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 blowtorch 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.