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 fianc?e 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 fianc?e 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.’