoo crowd asked him through the lecturer what the most

valuable thing he had learned on Tralfamadore was so far, and Billy

replied, ‘How the inhabitants of a whole planet can live in peace I As

you know, I am from a planet that has been engaged in senseless

slaughter since the beginning of time. I myself have seen the bodies of

schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen,

who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time. ‘ This was true. Billy

saw the boiled bodies in Dresden. ‘And I have lit my way in a prison at

night with candles from the fat of human beings who were butchered by

the brothers and fathers of those school girls who were boiled.

Earthlings must be the terrors of the Universe! If other planets aren’t

now in danger from Earth, they soon will be. So tell me the secret so I

can take it back to Earth and save us all: How can a planet live at

peace?’

Billy felt that he had spoken soaringly. He was baffled when he saw the

Tralfamadorians close their little hands on their eyes. He knew from

past experience what this meant: He was being stupid.

‘Would-would you mind telling me,’ he said to the guide, much deflated,

‘what was so stupid about that?’

‘We know how the Universe ends,’ said the guide, ‘and Earth has nothing

to do with it, except that it gets wiped out, too.’

‘How-how does the Universe end?’ said Billy.

‘We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A

Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole

Universe disappears.’ So it goes.

“If You know this,” said Billy, ‘isn’t there some way you can prevent

it? Can’t you keep the pilot from pressing the button?’

‘He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we

always will let him. The moment is structured that way.’

‘So,’ said Billy gropingly, I suppose that the idea of, preventing war

on Earth is stupid, too. ’

‘Of course.’

‘But you do have a peaceful planet here.’

‘Today we do. On other days we have wars as horrible as any you’ve ever

seen or read about. There isn’t anything we can do about them, so we

simply don’t look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at

pleasant moments-like today at the zoo. Isn’t this a nice moment?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard

enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.’

‘Um,’ said Billy Pilgrim.

Shortly after he went to sleep that night, Billy traveled in time to

another moment which was quite nice, his wedding night with the former

Valencia Merble. He had been out of the veterans’ hospital for six

months. He was all well. He had graduated from the Ilium School of

Optometry-third in his class of forty-seven.

Now he was in bed with Valencia in a delightful studio apartment which

was built on the end of a wharf on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Across the

water were the lights of Gloucester. Billy was on top of Valencia,

making love to her. One result of this act would be the birth of Robert

Pilgrim, who would become a problem in high school, but who would then

straighten out as a member of the famous Green Berets.

Valencia wasn’t a time-traveler, but she did have a lively imagination.

While Billy was making love to her, she imagined that she was a famous

woman in history. She was being Queen Elizabeth the First of England,

and Billy was supposedly Christopher Columbus.

Billy made a noise like a small, rusty hinge. He had just emptied his

seminal vesicles into Valencia, had contributed his share of the Green

Beret According to the Tralfamadorians, of course, the Green Beret would

have seven parents in all.

Now he rolled off his huge wife, whose rapt expression did not change

when he departed. He lay with the buttons of his spine along the edge of

the mattress, folded his hands behind his head. He was rich now. He had

been rewarded for marrying a girl nobody in his right mind would have

married. His father-in-law had given him a new Buick Roadmaster, an

all-electric home, and had made him manager of his most prosperous

office, his Ilium office, where Billy could expect to make at least

thirty thousand dollars a year. That was good. His father had been only

a barber.

As his mother said, “The Pilgrims are coming up in the world,’

The honeymoon was taking place in the bittersweet mysteries of Indian

summer in New England. The lovers’ apartment had one romantic wall which

was all French doors. They opened onto a balcony and the oily harbor

beyond.

A green and orange dragger, black in the night, grumbled and drummed

past their balcony, not thirty feet from their wedding bed. It was going

to sea with only its running lights on. Its empty holds were resonant,

made the song of the engines rich and loud. The wharf began to sing the

same song, and then the honeymooners’ headboard sang, too. And it

continued to sing long after the dragger was gone.

‘Thank you,’ said Valencia at last. The headboard was singing a mosquito

song.

‘You’re welcome.’

‘It was nice.’

‘I’m glad.’

Then she began to cry.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m so happy.’

‘Good.’

‘I never thought anybody would marry me.’

‘Um,’ said Billy Pilgrim.

I’m going to lose weight for you,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I’m going to go on a diet. I’m going to become beautiful for you.’

‘I like you just the way you are.’

‘Do you really?’

‘Really,’ said Billy Pilgrim. He had already seen a lot of their

marriage, thanks to time-travel, knew that it was going to be at least

bearable all the way.

A great motor yacht named the Scheherezade now slid past the marriage

bed. The song its engines sang was a very low organ note. All her lights

were on.

Two beautiful people, a young man and a young woman in evening clothes,

were at the rail hi the stem, loving each other and their dreams and the

wake. They were honeymooning, too. They were Lance Rumfoord., of

Newport, Rhode Island, and his bride,, the former Cynthia Landry., who

had been a childhood sweetheart of John F. Kennedy in Hyannis Port,

Massachusetts.

There was a slight coincidence here. Billy Pilgrim would later share a

hospital room with Rumfoord’s uncle, Professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord

of Harvard, official Historian of the United States Air Force.

When the beautiful people were past, Valencia questioned her

funny-looking husband about war. It was a simple-minded thing for a

female Earthling to do, to associate sex and glamor with war.

‘Do you ever think about the war?’ she said, laying a hand on his thigh.

‘Sometimes,’ said Billy Pilgrim.

‘I look at you sometimes,’ said Valencia, ‘and I get a funny feeling

that you’re full of secrets.’

‘I’m not,’ said Billy. This was a lie, of course. He hadn’t told anybody

about all the time traveling he’d done, about Tralfamadore and so on.

‘You must have secrets about the war. Or, not secrets, I guess, but

things you don’t want to talk about.’

‘No.’

‘I’m proud you were a soldier. Do you know that?’

‘Good.’

‘Was it awful?’

‘Sometimes.’ A crazy thought now occurred to Billy. The truth of it

startled him. It would make a good epitaph for Billy Pilgrim-and for me,

too.

‘Would you talk about the war now, if I wanted you to?’ said Valencia.

In a tiny cavity in her great body she was assembling the materials for

a Green Beret.

‘It would sound like a dream,’, said Billy. ‘Other people’s dreams

aren’t very interesting usually.’

‘I heard you tell Father one time about a German firing squad.’ She was

referring to the execution of poor old Edgar Derby.

‘Um.’

‘You had to bury him? ’

‘Yes.’

Did he see you with your shovels before he was shot?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he say anything?’

EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL, AND NOTHING HURT

‘No.’

‘Was he scared?’

‘They had him doped up. He was sort of glassy-eyed.’

And they pinned a target to him?’

A piece of paper,’ said Billy. He got out of bed, said, ‘Excuse me, ‘

went to the darkness of the bathroom to take a leak. He groped for the

light, realized as he felt the rough wall that he had traveled back to

1944, to the prison hospital again.

The candle in the hospital had gone out. Poor old Edgar Derby had fallen

asleep on the cot next to Billy’s. Billy was out of bed, groping along a

wall, trying to find a way out because he had to take a leak so badly.

He suddenly found a door, which opened, let him reel out into the prison

night. Billy was loony with time-travel and morphine. He delivered

himself to a barbed-wire fence which snagged him in a dozen places.

Billy tried to back away from it but the barbs wouldn’t let go. So Billy

did a silly little dance with the fence, taking a step this way, then

that way, then returning to the beginning again.

A Russian, himself out in the night to take a leak, saw Billy

dancing-from the other side of the fence. He came over to the curious

scarecrow, tried to talk with it gently, asked it what country it was

from. The scarecrow paid no attention, went on dancing. So the Russian

undid the snags one b y one, and the scarecrow danced off into the night

again without a word of thanks.

The Russian waved to him, and called after him in Russian, ‘Good-bye.’

Billy took his pecker out, there in the prison night, and peed and peed

on the ground. Then he put it away again, more or less, and contemplated

a new problem: Where had he come from, and where should he go now?

Somewhere in the night there were cries of grief. With nothing better to

do, Billy shuffled in their direction. He wondered what tragedy so many

had found to lament out of doors.

Billy was approaching, without knowing it, the back of the latrine. It

consisted of a one-rail fence with twelve buckets underneath it. The

fence was sheltered on three sides by a screen of scrap lumber and

flattened tin cans. The open side faced the black tarpaper wall of the

shed where the feast had, taken place.

Billy moved along the screen and reached a point where he could see a

message freshly painted on the tarpaper wall. The words were written

with the same pink paint which had brightened the set for Cinderella.

Billy’s perceptions were so unreliable that he saw the words as hanging

in air, painted on a transparent curtain, perhaps. And there were lovely

silver dots on the curtain, too. These were really nailheads holding the

tarpaper to the shed. Billy could not imagine how the curtain was

supported in nothingness, and he supposed that the magic curtain and the

theatrical grief were part of some religious ceremony he knew nothing

about.

Here is what the message said:

Billy looked inside the latrine. The wailing was coming from in there.

The place was crammed with Americans who had taken their pants down. The

welcome feast had made them as sick as volcanoes. The buckets were full

or had been kicked over.

An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his

brains. Moments later he said, ‘There they go, there they go.’ He meant

his brains.

That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.

Billy reeled away from his vision of Hell. He passed three Englishmen

who were watching the excrement festival from a distance. They were

catatonic with disgust.

‘Button your pants!’ said one as Billy went by.

So Billy buttoned his pants. He came to the door of the little hospital

by accident. He went through the door,, and found himself honeymooning

again, going from the bathroom back to bed with his bride on Cape Ann.

‘I missed you’ said Valencia.

‘I missed you,’ said Billy Pilgrim.

Billy and Valencia went to sleep nestled like spoons, and Billy traveled

in time back to the train ride he had taken in 194 4 from maneuvers in

South Carolina to his father’s funeral in Ilium. He hadn’t seen Europe

or combat yet. This was still in the days of steam locomotives.

Billy had to change trains a lot. All the trains were slow. The coaches

stunk of coal smoke and rationed tobacco and rationed booze and the

farts of people eating wartime food. The upholstery of the iron seats

was bristly, and Billy couldn’t sleep much. He got to sleep soundly when

he was only three hours from Ilium, with his legs splayed toward the

entrance of the busy dining car.

The porter woke him up when the train reached Ilium. Billy staggered off

with his duffel bag, and then he stood on the station platform next to

the porter, trying to wake up.

‘Have a good nap, did you?’ said the porter.

‘Yes,’ said Billy.

‘Man,’ said the porter, ‘you sure had a hard-on.’

At three in the morning on Bill’s morphine night in prison, a new

patient was carried into the hospital by two lusty Englishmen. He was

tiny. He was Paul Lazzaro, the polka-dotted car thief from Cicero,

Illinois. He had been caught stealing cigarettes from under the pillow

of an Englishman. The Englishman, half asleep, had broken Lazzaro’s

right arm and knocked him unconscious.

The Englishman who had done this was helping to carry Lazzaro in now. He

had fiery red hair and no eyebrows. He had been Cinderella’s Blue Fairy

Godmother in the play. Now he supported his half of Lazzaro with one

hand while he closed the door behind himself with the other. ‘Doesn’t

weigh as much as a chicken,’ he said.

The Englishman with Lazzaro’s feet was the colonel who had given Billy

his knock-out shot.

The Blue Fairy Godmother was embarrassed, and angry, too. ‘If I’d known

I was fighting a chicken,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have fought so hard.’

‘Um.’

The Blue Fairy Godmother spoke frankly about how disgusting all the

Americans were. ‘Weak, smelly, self-pitying-a pack of sniveling, dirty,

thieving bastards,’ he said. ‘They’re worse than the bleeding Russians.’

‘Do seem a scruffy lot,’ the colonel agreed.

A German major came in now. He considered the Englishmen as close

friends. He visited them nearly every day, played games with them,

lectured to them on German history, played their piano, gave them

lessons in conversational German. He told them often that, if it weren’t

for their civilized company, he would go mad. His English was splendid.

He was apologetic about the Englishmen’s having to put up with the

American enlisted men. He promised them that they would not be

inconvenienced for more than a day or two, that the Americans would soon

be shipped to Dresden as contract labor. He had a monograph with him,

published by the German Association of Prison Officials. It was a report

on the behavior in Germany of American enlisted men as prisoners of war.

It was written by a former American who had risen high in the German

Ministry of Propaganda. His name was Howard W. Campbell, Jr. He would

later hang himself while awaiting trial as a war criminal.

So it goes.

While the British colonel set Lazzaro’s broken arm and mixed plaster for

the cast, the German major translated out loud passages from Howard W.

Campbell, Jr.‘s monograph. Campbell had been a fairly well-known

playwright at one time. His opening line was this one:

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly

poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.

To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be

poor, but might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be

poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has

folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous,

and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such

tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify

their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a

man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall

asking this cruel question: ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t You rich? ‘

There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand-glued

to a lollipop stick and, flying from the cash register.

The author of the monograph, a native of Schenectady, New York, was said

by some to have had the highest I.Q. of all the war criminals who were

made to face a death by hanging. So it goes.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are

obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth

is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not

acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those

who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward

blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do

less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class

since, say, Napoleonic times.

Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a

thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love

one another because they do not love themselves. Once this is understood

the disagreeable behavior of American enlisted men in German prisons

ceases to be a mystery.

Howard W. Cambell, Jr., now discussed the uniform of the American

enlisted in the Second World War: Every other army in history,

prosperous or not, has attempted to clothe even its lowliest soldiers so

as to make them impressive to themselves and others as stylish experts

in drinking and copulation and looting and sudden death. The American

Army, however, sends its enlisted men out to fight and die in a modified

business suit quite evidently made for another man, a sterilized but

unpressed gift from a nose-holding charity which passes out clothing to

drunks in the slums.

When a dashingly-clad officer addresses such a frumpishly dressed bum,

he scolds him, as an officer in an army must. But the officer’s contempt

is not, as in ‘other armies, avuncular theatricality. It is a genuine

expression of hatred for the poor, who have no one to blame for their

misery but themselves.

A prison administrator dealing with captured American enlisted men for

the first time should be warned: Expect no brotherly love, even between

brothers. There will be no cohesion between the individuals. Each will

be a sulky child who often wishes he were dead

Campbell told what the German experience with captured American enlisted

men had been. They were known everywhere to be the most self-pitying,

least fraternal and dirtiest of all prisoners of war, said Campbell.

They were incapable of concerted action on their own behalf. They

despised any leader from among their own number, refused to follow or

even listen to him, on the grounds that he was no better than they were,

that he should stop putting on airs.

And so on. Billy Pilgrim went to sleep, woke up as a widower in his

empty home in Ilium. His daughter Barbara was reproaching him for

writing ridiculous letters to the newspapers.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ Barbara inquired. It was 1968 again.

‘Of course.’ He had been dozing.

‘If you’re going to act like a child, maybe we’ll just have to treat you

like a child.’

‘That isn’t what happens next,’ said Billy.

‘We’ll see what happens next.’ Big Barbara now embraced herself. ‘It’s

awfully cold in here. Is the heat on?’

‘The heat? ’

‘The furnace-the thing in the basement, the thing that makes hot air

that comes out of these registers. I don’t think it’s working.’

‘Maybe not.’

‘Aren’t you cold?’

‘I hadn’t noticed.’

‘Oh my God, you are a child. If we leave you alone here, you’ll freeze

to death, you’ll starve to death.’ And so on. It was very exciting for

her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.

Barbara called the oil-burner man, and she made Billy go to bed, made

him promise to stay under the electric blanket until the heat came on.

She set the control of the blanket at the highest notch, which soon made

Billy’s bed hot enough to bake bread in.

When Barbara left, slamming the door behind her, Billy traveled in time

to the zoo on Tralfamadore again. A mate has just been brought to him

from Earth. She was Montana Wildhack, a motion picture star.

Montana was under heavy sedation. Tralfamadorians wearing gas masks

brought her in, put her on Billy’s yellow lounge chair; withdrew through

his airlock. The vast crowd outside was delighted. All attendance

records for the zoo were broken. Everybody on the planet wanted to see

the Earthlings mate.

Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous

wang, incidentally. You never know who’ll get one.

Now she fluttered her eyelids. Her lashes were like buggy whips. ‘Where

am I?’ she said.

‘Everything is all right,’ said Billy gently. ‘Please don’t be afraid.

Montana had been unconscious during her trip from Earth. The

Tralfamadorians hadn’t talked to her, hadn’t shown themselves to her.

The last thing she remembered was sunning herself by a swimming pool in

Palm Springs, California. Montana was only twenty years old. Around her

neck was a silver chain with a heart-shaped locket hanging from

it-between her breasts.

Now she turned her head to see the myriads of Tralfamadorians outside

the dome. They were applauding her by opening and closing their little

green hands quickly.

Montana screamed and screamed.

All the little green hands closed fight, because Montana’s terror was so

unpleasant to see. The head zoo keeper ordered a crane operator, who was

standing by, to drop a navy blue canopy over the dome, thus simulating

Earthling night inside. Real night came to the zoo for only one

Earthling hour out of every sixty-two.

Billy switched on a floor lamp. The light from the single source threw

the baroque detailing of Montana’s body into sharp relief. Billy was

reminded of fantastic architecture in Dresden, before it was bombed.

In time, Montana came to love and trust Billy Pilgrim. He did not touch

her until she made it clear that she wanted him to. After she had been

on Tralfamadore for what would have been an Earthling week, she asked

him shyly if he wouldn’t sleep with her. Which he did. It was heavenly.

And Billy traveled in time from that delightful bed to a bed in 1968. It

was his bed in Ilium, and the electric blanket was turned up high. He

was drenched in sweat, remembered groggily that his daughter had put him

to bed, had told him to stay there until the oil burner was repaired.

Somebody was knocking on his bedroom door.

‘Yes?’ said Billy.

‘Oil-burner man.’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s running good now. Heat’s coming up.’

‘Good.’

‘Mouse ate through a wire from the thermostat’

‘I’ll be darned.’

Billy sniffed. His hot bed smelled like a mushroom cellar. He had had a

wet dream about Montana Wildhack.

On the morning after that wet dream, Billy decided to go back to work in

his office in the shopping plaza. Business was booming as usual. His

assistants were keeping up with it nicely. They were startled to see

him. They had been told by his daughter that he might never practice

again.

But Billy went into his examining room briskly, asked that the first

patient be sent in. So they sent him one-a twelve-year old boy who was

accompanied by his-widowed mother. They were strangers, new in town.

Billy asked them a little about themselves, learned that the boy’s

father had been killed in Vietnam-in the famous five-day battle for Hill

875 near Dakto. So it goes.

While he examined the boy’s eyes, Billy told him matter-of-factly about

his adventures on Tralfamadore, assured the fatherless boy that his

father was very much alive still in moments the boy would see again and

again.

‘Isn’t that comforting?’ Billy asked.

And somewhere in there, the boy’s mother went out and told the

receptionist that Billy was evidently going crazy. Billy was taken home.

His daughter asked him again, ‘Father, Father, Father-what are we going

to do with you?’

Six

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim says he went to Dresden Germany, on the day after his

morphine night in the British compound in the center of the

extermination camp for Russian prisoners of war. Billy woke up at dawn

on that day in January. There were no windows in the little hospital,

and the ghostly candles had gone out. So the only light came from

pin-prick holes in the walls, and from a sketchy rectangle that outlined

the imperfectly fitted door. Little Paul Lazzaro, with a broken arm,

snored on one bed. Edgar Derby, the high school teacher who would

eventually he shot, snored on another.

Billy sat up in bed. He had no idea what year it was or what planet he

was on. Whatever the planet’s name was, it was cold. But it wasn’t the

cold that had awakened Billy. It was animal magnetism which was making

him shiver and itch. It gave him profound aches in his musculature, as

though he had been exercising hard.

The animal magnetism was coming from behind him. If Billy had had to

guess as to the source, he would have said that there was a vampire bat

hanging upside down on the wall behind him.

Billy moved down toward the foot of his cot before turning to look at

whatever it was. He didn’t want the animal to drop into his face and

maybe claw his eyes out or bite off his big nose. Then he turned. The

source of the magnetism really did resemble a bat. It was Billy’s

impresario’s coat with the fur collar. It was hanging from a nail.

Billy now backed toward it again, looking at it over his shoulder,

feeling the magnetism increase. Then he faced it, kneeling on his cot,

dared to touch it here and there. He was seeking the exact source of the

radiations.

He found two small sources, two lumps an inch apart and hidden in the

lining. One was shaped like a pea. The other was shaped like a tiny

horseshoe. Billy received a message carried by the radiations. He was

told not to find out what the lumps were. He was advised to be content

with knowing that they could work miracles for him, provided he did not

insist on learning their nature. That was all right with Billy Pilgrim.

He was grateful. He was glad.

Billy dozed, awakened in the prison hospital again. The sun was high.

Outside were Golgotha sounds of strong men digging holes for upright

timbers in hard, hard ground. Englishmen were building themselves a new

latrine. They had abandoned their old latrine to the American d their

theater the place where the feast had been held, too.

Six Englishmen staggered through a hospital with a pool table on which

several mattresses were piled. They were transferring it to living

quarters attached to the hospital. They were followed by an Englishman

dragging his mattress and carrying a dartboard.

The man with the dartboard was the Blue Fairy Godmother who had injured

little Paul Lazzaro. He stopped by Lazzaro’s bed, asked Lazzaro how he

was.

Lazzaro told him he was going to have him killed after the war.

‘Oh? ’

‘You made a big mistake,’ said Lazzaro. ‘Anybody touches me, he better

kill me, or I’m gonna have him killed.’

The Blue Fairy Godmother knew something about killing. He gave Lazzaro a

careful smile. ‘There is still time for me to kill you,’ he said, ‘if

you really persuade me that it’s the sensible thing to do.’

‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’

‘Don’t think I haven’t tried,’ the Blue Fairy Godmother answered.

The Blue Fairy Godmother left, amused and patronizing. When he was gone,

Lazzaro promised Billy and poor old Edgar Derby that he was going to

have revenge, and that revenge was sweet.

‘It’s the sweetest thing there is,’ said Lazzaro. ‘People fuck with me,’

he said, ‘and Jesus Christ are they ever fucking sorry. I laugh like

hell. I don’t care if it’s a guy or a dame. If the President of the

United States fucked around with me, I’d fix him good. You should have

seen what I did to a dog one time.’

‘A dog?’ said Billy.

‘Son of a bitch bit me. So 1 got me some steak, and I got me the spring

out of a clock. I cut that spring up in little pieces. I put points on

the ends of the pieces. They were sharp as razor blades. I stuck ‘em

into the steak-way inside. And I went past where they had the dog tied

up. He wanted to bite me again. I said to him, ‘Come on., doggie-let’s

be friends. Let’s not be enemies any more. I’m not mad.” He believed

me.’

‘He did?’

‘I threw him the steak. He swallowed it down in one big gulp. I waited

around for ten minutes.’ Now Lazzaro’s eyes twinkled. ‘Blood started

coming out of his mouth. He started crying, and he rolled on the ground,

as though the knives were on the outside of him instead of on the inside

of him. Then he tried to bite out his own insides. I laughed, and I said

to him, “You got the right idea now. Tear your own guts out, boy. That’s

me in there with all those knives.”’ So it goes.

‘Anybody ever asks you what the sweetest thing in life is-’ said

Lazzaro, ‘it’s revenge.’

When Dresden was destroyed later on, incidentally, Lazzaro did not

exult. He didn’t have anything against the Germans, he said. Also, he

said he liked to take his enemies one at a time. He was proud of never

having hurt an innocent bystander. ‘Nobody ever got it from Lazzaro,’ he

said, ‘who didn’t have it coming.’

Poor old Edgar Derby, the high school teacher, got into the conversation

now. He asked Lazzaro if he planned to feed the Blue Fairy Godmother

clock springs and steak.

‘Shit,’ said Lazzaro.

‘He’s a pretty big man,’ said Derby, who, of course, was a pretty big

man himself.

‘Size don’t mean a thing.’

‘You’re going to shoot him?’

‘I’m gonna have him shot,’ said Lazzaro. ‘He’ll get home after the war.

He’ll be a big hero. The dames’ll be climbing all over him. He’ll settle

down. A couple of years’ll go by. And then one day there’ll be a knock

on his door. He’ll answer the door, and there’ll be a stranger out

there. The stranger’ll ask him if he’s so-and-so. When he says he is,

the stranger’ll say, “Paul Lazzaro sent me.” And he’ll pull out a gun

and shoot his pecker off. The stranger’ll let him think a couple of

seconds about who Paul Lazzaro is and what life’s gonna be like without

a pecker. Then he’ll shoot him once in the guts and walk away.’ So it

goes.

Lazzaro said that he could have anybody in the world killed for a

thousand dollars plus traveling expenses. He had a list in his head, he

said.

Derby asked him who all was on the list, and Lazzaro said, ‘Just make

fucking sure you don’t get on it. just don’t cross me, that’s all.’

There was a silence, and then he added, ‘And don’t cross my friends.’

‘You have friends?’ Derby wanted to know.

‘In the war?’ said Lazzaro. ‘Yeah-I had a friend in the war. He’s dead.’

So it goes.

‘That’s too bad.’

Lazzaro’s eyes were twinkling again. ‘Yeah. He was my buddy on the

boxcar. His name was Roland Weary. He died in my arms.’ Now he pointed

to Billy with his one mobile hand. ‘He died on account of this silly

cocksucker here. So I promised him

I’d have this silly cocksucker shot after the war.’

Lazzaro erased with his hand anything Billy Pilgrim might be about to

say. ‘Just forget about it, kid,’ he said. ‘Enjoy life while you can.

Nothing’s gonna happen for maybe five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. But

lemme give you a piece of advice: Whenever the doorbell rings, have

somebody else answer the door.’

Billy Pilgrim says now that this really is the way he is going to die,

too. As a time-traveler, he has seen his own death many times, has

described it to a tape recorder. The tape is locked up with his will and

some other valuables in his safe-deposit box at the Ilium Merchants

National Bank and Trust, he says.

I, Billy Pilgrim, the tape begins, will die, have died and always will

die on February thirteenth, 1976.

At the time of his death, he says, he is in Chicago to address a large

crowd on the subject of flying saucers and the true nature of time. His

home is still in Ilium. He has had to cross three international

boundaries in order to reach Chicago. The United States of America has

been Balkanized, has been divided into twenty petty nations so that it

will never again be a threat to world peace. Chicago has been

hydrogen-bombed by Angry Chinamen. So it goes. It is all brand new.

Billy is speaking before a capacity audience in a baseball park, which

is covered by a geodesic dome. The flag of the country is behind him. It

is a Hereford Bull on a field of green. Billy predicts his own death

within an hour. He laughed about it, invites the crowd to laugh with

him. ‘It is high time I was dead..’ he says. ‘Many years ago.’ he said,

‘a certain man promised to have me killed. He is an old man now, living

not far from here. He has read all the publicity associated with my

appearance in your fair city. He is insane. Tonight he will keep his

promise.’

There are protests from the crowd.

Billy Pilgrim rebukes them. ‘If you protest, if you think that death is

a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I’ve said.’ Now he

closes his speech as he closes every speech with these words: ‘Farewell,

hello, farewell, hello.’

There are police around him as he leaves the stage. They are there to

protect him from the crush of popularity. No threats on his life have

been made since 1945. The police offer to stay with him. They are

floridly willing to stand in a circle around him all night, with their

zap guns drawn.

‘No, no,’ says Billy serenely. ‘It is time for you to go home to your

wives and children, and it is time for me to be dead for a little

while-and then live again.’ At that moment, Billy’s high forehead is in

the cross hairs of a high-powered laser gun. It is aimed at him from the

darkened press box. In the next moment, Billy Pilgrim is dead. So it

goes.

So Billy experiences death for a while. It is simply violet light and a

hum. There isn’t anybody else there. Not even Billy Pilgrim is there.

Then he swings back into life again, all the way back to an hour after

his life was threatened by Lazzaro-in 1945. He has been told to get out

of his hospital bed and dress, that he is well. He and Lazzaro and poor

old Edgar Derby are to join their fellows in the theater. There they

will choose a leader for themselves by secret ballot in a free election.

Billy and Lazzaro and poor old Edgar Derby crossed the prison yard to

the theater now. Billy was carrying his little coat as though it were a

lady’s muff. It was wrapped around and round his hands. He was the

central clown in an unconscious travesty of that famous oil painting,

‘The Spirit of ’76.’

Edgar Derby was writing letters home in his head, telling his Wife that

he was alive and well, that she shouldn’t worry, that the war was.

nearly over, that he would soon be home.

Lazzaro was talking to himself about people he was going to have killed

after the war, and rackets he was going to work, and women he was going

to make fuck Mm, whether they wanted to or not. If he had been a dog in

a city, a policeman would have shot him and sent his head to a

laboratory, to see if he had rabies. So it goes.

As they neared the theater, they came upon an Englishman who was hacking

a groove in the Earth with the heel of his boot. He was marking the

boundary between the American and English sections of the compound.

Billy and Lazzaro and Derby didn’t have to ask what the line meant. It

was a familiar symbol from childhood.

The theater was paved with American bodies that nestled like spoons.

Most of the Americans were in stupors or asleep. Their guts were

fluttering, dry.

‘Close the fucking door,’ somebody said to Billy. ‘Were you born I’m a

barn?’

Billy closed it., took a hand from his muff, touched a stove. It was as

cold as ice. The stage was still set for Cinderella. Azure curtains hung

from the arches which were shocking pink. There were golden thrones and

the dummy clock, whose hands were set at midnight. Cinderella’s

slippers, which were a man’s boots painted silver, were capsized side by

side under a golden throne.

Billy and poor old Edgar Derby and Lazzaro had been in the hospital when

the British passed out blankets and mattresses, so they had none. They

had to improvise. The only space open to them was up on the stage, and

they went up there, pulled the azure curtains down, made nests.

Billy, curled in his azure nest., found himself staring at Cinderella’s

silver boots under a throne. And then he remembered that his shoes were

ruined, that he needed boots. He hated to get out of his nest., but he

forced himself to do it. He crawled to the boots on all fours, sat,

tried them on.

The boots fit perfectly. Billy Pilgrim was Cinderella, and Cinderella

was Billy Pilgrim.

Somewhere in there was a lecture on personal hygiene by the head

Englishman., and then a free election. At least half the Americans went

on snoozing through it all. The Englishman’ got up on the stage, and he

rapped on the arm of a throne with

a swagger stick, called, ‘Lads, lads, lad I have your attention,

please?’ And so on.

What the Englishman. said about survival was this ‘If you stop taking

pride ‘m your appearance, you will very soon die.’ He said that he had

seen several men die in the following way: They ceased to stand up

straight, then ceased to shave or wash, then ceased to get out of bed,

then ceased to talk, then died. There is this much to be said for it: it

is evidently a very easy and painless way to go.’ So it goes.

The Englishman said that he, when captured, had made and kept the

following vows to himself: To brush his teeth twice a day, to shave once

a day, to wash his face and hands before every meal and after going to

the latrine, to polish his shoes once a day, to exercise for at least

half an hour each morning and then move his bowels, and to look into a

mirror frequently, frankly evaluating his appearance, particularly with

respect to

posture.

Billy Pilgrim heard all this while lying in his nest. He looked not at

the Englishman’s face but his ankles.

‘I envy you lads,’ said the Englishman.

Somebody laughed. Billy wondered what the joke was.

‘You lads are leaving this afternoon for Dresden-a beautiful city., I’m

told. You won’t be cooped up like us. You’ll be out where the life is,

and the food is certain to be more plentiful than here. If I may inject

a personal note: It has been five years now since I have seen a tree or

flower or woman or child-or a dog or a cat or a place of entertainment,

or a human being doing useful work of any kind.

‘You needn’t worry about bombs, by the way. Dresden is an open city. It

is undefended, and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of

any importance.’

Somewhere in there, old Edgar Derby was elected head American. The

Englishman called for nominations from the floor, and there weren’t any.

So he nominated Derby, praising him for his maturity and long experience

in dealing with people. There were no further nominations, so the

nominations were closed.

‘All in favor?’

Two or three people said, ‘Aye.’

Then poor old Derby made a speech. He thanked the Englishman for his

good advice, said he meant to follow it exactly. He said he was sure

that all the other Americans would do the mm. He said that his primary

responsibility now was to make damn well sure that everybody got home

safely.

‘Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut,’ murmured Paul Lazzaro in

his azure nest. ‘Go take a flying fuck at the moon.’

The temperature climbed startlingly that day. The noontime was balmy.

The Germans brought soup and bread in two-wheeled carts which were

pulled by Russians. The Englishmen sent over real coffee and sugar and

marmalade and cigarettes and cigars, and the doors of the theater were

left open, so the warmth could get in.

The Americans began to feel much better. They were able to hold their

food. And then it was time to go to Dresden. The Americans marched

fairly stylishly out of the British compound. Billy Pilgrim again led

the parade. He had silver boots now, and a muff, and a piece of azure

curtain which he wore like a toga. Billy still had a beard. So did poor

old Edgar Derby, who was beside him. Derby was imagining letters to

home, his lips working tremulously.

Dear Margaret-We are leaving for Dresden today. Don t worry. It will

never be bombed. It is an open city. There was an election at noon, and

guess what? And so on.

They came to the prison railroad yard again. They had arrived on only

two cars. They would depart far more comfortably on four. They saw the

dead hobo again. He was frozen stiff in the weeds beside the track. He

was in a fetal position, trying even in death to nestle like a spoon

with others. There were no others now. He was nestling within thin air

and cinders. Somebody had taken his boots. His bare feet were blue and

ivory. It was all right, somehow, his being dead. So it goes.

The trip to Dresden was a lark. It took only two hours. Shriveled little

bellies were full. Sunlight and cold air came in through the

ventilators. There were plenty of smokes from the Englishmen.

The Americans arrived in Dresden at five in the afternoon. The boxcar

doors were opened, and the doorways framed the loveliest city that most

of the Americans had ever seen. The skyline was intricate and voluptuous

and enchanted and absurd. It looked like a Sunday school picture of

Heaven to Billy Pilgrim.

Somebody behind him in the boxcar said, ‘Oz.’ That was I. That was me.

The only other city I’d ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana.

Every other big city in Germany had been bombed and burned ferociously.

Dresden had not suffered so much as a cracked windowpane. Sirens went

off every day, screamed like hell, and people went down into cellars and

listened to radios there. The planes were always bound for someplace

else-Leipzig, Chemnitz, Plauen, places like that. So it goes.

Steam radiators still whistled cheerily in Dresden. Street-cars clanged.

Telephones rang and were answered. Lights went on and off when switches

were clicked. There were theaters and restaurants. There was a zoo. The

principal enterprises of the city were medicine and food-processing and

the making of cigarettes.

People were going home from work now in the late afternoon. They were

tired.

Eight Dresdeners crossed the steel spaghetti of the railroad yard. They

were wearing new uniforms. They had been sworn into the army the day

before. They were boys and men past middle age, and two veterans who had

been shot to pieces in Russia. Their assignment was to guard one hundred

American prisoners of war, who would work as contract labor. A

grandfather and his grandson were in the squad. The grandfather was an

architect.

The eight were grim as they approached the boxcars containing their

wards. They knew what sick and foolish soldiers they themselves appeared

to be. One of them actually had an artificial leg, and carried not only

a loaded rifle but a cane. Still they were expected to earn obedience

and respect from tall cocky, murderous American infantrymen who had just

come from all the killing of the front.

And then they saw bearded Billy Pilgrim in his blue toga and silver

shoes, with his hands in a muff. He looked at least sixty years old.

Next to Billy was little Paul Lazzaro with a broken arm. He was fizzing

with rabies. Next to Lazzaro was the poor old high school teacher, Edgar

Derby, mournfully pregnant with patriotism and middle age and imaginary

wisdom. And so on.

The eight ridiculous Dresdeners ascertained that these hundred

ridiculous creatures really were American fighting men fresh from the

front. They smiled, and then they laughed. Their terror evaporated.

There was nothing to be afraid of. Here were more crippled human beings,

more fools like themselves. Here was light opera.

So out of the gate of the railroad yard and into the streets of Dresden

marched the light opera. Billy Pilgrim was the star. He led the parade.

Thousands of people were on the sidewalks, going home from work. They

were watery and putty-colored, having eaten mostly potatoes during the

past two years. They had expected no blessings beyond the mildness of

the day. Suddenly-here was fun.

Billy did not meet many of the eyes that found him so entertaining. He

was enchanted by the architecture of the city. Merry amoretti wove

garlands above windows. Roguish fauns and naked nymphs peeked down at

Billy from festooned cornices. Stone monkeys frisked among scrolls and

seashells and bamboo.

Billy, with his memories of the future, knew that the city would be

smashed to smithereens and then burned-in about thirty more days. He

knew, too, that most of the people watching him would soon be dead. So

it goes.

And Billy worked his hands in his muff as he marched. His fingertips,

working there in the hot darkness of the muff, wanted to know what the

two lumps in the lining of the little impresario’s coat were. The

fingertips got inside the lining. They palpated the lumps, the

pea-shaped thing and the horseshoe-shaped thing. The parade had to halt

by a busy corner. The traffic light was red.

There at the comer, in the front rank of pedestrians, was a surgeon who

had been operating all day. He was a civilian, but his posture was

military. He had served in two world wars. The sight of Billy offended

him, especially after he learned from the guards that Billy was an

American. It seemed to Wm that Billy was in abominable taste, supposed

that Billy had gone to a lot of silly trouble to costume himself just

so.

The surgeon spoke English, and he said to Billy, ‘I take it you find war

a very comical thing.’

Billy looked at him vaguely. Billy had lost track momentarily of where

he was or how he had gotten there. He had no idea that people thought he

was clowning. It was Fate, of course, which had costumed him-Fate, and a

feeble will to survive.

‘Did you expect us to laugh?’ the surgeon asked him.

The surgeon was demanding some sort of satisfaction. Billy was

mystified. Billy wanted to be friendly, to help, if he could, but his

resources were meager. His fingers now held the two objects from the

lining of the coat. Billy decided to show the surgeon what they were.

‘You thought we would enjoy being mocked?’ the surgeon said. ‘And do you

feel proud to represent America as you do?’ Billy withdrew a hand from

his muff, held it under the surgeon’s nose. On his palm rested a

two-carat diamond and a partial denture. The denture was an obscene

little artifact-silver and pearl and tangerine. Billy smiled.

The parade pranced, staggered and reeled to the gate of the Dresden

slaughterhouse, and then it went inside. The slaughterhouse wasn’t a

busy place any more. Almost all the hooved animals in Germany had been

killed and eaten and excreted by human beings, mostly soldiers. So it

goes.

The Americans were taken to the fifth building inside the gate. It was a

one-story cement-block cube with sliding doors in front and back. It had

been built as a shelter for pigs about to be butchered. Now it was going

to serve as a home away from home for one hundred American prisoners of

war. There were bunks in there, and two potbellied stoves and a water

tap. Behind it was a latrine, which was a one-rail fence with buckets

under it.

There was a big number over the door of the building. The number was

five. Before the Americans could go inside, their only English-speaking

guard told them to memorize their simple address, in case they got lost

in the big city. Their address was this: ‘Schlachthöf-funf.’ Schlachthöf

meant slaughterhouse. Funf was good old five.

Seven

Billy Pilgrim got onto a chartered airplane in Ilium twenty-five years

after that. He knew he was going to crash, but he didn’t want to make a

fool of himself by saying so. It was supposed to carry Billy and

twenty-eight other optometrists to a convention in Montreal.

His wife, Valencia, was outside, and his father-in-law, Lionel Merble,

was strapped to the seat beside him.

Lionel Merble was a machine. Tralfamadorians, of course, say that every

creature and plant in the Universe is a machine. It amuses them that so

many Earthlings are offended by the idea of being machines.

Outside the plane, the machine named Valencia Merble Pilgrim was eating

a Peter Paul Mound Bar and waving bye-bye.

The plane took off without incident. The moment was structured that way.

There was a barbershop quartet on board. They were optometrists, too.

They called themselves ‘The Febs,’ which was an acronym for ‘Four-eyed

Bastards.’

When the plane was safely aloft, the machine that was Bill’s

father-in-law asked the quartet to sing his favorite song. They knew

what song he meant, and they sang it, and it went like this:

Billy’s father-in-law laughed and laughed at that, and he begged the

quartet to sing the other Polish song he liked so much. So they sang a

song from the Pennsylvania coal mines that began:

Speaking of people from Poland: Billy- Pilgrim accidentally saw a Pole

hanged in public, about three days after Billy got to Dresden. Billy

just happened to be walking to work with some others shortly after

sunrise, and they came to a gallows and a small crowd in front of a

soccer stadium. The Pole was a farm laborer who was being hanged for

having had sexual intercourse with a German woman. So it goes.

Billy, knowing the plane was going to crash pretty soon, closed his

eyes, traveled in time back to 1944. He was back in the forest in

Luxembourg again-with the Three Musketeers. Roland Weary was shaking

him, bonking his head against a tree. ‘You guys go on without me,’ said

Billy Pilgrim.

The barbershop quartet on the airplane was singing ‘Wait Till the Sun

Shines, Nelly,’ when the plane smacked into the top of Sugarbush

Mountain in Vermont. Everybody was killed but Billy and the copilot. So

it goes.

The people who first got to the crash scene were young Austrian ski

instructors from the famous ski resort below. They spoke to each other

in German as they went from body to body. They wore black wind masks

with two holes for their eyes and a red topknot. They looked like

golliwogs, like white people pretending to be black for the laughs they

could get.

Billy had a fractured skull, but he was still conscious. He didn’t know

where he was. His lips were working, and one of the golliwogs put his

ear close to them to hear what might be his dying words.

Billy thought the golliwog had something to do with the Second World

War, and he whispered to him his address: ‘Schlachthöf-funf.’

Billy was brought down Sugarbush Mountain on a toboggan. The golliwogs

controlled it with ropes and yodeled melodiously for right-of-way. Near

the bottom, the trail swooped around the pylons of a chair lift. Billy

looked up at all the young people in bright elastic clothing and

enormous boots and goggles, bombed out of their skulls with snow,

swinging through the sky in yellow chairs. He supposed that they were

part of an amazing new phase of the Second World War. It was all right

with him. Everything was pretty much all right with Billy.

He was taken to a small private hospital. A famous brain surgeon came up

from Boston and operated on him for three hours. Billy was unconscious

for two days after that, and he dreamed millions of things, some of them

true. The true things were time-travel.

One of the true things was his first evening in the slaughterhouse. He

and poor old Edgar Derby were pushing an empty two-wheeled cart down a

dirt lane between empty pens for animals. They were going to a communal

kitchen for supper for all. They were guarded by a sixteen-year-old

German named Werner Gluck. The axles of the cart were greased with the

fat of dead animals. So it goes.

The sun had just gone down, and its afterglow was backlighting the city,

which formed low cliffs around the bucolic void to the idle stockyards.

The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn’t get

to see Dresden do one of the most cheerful things a city is capable of

doing when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one.

There was a broad river to reflect those lights, which would have made

their nighttime winkings very pretty indeed. It was the Elbe.

Werner Gluck, the young guard, was a Dresden boy. He had never been in

the slaughterhouse before, so he wasn’t sure where the kitchen was. He

was tall and weak like Billy, might have been a younger brother of his.

They were, in fact, distant cousins, something they never found out.

Gluck was armed with an incredibly heavy musket, a single-shot museum

piece with an octagonal barrel and a smooth bore. He had fixed his

bayonet. It was like a long knitting needle. It had no blood gutters.

Gluck led the way to a building that he thought might contain the

kitchen, and he opened the sliding doors in its side. There wasn’t a

kitchen in there, though. There was a dressing room adjacent to a

communal shower, and there was a lot of steam. In the steam were about

thirty teen-age girls with no clothes on. They were German refugees from

Breslau, which had been tremendously bombed. They had just arrived in

Dresden, too. Dresden was jammed with refugees.

There those girls were with all their private parts bare, for anybody to

see. And there in the doorway were Gluck and Derby and Pilgrim-the

childish soldier and the poor old high school teacher and the clown in

his toga and silver shoes-staring. The girls screamed. They covered

themselves with their hands and turned their backs and so on, and made

themselves utterly beautiful.

Werner Gluck, who had never seen a naked woman before, closed the door.

Bill had never seen one, either. It was nothing new to Derby.

When the three fools found the communal kitchen, whose main job was to

make lunch for workers in the slaughterhouse, everybody had gone home

but one woman who had been waiting for them impatiently. She was a war

widow. So it goes. She had her hat and coat on. She wanted to go home,

too, even though there wasn’t anybody there. Her white gloves were laid

out side by side on the zinc counter top.

She had two big cans of soup for the Americans. It was simmering over

low fires on the gas range. She had stacks of loaves of black bread,

too.

She asked Gluck if he wasn’t awfully young to be in the army. He

admitted that he was.

She asked Edgar Derby if he wasn’t awfully old to be in the army. He

said he was.

She asked Billy Pilgrim what he was supposed to be. Billy said he didn’t

know. He was just trying to keep warm.

‘All the real soldiers are dead,’ she said. It was true. So it goes.

Another true thing that Billy saw while he was unconscious in Vermont

was the work that he and the others had to do in Dresden during the

month before the city was destroyed. They washed windows and swept

floors and cleaned lavatories and put jars into boxes and sealed

cardboard boxes in a factory that made malt syrup. The syrup was

enriched with vitamins and minerals. The syrup was for pregnant women.

The syrup tasted like thin honey laced with hickory smoke, and everybody

who worked in the factory secretly spooned it all day long. They weren’t

pregnant, but they needed vitamins and minerals, too. Billy didn’t spoon

syrup on his first day at work, but lots of other Americans did.

Billy spooned it on his second day. There were spoons hidden all over

the factory, on rafters, in drawers, behind radiators, and so on. They

had been hidden in haste by persons who had been spooning syrup, who had

heard somebody else coming. Spooning was a crime.

On his second day, Billy was cleaning behind a radiator and he found a

spoon. To his back was a vat of syrup that was cooling. The only other

person who could see Billy and his spoon was poor old Edgar Derby, who

was washing a window outside. The spoon was a tablespoon. Billy thrust

it into the vat, turned it around and around, making a gooey lollipop.

He thrust it into his mouth.

A moment went by, and then every cell in Billy’s body shook him with

ravenous gratitude and applause.

There were diffident raps at the factory window. Derby was out there,

having seen all. He wanted some syrup, too.

So Billy made a lollipop for him. He opened the window. He stuck the

lollipop into poor old Derby’s gaping mouth. A moment passed, and then

Derby burst into tears. Billy closed the window and hid the sticky

spoon. Somebody was coming.

Eight

The Americans in the slaughterhouse had a very interesting visitor two

days before Dresden was destroyed. He was Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an

American who had become a Nazi. Campbell was the one who had written the

monograph about the shabby behavior of American prisoners of war. He

wasn’t doing more research about prisoners now. He had come to the

slaughter house to recruit men for a German military unit called ‘The

Free American Corps.’ Campbell was the inventor and commander of the

unit, which was supposed to fight only on the Russian front.

Campbell was an ordinary looking man, but he was extravagantly costumed

in a uniform of his own design. He wore a white ten-gallon hat and black

cowboy boots decorated with swastikas and stars. He was sheathed in a

blue body stocking which had yellow stripes running from his armpits to

his ankles. His shoulder patch was a silhouette of Abraham Lincoln’s

profile on a field of pale green. He had a broad armband which was red,

with a blue swastika in a circle of white.

He was explaining this armband now in the cement-block hog barn.

Billy Pilgrim had a boiling case of heartburn, since he had been

spooning malt syrup all day long at work. The heartburn brought tears to

his eves, so that his image of Campbell was distorted by jiggling lenses

of salt water.

‘Blue is for the American sky,’ Campbell was saying. ‘White is for the

race that pioneered the continent, drained the swamps and cleared the

forests and built the roads and bridges. Red is for the blood of

American patriots which was shed so gladly in years gone by.’

Campbell’s audience was sleepy. It had worked hard at the syrup factory,

and then it had marched a long way home in the cold. It was skinny and

hollow-eyed. Its skins were beginning to blossom with small sores. So

were its mouths and throats and intestines. The malt syrup it spooned at

the factory contained only a few of the vitamins and minerals every

Earthling needs.

Campbell offered the Americans food now, steaks and mashed potatoes and

gravy and mince pie, if they would join the Free Corps. ‘Once the

Russians are defeated,’ he went on, you will be repatriated through

Switzerland.’

There was no response.

‘You’re going to have to fight the Communists sooner or later,’ said

Campbell. “Why not get it over with now?’

And then it developed that Campbell was not going to go unanswered after

all. Poor old Derby, the doomed high school teacher, lumbered to his

feet for what was probably the finest moment in his life. ‘Mere are

almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic

confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much

the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of

war, after an, is that people are discouraged from being characters. But

old Derby was a character now.

His stance was that of a punch-drunk fighter. His head was down, his

fists were out front, waiting for information and battle plan. Derby

raised his head, called Campbell a snake. He corrected that. He said

that snakes couldn’t help being snakes, and that Campbell, who could

help being what he was, was something much lower than a snake or a

rat-or even a blood-filled tick.

Campbell smiled.

Derby spoke movingly of the American form of government, with freedom

and justice and opportunities and fair play for all. He said there

wasn’t a man there who wouldn’t gladly die for those ideals.

He spoke of the brotherhood between the American and the Russian people,

and how those two nations were going to crush the disease of Nazism,

which wanted to infect the whole world.

The air-raid sirens of Dresden howled mournfully.

The Americans and their guards and Campbell took shelter in an echoing

meat locker which was hollowed in living rock under the slaughterhouse.

There was an iron staircase with iron doors at the top and bottom.

Down in the locker were a few cattle and sheep and pigs, and horses

hanging from iron hooks. So it goes. The locker had empty hooks for

thousands more. It was naturally cool. There was no refrigeration. There

was candlelight. The locker was whitewashed and smelled of carbolic

acid. There were benches along a wall. The Americans went to these,

brushing away flakes of whitewash before they sat down.

Howard W. Campbell. Jr., remained standing, like the guards. He talked

to the guards in excellent German. He had written many popular German

plays and poems in his time, and had married a famous German actress

named Resi North. She was dead now, had been killed while entertaining

troops in the Crimea. So it goes.

Nothing happened that night. It was the next night that about one

hundred and thirty thousand people in Dresden would die. So it goes.

Billy dozed in the meat locker. He found himself engaged again, word for

word, gesture for gesture, in the argument with his daughter with which

this tale begun.

‘Father,’ she said, ‘What are we going to do with you?’

And so on. ‘You know who I could just kill?’ she asked.

‘Who could you kill?’ said Billy.

‘That Kilgore Trout.’

Kilgore Trout was and is a science-fiction writer, of course. Billy has

not only read dozens of books by Trout-he has also become a friend of

Trout, who is a bitter man.

Trout lives in a rented basement in Ilium, about two miles from Billy’s

nice white home. He himself has no idea how many novels he has

written-possibly seventy-five of the things. Not one of them has made

money. So Trout keeps body and soul together as a circulation man for

the Ilium Gazette, manages newspaper delivery boys, bullies and flatters

and cheats little kids.

Billy met him for the first time in 1964. Billy drove his Cadillac down

a back alley in Ilium and he found his way blocked by dozens of boys and

their bicycles. A meeting was in progress. The boys were harangued by a

man in a full beard. He was cowardly and dangerous, and obviously very

good at his job. Trout was sixty-two years old back then. He was telling

the kids to get off their dead butts and get their daily customers to

subscribe to the fucking Sunday edition, too. He said that whoever sold

the most Sunday subscriptions during the next two months would get a

free trip for himself and his parents to ‘s fucking Vineyard for a week,

all expenses paid.

And so on.

One of the newspaper boys was actually a newspaper girl. She was

electrified.

Trout’s paranoid face was terribly familiar to Billy, who had seen it on

the jackets of so many books. But., coming upon that face suddenly in a

home-town alley, Billy could not guess why the face was familiar. Billy

thought maybe he had known this cracked messiah in Dresden somewhere.

Trout certainly looked like a prisoner of war.

And then the newspaper girl held up her hand. ‘Mr. Trout,’ she said, ‘if

I win, can I take my sister, too?’

‘Hell no,’ said Kilgore Trout. ‘You think money grows on trees?’

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had

twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its

fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other

around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

So it goes.

Billy Pilgrim parked his Cadillac in the alley, and waited for the

meeting to end. When the meeting broke up, there was still one boy Trout

had to deal with. The boy wanted to quit because the work was so hard

and the hours were so long and the pay was so small. Trout was

concerned, because, if the boy really quit, Trout would have to deliver

the boy’s route himself, until he could find another sucker.

‘What are you?’ Trout asked the boy scornfully. ‘Some kind of gutless

wonder?’

This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was

about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis

was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in

1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied

gasoline on human beings.

It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had

no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what

was happening to the people on the ground.

Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and

dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him

that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis

unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the

human race.

Trout lost his argument with the boy who wanted to quit. He told the boy

about all the millionaires who had carried newspapers as boys, and the

boy replied: ‘Yeah-but I bet they quit after a week, it’s such a royal

screwing.’

And the boy left his full newspaper bag at Trout’s feet, with the

customer book on top. It was up to Trout to deliver these papers. He

didn’t have a car. He didn’t even have a bicycle, and he was scared to

death of dogs.

Somewhere a big dog barked.

As Trout lugubriously slung the bag from his shoulder, Billy Pilgrim

approached him.

‘Mr. Trout-’

‘Yes?’

“Are-are you Kilgore Trout?

‘Yes.’ Trout supposed that Billy had some complaint about the way his

newspapers were being delivered. He did not think of himself as a writer

for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of

himself in this way.

‘The-the writer?’ said Billy.

‘The what?’

Billy was certain that he had made a mistake. ‘There’s a writer named

Kilgore Trout.’

‘There is?’ Trout looked foolish and dazed.

‘You never heard of him?’

Trout shook his head. ‘Nobody-nobody ever did.’

Billy helped Trout deliver his papers, driving him from house to house

in the Cadillac. Billy was the responsible one, finding the houses,

checking them off. Trout’s mind was blown. He had never met a fan

before, and Billy was such an avid fan.

Trout told him that he had never seen a book of his advertised,

reviewed, or on sale. ‘All these years’ he said, ‘I’ve been opening the

window and making love to the world.’

‘You must surely have gotten letters,’ said Billy. ‘I’ve felt like

writing you letters many times.’

Trout held up a single finger. ‘One.’

‘Was it enthusiastic?’

‘It was insane. The writer said I should be President of the World.’

It turned out that the person who had written this letter was Elliot

Rosewater, Billy’s friend in the veterans’ hospital near Lake Placid.

Billy told Trout about Rosewater.

‘My God-I thought he was about fourteen years old,’ said Trout.

“A full grown man-a captain in the war.’

‘The writes like a fourteen-year-old,’ said Kilgore Trout.

Billy invited Trout to his eighteenth wedding anniversary which was only

two days hence. Now the party was in progress.

Trout was in Billy’s dining room, gobbling canapés. He was talking with

a mouthful of Philadelphia cream cheese and salmon roe to an

optometrist’s wife. Everybody at the party was associated with optometry

in some way, except Trout. And he alone was without glasses. He was

making a great hit. Everybody was ed to have a real author at the party,

even though they had never read his books.

Trout was talking to a Maggie White, who had given up being a dental

assistant to become a homemaker for an optometrist. She was very pretty.

The last book she had read was Ivanhoe.

Billy Pilgrim stood nearby, listening. He was palpating something in his

pocket. It was a present he was about to give his Wife, a white satin

box containing a star sapphire cocktail ring. The ring was worth eight

hundred dollars.

The adulation that Trout was receiving, mindless and illiterate as it

was, affected Trout like marijuana. He was happy and loud and impudent.

‘I’m afraid I don’t read as much as I ought to,’ said Maggie.

‘We’re all afraid of something,’ Trout replied. ‘I’m afraid of cancer

and rats and Doberman pinschers.’

‘I should know, but I don’t, so I have to ask,’ said Maggie, ‘what’s the

most famous thing you ever wrote?’

‘It was about a funeral for a great French chef.’

‘That sounds interesting.’

‘All the great chefs in the world are there. It’s a beautiful ceremony.’

Trout was making this up as he went along. ‘Just before the casket is

closed, the mourners sprinkle parsley and paprika on the deceased.’ So

it goes.

‘Did that really happen?’ said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but

a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to

fill her up with babies right away. She hadn’t had even one baby yet.

She used birth control.

‘Of course it happened,’ Trout told her. ‘If I wrote something that

hadn’t really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail.

That’s fraud!’

Maggie believed him. ‘I’d never thought about that before.’

‘Think about it now.’

‘It’s like advertising. You have to tell the truth in advertising, or

you get in trouble.’

‘Exactly. The same body of laws applies.’

‘Do you think you might put us in a book sometime?’

‘I put everything that happens to me in books.’

‘I guess I better be careful what I say.’

‘That’s right. And I’m not the only one who’s listening. God is

listening, too. And on Judgment Day he’s going to tell you all the

things you said and did. If it turns out they’re bad things instead of

good things, that’s too bad for you, because you’ll bum forever and

ever. The burning never stops hurting.’

Poor Maggie turned gray. She believed that too, and was petrified.

Kilgore Trout laughed uproariously. A salmon egg flew out of his mouth

and landed in Maggie’s cleavage.

Now an optometrist called for attention. He proposed a toast to Billy

and Valencia, whose anniversary it was. According to plan, the

barbershop quartet of optometrists, ‘The Febs,’ sang while people drank

and Billy and Valencia put their arms around each other, just glowed.

Everybody’s eyes were shining. The song was ‘That Old Gang of Mine.’

Gee, that song went, but I’d give the world to see that old gang of

mine. And so on. A little later it said. So long forever, old fellows

and gals, so long forever old sweethearts and pals-God bless ‘em-And so

on.

Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the

occasion. He had never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he

missed one anyway, as the quartet made slow, agonized experiments with

chords-chords intentionally sour, sourer still, unbearably sour, and

then a chord that was suffocatingly sweet, and then some sour ones

again. Billy had powerful psychosomatic responses to the changing

chords. His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became

grotesque, as though he really were being stretched on the torture

engine called the rack.

He looked so peculiar that several people commented on it solicitously

when the song was done. They thought he might have been having a heart

attack, and Billy seemed to confirm this by going to a chair and sitting

down haggardly.

There was silence.

‘Oh my God,’ said Valencia, leaning over him, ‘Billy-are you all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘You look so awful.’

‘Really-I’m O.K.’ And he was, too, except that he could find no

explanation for why the song had affected him so grotesquely. He had

supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof

that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not

imagine what it was.

People drifted away now, seeing the color return to Billy’s cheeks,

seeing him smile. Valencia stayed with him, and Kilgore Trout, who had

been on the fringe of the crowd, came closer, interested, shrewd.

‘You looked as though you’d seen a ghost,’ said Valencia.

‘No,’ said Billy. He hadn’t seen anything but what was really before

him-the faces of the four singers, those four ordinary men, cow-eyed and

mindless and anguished as they went from sweetness to sourness to

sweetness again.

‘Can I make a guess?’ said Kilgore Trout ‘You saw through a time

window.’

‘A what?’ said Valencia.

‘He suddenly saw the past or the future. Am I right?’

‘No,’ said Billy Pilgrim. He got up, put a hand into his pocket, found

the box containing the ring in there. He took out the box, gave it

absently to Valencia. He had meant to give it to her at the end of the

song, while everybody was watching. Only Kilgore Trout was there to see.

‘For me?’ said Valencia.

‘Yes’

“Oh my God, she said. Then she said it louder, so other people heard.

They gathered around, and she opened it, and she almost screamed when

she saw the sapphire with a star in it. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. She gave

Billy a big kiss. She said, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

There was a lot of talk about what wonderful jewelry Billy had given to

Valencia over the years. ‘My God,’ said Maggie White, ‘she’s already got

the biggest diamond I ever saw outside of a movie.’ She was talking

about the diamond Billy had brought back from the war.

The partial denture he had found inside his little impresario’s coat,

incidentally, was in his cufflinks box in his dresser drawer. Billy had

a wonderful collection of cufflinks. It was the custom of the family to

give him cufflinks on every Father’s Day. He was wearing Father’s Day

cufflinks now. They had cost over one hundred dollars. They were made

out of ancient Roman coins. He had one pair of cufflinks upstairs which

were little roulette wheels that really worked. He had another pair

which had a real thermometer in one and a real compass in the other.

Billy now moved about the party-outwardly normal. Kilgore Trout was

shadowing him, keen to know what Billy had suspected or seen. Most of

Trout’s novels, after all, dealt with time warps and extrasensory

perception and other unexpected things. Trout believed in things like

that, was greedy to have their existence proved.

‘You ever put a full-length mirror on the floor, and then have a dog

stand on it?’ Trout asked Billy.

‘No.’

‘The dog will look down, and all of a sudden he’ll realize there’s

nothing under him. He thinks he’s standing on thin air. He’ll jump a

mile.’

‘He will?’

That’s how you looked-as though you all of a sudden realized you were

standing on thin air.’

The barbershop quartet sang again. Billy was emotionally racked again.

The experience was definitely associated with those four men and not

what they sang.

Here is what they sang, while Billy was pulled apart inside:

And so on.

Billy fled upstairs in his nice white home.

Trout would have come upstairs with him if Billy hadn’t told him not to.

Then Billy went into the upstairs bathroom, which was dark He closed and

locked the door. He left it dark, and gradually became aware that he was

not alone. His son was in there.

‘Dad?’ his son said in the dark. Robert, the future Green Beret, was

seventeen then. Billy liked him, but didn’t know him very well. Billy

couldn’t help suspecting that there wasn’t much to know about Robert.

Billy flicked on the light. Robert was sitting on the toilet with his

pajama bottoms around his ankles. He was wearing an electric guitar,

slung around his neck on a strap. He had just bought the guitar that

day. He couldn’t play it yet and, in fact, never learned to play it. It

was a nacreous pink.

‘Hello, son,’ said Billy Pilgrim.

Billy went into his bedroom, even though there were guests to be

entertained downstairs. He lay down on his bed, turned on the Magic

Fingers. The mattress trembled, drove a dog out from under the bed. The

dog was Spot. Good old Spot was still alive in those days. Spot lay down

again in a corner.

Billy thought hard about the effect the quartet had had on him, and then

found an association with an experience he had had long ago. He did not

travel in time to the experience. He remembered it shimmeringly-as

follows:

He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed.

There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of

high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was

a very safe shelter. All that happened down there was an occasional

shower of calcimine. The Americans and four of their guards and a few

dressed carcasses were down there, and nobody else. The rest of the

guards had, before the raid began, gone to the comforts of their own

homes in Dresden. They were all being killed with their families.

So it goes.

The girls that Billy had seen naked were all being killed, too, in a

much shallower shelter in another part of the stockyards.

So it goes.

A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it

was like outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other

guards. There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The

one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.

It wasn’t safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When

the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with

smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon

now nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the

neighborhood was dead.

So it goes.

The guards drew together instinctively, rolled their eyes. They

experimented with one expression and then another, said nothing, though

their mouths were often open. They looked like a silent film of a

barbershop quartet.

‘So long forever,’ they might have been singing, ‘old fellows and pals;

So long forever, old sweethearts and pals-God bless ‘em-’

‘Tell me a story,’ Montana Wildhack said to Billy Pilgrim in the

Tralfamadorian zoo one time. They were in bed side by side. They had

privacy. The canopy covered the dome. Montana was six months pregnant

now, big and rosy, lazily demanding small favors from Billy from time to

time. She couldn’t send Billy out for ice cream or strawberries, since

the atmosphere outside the dome was cyanide, and the nearest

strawberries and ice cream were millions of light years away.

She could send him to the refrigerator, which was decorated with the

blank couple on the bicycle built for two-or, as now she could wheedle,

‘Tell me a story, Billy boy.’

‘Dresden was destroyed on the night of February 13, 1945,’ Billy Pilgrim

began. ‘We came out of our shelter the next day.’ He told Montana about

the four guards who, in their astonishment and grief, resembled a

barber-shop quartet. He told her about the stockyards with all the

fenceposts gone, with roofs and windows gone-told her about seeing

little logs lying around. These were people who had been caught in the

firestorm. So it goes.

Billy told her what had happened to the buildings that used to form

cliffs around the stockyards. They had collapsed. Their wood had been

consumed, and their stones had crashed down, had tumbled against one

another until they locked at last in low and graceful curves.

‘It was like the moon,’ said Billy Pilgrim.

The guards told the Americans to form in ranks of four, which they did.

Then they had them march back to the hog barn which had, been their

home. Its wars still stood, but its windows and roof were gone, and

there was nothing inside but ashes and dollops of melted glass. It was

realized then that there was no food or water, and that the survivors,

if they were going to continue to survive, were going to have to climb

over curve after curve on the face of the moon.

Which they did.

The curves were smooth only when seen from a distance. The people

climbing them learned that they were treacherous, jagged things-hot to

the touch, often unstable eager, should certain important rocks be

disturbed, to tumble some more, to form lower, more solid curves.

Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing

appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the

city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that

anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to

be no moon men at all.

American fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything was

moving. They saw Billy and the rest moving down there. The planes

sprayed them with machine-gun bullets, but the bullets missed. Then they

saw some other people moving down by the riverside and they shot at

them. They hit some of them. So it goes.

The idea was to hasten the end of the war.

Billy’s story ended very curiously in a suburb untouched by fire and

explosions. The guards and the Americans came at nightfall to an inn

which was open for business. There was candlelight. There were fires in

three fireplaces downstairs. There were empty tables and chairs waiting

for anyone who might come, and empty beds with covers turned down

upstairs.

There was a blind innkeeper and his sighted wife, who was the cook, and

their two young daughters, who worked as waitresses and maids. This

family knew that Dresden was gone. Those with eyes had seen it bum and

bum, understood that they were on the edge of a desert now. Still-they

had opened for business, had polished the glasses and wound the clocks

and stirred the fires, and waited and waited to see who would come.

There was no great flow of refugees from Dresden. The clocks ticked on,

the crackled, the translucent candles dripped. And then there was a

knock on the door, and in came four guards and one hundred American

prisoners of war.

The innkeeper asked the guards if they had come from the city.

‘Yes.’

Are there more people coming?’

And the guards said that, on the difficult route they had chosen, they

had not seen another living soul.

The blind innkeeper said that the Americans could sleep in his stable

that night, and he gave them soup and ersatz coffee and a little beer.

Then he came out to the stable to listen to them bedding down in the

straw.

‘Good night, Americans,’ he said in German. ‘Sleep well.’

Nine

Here is how Billy Pilgrim lost his wife, Valencia.

He was unconscious in the hospital in Vermont, after the airplane crash

on Sugarbush Mountain, and Valencia, having heard about the crash, was

driving from Ilium to the hospital in the family Cadillac El Dorado

Coupe de Ville. Valencia was hysterical, because she had been told

frankly that Billy might die, or that, if he lived, he might be a

vegetable.

Valencia adored Billy. She was crying and yelping so hard as she drove

that she missed the correct turnoff from the throughway. She applied her

power brakes, and a Mercedes slammed into her from behind. Nobody was

hurt, thank God, because both drivers were wearing seat belts. Thank

God, thank God. The Mercedes lost only a headlight. But the rear end of

the Cadillac was a body-and-fender man’s wet dream. The trunk and

fenders were collapsed. The gaping trunk looked like the mouth of a

village idiot who ‘was explaining that he didn’t know anything about

anything. The fenders shrugged. The bumper was at a high port arms.

‘Reagan for President!’ a sticker on the bumper said. The back window

was veined with cracks. The exhaust system rested on the pavement.

The driver of the Mercedes got out and went to Valencia, to find out if

she was all right. She blabbed hysterically about Billy and the airplane

crash, and then she put her car in gear and crossed the median divider,

leaving her exhaust system behind.

When she arrived at the hospital, people rushed to the windows to see

what all the noise was. The Cadillac, with both mufflers gone, sounded

like a heavy bomber coming in on a wing and a prayer. Valencia turned

off the engine, but then she slumped against the steering wheel, and the

horn brayed steadily. A doctor and a nurse ran out to find out what the

trouble was. Poor Valencia was unconscious, overcome by carbon monoxide.

She was a heavenly azure.

One hour later she was dead. So it goes.

Billy knew nothing about it. He, dreamed on, and traveled in time and so

forth. The hospital was so crowded that Billy couldn’t have a room to

himself. He shared a room with a Harvard history professor named Bertram

Copeland Rumfoord. Rumfoord didn’t have to look at Billy, because Billy

was surrounded by white linen screens on rubber wheels. But Rumfoord

could hear Billy talking to himself from time to time.

Rumfoord’s left leg was in traction. He had broken it while skiing. He

was seventy years old, but had the body and spirit of a man half that

age. He had been honeymooning with his fifth wife when he broke his leg.

Her name was Lily. Lily was twenty-three.

Just about the time poor Valencia was pronounced dead, Lily came into

Billy’s and Rumfoord’s room with an armload of books. Rumfoord had sent

her down to Boston to get them. He was working on a one-volume history

of the United States Army Air Corps in the Second World War. The books

were about bombings and sky battles that had happened before Lily was

even born.

‘You guys go on without me,’ said Billy Pilgrim deliriously, as pretty

little Lily came in. She had been an a-go-go girl when Rumfoord saw her

and resolved to make her his own. She was a high school dropout. Her

I.Q. was 103. ‘He scares me,’ she whispered to her husband about Billy

Pilgrim.

‘He bores the hell out of me!’ Rumfoord replied boomingly. ‘All he does

in his sleep is quit and surrender and apologize and ask to be left

alone.’ Rumfoord was a retired brigadier general in the Air Force

Reserve, the official Air Force Historian, a fun professor, the author

of twenty-six books, a multimillionaire since birth, and one of the

great competitive sailors of all time. His most popular book was about

sex and strenuous athletics for men over sixty-five. Now he quoted

Theodore Roosevelt whom he resembled a lot:

“‘I could carve a better man out of a banana.”’

One of the things Rumfoord had told Lily to get in Boston was a copy of

President Harry S. Truman’s announcement to the world that an atomic

bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. She had a Xerox of it, and Rumfoord

asked her if she had read it.

‘No.’ She didn’t read well, which was one of the reasons she had dropped

out of high school.

Rumfoord ordered her to sit down and read the Truman statement now. He

didn’t know that she couldn’t read much. He knew very little about her,

except that she was one more public demonstration that he was a

superman.

So Lily sat down and pretended to read the Truman thing, which went like

this:

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an

important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons

of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the

British ‘Grand Slam’ which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the

history of warfare.

The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been

repaid many-fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now

added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the

growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are

now in production, and even more powerful forms are in development.

It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the

universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed

against those who brought war to the Far East.

Before 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was

theoretically possible to release atomic energy. But nobody knew any

practical method of doing it. By 1942, however, we knew that the Germans

were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to all the

other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world. But

they failed. We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans got the

V-1’s and V-2’s late and in limited quantities and even more grateful

that they did not get the atomic bomb at all.

The battle of the laboratories held-fateful risks for us as well as the

battles of the air, land and sea, and we have now won the battle of the

laboratories as we have won the other battles.

We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every

productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city, said

Harry Truman. We shall destroy their docks, their factories and their

communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy

Japan’s power to make war. It was to spare-

And so on.

One of the books that Lily had brought Rumfoord was The Destruction of

Dresden by an Englishman named David Irving. It was an American edition,

published by Holt., Rinehart and Winston in 1964. What Rumfoord wanted

from it were. portions of the forewords by his friends Ira C. Eaker,

Lieutenant General, U.S.A.F., retired, and British Air Marshal Sir

Robert Saundby, K.C.B., K.B.E., M.C., D.F.C., A.F.C.

I find it difficult to understand Englishmen or Americans .who weep

about enemy civilians who were killed but who have not shed a tear for

our gallant crews lost in combat with a cruel enemy, wrote his friend

General Eaker in part. I think it would have been well for Mr. Irving to

have remembered, when he was drawing the frightful picture of the

civilian killed at Dresden, that V-1’s and V-2’s were at that very time

failing on England, killing civilian men, women and children

indiscriminately, as they were designed and launched to do. It might be

well to remember Buchenwald and Coventry, too

Eaker’s foreword ended this way

I deeply regret that British and U.S. bombers killed 135,000 people in

the attack on Dresden, but I remember who started the last war and I

regret even more the -loss of more than 5,000,000, Allied lives in the

necessary effort to completely defeat and utterly destroy nazism.

So it goes.

What Air Marshal Saundby said, among other things, was this

That the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. That it

was really a military necessity few, after reading this book, will

believe. It was one of those terrible things that sometimes happen in

wartime, brought about by an unfortunate combination of circumstances.

Those who approved it were neither wicked no?, cruel, though it may well

be that they were too remote from the harsh realities of war to

understand fully the appalling destructive power of air bombardment in

the spring of 1945

The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could

achieve their aim., war would become tolerable and decent. They would do

well to read this book and ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000

people died as the result of an at attack with conventional weapons. On

the night of March 9^(th), 1945, an air attack on Tokyo by American

heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the

death of 83,793 people. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71,379

people.

So it goes.

‘If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming,’ said Billy Pilgrim behind his white

linen screens, ‘just ask for Wild Bob.’

Lily Rumfoord shuddered, went on pretending to read the Harry Truman

thing.

Billy’s daughter Barbara came in later that day. She was all doped up,

had the same glassy-eyed look that poor old Edgar Derby wore just before

he was shot in Dresden. Doctors had given her pills so she could

continue to function, even though her father was broken and her mother

was dead.

So it goes.

She was accompanied by a doctor and a nurse. Her brother Robert was

flying home from a battlefield in Vietnam. ‘Daddy,’ she said

tentatively. ‘Daddy? ’

But Billy was ten years away, back in 1958. He was examining the eyes of

a young male Mongolian idiot in order to prescribe corrective lenses.

The idiot’s mother was there, acting as an interpreter.

‘How many dots do you see?’ Billy Pilgrim asked him.

And then Billy traveled in time to when he was sixteen years old, in the

waiting room of a doctor. Billy had an infected thumb. There was only

one other patient waiting-an old, old man. The old man was in agony

because of gas. He farted tremendously, and then he belched.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to Billy. Then he did it again. ‘Oh God he said, ‘I

knew it was going to be bad getting old.’ He shook his head. ‘I didn’t

know it was going to be this bad.’

Billy Pilgrim opened his eyes in the hospital in Vermont, did not know

where he was. Watching him was his son Robert. Robert was wearing the

uniform of the famous Green Berets. Robert’s hair was short, was

wheat-colored bristles. Robert was clean and neat. He was decorated with

a Purple Heart and a Silver Star and a Bronze Star with two clusters.

This was a boy who had flunked out of high school, who had been an

alcoholic at sixteen, who had run with a rotten bunch of kids, who had

been arrested for tipping over hundreds of tombstones in a Catholic

cemetery one time. He was all straightened out now. His posture was

wonderful and his shoes were shined and his trousers were pressed, and

he was a leader of men.

‘Dad?’

Billy Pilgrim closed his eyes again.

Billy had to miss his wife’s funeral because he was still so sick. He

was conscious, though, while Valencia was being put into the ground in

Ilium. Billy hadn’t said much since regaining consciousness, hadn’t

responded very elaborately to the news of Valencia’s death and Robert’s

coming home from the war and so on-so it was generally believed that he

was a vegetable. There was talk of performing an operation on him later,

one which might improve the circulation of blood to his brain.

Actually, Billy’s outward listlessness was a screen. The listlessness

concealed a mind which was fizzing and flashing thrillingly. It was

preparing letters and lectures about the flying saucers, the

negligibility of death and the true nature of time.

Professor Rumfoord said frightful things about Billy within Billy’s

hearing, confident that Billy no longer had any brain at all. ‘Why don’t

they let him die?’ he asked Lily.

‘I don’t know, she said.

‘That’s not a human being anymore. Doctors are for human beings. They

should turn him over to a veterinarian or a tree surgeon. They’d know

what to do. Look at him! That’s life, according to the medical

profession. Isn’t life wonderful?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lily.

Rumfoord talked to Lily about the bombing of Dresden one time, and Billy

heard it all. Rumfoord had a problem about Dresden. His one-volume

history of the Army Air Force in the Second World War was supposed to be

a readable condensation of the twenty-seven-volume Official History of

the Army Air Force in World War Two. The thing was, though, there was

almost nothing in the twenty-seven volumes about the Dresden raid, even

though it had been such a howling success. The extent of the success had

been kept a secret for many years after the war-a secret from the

American people. It was no secret from the Germans, of course, or from

the Russians, who occupied Dresden after the war, who are in Dresden

still.

‘Americans have finally heard about Dresden.,’ said Rumfoord,

twenty-three years after the raid. ‘A lot of them know now how much

worse it was than Hiroshima. So I’ve got to put something about it in my

book. From the official Air Force standpoint., it’ll all be new.’

‘Why would they keep it a secret so long?’ said Lily.

‘For fear that a lot of bleeding hearts’ said Rumfoord, ‘might not think

it was such a wonderful thing to do.’

It was now that Billy Pilgrim spoke up intelligently. ‘I was there’ he

said.

It was difficult for Rumfoord to take Billy seriously, since Rumfoord,

had so long considered Billy a repulsive non-person who would be much

better off dead. Now, with Billy speaking clearly and to the point,

Rumfoord’s ears wanted to treat the words as a foreign language that was

not worth learning. did he say?’ said Rumfoord.

Lily had to serve as an ‘interpreter. ‘He said he was there.’ she

explained.

‘He was where?

‘I don’t know,’ said Lily. ‘Where were you?’ she asked Billy.

‘Dresden’ said Billy.

‘Dresden,’ Lily told Rumfoord.

‘He’s simply echoing things we say,’ said Rumfoord.

‘Oh, ‘ said Lily.

‘He’s got echolalia now.’

‘Oh.’

Echolalia is a mental disease which makes people immediately repeat

things that well people around them say. But Billy didn’t really have

it. Rumfoord simply insisted, for his own comfort, that Billy had it.

Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner: that an inconvenient person,

one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was

suffering from a repulsive disease.

Rumfoord went on insisting for several hours that Billy had

echolalia-told nurses and a doctor that Billy had echolalia now. Some

experiments were performed on Billy. Doctors and nurses tried to get

Billy to echo something, but Billy wouldn’t make a sound for them.

‘He isn’t doing it now,’ said Rumfoord peevishly. ‘The minute you go

away, he’ll start doing it again.’

Nobody took Rumfoord’s diagnosis seriously. The staff thought Rumfoord

was a hateful old man, conceited and cruel. He often said to them, in

one way or another, that people who were weak deserved to die. Whereas

the staff, of course, was devoted to the idea that weak people should be

helped as much as possible, that nobody should die.

There in the hospital, Billy was having an adventure very common among

people without power in time of war: He was trying to prove to a

wilfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to hear and see.

He kept silent until the lights went’ out at night, and then, when there

had been a long silence containing nothing to echo, he said to Rumfoord,

‘I was in Dresden when it was bombed. I was a prisoner of war.’ Rumfoord

sighed impatiently.

‘Word of honor.,’ said Billy Pilgrim. ‘Do you believe me?’

‘Must we talk about it now?’ said Rumfoord. He had heard. He didn’t

believe.

‘We don’t ever have to talk about it,’ said Billy. ‘I just want you to

know: I was there.’

Nothing more was said about Dresden that night, and Billy closed his

eyes, traveled in time to a May afternoon, two days after the end of the

Second World War in Europe. Billy and five other American prisoners were

riding in a coffin-shaped green wagon, which they had found abandoned

complete with two horses, in a suburb of Dresden. Now they were being

drawn by the clop-clop-clopping horses down narrow lanes which had been

cleared through the moonlike ruins. They were going back to the

slaughterhouse for souvenirs of the war. Billy was reminded of the

sounds of milkmen’s horses early in the morning in Ilium, when he was a

boy.

Billy sat in the back of the jiggling coffin. His head was tilted back

and his nostrils were flaring. He was happy. He was warm. There was food

in the wagon, and wine-and a camera, and a stamp collection, and a

stuffed owl, and a mantel clock that ran on changes of barometric

pressure. The Americans had gone into empty houses in the suburb where

they had been imprisoned, and they had taken these and many other

things.

The owners, hearing that the Russians were coming, killing and robbing

and raping and burning, had fled.

But the Russians hadn’t come yet, even two days after the war. It was

peaceful in the ruins. Billy saw only one other person on the way to the

slaughterhouse. It was an old man pushing a baby buggy. In the buggy

were pots and cups and an umbrella frame, and other things he had found.

Billy stayed in the wagon when it reached the slaughterhouse, sunning

himself. The others went looking for souvenirs. Later on in life, the

Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments

of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones-to stare only at pretty

things as eternity failed to go by. If this sort of selectivity had been

possible for Billy, he might have chosen as his happiest moment his

sun-drenched snooze in the back of the wagon.

Billy Pilgrim was armed as he snoozed. It was the first time he had been

armed since basic training. His companions had insisted that he arm

himself, since God only knew what sorts of killers might be in burrows

on the face of the moon-wild dogs, packs of rats fattened on corpses,

escaped maniacs and murderers, soldiers who would never quit killing

until they themselves were killed.

Billy had a tremendous cavalry pistol in his belt. It was a relic of the

First World War. It had a ring in its butt. It was loaded with bullets

the size of robins’ eggs. Billy had found it in the bedside table in a

house. That was one of the things about the end of the war: Absolutely

anybody who wanted a weapon could have one. They were lying all around.

Billy had a saber, too. It was a Luftwaffe ceremonial saber. Its hilt

was stamped with a screaming eagle. The eagle was carrying a swastika

and looking down. Billy found it stuck into a telephone pole. He had

pulled it out of the pole as the wagon went by.

Now his snoozing became shallower as be heard a man and a woman speaking

German in pitying tones. The speakers were commiserating with somebody

lyrically. Before Billy opened his eyes, it seemed to him that the tones

might have been those used by the friends of Jesus when they took His

ruined body down from His cross. So it goes.

Billy opened his eyes. A middle-aged man and wife were crooning to the

horses. They were noticing what the Americans had not noticed-that the

horses’ mouths were bleeding, gashed by the bits, that the horses’

hooves were broken, so that every step meant agony, that the horses were

insane with thirst. The Americans had treated their form of

transportation as though it were no more sensitive than a six-cylinder

Chevrolet.

These two horse pitiers moved back along the wagon to where they could

gaze in patronizing reproach at Billy-at Billy Pilgrim, who was so long

and weak, so ridiculous in his azure toga and silver shoes. They weren’t

afraid of him. They weren’t afraid of anything. They were doctors, both

obstetricians. They had been delivering babies until the hospitals were

all burned down. Now they were picnicking near where their apartment

used to be.

The woman was softly beautiful, translucent from having eaten potatoes

for so long. The man wore a business suit, necktie and all. Potatoes had

made him gaunt. He was as tall as Billy, wore steel-rimmed tri-focals.

This couple, so involved with babies, had never reproduced themselves,

though they could have. This was an interesting comment on the whole

idea of reproduction.

They had nine languages between them. They tried Polish on Billy Pilgrim

first, since he was dressed so clownishly, since the wretched Poles were

the involuntary clowns of the Second World War.

Billy asked them in English what it was they wanted, and they at once

scolded him in English for the condition of the horses. They made Billy

get out of the wagon and come look at the horses. When Billy saw the

condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn’t

cried about anything else in the war.

Later on, as a middle-aged optometrist, he would weep quietly and

privately sometimes, but never make loud boo-hoo-ing noises.

Which is why the epigraph of this book is the quatrain from the famous

Christmas carol. Billy cried very little, though he often saw things

worth crying about, and in that respect, at least, he resembled the

Christ of the Carol:

Billy traveled in time back to the hospital in Vermont. Breakfast had

been eaten and cleared away and Professor Rumfoord was reluctantly

becoming interested in Billy as a human being. Rumfoord questioned Billy

gruffly, satisfied himself that Billy really had been in Dresden. He

asked Billy what it had been like, and Billy told him about the horses

and the couple picnicking on the moon.

The story ended this way,. Billy and the doctors unharnessed the horses,

but the horses wouldn’t go anywhere. Their feet hurt too much. And then

Russians came on motorcycles, and they arrested everybody but the

horses.

Two days after that, Billy was turned over to the Americans, who shipped

him home on a very slow freighter called the Lucretia A. Mott. Lucretia

A. Mott was a famous American suffragette. She was dead. So it goes.

‘It had to be done,’ Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of

Dresden.

‘I know,’ said Billy.

‘That’s war.’

‘I know. I’m not complaining.’

‘It must have been hell on the ground.’

‘It was,’ said Billy Pilgrim.

Pity the men who had to do it.’

“I do.’

‘You must have had mixed feelings, there on the ground.’

“It was all right.,’ said Billy. ‘Everything is all right, and everybody

has to do exactly what he does. -I learned that on Tralfamadore.’

Billy Pilgrim’s daughter took him home later that day, put him to bed in

his house, turned the Magic Fingers on. There was a practical nurse

there. Billy wasn’t supposed to work or even leave the house for a

while, at least. He was under observation.

But Billy sneaked out while the nurse wasn’t watching and he drove to

New York City, where he hoped to appear on television. He was going to

tell the world about the lessons of Tralfamadore.

Billy Pilgrim checked into the Royalton Hotel on Forty-fourth Street in

New York. He by chance was given a room which had once been the home of

George Jean Nathan, the critic and editor. Nathan, according to the

Earthling concept of time, had died back in 1958. According to the

Tralfamadorian concept, of course. Nathan was still alive somewhere and

always would be.

The room was small and simple, except that it was on the top floor, and

had French doors which opened onto a terrace as large as the room. And

beyond the parapet of the terrace was the air space over Forty-fourth

Street. Billy now leaned over that parapet, looked down at all the

people moving hither and yon. They were jerky little scissors. They were

a lot of fun.

It was a chilly night, and Billy came indoors after a while, closed the

French doors. Closing those doors reminded him of his honeymoon. There

had been French doors on the Cape Ann love nest of his honeymoon, still

were, always would be.

Billy turned on his television set checking its channel selector around

and around. He was looking for programs on which he might be allowed to

appear. But it was too early in the evening for programs that allowed

people with peculiar opinions to speak out. It was only a little after

eight o’clock, so all the shows were about silliness or murder. So it

goes.

Billy left his room, went down the slow elevator, walked over to Times

Square, looked into the window of a tawdry bookstore. In the window were

hundreds of books about fucking and buggery and murder, and a street

guide to New York City, and a model of the Statue of Liberty with a

thermometer on it. Also in the window, speckled with soot and fly shit,

were four paperback novels by Billy’s friend, Kilgore Trout.

The news of the day, meanwhile, was being written in a ribbon of lights

on a building to Billy’s back. The window reflected the news. It was

about power and sports and anger and death. So it goes.

Billy went into the bookstore.

A sign in there said that adults only were allowed in the back. There

were peep shows in the back that showed movies of young women and men

with no clothes on. It cost a quarter to look into a machine for one

minute. There were still photographs of naked young people for sale back

there, too. You could take those home. The stills were a lot more

Tralfamadorian than the movies, since you could look at them whenever

you wanted to, and they wouldn’t change. Twenty years in the future,

those girls would still be young, would still be smiling or smoldering

or simply looking stupid, with their legs wide open. Some of them were

eating lollipops or bananas. They would still be eating those. And the

peckers of the young men would still be semi-erect, and their muscles

would be bulging like cannonballs.

But Billy Pilgrim wasn’t beguiled by the back of the store. He was

thrilled by the Kilgore Trout novels in the front. The tides were all

new to him, or he thought they were. Now he opened one. It seemed all

right for him to do that. Everybody else in the store was pawing things.

The name of the book was The Big Board. He got a few paragraphs into it,

and then realized that he had read it before-years ago, in the veterans’

hospital. It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by

extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called

Zircon-212.

These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing

stock market, quotations and commodity prices along one wall of their

habitat, and a news ticker, and a telephone that was supposedly

connected to a brokerage on Earth. The creatures on Zircon-212 told

their captives that they had invested a million dollars for them back on

Earth, and that it was up to the captives to manage it so that they

would be fabulously wealthy when they returned to Earth.

The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of —

course. They were simply stimulants to make the Earthlings perform

vividly for the crowds at the zoo — to make them jump up and down and

cheer, or gloat, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared shitless or

to feel as contented as babies in their mothers’ arms.

The Earthlings did very well on paper. That was part of the rigging, of

course. And religion got mixed up in it, too. The news ticker reminded

them that the President of the United States had declared National

Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray. The Earthlings had had a

bad week on the market before that. They had lost a small fortune in

olive oil futures. So they gave praying a whirl.

It worked. Olive oil went up.

Another Kilgore Trout book there in the window was about a man who built

a time machine so he could go back and see Jesus. It worked, and he saw

Jesus when Jesus was only twelve years old. Jesus was learning the

carpentry trade from his father.

Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on

papyrus of a device they wanted built by sunrise the next morning. It

was a cross to be used in the execution of a rabble-rouser.

Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work. And the

rabble-rouser was executed on it.

So it goes.

The bookstore was run by seeming quintuplets, by five short, bald men

chewing unfit cigars that were sopping wet. They never smiled, and each

one had a stool to perch on. They were making money running a

paper-and-celluloid whorehouse.

They didn’t have hard-ons. Neither did Billy Pilgrim. Everybody else

did. It was a ridiculous store, all about love and babies.

The clerks occasionally told somebody to buy or get out, not to just

look and look and look and paw and paw. Some of the people were looking

at each other instead of the merchandise.

A clerk came up to Billy and told him the good stuff was in the back,

that the books Billy was reading were window dressing. ‘That ain’t what

you want, for Christ’s sake,’ he told Billy ‘What you want’s in back.’

So Billy moved a little farther back, but not as far as the part for

adults only. He moved because of absentminded politeness, taking a Trout

book with him-the one about Jesus and the time machine.

The time-traveler in the book went back to Bible times to find out one

thing in particular: Whether or not Jesus had really died on the cross,

or whether he had been taken down while still alive, whether he had

really gone on living. The hero had a stethoscope along.

Billy skipped to the end of the book, where the hero mingled with the

people who were taking Jesus down from the cross. The time-traveler was

the first one up the ladder, dressed in clothes of the period, and he

leaned close to Jesus so people couldn’t see him use the stethoscope,

and he listened.

There wasn’t a sound inside the emaciated chest cavity. The Son of God

was as dead as a doornail.

So it goes.

The time-traveler, whose name was Lance Corwin, also got to measure the

length of Jesus, but not to weigh him. Jesus was five feet and three and

a half inches long.

Another clerk came up to Billy and asked him if he was going to buy the

book or not, and Billy said that he wanted to buy it, please. He had his

back to a rack of paperback books about oral-genital contacts from

ancient Egypt to the present and so on, and the clerk supposed Billy was

reading one of these. So he was startled when he saw what Billy’s book

was. He said, ‘Jesus Christ, where did you find this thing?’ and so on,

and he had to tell the other clerks about the pervert who wanted to buy

the window dressing. The other clerks already knew about Billy. They had

been watching him, too.

The cash register where Billy waited for his change was near a bin of

old girly magazines. Billy looked at one out of the corner of his eye,

and he saw this question on its cover: What really became of Montana

Wildhack?

So Billy read it. He knew where Montana Wildhack really was, of course.

She was back on Tralfamadore, taking care of the baby, but the magazine,

which was called Midnight Pussycats, promised that she was wearing a

cement overcoat under fathoms of saltwater in San Pedro Bay.

So it goes.

Billy wanted to laugh. The magazine., which was published for lonesome

men to jerk off to, ran the story so it could print pictures taken from

blue movies which Montana had made as a teenagers Billy did not look

closely at these. They were grainy things, soot and chalk. They could

have been anybody.

Billy was again directed to the back of the store and he went this time.

A jaded sailor stepped away from a movie machine while the film was

still running. Billy looked in, and there was Montana Wildhack alone on

a bed, peeling a banana. The picture clicked off. Billy did not want to

see what happened next, and a clerk importuned him to come over and see

some really hot stuff they kept under the counter for connoisseurs.

Billy was mildly curious as to what could possibly have been kept hidden

in such a place. The clerk leered and showed him. It was a photograph of

a woman and a Shetland pony. They were attempting to have sexual

intercourse between two Doric columns, in front of velvet draperies

which were fringed with deedlee-balls.

Billy didn’t get onto television in New York that night., but he did get

onto a radio talk show. There was a radio station right next to Billy’s

hotel. He saw its call letters over the entrance of an office building,

so he went in. He went up to the studio on an automatic elevator, and

there were other people up there, waiting to go in. They were literary

critics, and they thought Billy was one, too. They were going to discuss

whether the novel was dead or not. So it goes.

Billy took his seat with the others around a golden oak table, with a

microphone all his own. The master of ceremonies asked him his name and

what paper he was from. Billy said he was from the Ilium Gazette.

He was nervous and happy. ‘If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming,’ he told

himself, ‘just ask for Wild Bob.’

Billy put his hand up at the very first part of the program but he

wasn’t called on right away. Others got in ahead of him. One of them

said that it would be a nice time to bury the novel, now that a

Virginian, one hundred years after Appomattox, had written Uncle Tom’s

Cabin. Another one said that people couldn’t read well enough anymore to

turn print into exciting situations in their skulls, so that authors had

to do what Norman Mailer did, which was to perform in public what he had

written. The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought

the function of the novel might be in modem society, and one critic

said, ‘To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white wars.’

Another one said, ‘To describe blow-jobs artistically.’ Another one

said, ‘To teach wives of junior executives what to buy next and how to

act in a French restaurant.’

And then Billy was allowed to speak. Off he went, in that beautifully

trained voice of his, telling about the flying saucers and Montana

Wildhack and so on.

He was gently expelled from the studio during a commercial. He went back

to his hotel room, put a quarter into the Magic Fingers machine

connected to his bed, and he went to sleep. He traveled in time back to

Tralfamadore.

‘Time-traveling again?’ said Montana. It was artificial evening in the

dome. She was breast-feeding their child.

‘Hmm?’ said Billy.

‘You’ve been time-traveling again. I can always tell.’

‘Um.’

‘Where did you go this time? It wasn’t the war. I can tell that, too. ’

‘New York.’

‘The Big Apple.’

‘Hm?’

‘That’s what they used to call New York.’

“Oh.’

‘You see any plays or movies?’

‘No-I walked around Times Square some, bought a book by Kilgore Trout.’

‘Lucky you.’ She did not share his enthusiasm for Kilgore Trout.

Billy mentioned casually that he had seen part of a blue movie she had

made. Her response was no less casual. It was Tralfamadorian and

guilt-free:

‘Yes-’ she said, ‘and I’ve heard about you in the war, about what a

clown you were. And I’ve heard about the high school teacher who was

shot. He made a blue movie with a firing squad.’ She moved the baby from

one breast to the other, because the moment was so structured that she

had to do so.

There was a silence.

‘They’re playing with the clocks again,’ said Montana, rising, preparing

to put the baby into its crib. She meant that their keepers were making

the electric clocks in the dome go fast, then slow, then fast again.,

and watching the little Earthling family through peepholes.

There was a silver chain around Montana Wildhack’s neck. Hanging from

it, between her breasts, was a locket containing a photograph of her

alcoholic mother-grainy thing, soot and chalk. It could have been

anybody. Engraved on the outside of the locket were these words:

Ten

Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in

all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.

And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by

military science in Vietnam. So it goes.

My father died many years ago now-of natural causes. So it goes. He was

a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.

On Tralfamadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn’t much interest in Jesus

Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian

mind, he says, is Charles Darwin-who taught that those who die are meant

to die, that corpses are improvements. So it goes.

The same general idea appears in The Big Board by Kilgore Trout. The

flying saucer creatures who capture Trout’s hem ask him about Darwin.

They also ask him about golf.

If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we

will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I

am not overjoyed. Still-if I am going to spend eternity visiting this

moment and that, I’m grateful that so many of those moments are nice.

One of the nicest ones in recent times was on my trip back to Dresden

with my old war buddy, O’Hare.

We took a Hungarian Airlines plane from East Berlin. The pilot had a

handlebar mustache. He looked like Adolph Menjou. He smoked a Cuban

cigar while the plane was being fueled. When we took off, there was no

talk of fastening seat belts.

When we were up in the air, a young steward served us rye bread and

salami and butter and cheese and white wine. The folding tray in front

of me would not open out. The steward went into the cockpit for a tool,

came back with a beer-can opener. He used it to pry out the tray.

There were only six other passengers. They spoke many languages. They

were having nice times, too. East Germany was down below, and the lights

were on. I imagined dropping bombs on those lights, those villages and

cities and towns.

O’Hare and I had never expected to make any money-and here we were now,

extremely well-to-do.

‘If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming,’ I said to him lazily, ‘just ask for

Wild Bob.’

O’Hare had a little notebook with him, and printed in the back of it

were postal rates and airline distances and the altitudes of famous

mountains and other key facts about the world. He was looking up the

population of Dresden, which wasn’t in the notebook, when he came across

this, which he gave me to read:

On an average, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day.

During that same day, 10,000 persons, in an average, will have starved

to death or died from malnutrition. So it goes. In addition, 123,000

persons will die for other reasons. So it goes. This leaves a net gain

of about 191,000 each day in the world. The Population Reference Bureau

predicts that the world’s total population will double to 7,000,000,000

before the year 2000.

‘I suppose they will all want dignity,’ I said.

‘I suppose,’ said O’Hare.

Billy Pilgrim was meanwhile traveling back to Dresden, too, but not in

the present. He was going back there in 1945, two days after the city

was destroyed. Now Billy and the rest were being marched into the ruins

by their guards. I was there. O’Hare was there. We had spent the past

two nights in the blind innkeeper’s stable. Authorities had found us

there. They told us what to do. We were to borrow picks and shovels and

crowbars and wheelbarrows from our neighbors. We were to march with

these implements to such and such a place in the ruins, ready to go to

work.

There were cades on the main roads leading into the ruins. Germans were

stopped there. They were not permitted to explore the moon.

Prisoners of war from many lands came together that morning at such and

such a place in Dresden. It had been decreed that here was where the

digging for bodies was to begin. So the digging began.

Billy found himself paired as a digger with a Maori, who had been

captured at Tobruk. The Maori was chocolate brown. He had whirlpools

tattooed on his forehead and his cheeks. Billy and the Maori dug into

the inert, unpromising gravel of the moon. The materials were loose, so

there were constant little avalanches.

Many holes were dug at once. Nobody knew yet what there was to find.

Most holes came to nothing-to pavement, or to boulders so huge they

would not move. There was no

machinery. Not even horses or mules or oxen could cross the moonscape.

And Billy and the Maori and others helping them with their particular

hole came at last to a membrane of timbers laced over rocks which had

wedged together to form an accidental dome. They made a hole in the

membrane. There was darkness and space under there.

A German soldier with a flashlight went down into the darkness, was gone

a long time. When he finally came back, he told a superior on the rim of

the hole that there were dozens of bodies down there. They were sitting

on benches. They were unmarked.

So it goes.

The superior said that the opening in the membrane should be enlarged,

and that a ladder should be put in the hole, so that bodies could be

carried out. Thus began the first corpse mine in Dresden.

There were hundreds of corpse mines operating by and by. They didn’t

smell bad at first, were wax museums. But then the bodies rotted and

liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas.

So it goes.

The Maori Billy had worked with died of the dry heaves, after having

been ordered to go down in that stink and work. He tore himself to

pieces, throwing up and throwing up.

So it goes.

So a new technique was devised. Bodies weren’t brought up any more. They

were cremated by soldiers with flamethrowers right where they were. The

soldiers. stood outside the shelters, simply sent the fire in.

Somewhere in there the poor old high school teacher, Edgar Derby, was

caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested

for plundering. He was tried and shot.

So it goes.

And somewhere in there was springtime. The corpse mines were closed

down. The soldiers all left to fight the Russians. In the suburbs, the

women and children dug rifle pits. Billy and the rest of his group were

locked up in the stable in the suburbs. And then, one morning, they got

up to discover that the door was unlocked. The Second World War in

Europe was over.

Billy and the rest wandered out onto the shady street. The trees were

leafing out. There was nothing going on out there, no traffic of any

kind. There was only one vehicle, an abandoned wagon drawn by two

horses. The wagon was green and coffin-shaped.

Birds were talking.

One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, ‘Poo-tee-weet?’