The Sirens of Titan

by Kurt Vonnegut

  The game of German batball is played with a flabby ball the size of a big honeydew melon. The ball is no more lively than a ten-gallon hat filled with rain water. The game is something like baseball, with a batter striking the ball into a field of opposing players and running around bases; and with the fielders attempting to catch the ball and frustrate the runner. There are, however, only three bases in German batball--first, second, and home. And the batter is not pitched to. He places the ball on one fist and strikes the ball with his other fist. And if a fielder succeeds in striking the runner with the ball when the runner is between bases, the runner is deemed out, and must leave the playing field at once.

  The person responsible for the heavy emphasis on German batball on Mars was, of course, Winston Niles Rumfoord, who was responsible for everything on Mars.

  Howard W. Sams proves in his Winston Niles Rumfoord, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci that German batball was the only team sport with which Rumfoord was at all familiar as a child. Sams shows that Rumfoord was taught the game, when a child, by his governess, a Miss Joyce MacKenzie.

  Back in Rumfoord's childhood in Newport, a team composed of Rumfoord, Miss MacKenzie, and Earl Moncrief the butler, used to play German batball regularly against a team composed of Watanabe Wataru the Japanese gardener, Beverly June Wataru the gardener's daughter, and Edward Seward Darlington the half-wit stable boy. Rumfoord's team invariably won.

  Unk, the only deserter in the history of the Army of Mars, now crouched panting behind a turquoise boulder and watched the school children playing German batball on the iron playground. Behind the boulder with Unk was a bicycle he had stolen from a gas-mask factory's bicycle rack. Unk did not know which child was his son, which child was Chrono.

  Unk's plans were nebulous. His dream was to gather together his wife, his son, and his best friend, to steal a space ship, and to fly away to some place where they could all live happily ever after.

  "Hey, Chrono!" cried a child on the playground. "You're up to bat!"

  Unk peered around the boulder at home plate. The child who came up to bat there would be Chrono, would be his son.

  Chrono, Unk's son, came up to bat.

  He was small for his age, but surprisingly manly through the shoulders. The child's hair was jet black, bristly--and the black bristles grew in a violently counter-clockwise swirl.

  The child was left-handed. The ball rested on his right fist, and he prepared to hit it with his left.

  His eyes were deep-set like his father's eyes. And his eyes were luminous under their black-thatched eaves. They glowed with an unshared rage.

  Those rage-filled eyes flicked this way, then that. Their movements rattled the fielders, drawing them away from their positions, convincing them that the slow, stupid ball was going to come at them with terrible speed, was going to tear them to pieces if they dared to get in the way.

  The alarm inspired by the boy at bat was felt by the teacher, too. She was in the traditional position for an umpire in German batball, between first and second base, and she was terrified. She was a frail old lady name Isabel Fenstermaker. She was seventy-three, and had been a Jehovah's Witness before having her memory cleaned out. She had been shanghaied while trying to sell a copy of The Watchtower to a Martian agent in Duluth.

  "Now, Chrono--" she said simperingly, "it's only a game, you know."

  The sky was suddenly blackened by a formation of a hundred flying saucers, the blood-red ships of the Martian Parachute Ski Marines. The combined cooing of the ships was a melodious thunder that rattled the schoolhouse windowpanes.

  But, as a measure of the importance young Chrono gave to German batball when he came to bat, not a single child looked up at the sky.

  Young Chrono, having brought the fielders and Miss Fenstermaker to the brink of nervous collapse, now put the ball down by his feet, took from his pocket a short strip of metal that was his good-luck piece. He kissed the strip for luck, returned the strip to his pocket.

  Then he suddenly picked up the ball again, hit it a mighty bloop, and went scrambling around the bases.

  The fielders and Miss Fenstermaker dodged the ball as though it were a red-hot cannonball. When the ball came to a stop of its own accord, the fielders went after it with a sort of ritual clumsiness. Clearly, the point of their efforts was not to hit Chrono with the ball, was not to put him out. The fielders were all conspiring to increase the glory of Chrono by making a show of helpless opposition.

  Clearly, Chrono was the most glorious thing that the children had ever seen on Mars, and any glory they themselves had came from their association with him. They would do anything to make his glory grow.

  Young Chrono slid into home in a cloud of rust.

  A fielder hurled the ball at him--too late, too late, much too late. The fielder ritually cursed his luck.

  Young Chrono stood, dusted himself off, and again kissed his good-luck piece, thanked it for another home run. He believed firmly that all his powers came from the good-luck piece, and so did his schoolmates, and so, secretly, did Miss Fenstermaker.

  The history of the good-luck piece was this:

  One day the school children were taken by Miss Fenstermaker on an educational tour of a flamethrower factory. The factory manager explained to the children all the steps in the manufacture of flamethrowers, and hoped that some of the children, when they grew up, would want to come to work for him. At the end of the tour, in the packaging department, the manager's ankle became snarled in a spiral of steel strapping, a type of strapping that was used for binding shut the packaged flamethrowers.

  The spiral was a piece of jagged-ended scrap that had been cast into the factory aisle by a careless workman. The manager scratched his ankle and tore his pants before he got free of the spiral. He thereupon put on the first really comprehensible demonstration that the children had seen that day. Comprehensibly, he blew up at the spiral.

  He stamped on it.

  Then, when it nipped him again, he snatched it up and chopped it into four-inch lengths with great shears.

  The children were edified, thrilled, and satisfied. And, as they were leaving the packaging department, young Chrono picked up one of the four-inch pieces and slipped it into his pocket. The piece he picked up differed from all the rest in having two holes drilled in it.

  This was Chrono's good-luck piece. It became as much a part of him as his right hand. His nervous system, so to speak, extended itself into the metal strap. Touch it and you touched Chrono.

  Unk, the deserter, stood up behind his turquoise boulder, walked vigorously and officiously into the school yard. He had stripped his uniform of all insignia. This gave him a rather official, warlike look, without binding him to any particular enterprise. Of all the equipment he had been carrying before he deserted, he retained only a jungle knife, his single-shot Mauser, and one grenade. These three weapons he left cached behind the boulder, along with the stolen bicycle.

  Unk marched up to Miss Fenstermaker. He told her that he wished to interview young Chrono on official business at once--privately. He did not tell her that he was the boy's father. Being the boy's father entitled him to nothing. Being an official investigator entitled him to anything he might care to ask for.

  Poor Miss Fenstermaker was easily fooled. She agreed to let Unk interview the boy in her own office.

  Her office was crammed with ungraded school papers, some of them dating back five years. She was far behind in her work--so far behind that she had declared a moratorium on school work until she could catch up on her grading. Some of the stacks of papers had tumbled, forming glaciers that sent fingers under her desk, into the hallway, and into her private lavatory.

  There was an open, two-drawer filing cabinet filled with her rock collection.

  Nobody ever checked up on Miss Fenstermaker. Nobody cared. She had a teaching certificate from the State of Minnesota, U.S.A., Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, and that was all that mattered.

  For his interview with his
son, Unk sat behind her desk while his son Chrono stood before him. It was Chrono's wish to remain standing.

  Unk, in planning the things he would say, idly opened Miss Fenstermaker's desk drawers, found that they were filled with rocks, too.

  Young Chrono was shrewd and hostile, and he thought of something to say before Unk did. "Baloney," he said.

  "What?" said Unk.

  "Whatever you say--it's baloney," said the eight-year-old.

  "What makes you think so?" said Unk.

  "Everything anybody says is baloney," said Chrono. "What you care what I think anyway? When I'm fourteen, you put a thing in my head and I do whatever you want anyway."

  He was referring to the fact that antennas were not installed in the skulls of children until their fourteenth year. This was a matter of skull size. When a child reached his fourteenth birthday, he was sent to the hospital for the operation. His hair was shaved off, and the doctors and nurses joshed him about having entered adulthood. Before the child was wheeled into the operating room he was asked to name his favorite kind of ice cream. When the child awoke after the operation, a big dish of that kind of ice cream was waiting for him--maple walnut, buttercrunch, chocolate chip, anything.

  "Is your mother full of baloney?" said Unk.

  "She is since she came back from the hospital this last time," said Chrono.

  "What about your father?" said Unk.

  "I don't know anything about him," said Chrono. "I don't care. He's full of baloney like everybody else."

  "Who isn't full of baloney?" said Unk.

  "I'm not full of baloney," said Chrono. "I'm the only one."

  "Come closer," said Unk.

  "Why should I?" said Chrono.

  "Because I'm going to whisper something very important,"

  "I doubt it," said Chrono.

  Unk got up from the desk, went around to Chrono, and whispered in his ear, "I'm your father, boy!" When Unk said those words, his heart went off like a burglar alarm.

  Chrono was unmoved. "So what?" he said stonily. He had never received any instructions, had never seen an example in life, that would make him think a father was of any importance. On Mars, the word was emotionally meaningless.

  "I've come to get you," said Unk. "Somehow we're going to get away from here." He shook the boy gently, trying to make him bubble a little.

  Chrono peeled his father's hand from his arm as though the hand were a leech. "And do what?" he said.

  "Live!" said Unk.

  The boy looked over his father dispassionately, seeking one good reason why he should throw in his lot with this stranger. Chrono took his good-luck piece from his pocket, and rubbed it between his palms.

  The imagined strength he got from the good-luck piece made him strong enough to trust nobody, to go on as he had for so long, angry and alone. "I'm living," he said. "I'm all right," he said. "Go to hell."

  Unk took a step backward. The corners of his mouth pulled down. "Go to hell?" he whispered.

  "I tell everybody to go to hell," said the boy. He was trying to be kind, but he wearied of the effort at once. "Can I go out and play batball now?"

  "You'd tell your own father to go to hell?" murmured Unk. The question echoed back through Unk's emptied memory to an untouched corner where bits of his own strange childhood still lived. His own strange childhood had been spent in daydreams of at last seeing and loving a father who did not want to see him, who did not want to be loved by him.

  "I--I deserted from the army to come here--to find you," said Unk.

  Interest flickered in the boy's eyes, then died. "They'll get you," he said. "They get everybody."

  "I'll steal a space ship," said Unk. "And you and your mother and I will get on it, and we'll fly away!"

  "To where?" said the boy.

  "Some place good!" said Unk.

  "Tell me about some place good," said Chrono.

  "I don't know. We'll have to look!" said Unk.

  Chrono shook his head pityingly. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't think you know what you're talking about. You'd just get a lot of people killed."

  "You want to stay here?" said Unk.

  "I'm all right here," said Chrono. "Can I go out and play batball now?"

  Unk wept.

  His weeping appalled the boy. He had never seen a man weep before. He never wept himself. "I'm going out to play!" he cried wildly, and he ran out of the office.

  Unk went to the window of the office. He looked out at the iron playground. Young Chrono's team was in the field now. Young Chrono joined his teammates, faced a batter whose back was to Unk.

  Chrono kissed his good-luck piece, put it in his pocket. "Easy out, you guys," he yelled hoarsely. "Come on, you guys--let's kill him!"

  Unk's mate, the mother of young Chrono, was an instructress in the Schliemann Breathing School for Recruits. Schliemann breathing, of course, is a technique that enables human beings to survive in a vacuum or in an inhospitable atmosphere without the use of helmets or other cumbersome respiratory gear.

  It consists, essentially, of taking a pill rich in oxygen. The bloodstream takes on this oxygen through the wall of the small intestine rather than through the lungs. On Mars, the pills were known officially as Combat Respiratory Rations, in popular parlance as goofballs.

  Schliemann Breathing is at its simplest in a benign but useless atmosphere like that of Mars. The breather goes on breathing and talking in a normal manner, though there is no oxygen for his lungs to take in from the atmosphere. All he has to remember is to take his goofballs regularly.

  The school in which Unk's mate was an instructress taught recruits the more difficult techniques necessary in a vacuum or in a harmful atmosphere. This involves not only pill-taking, but plugging one's ears and nostrils, and keeping one's mouth shut as well. Any effort to speak or to breathe would result in hemorrhages and probably death.

  Unk's mate was one of six instructresses at the Schliemann Breathing School for Recruits. Her classroom was a bare, windowless, whitewashed room, thirty feet square. Ranged around the walls were benches.

  On a table in the middle was a bowl of goofballs, a bowl of nose and ear plugs, a roll of adhesive plaster, scissors, and a small tape recorder. Purpose of the tape recorder was to play music during the long periods in which there was nothing to do but sit and wait patiently for nature to take its course.

  Such a period had been reached now. The class had just been dosed with goofballs. Now the students had to sit quietly on the benches and listen to music and wait for the goofballs to reach their small intestines.

  The tune being played had been pirated recently from an Earthling broadcast. It was a big hit on Earth--a trio composed for a boy, a girl, and cathedral bells. It was called "God Is Our Interior Decorator." The boy and girl sang alternate lines of the verses, and joined in close harmony on the choruses.

  The cathedral bells whanged and clanged whenever anything of a religious nature was mentioned.

  There were seventeen recruits. They were all in their newly issued lichen-green undershorts. The purpose of having them strip was to permit the instructress to see at a glance their external bodily reactions to Schliemann breathing.

  The recruits were fresh from amnesia treatments and antenna installations at the Reception Center Hospital. Their hair had been shaved off, and each recruit had a strip of adhesive plaster running from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck.

  The adhesive plaster showed where the antenna had been put in.

  The recruits' eyes were as empty as the windows of abandoned textile mills.

  So were the eyes of the instructress, since she, too, had recently had her memory cleaned out.

  When they released her from the hospital, they told her what her name was, and where she lived, and how to teach Schliemann breathing--and that was about all the factual information they gave her. There was one other item: they told her she had an eight-year-old son named Chrono, and that she could visit him at his school on Tuesday e
venings, if she liked.

  The name of the instructress, of Chrono's mother, of Unk's mate, was Bee. She wore a lichen-green sweatsuit, white gym shoes, and, around her neck, a whistle on a chain and a stethoscope.

  There was a rebus of her name on her sweatshirt.

  She looked at the clock on the wall. Enough time had passed for the slowest digestive system to carry a goofball to the small intestine. She stood, turned off the tape recorder, and blew her whistle.

  "Fall in!" she said.

  The recruits had not yet had basic military training, so they were incapable of falling in with precision. Painted on the floor were squares within which the recruits were to stand in order to form ranks and files pleasing to the eye. A game resembling musical chairs was now played, with several empty-eyed recruits scuffling for the same square. In time, each found a square of his own.

  "All right," said Bee, "take your plugs and plug up your noses and ears, please."

  The recruits had been carrying the plugs in their clammy fists. They plugged their noses and ears.

  Bee now went from recruit to recruit, making certain that all ears and nostrils were sealed.

  "All right," she said, when her inspection was done. "Very good," she said. She took from the table the roll of adhesive plaster. "Now I am going to prove to you that you don't need to use your lungs at all, as long as you have Combat Respiratory Rations--or, as you'll soon be calling them in the Army, goofballs." She moved through the ranks, snipping off lengths of adhesive, sealing mouths with them. No one objected. When she got through, no one had a suitable aperture through which to issue an objection.

  She noted the time, and again turned on the music. For the next twenty minutes there would be nothing to do but watch the bare bodies for color changes, for the dying spasms in the sealed and useless lungs. Ideally, the bodies would turn blue, then red, then natural again within the twenty minutes--and the rib cages would quake violently, give up, be still.

  When the twenty-minute ordeal was over, every recruit would know how unnecessary lung-breathing was. Ideally, every recruit would be so confident in himself and goofballs, when his course of instruction was over, that he would be ready to spring out of a space ship on the Earthling moon or on the bottom of an Earthling ocean or anywhere, without wondering for a split second what he might be springing into.