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:
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.
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.