Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "Baker Dog Three--did you hear me?" shouted Lasher.

  "Zowie!" came a faraway cry in the speaker, and another volcano erupted in the Works.

  "Lubbock!" said Finnerty. "Take over. I'm going over there to teach those babies a little discipline. We'll see who's running this show!" He climbed into a car, and sped across the bridge to the Works.

  "Salt Lake City is ours!" shouted another radio operator inside the saloon.

  "Oakland and Salt Lake and Ilium so far!" said Lasher. "What about Pittsburgh?"

  "No reply."

  "Pittsburgh's the key," said Lasher. "Keep trying." He glanced to the south over his shoulder, and a look of horror crossed his face. "Who set the museum on fire?" He shouted into his microphone desperately, "All posts! All posts! Protect all property! Vandalism and looting will be punished by death. Attention all posts--can you hear me?"

  Silence.

  "Moose? Elks? Knights of Pythias? VFW? Eagles? Hello! Anybody--can you hear me? Hello!"

  Silence.

  "Proteus!" called an Arab, staggering up to the saloon door, brandishing a bottle. "Where'sh Proteus? Give us a word."

  Paul, haggard and aged, appeared beside Lasher in the saloon door. "God help us, gentlemen," he said slowly. "God help us. If we've won, it means that now the hard part begins."

  "Jesus--you'd think we losht," said the Arab. "Shorry now I ashked for a word."

  "Lou!"

  "Right here," said the drunk Arab.

  "Lou, boy--we forgot the bakery. Still poopin' out bread like nobody's business."

  "Can't have it doin' that," said Lou. "Le'sh go knock the crap out of it."

  "Listen, wait," said Paul. "We'll need the bakery."

  "Machine, ain't it?" said Lou.

  "Yes, sure, but there's no sense in--"

  "Then le'sh go knock the crap out of it. And, by God, here'sh ol' Al to go with us. Where you been, y'ol' horse-thief?"

  "Blew up the goddam sewage 'sposal plant," said Al proudly.

  " 'At's the shtuff! Give the friggin' worl' back to the friggin' people."

  34

  "I DON'T UNDERSTAND about Pittsburgh," said Finnerty. "I knew Seattle and Minneapolis were touch-and-go, but Pittsburgh!"

  "And St. Louis and Chicago," said Paul, shaking his head.

  "And Birmingham and Boston and New York," said Lasher, smiling sadly. He seemed curiously at peace, inexplicably satisfied.

  "Pfft!" said Finnerty.

  "Ilium came off like clockwork, anyway, and Salt Lake and Oakland," said Professor von Neumann. "So I think we can say that the theory of attack was essentially valid. The execution, of course, was something else again."

  "It always is," said Lasher.

  "What makes you so cheery?" said Paul.

  "Would a good cry make you feel better, Doctor?" said Lasher.

  "Now all we have to do is close ranks with Salt Lake City and Oakland, and strangle the country into submission," said Finnerty.

  "I wish now we'd sent one of our Ilium people out to get EPICAC," said von Neumann. "EPICAC was worth three Pittsburghs."

  "Too bad about the Roswell Moose, all right," said Lasher. "D-71 said they were crazy about the idea of getting EPICAC."

  "Too crazy," said Paul.

  "Nitro's tricky enough stuff, without having crazy men trying to get it into Coke bottles," said Finnerty.

  The four thought-chiefs of the Ghost Shirt Society were seated about what had once been Paul's desk, the works manager's desk in the Ilium Works.

  The revolution was not yet a day old. It was early in the morning, before sunrise, but here and there burning buildings made patches of Ilium as bright and hot as tropical noon.

  "I wish they'd attack, and get it over with," said Paul.

  "It'll take them a little while to get their nerve back, after what the Knights of Kandahar did to the state police on Griffin Boulevard," said Finnerty. He sighed. "By God, if only we'd had a few more outfits like that in Pittsburgh--"

  "And St. Louis," said Paul, "and Seattle and Minneapolis and Boston and--"

  "Let's talk about something else," said Finnerty. "How's the arm, Paul?"

  "Not bad," said Paul, stroking the makeshift splint. The Messiah of the Ghost Shirt Society had had his left arm broken by a rock while exercising his magnetism on a crowd interested in seeing the power station blown up. "How's the head, Professor?"

  "Ringing," said von Neumann, adjusting his bandage. He had been struck by the Sacred Mace of The Order of the Aurora Borealis while giving a crowd reasons for not felling a two-hundred-foot radio tower.

  "Glockenspiel or carillon?" said Lasher. "And how are your own contusions and abrasions, Ed?"

  Finnerty twisted his neck and raised his arms experimentally. "Nothing, really. If the pain gets any worse, I can simply kill myself." He had been floored and trampled by stampeding Moose and Elks while explaining that the Works should be kept intact until a cool decision could be made as to which machines should be destroyed, which retained.

  Fire spurted skyward from Homestead.

  "Keeping the map right up to the minute, Professor?" said Lasher.

  Professor von Neumann looked out at the new blaze through field glasses, and made a black X on the map before him. "Post office, most likely."

  The map of the city had been clean and crackling at the start of the campaign, with a dozen small red circles indicating the primary objectives of the Ilium Putsch: the police station, the courthouse, communications centers, sites for roadblocks, the Ilium Works. After these objectives were taken, with a minimum of bloodshed and damage, the plan of operations declared, the systematic replacement of automatic control devices by human beings was to begin. The more important of these secondary objectives were circled in green.

  But now the map was smudged and limp. Overlying the scattered constellation of red and green circles was a black, continuous smear of X's that marked what had been taken, and, moreover, destroyed.

  Lasher glanced at his watch. "I've got 4 A.M. That right?"

  "Who knows?" said Finnerty.

  "Can't you see the City Hall clock from there?"

  "They got that hours ago."

  "And they're likely to be after your watch any minute," said Paul. "Better put it back in your pocket."

  "What gets me are the specialists," said Finnerty. "Some guys seem to have it in for just one kind of machine, and leave everything else alone. There's a little colored guy going around town with a shotgun, blasting nothing but those little traffic safety boxes."

  "Lord," said Paul, "I didn't think it'd be like this."

  "You mean losing?" said Lasher.

  "Losing, winning--whatever this mess is."

  "It has all the characteristics of a lynching," said the professor. "It's on such a big scale, though, I suppose genocide is closer. The good die with the bad--the flush toilets with the automatic lathe controls."

  "I wonder if things would have been much different if it hadn't been for the liquor," said Paul.

  "You can't ask men to attack pillboxes cold sober," said Finnerty.

  "And you can't ask them to stop when they're drunk," said Paul.

  "Nobody said it wasn't going to be messy," said Lasher.

  A terrific explosion lifted the floor and dropped it.

  "Boy!" said Luke Lubbock, standing guard in what had been Katharine Finch's office.

  "What was it, Luke?" called Lasher.

  "Gasoline storage tanks. Boy!"

  " 'Ray," said Paul dismally.

  "People of Ilium!" boomed a voice from the sky. "People of Ilium!"

  Paul, Lasher, Finnerty, and von Neumann hurried to the opening where the floor-to-ceiling window had once been. Looking up, they saw a robot helicopter in the sky, its belly and blades reddened by the fires below.

  "People of Ilium, lay down your arms!" said its loudspeaker. "Oakland and Salt Lake City have been restored to order. Your cause is lost. Overthrow your false leaders.

  "You are com
pletely surrounded, cut off from the rest of the world. The blockade will not be lifted until Proteus, Lasher, Finnerty, and von Neumann are turned over to the authorities beyond the Griffin Boulevard roadblock.

  "We could bomb and strafe you, but that is not the American way. We could send in tanks, but that is not the American way.

  "This is an ultimatum: surrender your false leaders and lay down your arms within the next six hours, or suffer in the ruins of your own making for the next six months, cut off from the rest of the world. Click.

  "People of Ilium, lay down your arms! Oakland and Salt Lake City have been re--"

  Luke Lubbock aimed his rifle and fired.

  "Beeby dee bobble dee beezle!" said the loudspeaker shrilly. "Noozle ah reeble beejee boo."

  "Put it out of its misery," said Finnerty.

  Luke fired again.

  The helicopter floundered off clumsily, still haranguing the town. "Beeby dee bobble dee beezle! Noozle ah reeble beejee ..."

  "Where are you going, Paul?" said Finnerty.

  "A walk."

  "Mind if I come?"

  "That's a small matter these days."

  And the two walked out of the building and down the broad, littered boulevard that split the plant, past numbered facades that had nothing but silence, rubble, and scrap behind them.

  "Not enough of it left for this to be like old times, eh?" said Finnerty, after they had walked some distance without speaking.

  "New era," said Paul.

  "Drink to it?" said Finnerty, taking a pint from the pocket of his ghost shirt.

  "To the new era."

  They sat down together before Building 58, and wordlessly passed the bottle back and forth.

  "You know," said Paul at last, "things wouldn't have been so bad if they'd stayed the way they were when we first got here. Those were passable days, weren't they?" He and Finnerty were feeling a deep, melancholy rapport now, sitting amid the smashed masterpieces, the brilliantly designed, beautifully made machines. A good part of their lives and skills had gone into making them, making what they'd helped to destroy in a few hours.

  "Things don't stay the way they are," said Finnerty. "It's too entertaining to try to change them. Remember the excitement of recording Rudy Hertz's movements, then trying to run automatic controls from the tape?"

  "It worked!" said Paul.

  "Damn right!"

  "And then putting lathe group three together," said Paul. "Those weren't our ideas, of course."

  "No, but we got ideas of our own later on. Wonderful ideas," said Finnerty. "Happiest I ever was, I guess, Paul; so damn engrossed, I never looked up to notice anything else."

  "Most fascinating game there is, keeping things from staying the way they are."

  "If only it weren't for the people, the goddamned people," said Finnerty, "always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren't for them, earth would be an engineer's paradise."

  "Let's drink to that."

  They did.

  "You were a good engineer, Paul."

  "You too, Ed. And there's no shame in that."

  They shook hands warmly.

  When they got back to the former works manager's office, they found Lasher and von Neumann asleep.

  Finnerty shook Lasher's shoulder. "Master! Maestro! Matter"

  "Hmm?" The squat, homely man fumbled for his thick glasses, found them, and sat up. "Yes?"

  "Doctor Proteus here has asked me a very interesting question," said Finnerty. "I was unable to supply him with a satisfactory answer."

  "You're drunk. Go away, and let an old man sleep."

  "This won't take long," said Finnerty. "Go ahead, Paul."

  "What became of the Indians?" said Paul.

  "What Indians?" said Lasher wearily.

  "The original Ghost Shirt Society--the Ghost Dance Indians," said Finnerty. "Eighteen-ninety and all that."

  "They found out the shirts weren't bulletproof, and magic didn't bother the U. S. Cavalry at all."

  "So--?"

  "So they were killed or gave up trying to be good Indians, and started being second-rate white men."

  "And the Ghost Dance movement proved what?" said Paul.

  "That being a good Indian was as important as being a good white man--important enough to fight and die for, no matter what the odds. They fought against the same odds we fought against: a thousand to one, maybe, or a little more."

  Paul and Ed Finnerty looked at him incredulously.

  "You thought we were sure to lose?" said Paul huskily.

  "Certainly," said Lasher, looking at him as though Paul had said something idiotic.

  "But you've been talking all along as though it were almost a sure thing," said Paul.

  "Of course, Doctor," said Lasher patronizingly. "If we hadn't all talked that way, we wouldn't have had that one chance in a thousand. But I didn't let myself lose touch with reality."

  Lasher, Paul realized, was the only one who hadn't lost touch with reality. He, alone of the four leaders, seemed unshocked by the course of events, undisturbed by them, even, inexplicably, at peace. Paul, perhaps, had been the one most out of touch, having had little time for reflection, having been so eager to join a large, confident organization with seeming answers to the problems that had made him sorry to be alive.

  Finnerty was covering his initial surprise at Lasher's statement, so perfect an apostle was he. Most of all, apparently, he wanted to remain intellectually as one with the dynamic Lasher, and he, too, now looked at Paul as though surprised to find that Paul wasn't sure what was going on.

  "If we didn't have a chance, then what on earth was the sense of--?" Paul left the sentence unfinished, and included the ruins of Ilium in a sweep of his hand.

  Lasher was fully awake now, and he stood, and paced up and down the room, apparently irritated that he should have to explain something so obvious. "It doesn't matter if we win or lose, Doctor. The important thing is that we tried. For the record, we tried!" He walked behind Paul's old desk and faced Paul and Finnerty across it.

  "What record?" said Paul.

  Suddenly Lasher underwent a transformation. He showed a side of himself he had mentioned, but which Paul had found impossible to imagine.

  And, with the transformation, the desk became a pulpit.

  "Revolutions aren't my main line of business," said Lasher, his voice deep and rolling. "I'm a minister, Doctor, remember? First and last, I'm an enemy of the Devil, a man of God!"

  35

  AS THE SUN arose over Ilium, and the embers of the town seemed gray in the light of the eternal fire ninety-three million miles away, the State Department limousine, flying a ghost shirt from its radio antenna, crept through the streets.

  Bodies lay everywhere, in grotesque attitudes of violent death, but manifesting the miracle of life in a snore, a mutter, the flight of a bubble from the lips.

  In the early light, the town seemed an enormous jewel box, lined with the black and gray velvet of fly-ash, and filled with millions of twinkling treasures: bits of air conditioners, amplidynes, analyzers, arc welders, batteries, belts, billers, bookkeeping machines, bottlers, canners, capacitors, circuit-breakers, clocks, coin boxes, calorimeters, colorimeters, computers, condensers, conduits, controls, converters, conveyers, cryostats, counters, cutouts, densitometers, detectors, dust precipitators, dishwashers, dispensers, dynamometers, dynamotors, electrodes, electronic tubes, exciters, fans, filers, filters, frequency changers, furnaces, fuses, gages, garbage disposers, gears, generators, heat exchangers, insulators, lamps, loudspeakers, magnets, mass spectrometers, motor generators, motors, noisemeters, oscillographs, panelboards, personnel machines, photoelectric cells, potentiometers, pushbuttons, radios, radiation detectors, reactors, recorders, rectifiers, reducers, regulators, relays, remote controls, resistors, rheostats, selsyns, servos, solenoids, sorters, spectrophotometers, spectroscopes, springs, starters, straingages, switchboards, switches, tape recorders, tachometers, telemeters, television sets, televi
sion cameras, testers, thermocouples, thermostats, timers, toasters, torquemeters, traffic controls, transitors, transducers, transformers, turbines, vacuum cleaners, vacuum gages, vacuum tubes, venders, vibration meters, viscosimeters, water heaters, wheels, X-ray spectrogoniometers, zymometers ...

  At the wheel of the limousine was Doctor Edward Francis Finnerty. Beside him was Doctor Paul Proteus. In the back seat were the Reverend James J. Lasher and Professor Ludwig von Neumann, and, asleep on the floor, lay Mr. Ewing J. Halyard of the State Department. In a world of ruins and deep sleep, Halyard's form on the floor was hardly cause for curiosity, comment, or remedial action.

  The brains of the Ghost Shirt Society were touring the strongpoints on the frontiers of their Utopia. And everywhere they found the same things: abandoned weapons, abandoned posts, mounds of expended ammunition, and riddled machinery.

  The four had come to an exciting decision: during the six months of blockade threatened by the authorities, they would make the ruins a laboratory, a demonstration of how well and happily men could live with virtually no machines. They saw now the common man's wisdom in wrecking practically everything. That was the way to do it, and the hell with moderation!

  "All right, so we'll heat our water and cook our food and light and warm our homes with wood fires," said Lasher.

  "And walk wherever we're going," said Finnerty.

  "And read books instead of watching television," said von Neumann. "The Renaissance comes to upstate New York! We'll rediscover the two greatest wonders of the world, the human mind and hand."

  "No quarter asked, no quarter given," said Paul as they contemplated the entire furnishings of an M-11 house, dragged into a vacant lot and hacked to bits.

  "This is like the Indians' massacre of Custer and his men," said Lasher reflectively. "The Little Bighorn. One isolated victory against an irresistable tide. More and more whites where Custer came from; more and more machines where these came from. But we may win yet. Well! What is that noise? Somebody awake?"

  A faint hubbub came from around a corner, from where the railroad station had been, where it still was after a fashion. Finnerty turned the corner for a better look at the celebrators.

  In the station's waiting room, carnage was everywhere. The terrazzo floor, depicting an earlier slaughter of Iliumites by Oneida Indians, was strewn with the guts and internal secretions of the automatic ticket vendor, the automatic nylon vendor, the automatic coffee vendor, the automatic newspaper vendor, the automatic toothbrush vendor, the automatic shoeshine machine, the automatic photo studio, the automatic baggage checker, the automatic insurance salesman ...