Player Piano (Utopia 14)

by Курт Воннегут

  Farming. Paul's pulse quickened, and he daydreamed of living a century before - living in one of the many farmhouses now crumbling into their foundations over the valley. He chose one farmhouse in particular for his fantasy, one close to the edge of town that he'd often admired. He suddenly realized that the farm, the little patch of the past, wasn't a part of van Curler's farm system. He was almost sure it wasn't.

  "Katharine," he called excitedly, "get me the Ilium Real Estate Manager on the phone."

  "Ilium Real Estate Office. Doctor Pond speaking." Pond's speech was effeminate, lisping.

  "Doctor Pond, this is Doctor Proteus at the Works."

  "Well! What can I do for you, Doctor Proteus?"

  "You know that farmhouse out on King Street, just outside the city limits?"

  "Mmmm. Just a moment." Paul heard a machine shuffling through cards, and then a bell announced that the card had been found. "Yes, the Gottwald place. I have the card right here."

  "What's being done with it?"

  "A good question! What can be done with it? I wish I knew. It was a hobby with Gottwald, you know, keeping it just like an old-fashioned farm. When he died, the heirs wanted to get van Curler to take it over, but he said it wasn't worth bothering with. Two hundred acres is all, and he'd have to cut down the windbreaks to connect it with other fields so he could farm it efficiently. Then the heirs found out that they couldn't have sold it to the Farm System anyway. It's in the deed that the place has to be kept old-fashioned." He laughed bitterly. "So all old Gottwald left his heirs was a nice headache, a white elephant."

  "How much?"

  "Are you serious? The thing's a museum exhibit, Doctor. I mean, almost nothing mechanical on the place. Even if you could beat the restrictions in the deed, it'd cost you thousands to get it in shape."

  "How much?" The farm was looking better and better.

  "Eighteen thousand, it says on the card." Before Paul could close the deal that instant, Pond added, "but you can get it for fifteen, I'm sure. How would twelve suit you?"

  "Would five hundred hold it until I can look it over?"

  "It's been holding itself for almost fourteen years. Go on out and have a look, if you really feel you have to. After you've thrown up, there are some really nice things I'd like to show you." The machine riffled through its cards again. "For instance, there's a nice Georgian house on Griffin Boulevard. Electronic door openers, thermostatically controlled windows, radar range, electrostatic dust precipitators, ultrasonic clothes washer built in, forty-inch television screens in the master bedroom, guest room, living room, kitchen, and rumpus rooms, and twenty-inch screens in the maids' rooms and the kiddies' rooms, and -"

  "Where can I get the key to the farm?"

  "Oh, that thing. Well, to give you an idea of what you're getting into, there is no lock. There's a latchstring."

  "Latchstring?"

  "Yes, latchstring. I had to go out myself to find out what the darn thing is. There's a latch on the inside of the door, with a string tied to it. When you want to let somebody just walk in, you stick the little string through a hole in the door, so the string dangles outside. If you don't want people walking in, you pull the string in through the hole. Ghastly?"

  "I'll survive somehow. Is the latchstring out?"

  "There's a caretaker there, detailed from the Reeks and Wrecks. I'll call him and tell him to put it out. Confidentially, I'm sure they'll take eight."

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE latchstring at the Gottwald house was out for Doctor Paul Proteus.

  He tugged at it, listened with satisfaction as the latch disengaged itself inside, and walked in. The living room was dimly lit through tiny-paned, dusty windows, and what light did get in died without reflection on dull, dark antique surfaces. The floor rose and fell like a springboard beneath Paul's feet.

  "The house breathes with you, like good underwear," said a lisping voice from the shadows. Paul looked in the direction from which it had come. The man sucked on his cigarette, lighting his moon face with a pink glow. "Doctor Proteus?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm Doctor Pond. Would you like me to turn on the lights?"

  "Please, Doctor."

  "Well, there aren't any. Kerosene lanterns throughout. Want to wash your hands or something?"

  "Well, not -"

  "Because, if you do, there's a pump in the back yard, and an outhouse by the chicken coop. Would you like to see the termites, the dry rot, the hog pen, and the manurespreader, or shall we go to see that Georgian on Griffin Boulevard?" He walked to where they could see each other. Doctor Pond was very young, fat, and earnest, and plainly distressed by his surroundings.

  "You're certainly eager to sell me the place," said Paul, laughing. With each new inconvenience, the place became more irresistible. It was a completely isolated backwater, cut off from the boiling rapids of history, society, and the economy. Timeless.

  "I have a certain responsibility," said Doctor Pond carefully. "An administrator without a certain awareness, above and beyond the Manual, is like a ship without a rudder."

  "He is?" said Paul absently. He was peering through a back window into the barnyard, and beyond that, through an opened barn door, where he could see the firm buff flank of a cow.

  "Yes," said Doctor Pond, "like a ship without a rudder. For example, while the Manual doesn't tell me to do it, I make very sure that every man gets a house suited to his station on the ladder of life. The way a man lives can destroy or increase the stature of his job - can increase or decrease the stability and prestige of the entire system."

  "You say I can get this whole farm for eight?"

  "Please, Doctor - you put me in an uncomfortable position. I was excited when you first called, because this place has been such a headache for so long. But then my conscience started to work on me, and, well, I simply can't let you do it."

  "I'll take it. Do the animals go with it?"

  "Everything goes with it. That's in Gottwald's will and in the deed. It has to be kept just as it is and it must be farmed. See how impossible it is? Now, shall we go to Griffin Boulevard, where there's just the right house for the Manager of the Ilium Works?" When he spoke the title, his voice sounded like a choir of French horns.

  "I want this."

  "If you try to force me to sell it, I'll quit." Doctor Pond reddened. "My classification number may be twice what yours is, but I have a certain amount of integrity."

  The word, coming from Pond, struck Paul as ridiculous at first, and he started to smile about it. Then he saw how tense the man was, and realized that what Pond was talking about was, by God, integrity. This pipsqueak of a man in a pipsqueak job had pipsqueak standards he was willing to lay his pipsqueak life down for. And Paul had a vision of civilization as a vast and faulty dike, with thousands of men like Doctor Pond in a rank stretching to the horizon, each man grimly stopping a leak with his finger.

  "This would be a hobby, of course - a plaything," Paul lied. "I'd go on living where I'm living now."

  Doctor Pond sighed and sank into a chair. "Oh - thank the Lord! Oh! You have no idea how much better I feel." He laughed in nervous relief. "Of course, of course, of course. And you'd keep Mr. Haycox on?"

  "Who is Mr. Haycox?"

  "The Reek and Wreck who's assigned to keep the place going. He's under orders from the Reeks and Wrecks, but of course the Gottwald estate pays him. You'd have to do the same."

  "I'd like to meet him."

  "He's an antique too." He threw his hands over his head. "What a place. I think you're mad, simply mad. But he who pays the piper calls the tune."

  "As long as he doesn't threaten to disgrace the system."

  "Exactly! That's almost good enough to carve over your mantel, but I doubt if the deed will let you."

  "How about, 'After us the deluge,' " said Paul.

  "Hmm?" Doctor Pond tried to make sense of the quotation, seemingly decided that it was some archaic, pleasant sentiment for those who understood poetry, and
smiled. "That's nice too." Apparently the word "deluge" stuck in his mind. "Now, about the cellar here: it has an earth floor and is damp." He leaned out of the back door, wrinkled his nose in the sweet, stringent odor of manure cooking in the sunlight, and shouted, "Mr. Haycox! Oh, Mr. Haycox!"

  Paul had opened the back of a grandfather clock. "I'll be damned," he said under his breath. "Wooden works." He checked his own watch, the shock-proof, waterproof, antimagnetic, glow-in-the-dark, self-winding chronometer Anita had given him for Christmas, and found that the grandfather clock was off by about twelve minutes. Indulging an atavistic whim, he set his watch to correspond with the hands of the relic, which grated and creaked away the seconds, sounding like a wooden ship straining in a strong wind.

  The house was certainly one of the oldest in the valley. The rough rafters were inches above Paul's head, and the fireplace was sooted black, and there wasn't a true right angle anywhere. The house seemed to have twisted and stretched on its foundations until it had found a position of comfort for all of its parts - like a sleeping dog.

  More remarkable than the way the house had relieved its stresses was the way it conformed to Paul's particular, not to say peculiar, needs. Here was a place where he could work with his hands, getting life from nature without being disturbed by any human beings other than his wife. Not only that, but Anita, with her love for things colonial, would be enchanted, stunned, even, by this completely authentic microcosm of the past.

  "Ah," said Doctor Pond, "Mr. Haycox at last. When you yell for him, he never yells back. Just starts coming, taking his own sweet time."

  Paul watched Mr. Haycox's heavy-footed progress across the hard-packed earth of the barnyard. The caretaker was an old man, with close-cropped white hair, coarse, tanned skin, and, like Rudy Hertz, with remarkably big hands. Unlike Rudy, Mr. Haycox wasn't desiccated. His flesh was firm, hard, and well colored. The chief toll he seemed to have paid time was in teeth, of which he had few. He might have been part of a pageant recalling farm life as it had once been. He wore old-fashioned blue denim overalls, a wide-brimmed straw hat, and heavy, crusty work shoes.

  As though to point up the anachronism of Mr. Haycox and the Gottwald place for Paul, one of Doctor Ormand van Curler's men, riding on a tractor, appeared on the other side of the windbreak, snappy in spotless white coveralls, a red baseball cap, cool sandals which almost never touched the ground, and white gloves which, like Paul's hands, rarely touched anything but steering wheels, levers, and switches.

  "What do you want?" said Mr. Haycox. "What's the matter now?" His voice was strong. He had none of the sheepishness or obsequiousness Paul had seen so frequently in Reeks and Wrecks. Mr. Haycox bore himself as though he owned the place, wanted the talk to be as brief and pithy as possible, and doubted that whatever was wanted of him could possibly be more important than what he had been doing.

  "Doctor Proteus - this is Mr. Haycox."

  "How are you?" said Paul.

  " 'Do," said Mr. Haycox. "What kind of doctor?"

  "Doctor of Science," said Paul.

  Mr. Haycox seemed annoyed and disappointed. "Don't call that kind a doctor at all. Three kinds of doctors: dentists, vets, and physicians. You one of those?"

  "No. Sorry."

  "Then you ain't a doctor."

  "He is a doctor," said Doctor Pond earnestly. "He knows how to keep machines healthy." He was trying to build up the importance of graduate degrees in the mind of this clod.

  "Mechanic," said Mr. Haycox.

  "Well," said Doctor Pond, "you can go to college and learn to be a specialist in all sorts of things besides making people or animals well. I mean, after all. The modern world would grind to a halt if there weren't men with enough advanced training to keep the complicated parts of civilization working smoothly."

  "Um," said Mr. Haycox apathetically. "What do you keep working so smoothly?"

  Doctor Pond smiled modestly. "I spent seven years in the Cornell Graduate School of Realty to qualify for a Doctor of Realty degree and get this job."

  "Call yourself a doctor, too, do you?" said Mr. Haycox.

  "I think I can say without fear of contradiction that I earned that degree," said Doctor Pond coolly. "My thesis was the third longest in any field in the country that year - eight hundred and ninety-six pages, double-spaced, with narrow margins."

  "Real-estate salesman," said Mr. Haycox. He looked back and forth between Paul and Doctor Pond, waiting for them to say something worth his attention. When they'd failed to rally after twenty seconds, he turned to go. "I'm doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit," he said. "When you doctors figure out what you want, you'll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis."

  "Mr. Haycox!" said Doctor Pond, furious. "You'll stay here until we're through with you!"

  "Thought you was." He stopped, and stood perfectly motionless.

  "Doctor Proteus is buying the farm."

  "My farm?" Mr. Haycox turned slowly to face them, and real concern was in his eyes.

  "The farm you've been taking care of," said Doctor Pond.

  "My farm."

  "The Gottwald estate's farm," said Doctor Pond.

  "That a man?"

  "You know it isn't."

  "Well, I'm a man. As far as men go, this here is my farm more'n it's anybody else's. I'm the only man who ever cared about it, ever did anything about it." He turned earnestly to Paul. "You know the will says you got to keep it just like it is?"

  "I plan to."

  "And keep me on," said Mr. Haycox.

  "Well, I don't know for sure," said Paul. This was a complication he hadn't foreseen. He planned to do the work himself. That was the point of the undertaking.

  "That isn't in the will," said Doctor Pond, pleased to have found something that shocked respect into Mr. Haycox.

  "All the same, you got to keep me on," said Mr. Haycox. "This is what I do." He gestured at the yard and buildings, all neat. "This is what I've done."

  "Gottwald bought this place from Mr. Haycox's father," Doctor Pond explained. "There was some sort of informal agreement, I think, that Mr. Haycox could have the job of caretaker for his lifetime."

  "Informal, hell!" said Mr. Haycox. "He promised, Gottwald did. This here's been our family's for more'n a hundred years - lots more. And I'm the last of the line, and Gottwald promised, by God, he promised it'd be the same as mine till it came time for me to go."

  "Well, the time has come," said Doctor Pond.

  "Dead - Gottwald meant when I was dead. I got twice as many years behind me as you do, sonny boy, and twice as many ahead of me." He moved closer to Doctor Pond, and squinted at him. "I've moved so many big piles of shit in my life, figure I could throw a little dab like you clean over the barn."

  Doctor Pond's eyes widened, and he backed away. "We'll see about that," he said faintly.

  "Look," said Paul hastily, "I'm sure we can work this out. Soon as I close the deal, Mr. Haycox, you'll be working for me."

  "Things going to be just like they were?"

  "My wife and I'll be coming out from time to time." Now didn't seem to be the time to tell him or anyone that he and Anita would be permanent residents.

  Haycox didn't care for this much. "When?"

  "We'll give you plenty of notice."

  He nodded grimly. Then, unexpectedly and charmingly, Mr. Haycox smiled. "Wonder if I went and offended that there Doctor of Realty?" Pond had fled. "Well, I'll be getting back to work. Long as this here is going to be your farm, you might's well fix the pump. Needs a new packing."

  "Afraid I don't know how," said Paul.

  "Maybe," said Mr. Haycox walking away, "maybe if you'd of gone to college another ten or twenty years, somebody would of gotten around to showing you how, Doctor."

  Chapter Sixteen

  ANITA seemingly mistook Paul's quite excitement for daydreams of happy hours to come at the Meadows, which were less than two weeks away.

  She didn't know that he was learning to be a farmer and laying
the groundwork for teaching her to be a farmer's wife.

  It was a hot Saturday, and on the pretext of buying himself a fielder's mitt, Paul went to his farm - to his and Mr. Haycox's farm. There Mr. Haycox condescendingly and impatiently imparted half-truths about running the place, and gave Paul a vague confidence that he could get the hang of it after a while.

  That evening at suppertime, Paul, satisfyingly pooped after having trailed Mr. Haycox for hours, asked his wife if she knew what day the coming Wednesday was.

  She looked up from a list of things she was to pack for her trip to the Mainland and, more important, for Paul's trip to the Meadows. "Can't imagine. Have you got nice-looking tennis shoes for the trip?"

  "They'll do. For your information, next Wednesday is -"

  "Shepherd is taking twelve pairs of socks - all green. He's a captain, too, you know."

  "I know."

  "What do you make of that? It's kind of a surprise: the first time you get to be captain, he does, too."

  "Maybe he sent a coupon to the Rosicrucians. How on earth do you know how many pairs of socks he's taking?"

  "Well, he hasn't got a wife to help him plan, so he came over this afternoon to get my help. So I made a list of things he ought to take. Men are so helpless."

  "They muddle through. Did he have anything interesting to say?"

  She laid down the list and looked at him reproachfully. "Only about the police report about your pistol, and another one about the underworld people you were with that awful night in Homestead." She wadded her napkin and threw it down petulantly. "Paul - why don't you tell me these things? Why do I always have to find out from someone else?"

  "Underworld!" snorted Paul. "Oh, for heaven's sake."

  "Shepherd says Lasher and Finnerty are being watched as potential saboteurs."