Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "Sabotagin' bastard."

  "Yeah. O.K., you, on your feet and shag your tail."

  "What happened?" mumbled Paul.

  "Police. You just got brained for savin' Proteus' hide. Why'n't you wise up? He's nuts, guy. Hell, he's got it in his head he's gonna be king."

  31

  PAUL'S CELLMATE IN the basement of police Headquarters was a small, elegant young Negro named Harold, who was in jail for petty sabotage. He had smashed a traffic safety education box--a tape-recording and loudspeaker arrangement--that had been fixed to a lamppost outside his bedroom window.

  " 'Look out!' it say. 'Don't you go crossin' in the middle of the block!' " said Harold, mimicking the tape recording. "Fo' two years, ol' loudmouth and me done lived together. An' evah last time some'un come on pas', they hits 'at 'lectric eye, and ol' loudmouth, he just naturally gotta shoot off his big ba-zoo. 'Don' step out 'tween two parked cars,' he say. No matter who 'tis, no matter what tahm 'tis. Loudmouth, he don' care. Jus' gotta be sociable. 'Cayful, now! Don' you do this! Don' you do that!' Ol' mangy dog come bah at three in the mornin', and ol' loudmouth jus' gotta get his two cents wuth in. 'If you drahve,' he tells that ol' mangy dog, 'if you drahve, don' drink!' Then an' ol' drunk comes crawlin' along, and ol' gravelthroat tells him it's a city ohdnance ev'y bicycle jus' gotta have a re-flectah on the back."

  "How long you in for?" said Paul.

  "Fahve days. Judge said Ah could walk raht out. All Ah had to do was say Ah's sorry. Ah ain' goin' do that, 'cause," said Harold, "Ah ain' sorry."

  Paul was glad that Harold was too bound up in his act of integrity to explore Paul's troubles. Not that it would have pained Paul to talk about them, but because they were extraordinarily difficult to describe. His own motivation was obscure, the cast was unwieldy, and, Paul realized, the denouement was still to come. Through all his adventures, he had been a derelict, tossed this way, then that. He had yet to lay a firm hand on the tiller.

  The managers and engineers still believed he was their man; the Ghost Shirt Society was just as convinced that he belonged to them, and both had demonstrated that there was no middle ground for him.

  When the police had identified Paul, they had been embarrassed by his I.Q., and his rank in the criminal hierarchy: the archcriminal, the would-be king of the saboteurs. There was no comparable rank in the Ilium police force, and the police had, out of humbleness and lifelong indoctrination, sent for inquisitors with adequate classification numbers and I.Q.'s.

  Meanwhile, Paul and Harold passed the time of day.

  "Ain' a bit sorry," said Harold. "Wha's 'at tap-tap-tappin'?"

  The irregular tapping came from the other side of the sheet-metal wall that separated Paul's and Harold's barred cell from the totally enclosed tank for desperados next door.

  Experimentally, Paul tapped on his side.

  "Twenty-three--eight-fifteen," came the reply. Paul recognized the schoolboy's code: one for A, two for B ... "Twenty-three--eight-fifteen" was "Who?"

  Paul tapped out his name, and added his own query.

  "Seven--one--eighteen--twenty--eight."

  "Garth!" said Paul aloud, and he tapped out, "Chin up, boy." An exotic emotion welled up within him, and it took him a moment to understand it. For the first time in the whole of his orderly life he was sharing profound misfortune with another human being. Fate was making him feel a warmth for Garth, the colorless, the nervous, the enervated, that he had never felt for Anita, for Finnerty, for his parents, for anyone. "You fixed the tree?"

  "You bet," tapped Garth.

  "Why?"

  "Boy flunked GCT again. He cracked up."

  "Lord! Sorry," tapped Paul.

  "Dead weight on world. Useless. Drag."

  "Not so."

  "But only God can make tree," tapped Garth.

  "Blessed are fetishists. Inherited earth," tapped Paul.

  "Rot, corrosion on our side."

  "What next for you?" tapped Paul.

  Garth tapped out the story of his being discovered as the criminal at the Meadows, of the furor, the threats, the actual tears shed over the wounded oak. He'd been locked up in the Council House, and guarded by dozens of angry, stalwart young engineers and managers. He'd been promised grimly that he would get the book thrown at him--years of prison, fines that would wipe him out.

  When the police had arrived on the island to pick him up, they'd caught the hysteria of the brass and had treated Garth like one of the century's most terrible criminals.

  "Only when we got back here and they booked me did they wake up," he tapped.

  Paul, himself awed by Garth's crime, was puzzled by this twist. "How so?" he tapped.

  "Ha!" tapped Garth. "What's my crime?"

  Paul laughed wonderingly. "Treeslaughter?" he tapped.

  "Attempted treeslaughter," tapped Garth. "Thing's still alive, though probably never have acorns again."

  "Proteus!" called the cellblock loudspeaker. "Visitors. Stay where you are, Harold."

  "Ain' going nowhere, 'cause Ah ain' sorry," said Harold. " 'Cayful, look out, now. Walk facin' the traffic' "

  The cell door buzzed and opened, and Paul walked to the green door of the visitors' room. The green door opened, whispered shut behind him, and he found himself face to face with Anita and Kroner.

  Both were dressed funereally, as though not to compete for glamour with the corpse. Gravely, wordlessly, Anita handed him a carton containing a milkshake and a sheaf of funnypapers. She lifted her veil and pecked him on his cheek.

  "Paul, my boy," rumbled Kroner. "It's been hard, hasn't it? How are you, my boy?"

  Paul stepped back out of reach of the big, sapping, paternal hands. "Fine, thanks."

  "Congratulations, Paul, darling," said Anita, her voice tiny.

  "For what?"

  "She knows, my boy," said Kroner. "She knows you're a secret agent."

  "And I'm awfully proud of you."

  "When do I get out?"

  "Right away. Just as soon as we can transcribe what you found out about the Ghost Shirts, who they are, how they work," said Kroner.

  "Home is all ready, Paul," said Anita. "I let the maid off, so we could have an old-fashioned American homecoming."

  Paul could see her creating this old-fashioned atmosphere--putting a drop of Tabu on the filter of the electronic dust precipitator, setting the clockwork on the master control panel, which would thaw a steak dinner and load it into the radar stove at the proper moment, and turn on the television just as they crossed the threshold. Goaded by a primitive and insistent appetite, Paul gave her offer cautious consideration. He was pleased to find a higher order of human need asserting itself, a need that made him think, if not feel, that he didn't give a damn if he never slept with her again. She seemed to sense this, too, and, for want of any proclivities to interest Paul save sex, her smile of welcome and forgiveness became a thin and chilling thing indeed.

  "Your bodyguards can eat later," said Kroner. He chuckled. "Say, that was quite a letter you wrote for the Ghost Shirts. Sounded wonderful, till you tried to make sense out of it."

  "You couldn't?" said Paul.

  Kroner shook his head. "Words."

  "But it did one thing I'll bet you never expected," said Anita. "Can I tell him--about the new job?"

  "Yes, Paul," said Kroner, "the Eastern Division needs a new manager of engineering."

  "And you're the man, darling!" said Anita.

  "Manager of engineering?" said Paul. "What about Baer?" Somehow Paul had expected the rest of the world to hold firm while his own life went spinning. And of that rest of the world nothing had seemed more firm than the union of Baer, the engineering genius, and Kroner, the rock of faith in technology. "He isn't dead, is he?"

  "No," said Kroner sadly, "no, he's still alive--physically, that is." He placed a microphone on a table and moved up a chair, so that Paul might testify in comfort. "Well, who knows--maybe what happened is just as well. Poor Baer never was too stable, you know." He adjus
ted the microphone. "There. Now, you come over here, Paul, my boy."

  "What about Baer?" insisted Paul.

  "Oh," sighed Kroner, "he read that fool letter, cleaned out his desk drawers, and walked out. Sit right here, Paul."

  The letter, then, had been that good, Paul thought, astonished at the upheaval it had caused in at least one man's life. But then he wondered if the letter hadn't won Baer's support by default of the opposition rather than by its being unanswerable. If someone with quicker wits than Kroner's had been at hand to argue against the letter, perhaps Baer would still have been on the job in Albany. "What was the official reaction to the letter?" asked Paul.

  "Classified as top secret," said Kroner, "so anybody trying to circulate it will come under the National Security Act. So don't worry, my boy, it isn't going any farther."

  "There is going to be an official reply, isn't there?" said Paul.

  "That'd be playing right into their hands, wouldn't it--acknowledging publicly that this Ghost Shirt nonsense is worth the notice of the system? That's exactly what they want to have happen! Come on, now, sit down, and let's get this over with, so you can get home and have a well-earned rest."

  Absently, Paul sat down before the microphone, and Kroner switched on the recorder. The official reaction to the Ghost Shirt Society was the official response to so many things: to ignore it, as pressing and complicated matters were ignored in the annual passion plays at the Meadows. It was as though the giving or withholding of official recognition were life or death to ideas. And there was the old Meadows team spirit in the reaction, too, the spirit that was supposed to hold the system together: the notion that the opposition wanted nothing but to win and humiliate, that the object of competition was total victory, with mortifying defeat the only alternative imaginable.

  "Now then," said Kroner, "who's really at the head of this monkey business, this Ghost Shirt Society?"

  Here it was again, the most ancient of roadforks, one that Paul had glimpsed before, in Kroner's study, months ago. The choice of one course or the other had nothing to do with machines, hierarchies, economics, love, age. It was a purely internal matter. Every child older than six knew the fork, and knew what the good guys did here, and what the bad guys did here. The fork was a familiar one in folk tales the world over, and the good guys and the bad guys, whether in chaps, breechclouts, serapes, leopardskins, or banker's gray pinstripes, all separated here.

  Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn't--no matter when, no matter what.

  Kroner cleared his throat. "I said, 'who's their leader, Paul?' "

  "I am," said Paul. "And I wish to God I were a better one."

  The instant he'd said it, he knew it was true, and knew what his father had known--what it was to belong and believe.

  32

  "DO YOU SWEAR to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?"

  "I do," said Paul.

  The courtroom television cameras dollied back from his face, to reveal on fifty million television screens the tableau of the Ilium Federal Courtroom's south wall. There, beside and above Doctor Paul Proteus, sat the judge--the Sky Manager, Paul thought. The accused, seated on the witness stand, resembled less a man than an old-fashioned switchboard, with wires running from temperature-, pressure-, and moisture-sensitive instruments at his wrists, armpits, chest, temples, and palms. These, in turn, ran to a gray cabinet under the witness stand, where their findings were interpreted and relayed to a dial a yard in diameter over Paul's head.

  The indicator needle on the dial, now pointing straight down, was pivoted so as to swing easily between a black T on the right and a red F on the left, or to a series of arbitrarily calibrated points between them.

  Paul had pleaded guilty to conspiring to advocate the commission of sabotage, but was now being tried for treason, three weeks after his arrest.

  "Doctor Proteus," said the prosecutor nastily. The television cameras closed in on his sneer and panned to the beads of sweat on Paul's forehead. "You have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to advocate the commission of sabotage, isn't that so?"

  "It is." The needle swung toward T, and back to the neutral position, proving that, to the best of Paul's knowledge, it was indeed true.

  "This conspiracy, of which you are the head, has as its method, and I quote from your famous letter, 'We are prepared to use force to end the lawlessness, if other means fail.' Those are your words, Doctor?"

  "They were written by someone else, but I'm in sympathy with them," said Paul.

  "And the word, 'lawlessness,' refers in this case to the present mechanized economy?"

  "And future."

  "Your goal, as I understand it, was to destroy machines in order that people might take a more personal part in production?"

  "Some of the machines."

  "What machines, Doctor?"

  "That would have to be worked out."

  "Oho! You haven't worked that out yet, eh?"

  "The first step would be to get Americans to agree that limitations be placed on the scope of machines."

  "You would get this agreement by force, if necessary? You would force this artificial condition, this step backward, on the American people?"

  "What distinguishes man from the rest of the animals is his ability to do artificial things," said Paul. "To his greater glory, I say. And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction."

  The television cameras looked deep into the prosecutor's righteously angry eyes, and backed away, awed at the still unloosed mighty lightning there.

  Paul looked too, and saw that the prosecutor knew a great deal more than he had yet revealed. But Paul doubted that the prosecutor knew his secretary was a member of the Ghost Shirt Society, and that Paul's answers, while registering as heartfelt on the lie detector, were a synthesis of the best thinking and phrasing of Lasher, Finnerty, and Professor von Neumann.

  Paul was at ease, filled with the euphoria of well-publicized martyrdom for a cause in which he believed. There was no more question in his mind than there was in the prosecutor's that what the Ghost Shirt Society proposed to do was treason. The machines and the institutions of government were so integrated that trying to attack one without damaging the other was like trying to remove a diseased brain in order to save a patient. There would have to be a seizure of power--a benevolent seizure, but a seizure nonetheless.

  The only old acquaintances in the room were Kroner, who seemed close to tears, and the fat, pig-eyed Fred Berringer, who was present, Paul supposed, to see the murder of Checker Charley avenged.

  Anita hadn't come to court, nor had Shepherd. The two of them, presumably, were too busy mapping future campaigns to give more than a brief, pious prayer for those caught on the barbed wire of the battlefield of life. There was no need for Anita's coming to court to show the world how she felt about her erring husband. She had made that clear in several interviews with the press. She had married Paul, she'd explained, when she was but a child, and she thanked God things had come to a head while she was still young enough to salvage a little real happiness for herself. "Salvage" seemed a particularly apt term to Paul, with its implications of picking over city dumps and dragging harbor bottoms, for Anita had announced in her next breath that she was going to marry Doctor Lawson Shepherd as soon as she could get a divorce from Paul.

  Paul had read her public declarations with ennui, as though they were gossip about someone else, about a television starlet's accusations against a middle-aged producer, say. The thing he concentrated on now, a far more entertaining and consequential enterprise, was the saying of as many poignant, antimachine, pro-Ghost Shirt Society things as he could over a nationwide television network.

  "This use of force--you don't regard that as a levying of war against the United States, as treason, Doctor?" wheedled the prosecutor.

  "The sovereignty of the United States resides in the people, not in the machines, and it's the people's to take back, if they so
wish. The machines," said Paul, "have exceeded the personal sovereignty willingly surrendered to them by the American people for good government. Machines and organization and pursuit of efficiency have robbed the American people of liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

  Paul twisted his head, and saw that the needle pointed at T.

  "The witness will keep his head to the front," said the Judge sternly. "His concern is with telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The indicator will take care of itself."

  The prosecutor turned his back to Paul, as though finished with him, and suddenly wheeled to shake a finger at him. "You are a patriot, are you, Doctor?"

  "I try to be."

  "Your chief wish is to serve the American people well?"

  "It is." Paul was puzzled by this new line of questioning, for which no one had prepared him.

  "That is your basic reason for serving as nominal head of the Ghost Shirt Society--to do good?"

  "It is," said Paul.

  A ripple of whispers and a creaking of chairs under shifting bottoms told Paul that something had gone wrong with the lie detector's indicator.

  The judge hammered with his gavel. "Order in the court. The court engineer will please check the tubes and circuits."

  The engineer wheeled his steel cart up to the witness stand, and impersonally tested the connections to Paul. He took meter readings at various points along the circuits, slid the gray box out from under the witness stand, took out each of the tubes and tested them, and put everything back together, all in less than two minutes. "Everything in order, your honor."

  "The witness will please tell what he considers to be a lie," said the judge.

  "Every new piece of scientific knowledge is a good thing for humanity," said Paul.

  "Object!" said the prosecutor.

  "This is off the record--a test of the instrument," said the judge.

  "Swung to the left, all righty," said the engineer.

  "Now a truth," said the judge.

  "The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings," said Paul, "not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems."