Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "Yessir."

  "Kaplowie! Some men try to make light of what we're doing, what men like your father did, by saying it's just gadgeteering, blind tinkering. It's more than that, Paul."

  Paul leaned forward, eager to hear what this extra quality might be. He'd felt for some time that everyone else in the system must be seeing something he was missing. Perhaps this was it, perhaps the beginning of an overwhelming fervor like his father's.

  "It's a sight more than gadgeteering, I'll tell you, Paul."

  "Yessir?"

  "It's strength and faith and determination. Our job is to open new doors at the head of the procession of civilization. That's what the engineer, the manager does. There is no higher calling."

  Dejectedly, Paul let his spine sag back in the chair.

  Kroner put a fresh patch on the cleaning rod and began swabbing the bore again. "Paul--Pittsburgh is still open. The field has been narrowed down to two men."

  It was somewhat startling that he said it just that way, the way Anita had said he would. He wondered what it was she thought he should say in response. He'd never given her a chance to say, and hadn't read the outline. "It's a wonderful chance to be of real service," he said. He supposed that was pretty close to what she had in mind.

  Paul felt lightheaded, having borrowed Anita's thoughts for want of enthusiasm of his own. He was being offered the Pittsburgh job, lots more money, and, since he would have risen so high with the greater portion of his life still ahead, the assurance that he would almost certainly go clear to the top. The moment of his arrival at this point of immense good fortune was curiously bland. He had known it was coming for a long time. Kroner had wanted it for him and had come close to promising it to him often--always in the name of his father. When advances had come, as now, there had been a vestigal sort of ritual of surprise and congratulation, as though Paul, like his ancestors, had arrived by cunning, tenacity, and God's will or the Devil's laxness.

  "It's a tough decision, Paul, between you and Fred Garth." Garth was a much older man, nearly Kroner's age, manager of the Buffalo Works. "Frankly, Garth hasn't got your technical imagination, Paul. As a manager he's excellent, but if it wasn't for prodding, the Buffalo Works would be just as it was when he took over five years ago. But he's steady and reliable, Paul, and there's never been any question that he was one of us, that he put progress and the system ahead of his own interests."

  "Garth's a fine man," said Paul. Garth was, too: foursquare, desperate to please, and he seemed to have an anthropomorphic image of the corporate personality. Garth stood in relation to that image as a lover, and Paul wondered if this prevalent type of relationship had ever been given the consideration it deserved by sexologists. On second thought, he supposed that it had--the general phenomenon of a lover's devotion to the unseen--in studies of nuns' symbolic marriages to Christ. At any rate, Paul had seen Garth at various stages of his love affair, unable to eat for anxiety, on a manic crest, moved to maudlin near-crying at recollections of the affair's tender beginnings. In short, Garth suffered all the emotional hazards of a perennial game of she-loves-me, she-loves-me-not. To carry out directions from above--an irritating business for Paul--was, for Garth, a favor to please a lady. "I'd like to see him get the job."

  "I'd like to see you get the job, Paul." Kroner's expression indicated that the mention of Garth had been so much window dressing. "You've got imagination and spirit and ability--"

  "Thank you, sir."

  "Let me finish. Imagination, spirit, and ability, and, for all I know, I may be completely wrong in calling your loyalty into question."

  "Loyalty?"

  Kroner laid the shotgun aside and pulled up a chair to face Paul's. He laid his big hands on Paul's knees and lowered his thick brows. The situation had the quality of a seance, with Kroner as the medium. Again, as he had felt when Kroner took his hand at the Country Club, Paul felt his strength and will dwarfed by the old man. "Paul, I want you to tell me what's on your mind."

  The hands on his knees tightened. Paul struggled resentfully against the urge to pour his heart out to this merciful, wise, gentle father. But his sullenness decayed. Paul began to talk.

  His formless misgivings and disquiet of a week before, he realized, had shape now. The raw material of his discontent was now cast in another man's molds. He was saying what Lasher had said the night before, talking about the spiritual disaster across the river, about the threat of revolution, about the hierarchy that was a nightmare to most. The way he phrased it, it wasn't a condemnation, it was a plea for refutation.

  Kroner, his hands still on Paul's knees, hung his head lower and lower.

  Paul came to the end, and Kroner stood and turned his back to stare out of the window. The spell was still in force, and Paul looked expectantly at the broad back, waiting for wisdom.

  Kroner turned suddenly. "So you're against us."

  "I didn't mean to say that, certainly. They're questions that deserve some sort of answer."

  "Keep to your own side of the river, Paul! Your job is management and engineering. I don't know what the answers are to Lasher's questions. I do know that it's far easier to ask questions than to answer them. I know that there have always been questions, and men like Lasher ready to make trouble by asking them."

  "You know about Lasher?" Paul hadn't mentioned his name.

  "Yes, I've known about him for quite some time. And, as of this noon, I know what you and Lasher and Finnerty were up to last night." He looked sad. "As district industrial security officer, there isn't much I don't know, Paul. And sometimes, like now, I wish I didn't know so much."

  "And Pittsburgh?"

  "I still think you're the man for the job. I'm going to pretend that you didn't do last night what you did, didn't say just now what you said. I don't believe it came from your heart."

  Paul was amazed. By some freakish circumstance he'd apparently clinched the job--after having arrived with the vague intention of disqualifying himself.

  "This is the main stretch, Paul. Now it's all up to you."

  "I could go on the wagon, I suppose."

  "It's a little more complicated than that, I'm afraid. In a very short while you managed to pile up a fairly impressive police dossier: the pistol, letting Finnerty into the plant, last night's indiscretions--and, well, I've got to be able to explain it all away to the satisfaction of Headquarters. You could go to prison, you know."

  Paul laughed nervously.

  "I want to be able to say, Paul, that you were doing special security work for me, and I'd like to prove it."

  "I see." Paul didn't.

  "You'll agree that both Lasher and Finnerty are dangerous men, potential saboteurs who should be put where they can't do any harm." He took the shotgun down from the rack again and distorted his face as he cleaned around the ejector with a toothpick. "So," he said after a few moments of silence, "I'll want you to testify that they tried to get you into a plot to sabotage the Ilium Works."

  The door flew open, and Baer came in, grinning. "Congratulations, my boy. Congratulations. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful."

  "Congratulations?" said Paul.

  "Pittsburgh, my boy, Pittsburgh!"

  "It hasn't quite been settled," said Kroner.

  "But you said yesterday--"

  "A little something's come up since then." Kroner winked at Paul. "Nothing very serious, though, eh, Paul? A little hurdle."

  "Um, oh, I see, uh-huh; a hurdle, a hurdle. I see. Urn."

  Paul was shaken and confused by what had just happened to him, and he hid his lack of composure behind a vacuous smile. He wondered if Baer had come in on cue.

  "Paul here had some questions," said Kroner.

  "Questions? Questions, my boy?"

  "He wanted to know if we weren't doing something bad in the name of progress."

  Baer sat on the desk and began taking kinks out of the telephone cord. He was thinking very hard, and from the man's expression Paul could only conclude that the quest
ion had never come to Baer's attention before. Now that it had, he was giving it his earnest consideration. "Is progress bad? Uh-huh--good question." He looked up from the cord. "I don't know, don't know. Maybe progress is bad, eh?"

  Kroner looked at him with surprise. "Look, you know darn good and well history's answered the question a thousand times."

  "It has? Has it? You know; I wouldn't. Answered it a thousand times, has it? That's good, good. All I know is, you've got to act like it has, or you might as well throw in the towel. Don't know, my boy. Guess I should, but I don't. Just do my job. Maybe that's wrong."

  It was Kroner's turn to be dismayed. "Well, what say to a refresher?" he said briskly.

  "I say yes to a refresher," said Paul gratefully.

  Kroner chuckled. "There, there; it wasn't so rough, now was it?"

  "Nope."

  "That's my boy. Chin up."

  As Baer, Paul, and Kroner filed into the living room, Mom was telling Anita sadly that it took all kinds of people to make a world.

  "I just want to make sure everybody understands he invited himself," said Anita. "Mom, there wasn't a thing we could do about it."

  Kroner dusted his hands. "Well, what say to a pick-me-up?"

  "Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful," said Baer.

  "Did you men have a good time with those awful guns?" said Mom, wrinkling her nose.

  "Swell, Mom," said Paul.

  Anita caught Paul's eyes, and raised her brows questioningly.

  Paul nodded slightly.

  She smiled and lay back in her chair, exhausted, satisfied.

  Mom handed out small glasses of port, while Kroner tinkered with the phonograph. "Where is it?" he said.

  "Now, now--right where it always is, on the turntable," said Mom.

  "Oh yes--here it is. I thought maybe somebody else had been playing something since I used it."

  "No. Nobody's been near the phonograph since last night."

  Kroner held the tone arm over the spinning record. "This is for you, Paul. When I said pick-me-up I really had this in mind more than the wine. This is meat for the spirit. This can pull me out of a slump like nothing I can think of."

  "I gave it to him last month, and I can't think of anything that's ever pleased him as much," said Mom.

  Kroner lowered the needle into the groove and hurried to a chair and covered his eyes before the music began.

  The volume was turned way up, and suddenly the loudspeaker howled:

  "Ooooooooooooh, give me some men, who are stout-hearted men, who will fight for the right they adore ..."

  Paul looked around the room. Kroner was clumping his feet up and down and jerking his head from side to side. Mom was jerking her head, too, and so were Baer and Anita--Anita more violently than any of them.

  Paul sighed, and began to jerk his head, too.

  "Shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolder, they grow as they go to the fore! Ooooooooooooh ..."

  13

  LYING ABED AFTER the stout-hearted men's evening at the Kroner's, Doctor Paul Proteus, son of a successful man, himself rich with prospects of being richer, counted his material blessings. He found that he was in excellent shape to afford integrity. He was worth, without having to work another day in his life, almost three-quarters of a million dollars.

  For once, his dissatisfaction with his life was specific. He was reacting to an outrage that would be regarded as such by almost any man in any period in history. He had been told to turn informer on his friend, Ed Finnerty. This was about as basic as an attack on integrity could be, and Paul received it with the same sort of relief that was felt when the first shots of the last war were fired--after decades of tension.

  Now he could damn well lose his temper and quit.

  Anita slept--utterly satisfied, not so much by Paul as by the social orgasm of, after years of the system's love play, being offered Pittsburgh.

  She had delivered a monologue on the way home from Albany--a recitation that might have come from Shepherd. She'd reviewed Paul's career from the instant of their marriage onward, and Paul was surprised to learn that his path was strewn with bodies--men who had tried to best him, only to be chagrined and ruined.

  She made the carnage so vivid that he was obliged for a moment to abandon his own thoughts, to see if there was the slightest truth in what she was saying. He went over the scalps she was counting one by one--men who had competed with him for this job or that--and found that they all had done well for themselves and were quite unbroken either financially or in spirit. But to Anita they were dead men, shot squarely between the eyes, and good riddance of bad rubbish.

  Paul hadn't told Anita the conditions he would have to meet before he could have Pittsburgh. And he didn't intimate that he was going to do anything but take the job proudly, joyfully.

  Now, lying beside her, he congratulated himself on his calm, on his being wily for the first time in his life, really. He wasn't going to tell Anita that he was quitting for a long time, not until she was ready. He would subtly re-educate her to a new set of values, and then quit. Otherwise the shock of being the wife of a nobody might do tragic things. The only grounds on which she met the world were those of her husband's rank. If he were to lose the rank it was frighteningly possible that she would lose touch with the world altogether, or, worse for Paul, leave him.

  And Paul didn't want either of those things to happen. She was what fate had given him to love, and he did his best to love her. He knew her too well for her conceits to be offensive most of the time, to be anything but pathetic.

  She was also more of a source of courage than he cared to admit.

  She also had a sexual genius that gave Paul his one unqualified enthusiasm in life.

  And Anita had also made possible, by her dogged attention to details, the luxury of his detached, variously amused or cynical outlook on life.

  She was also all he had.

  A vague panic welled up cold in his chest, driving away drowsiness when he would most have welcomed it. He began to see that he, too, would be in for a shock. He felt oddly disembodied, an insubstantial wisp, nothingness, a man who declined to be any more. Suddenly understanding that he, like Anita, was little more than his station in life, he threw his arms around his sleeping wife, and laid his head on the breast of his fellow wraith-to-be.

  "Mmmmm?" said Anita. "Mmmmmmm?"

  "Anita--"

  "Mmm?"

  "Anita, I love you." The compulsion was upon him to tell her everything, to mingle his consciousness with hers. But as he momentarily raised his head from the drugging warmth and fragrance of her bosom, cool, fresh air from the Adirondacks bathed his face, and wisdom returned. He said nothing more to her.

  "I love you, Paul," she murmured.

  14

  DOCTOR PAUL PROTEUS was a man with a secret. Most of the time it was an exhilarating secret, and he extracted momentary highs of joy from it while dealing with fellow members of the system in the course of his job. At the beginning and close of each item of business he thought, "To hell with you."

  It was to hell with them, to hell with everything. This secret detachment gave him a delightful sense of all the world's being a stage. Waiting until the time when he and Anita would be in mental shape to quit and start a better life, Paul acted out his role as manager of the Ilium Works. Outwardly, as manager, he was unchanged; but inwardly he was burlesquing smaller, less free souls who would have taken the job seriously.

  He had never been a reading man, but now he was developing an appetite for novels wherein the hero lived vigorously and out-of-doors, dealing directly with nature, dependent upon basic cunning and physical strength for survival--woodsmen, sailors, cattlemen....

  He read of these heroes with a half-smile on his lips. He knew his enjoyment of them was in a measure childish, and he doubted that a life could ever be as clean, hearty, and satisfying as those in the books. Still and all, there was a basic truth underlying the tales, a primitive ideal to which he could aspire.
He wanted to deal, not with society, but only with Earth as God had given it to man.

  "Is that a good book, Doctor Proteus?" said Doctor Katharine Finch, his secretary. She'd come into his office carrying a large gray cardboard box.

  "Oh--hello, Katharine." He laid the book down with a smile. "Not great literature; I'll promise you that. Pleasant relaxation is all. All about bargemen on the old Erie Ship Canal." He tapped the broad, naked chest of the hero on the book jacket. "Don't make men like that any more. Well, what's in the box? That for me?"

  "It's your shirts. They just came by mail."

  "Shirts?"

  "For the Meadows."

  "Oh, those things. Open them up. What color are they?"

  "Blue. You're on the Blue Team this year." She laid the shirts on the desk.

  "Oh, no!" Paul stood and held one of the deep blue T-shirts at arm's length. "Dear God in heaven--no!" Across the chest of each of the shirts, in blazing gold letters, was the word "Captain." "Katharine, they can't do this to me."

  "It's an honor, isn't it?"

  "Honor!" He exhaled noisily and shook his head. "For fourteen days, Katharine, I, Queen of the May and captain of the Blue Team, am going to have to lead my men in group singing, marches, greased-pole climbing, volley ball, horseshoes, softball, golf-ball driving, badminton, trapshooting, capture the flag, Indian wrestling, touch football, shuffle-board, and trying to throw the other captains into the lake. Agh!"

  "Doctor Shepherd was very pleased."

  "He always has been fond of me."

  "No--I mean he was pleased about being a captain himself."

  "Oh? Shepherd is a captain?" Paul's raised eyebrows were part of an old reflex, the wary reaction of a man who has been in the system for a good many years. Being chosen to captain one of the four teams was an honor, if a man gave a damn about such things. It was a way the higher brass had of showing favor, and, politically, Shepherd's having been chosen a captain was a striking business. Shepherd had always been a nobody at the Meadows, whose chief fame was as a pretty fair softball pitcher. Now, suddenly, he was a captain. "Which team?"

  "Green. His shirts are on my desk. Green with orange lettering. Very vivid."

  "Green, eh?" Well, if one cared about such things, Green was the lowest in the unofficial hierarchy of teams. It was one of those things that was understood without anyone's saying anything about it. Having looked this far into the piddling matter, Paul congratulated himself for having been named captain of the Blue, which, again, everybody seemed to feel was the team with the most tone. Not that it made any difference at all any more. Made none. Silly. To hell with it.