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 thirty 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.
* * *
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.
* * *
Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his
method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living.
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.
* * *
"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."
* * *
``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.' ''
* * *
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 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.
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."
* * *
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!
* * *
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.'
* * *
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 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.
* * *