‘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.’