Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "Yes, the professional actors and the television circuits are a big improvement, sir," said Buck.

  "And the exams!" said Halyard. "Pretty cute, you know, punching out the answers, and then finding out right off if you passed or flunked. Boy, believe me, we used to have to write our arms off, and then we'd have to wait weeks for a prof to grade the exams. And plenty of times they made bad mistakes on the grades."

  "Yessir," said Buck politely.

  "Well, I'll see one of your assistants tomorrow, eh?" said Halyard to Roseberry.

  "I intend I should give you the tests personal," said Roseberry.

  "Well! I guess that's an honor, with the season just beginning."

  "Sure," said Roseberry. He reached into his breast pocket and produced the letter and the memo. He handed the letter to Halyard. "Here's something you should oughta read before you come."

  "Fine, thanks." Halyard took it, supposing it was a list of the things he would have to do. He smiled warmly at Roseberry, who had given every indication that Halyard would be given an exceedingly simple and short series of tests. A mere fifteen minutes, he'd said. That would do it.

  Halyard glanced at the letter, and couldn't imagine what it was all about at first. It was addressed to the president of Cornell, Doctor Albert Herpers, not to him. Moreover, the date on it indicated that it was five years old.

  Dear Doctor Herpers: he read--

  I had occasion to see the wearers of the Red and White after the Penn game in Philadelphia this Thanksgiving, and I must say I was ashamed to admit to anyone that I had ever come within fifty miles of Ithaca.

  I was dining in the Club Cybernetics after the game, when the team, led by this new man, Doctor Roseberry, arrived en masse ...

  The letter went on to describe the bacchanal that followed, with particular emphasis on the crudities of Roseberry's behavior--

  while, mind you, all were wearing what I, perhaps in my old-fashioned way, consider sacred, the C of the Big Red....

  In view of this, Doctor Herpers, I feel constrained to point out, as a loyal alumnus, that Doctor Roseberry, in his first year with the Big Red, is off to an extremely poor start. In the brief time of his incumbency, I have no doubt that the shockingly public moral turpitude of the team has made a worse name for what I was once proud to claim as my Alma Mater than a lifetime of gridiron victories can possibly offset....

  It is my fervent hope that Roseberry will be forced to resign forthwith, or, failing that, that outraged alumni sell him to some Grade C school forthwith.

  To this end, I am sending copies of this letter to the Alumni Secretary, to each of the local alumni chapters, to the Trustees, and to the Secretary of Athletics in Washington, D. C.

  Very truly yours,

  Doctor Ewing J. Halyard

  "Oh," said Halyard, his poise gone, suddenly looking ridiculous in the clothes that had been high fashion a moment before. "Saw this, did you?"

  "Doctor Herpers thought I'd be interested."

  A sickly grin framed Halyard's white teeth. "Long time ago, wasn't it, Doctor? Seems like a hundred years."

  "Like yesterday."

  "Ha ha. Lot of water under the dam since those days, eh?"

  The Shah looked questioningly at Khashdrahr for an explanation of what made Halyard so gray suddenly. Khashdrahr shrugged.

  "Over the dam," said Buck Young, filling the grim void in the conversation. "Or under the bridge."

  "Yes. Quite so," said Halyard hollowly. "Well, best we should go. See you in the morning."

  "Wouldn't miss it for the world."

  Doctor Roseberry turned back to Buck Young, as Halyard, his face somber, shepherded the Shah and Khashdrahr into the Ithaca night. The Shah was sneezing violently.

  "Well, kid," said Roseberry. "What say to thirty-five grand? Yes or no?"

  "I--"

  "Thirty-six."

  "Yes," whispered Buck. "Hell yes."

  When the two went back into The Dutch to drink to the deal, Purdy and McCloud were still talking gloomily in their dark corner.

  "Sure," said Purdy, "Roseberry's a tough guy to work for, but thank God you ain't workin' for Harvard."

  McCloud nodded. "Yeah, work there, and 'ey won't letch wear nothin' but dark-gray flannels in the winter, and seersucker in the summer."

  They both shuddered, and furtively refilled their glasses from a half-case hidden under the table.

  "Wit' out shoulders," said Purdy.

  29

  DOCTOR PAUL PROTEUS, to all practical purposes Mr. Paul Proteus, dreamed of nothing but pleasant things under the benign drug, and spoke simultaneously, without reflection but truthfully, on whatever subject was brought to his attention. The talking he did, the answering of questions, went on as though it were being done by a person hired to represent him, while Paul personally gave his attention to entertaining phantasmagoria within the privacy of his closed eyelids.

  "Did you really get fired, or was it a pretense?" said the voice.

  "Pretense. Supposed to get into the Ghost Shirt Society and find out what they're up to. Only I quit, and they don't know that, yet." Paul chuckled.

  And in his dream, Paul danced powerfully, gracefully, to the hectic rhythms of the Building 58 Suite.

  "Furrazz-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ak! ting!" went lathe group three, and Paul leapt and spun among the machines, while, pink amid the gray machines in the building's center, Anita lay invitingly in a rainbow-colored nest of control wires. Her part in the dance called for her only to lie there motionless, while Paul approached and fled, approached and fled in frenzied, random action.

  "Why are you quitting?"

  "Sick of my job."

  "Because what you were doing was morally bad?" suggested the voice.

  "Because it wasn't getting anybody anywhere. Because it was getting everybody nowhere."

  "Because it was evil?" insisted the voice.

  "Because it was pointless," said Paul's representative, as Kroner joined the ballet, ponderously, earthbound, with a methodical marching to the voices of the punch presses in the basement: "Aw-grumph! tonka-tonka. Aw-grumph! tonka-tonka ..."

  Kroner looked lovingly at Paul, caught him as he bounded past, and carried him in a bearlike embrace toward Anita. Paul squirmed free in the nick of time, and off he went again, leaving Kroner in tears, urging Anita to follow him into the out-of-doors.

  "Then you're against the organization now?"

  "I'm not with them now."

  Shepherd, clumsily but energetically, entered the growing tableau from the basement, choosing as his theme the hoarse voices of the welders: "Vaaaaaaa-zuzip! Vaaaaaaa-zuzip!" Shepherd marked time with one foot, watching Paul's gyrations, another rejection of Kroner, another effort to coax the dead-panned Anita from her nest amid the machines. Shepherd watched with puzzlement and disdain, shrugged, and walked straight to Kroner and Anita. The three settled in the nest of wires, and together followed Paul's movements with baffled, censorious eyes.

  Suddenly, a window by which Paul was bounding flew open, and Finnerty's face was thrust into the opening.

  "Paul!"

  "Yes, Ed?"

  "You're on our side now!"

  The Building 58 Suite stopped abruptly, and a black curtain fell between Paul and the rest of the cast, save Finnerty.

  "Hmmm?" said Paul.

  "You're on our side," said Finnerty. "If you're not with them, you're with us!"

  Paul's head was aching now, and his lips were dry. He opened his eyes and saw Finnerty's face, gross, caricatured by its closeness.

  "With who? Whom?"

  "The Ghost Shirt Society, Paul."

  "Oh, them. What do they think, Ed?" he asked drowsily. He was on a mattress, he realized, in a chamber whose air was still and damp, dense with the feel of dead mass pressing down from above. "What they think, Ed?"

  "That the world should be restored to the people."

  "By all means," said Paul, trying to nod. His muscles were only faintly connected to his will, a
nd his will, in turn, was a fuzzy, ineffectual thing. "People oughta get it back."

  "You're going to help."

  "Yup," murmured Paul. He was in a highly tolerant mood, full of admiration and well-wishing for anyone with convictions, and cheerfully hors de combat under the influence of the drug. Obviously, he couldn't be expected to do anything. And Finnerty began to fade again, and Paul danced once more in Building 58, danced God knows why, uncertain that there was an audience anywhere to appreciate his exertions.

  "What do you think?" he heard Finnerty say.

  "He'll do nicely," he heard another voice reply, and he recognized the voice as Lasher's.

  "What's a ghost shirt?" murmured Paul between prickling lips.

  "Toward the end of the nineteenth century," said Lasher, "a new religious movement swept the Indians in this country, Doctor."

  "The Ghost Dance, Paul," said Finnerty.

  "The white man had broken promise after promise to the Indians, killed off most of the game, taken most of the Indians' land, and handed the Indians bad beatings every time they'd offered any resistance," said Lasher.

  "Poor Injuns," murmured Paul.

  "This is serious," said Finnerty. "Listen to what he's telling you."

  "With the game and land and ability to defend themselves gone," said Lasher, "the Indians found out that all the things they used to take pride in doing, all the things that had made them feel important, all the things that used to gain them prestige, all the ways in which they used to justify their existence--they found that all those things were going or gone. Great hunters had nothing to hunt. Great fighters did not come back from charging into repeating-arms fire. Great leaders could lead the people nowhere but into death in hopeless attack, or deeper into wastelands. Great religious leaders could no longer show that the old religious beliefs were the way to victory and plenty."

  Paul, suggestible under the drug, was deeply disturbed by the plight of the redskins. "Golly."

  "The world had changed radically for the Indians," said Lasher. "It had become a white man's world, and Indian ways in a white man's world were irrelevant. It was impossible to hold the old Indian values in the changed world. The only thing they could do in the changed world was to become second-rate white men or wards of the white men."

  "Or they could make one last fight for the old values," said Finnerty with relish.

  "And the Ghost Dance religion," said Lasher, "was that last, desperate defense of the old values. Messiahs appeared, the way they're always ready to appear, to preach magic that would restore the game, the old values, the old reasons for being. There were new rituals and new songs that were supposed to get rid of the white men by magic. And some of the more warlike tribes that still had a little physical fight left in them added a flourish of their own--the Ghost Shirt."

  "Oho," said Paul.

  "They were going to ride into battle one last time," said Lasher, "in magic shirts that white men's bullets couldn't go through."

  "Luke! Hey, Luke!" called Finnerty. "Stop the mimeo machine a second and come on over here."

  Paul heard footsteps shuffling across the damp floor. He opened his eyes to see Luke Lubbock, his features sour with the tragic stoicism of a dispossessed redskin, standing by his bed, wearing a white shirt fringed in an imitation of a buckskin shirt, and decorated with thunderbirds and stylized buffalo worked into the fabric with brightly insulated bits of wire.

  "Ug," said Paul.

  "Ug," said Luke, without hesitation, deep in his role.

  "This isn't any joke, Paul," said Finnerty.

  "Everything's a joke until the drug wears off," said Lasher.

  "Does Luke think he's bulletproof?" said Paul.

  "It's the symbolism of the thing!" said Finnerty. "Don't you get it yet?"

  "I expect," said Paul amiably, dreamily. "Sure. You bet. I guess."

  "What is the symbolism?" asked Finnerty.

  "Luke Lubbock wants his buffaloes back."

  "Paul--come on, snap out of it!" said Finnerty.

  "Okey dokey."

  "Don't you see, Doctor?" said Lasher. "The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don't apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines."

  "God help us," said Paul. "But, I dunno, this Ghost Shirt thing--it's kind of childish, isn't it? Dressing up like that, and--"

  "Childish--like Hitler's Brown Shirts, like Mussolini's Black Shirts. Childish like any uniform," said Lasher. "We don't deny it's childish. At the same time, we admit that we've got to be a little childish, anyway, to get the big following we need."

  "Wait until he sits in on some meetings," said Finnerty. "They're like something out of Alice in Wonderland, Paul."

  "All meetings are," said Lasher. "But, by some magic that's beyond my comprehension, meetings get things done. I could do with a little more dignity and maturity in our operations, because those are the things we're fighting for. But first of all we've got to fight, and fighting is necessarily undignified and immature."

  "Fight?" said Paul.

  "Fight," said Lasher. "And there's hope of putting up a good fight. This business of one set of values being replaced by force by another set of values has come up often enough in history--"

  "Among the Indians and the Jews and a lot of other people who've been tyrannized by outsiders," said Finnerty.

  "Yes, it's come up often enough for us to make a good guess as to what can happen this time," said Lasher. He paused. "What we can make happen."

  "Beat it, Luke," said Finnerty.

  "Yessir."

  "Paul, are you listening?" said Finnerty.

  "Yep. Interesting."

  "All right," said Lasher, his voice low. "In the past, in a situation like this, if Messiahs showed up with credible, dramatic messages of hope, they often set off powerful physical and spiritual revolutions in the face of terrific odds. If a Messiah shows up now with a good, solid, startling message, and if he keeps out of the hands of the police, he can set off a revolution--maybe one big enough to take the world away from the machines, Doctor, and give it back to the people."

  "And you're just the boy to do it, too, Ed," said Paul.

  "That's what I thought, too," said Lasher, "at first. Then I realized we could do much better starting off with a name that was already well known."

  "Sitting Bull?" said Paul.

  "Proteus," said Lasher.

  "You don't have to do anything but keep out of sight," said Finnerty. "Everything will be done for you."

  "Is being done," said Lasher.

  "So you just rest now," said Finnerty gently. "Build up your strength."

  "I--"

  "You don't matter," said Finnerty. "You belong to History now."

  A heavy door thumped shut, and Paul knew that he was alone again, and that History, somewhere on the other side of the door, would let him out only when it was good and ready to.

  30

  HISTORY, PERSONIFIED AT this point in the life of Doctor Paul Proteus by Ed Finnerty and the Reverend James J. Lasher, let Paul out of his cell in an old Ilium air-raid shelter only in order for him to eliminate the wastes accrued in the process of his continued existence as an animal. Other signs of his being alive--outcries, protests, demands, profanity--were beneath History's notice until the proper time came, when the door swung open, and Ed Finnerty ushered Paul into his first meeting of the Ghost Shirt Society.

  When Paul was led into the meeting chamber, another segment of the air-raid shelter system, everyone stood: Lasher, at the head of the table, Bud Calhoun, Katharine Finch, Luke Lubbock, Paul's tenant farmer Mr. Haycox, and a score of others, whose names Paul didn't know.

  It wasn't a brilliant-looking aggregation of conspirators, on the whole, but a righteous and determined one. Paul supposed that Lasher and Finnerty had gathered the
group on the basis of availability and trustworthiness rather than talent, starting, seemingly, with some of the more intelligent regulars at the saloon at the foot of the bridge. While the group was predominantly composed of Iliumites, Paul learned, every region of the country was represented.

  Amid the mediocrity was a scattering of men who radiated a good deal of competence and, incidentally, prosperity, who seemed, like Paul, in the act of deserting a system that had treated them very well indeed.

  As Paul studied these interesting exceptions, he looked at one of the seedier members adjacent, and was surprised by another familiar face--that of Professor Ludwig von Neumann, a slight, disorderly old man, who had taught political science at Union College in Schenectady until the Social Sciences Building had been torn down to make space for the new Heat and Power Laboratory. Paul and von Neumann had known each other slightly as members of the Ilium Historical Society, before the Historical Society Building had been torn down to make room for the new Ilium Atomic Reactor.

  "Here he is," said Finnerty proudly.

  Paul was given a polite round of applause. The expressions of the applauders were somewhat chilly, giving Paul to understand that he could never really be a full partner in their enterprise, since he had not been with them from the beginning.

  The only exceptions to this snobbery were Katharine Finch, formerly Paul's secretary, and Bud Calhoun, both of whom seemed as amiable and unchanged as though they were lounging in Paul's outer office at the Works in the old days. Bud, Paul reflected, moved from situation to situation in the protective atmosphere of his imagination, while Katharine was similarly insulated by her adoration for Bud.

  The formality of the meeting, the purposefulness in the faces, bluffed Paul into holding his peace for the moment. The chair on Lasher's left was pulled out for him, and Finnerty took the chair on Lasher's right.

  As Paul sat down, he noted that only Luke Lubbock wore a ghost shirt, and he supposed that Luke couldn't accomplish anything without a uniform of some sort.

  "Meeting of the Ghost Shirt Society will come to order," said Lasher.

  Paul, with a trace of drug-inspired whimsey still in his bloodstream, had expected a show of fraternal-order nonsense, full of quasi-Indian talk. Instead, save for Luke Lubbock's shirt, the meeting belonged very much to the present, a sordid, realistic present, an angry present.