The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
Brackman rolled his eyes. "Jesus--you'd think so, wouldn't you?" he said. "That's the platoon f-kup."
"You kidding me?" said the visiting sergeant.
"Hell no, I ain't kidding you," said Brackman. "Look at him--been standing there for ten minutes, and hasn't touched a piece of soap yet Unk! Wake up, Unk!"
Unk shuddered, stopped dreaming under the tepid drizzle of the shower head. He looked questioningly at Brackman, bleakly co-operative.
"Use some soap, Unk!" said Brackman. "For Chris-sakes, use some soap!"
Now, on the iron parade ground, Unk stood at attention in the hollow square like all the rest.
In the middle of the hollow square was a stone post with iron rings fixed to it. Chains had been drawn rattling through the rings--had been drawn tight around a red-haired soldier standing against a post. The soldier was a clean soldier--but he was not a neat soldier, for all the badges and decorations had been stripped off his uniform, and he had no belt, no necktie, no snow-white puttees.
Everybody else, including Unk, was all spiffed up. Everybody else looked very nice indeed.
Something painful was going to happen to the man at the stake--something from which the man would want to escape very much, something from which he was not going to escape, because of the chains.
And all the soldiers were going to watch.
The event was being given great importance.
Even the man at the stake was standing at attention, being the best soldier he knew how to be, under the circumstances.
Again--no audible or visible order was given, but the ten thousand soldiers executed the movement of parade rest as a man.
So did the man at the stake.
Then the soldiers relaxed in ranks, as though given the order at ease. Their obligations under this order were to relax, but to keep their feet in place, and to keep silent. The soldiers were free to think a little now, and to look around and to send messages with their eyes, if they had messages and could find receivers.
The man at the stake tugged against his chains, craned his neck to judge the height of the stake to which he was chained. It was as though he thought he might escape by use of the scientific method, if only he could find out how high the stake was and what it was made of.
The stake was nineteen feet, six and five thirty-seconds inches high, not counting the twelve feet, two and one-eighth inches of it embedded in the iron. The stake had a mean diameter of two feet, five and eleven third-seconds inches, varying from this mean, however, by as much as seven and one thirty-second inches. The stake was composed of quartz, alkali, feldspar, mica, and traces of tourmaline and hornblende. For the information of the man at the stake: He was one hundred and forty-two million, three hundred and forty-six thousand, nine hundred and eleven miles from the Sun, and help was not on its way.
The red-haired man at the stake made no sound, because soldiers at ease were not permitted to make sounds. He sent a message with his eyes, however, to the effect that he would like to scream He sent the message to anyone whose eyes would meet his. He was hoping to get the message to one person in particular, to his best friend--to Unk. He was looking for Unk.
He couldn't find Unk's face.
If he had found Unk's face, there wouldn't have been any blooming of recognition and pity on Unk's face. Unk had just come out of the base hospital, where he had been treated for mental illness, and Unk's mind was almost a blank. Unk didn't recognize his best friend at the stake. Unk didn't recognize anybody. Unk wouldn't have even known his own name was Unk, wouldn't even have known he was a soldier, if they hadn't told him so when they discharged him from the hospital.
He had gone straight from the hospital to the formation he was in now.
At the hospital they told him again and again and again that he was the best soldier in the best squad in the best platoon in the best company in the best battalion in the best regiment in the best division in the best army.
Unk guessed that was something to be proud of.
At the hospital they told him he had been a pretty sick boy, but he was fully recovered now.
That seemed like good news.
At the hospital they told him what his sergeant's name was, and what a sergeant was, and what all the symbols of ranks and grades and specialties were.
They had blanked out so much of Unk's memory that they even had to teach him the foot movements and the manual of arms all over again.
At the hospital they even had to explain to Unk what Combat Respiratory Rations or CRR's or goofballs were--had to tell him to take one every six hours or suffocate. These were oxygen pills that made up for the fact that there wasn't any oxygen in the Martian atmosphere.
At the hospital they even had to explain to Unk that there was a radio antenna under the crown of his skull, and that it would hurt him whenever he did something a good soldier wouldn't ever do. The antenna also would give him orders and furnish drum music to march to. They said that not just Unk but everybody had an antenna like that--doctors and nurses and four-star generals included. It was a very democratic army, they said.
Unk guessed that was a good way for an army to be.
At the hospital they gave Unk a small sample of the pain his antenna would stick him with if he ever did anything wrong.
The pain was horrible.
Unk was bound to admit that a soldier would be crazy not to do his duty at all times.
At the hospital they had said the most important rule of all was this one: Always obey a direct order without a moment's hesitation.
Standing there in formation on the iron parade ground, Unk realized that he had a lot to relearn. At the hospital they hadn't taught him everything there was to know about living.
The antenna in his head brought him to attention again and his mind went blank. Then the antenna put Unk at parade rest again, then at attention again, then made him give a rifle salute, then put him at ease again.
His thinking began again. He caught another glimpse of the world around him.
Life was like that, Unk told himself tentatively--blanks and glimpses, and now and then maybe that awful flash of pain for doing something wrong.
A small, low-flying, fast-flying moon sailed in the violet sky overhead. Unk didn't know why he thought so, but he thought the moon was moving too fast. It didn't seem right. And the sky, he thought, should be blue instead of violet.
Unk felt cold, too, and he longed for more warmth. The unending cold seemed as wrong, as unfair, somehow, as the fast moon and the violet sky.
Unk's divisional commander was now talking to Unk's regimental commander. Unk's regimental commander spoke to Unk's battalion commander. Unk's battalion commander spoke to Unk's company commander. Unk's company commander spoke to Unk's platoon leader, who was Sergeant Brackman.
Brackman came up to Unk and ordered him to march up to the man at the stake in a military manner and strangle him until he was dead.
Brackman told Unk it was a direct order.
So Unk did it.
He marched up to the man at the stake. He marched in time to the dry, tinny music of one snare drum The sound of the snare drum was really just in his head, coming from his antenna:
Rented a tent, a tent, a tent;
Rented a tent, a tent, a tent.
Rented a tent!
Rented a tent!
Rented a, rented a tent.
When Unk got to the man at the stake, Unk hesitated for just a second--because the red-haired man at the stake looked so unhappy. Then there was a tiny warning pain in Unk's head, like the first deep nip of a dentist's drill.
Unk put his thumbs on the red-haired man's windpipe, and the pain stopped right away. Unk didn't press with his thumbs, because the man was trying to tell him something. Unk was puzzled by the man's silence--and then realized that the man's antenna must be keeping him silent, just as antennas were keeping all of the soldiers silent.
Heroically, the man at the stake now overcame the will of his antenna, spok
The warning pain nagged in Unk's head again. Dutifully, Unk strangled the man at the stake--choked him until the man's face was purple and his tongue stuck out.
Unk stepped back, came to attention, did a smart about-face and returned to his place in ranks--again accompanied by the snare drum in his head:
Rented a tent, a tent, a tent;
Rented a tent, a tent, a tent.
Rented a tent!
Rented a tent!
Rented a, rented a tent.
Sergeant Brackman nodded at Unk, winked affectionately.
Again the ten thousand came to attention.
Horribly, the dead man at the stake struggled to come to attention, too, rattling his chains. He failed--failed to be a perfect soldier--not because he didn't want to be one but because he was dead.
Now the great formation broke up into rectangular components. These marched mindlessly away, each man hearing a snare drum in his head. An observer would have heard nothing but the tread of boots.
An observer would have been at a loss as to who was really in charge, since even the generals moved like marionettes, keeping time to the idiotic words:
Rented a tent, a tent, a tent;
Rented a tent, a tent, a tent.
Rented a tent!
Rented a tent!
Rented a, rented a tent.
chapter five
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN HERO
"We can make the center of a man's memory virtually as sterile as a scalpel fresh from the autoclave. But grains of new experience begin to accumulate on it at once. These grains in turn form themselves into patterns not necessarily favorable to military thinking. Unfortunately, this problem of recontamination seems insoluble."
--DR. MORRIS N. CASTLE.
Director of Mental Health, Mars
Unk's formation halted before a granite barrack, before a barrack in a perspective of thousands, a perspective that ran to seeming infinity on the iron plain. Before every tenth barrack was a flagpole with a banner snapping in the keen wind.
The banners were all different.
The banner that fluttered like a guardian angel over Unk's company area was very gay--red and white stripes, and many white stars on a field of blue. It was Old Glory, the flag of the United States of America on Earth.
Down the line was the red banner of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Past that was a wonderful green, orange, yellow, and purple banner, showing a lion holding a sword. It was the flag of Ceylon.
And past that was a red ball on a white field, the flag of Japan.
The banners signified the countries that the various Martian units would attack and paralyze when the war between Mars and Earth began.
Unk saw no banners until his antenna let his shoulders sag, let his joints loosen--let him fall out. He gawked at the long perspective of barracks and flagpoles. The barrack before which he stood had a large number painted over the door. The number was 576.
Some part of Unk found the number fascinating, made Unk study it. Then he remembered the execution--remembered that the red-headed man he had killed had told him something about a blue stone and barrack twelve.
Inside barrack 576, Unk cleaned his rifle, found it an extremely pleasant thing to do. He found, moreover, that he still knew how to take the weapon apart. That much of his memory, at any rate, had not been wiped out at the hospital. It made him furtively happy to suspect that there were probably other parts of his memory that had been missed as well. Why this suspicion should make him furtively happy he didn't know.
He swabbed away at his rifle's bore. His weapon was an 11-millimeter German Mauser, single shot, a type of rifle that made its reputation when used by the Spaniards in the Earthling Spanish-American War. All of the Martian Army's rifles were of about the same vintage. Martian agents, working quietly on Earth, had been able to buy up huge quantities of Mausers and British Enfields and American Springfieids for next to nothing.
Unk's squadmates were swabbing their bores, too. The oil smelled good, and the oily patches, twisting through the rifling, resisted the thrust of the cleaning rod just enough to be interesting. There was hardly any talk.
No one seemed to have taken particular notice of the execution. If there had been a lesson in the execution for Unk's squadmates, they were finding the lesson as digestible as Pablum.
There had been only one comment on Unk's participation in the execution, and that had come from Sergeant Brackman. "You done all right, Unk," said Brackman.
"Thanks," said Unk.
"This man done all right, didn't he?" Brackman asked Unk's squadmates.
There had been some nods, but Unk had the impression that his squadmates would have nodded in response to any positive question, would have shaken their heads in response to any negative one.
Unk withdrew the rod and patch, slipped his thumb under the open breech, caught the sunlight on his oily thumbnail. The thumbnail sent the sunlight up the bore. Unk put his eye to the muzzle and was thrilled by perfect beauty. He could have stared happily at the immaculate spiral of the rifling for hours, dreaming of the happy land whose round gate he saw at the other end of the bore. The pink under his oily thumbnail at the far end of the barrel made that far end seem a rosy paradise indeed. Some day he was going to crawl down the barrel to that paradise.
It would be warm there--and there would be only one moon, Unk thought, and the moon would be fat, stately, and slow. Something else about the pink paradise at the end of the barrel came to Unk, and Unk was puzzled by the clarity of the vision. There were three beautiful women in that paradise, and Unk knew exactly what they looked like! One was white, one was gold, and one was brown. The golden girl was smoking a cigarette in Unk's vision. Unk was further surprised to find that he even knew what kind of cigarette the golden girl was smoking.
It was a MoonMist Cigarette.
"Sell MoonMist," Unk said out loud. It felt good to say that--felt authoritative, shrewd.
"Huh?" said a young colored soldier, cleaning his rifle next to Unk. "What's that you say, Unk?" he said. He was twenty-three years old. His name was stitched in yellow on a black patch over his left breast pocket.
Boaz was his name.
If suspicions had been permitted in the Army of Mars, Boaz would have been a person to suspect. His rank was only Private, First Class, but his uniform, though regulation lichen green, was made of far finer stuff, and was much better tailored than the uniform of anyone around him--including the uniform of Sergeant Brackman.
Everyone else's uniform was coarse, scratchy--held together by clumsy stitches of thick thread. And everyone else's uniform looked good only when the wearer stood at attention. In any other position, an ordinary soldier found that his uniform tended to bunch and crackle, as though made of paper.
Boaz's uniform followed his every movement with silken grace. The stitches were numerous and tiny. And most puzzling of all: Boaz's shoes had a deep, rich, ruby luster--a luster that other soldiers could not achieve no matter how much they might polish their shoes. Unlike the shoes of anyone else in the company area, the shoes of Boaz were genuine leather from Earth.
"You say sell something, Unk?" said Boaz.
"Dump MoonMist. Get rid of it," murmured Unk. The words made no sense to him. He had let them out simply because they had wanted out so badly. "Sell," he said.
Boaz smiled--ruefully amused. "Sell it, eh?" he said. "O.K., Unk--we sell it." He raised an eyebrow. "What we gonna sell, Unk?" There was something particularly bright and piercing about the pupils of his eyes.
Unk found this yellow brightness, this sharpness of Boaz's eyes disquieting--increasingly so, as Boaz continued to stare. Unk looked away, looked by chance into the eyes of some of his other squadmates--found their eyes to be uniformly du
Boaz's eyes continued to bite into Unk. Unk felt compelled to meet their gaze again. The pupils were seeming diamonds.
"You don't remember me, Unk?" said Boaz.
The question alarmed Unk. For some reason, it was important that he not remember Boaz. He was grateful that he really didn't remember him.
"Boaz, Unk," said the colored man. "I'm Boaz."
Unk nodded. "How do you do?" he said.
"Oh--I don't do what you'd call real bad," said Boaz. He shook his head. "You don't remember nothing about me, Unk?"
"No," said Unk. His memory was nagging him a little now--telling him that he might remember something about Boaz, if he tried as hard as he could. He shushed his memory. "Sorry--" said Unk. "My mind's a blank."
"You, and me--we're buddies," said Boaz. "Boaz and Unk."
"Um," said Unk.
"You remember what the buddy system is, Unk?" said Boaz.
"No," said Unk.
"Ever' man in ever' squad," said Boaz, "he got a buddy. Buddies share the same foxhole, stick right close to each other in attacks, cover each other. One buddy get in trouble in hand-to-hand, other buddy come up and help, slip a knife in."
"Um," said Unk.
"Funny," said Boaz, "what a man'll forget in the hospital and what he'll still remember, no matter what they do. You and me--we trained as buddies for a whole year, and you done forgot that. And then you say that thing 'bout cigarettes. What kind cigarettes, Unk?"
"I-I forget," said Unk.
"Try and remember now," said Boaz. "You had it once." He frowned and squinted, as though trying to help Unk remember. "I think it's so interesting what a man can remember after he's been to the hospital. Try and remember everything you can."
There was a certain effeminacy about Boaz--in the nature of a cunning bully's chucking a sissy under the chin, talking baby-talk to him.
But Boaz liked Unk--that was in his manner, too.
Unk had the eerie feeling that he and Boaz were the only real people in the stone building--that the rest were glass-eyed robots, and not very well-made robots at that. Sergeant Brackman, supposedly in command, seemed no more alert, no more responsible, no more in command than a bag of wet feathers.
"Let's hear all you can remember, Unk," wheedled Boaz. "Old buddy--" he said, "just remember all you can."