Kilgore Trout novels in the front. The tides were all new to him, or he thought they were.
Now he opened one. It seemed all right for him to do that. Everybody else in the store
was pawing things. The name of the book was The Big Board. He got a few paragraphs
into it, and then realized that he had read it before-years ago, in the veterans' hospital. It
was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They
were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.
These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing stock market,
quotations and commodity prices along one wall of their habitat, and a news ticker, and a
telephone that was supposedly connected to a brokerage on Earth. The creatures on
Zircon-212 told their captives that they had invested a million dollars for them back on
Earth, and that it was up to the captives to manage it so that they would be fabulously
wealthy when they returned to Earth.
The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of -course. They were
simply stimulants to make the Earthlings perform vividly for the crowds at the zoo- to
make them jump up and down and cheer, or gloat, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared
shitless or to feel as contented as babies in their mothers' arms.
The Earthlings did very well on paper. That was part of the rigging, of course. And
religion got mixed up in it, too. The news ticker reminded them that the President of the
United States had declared National Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray. The
Earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that. They had lost a small fortune in
olive oil futures. So they gave praying a whirl.
It worked. Olive oil went up.
Another Kilgore Trout book there in the window was about a man who built a time
machine so he could go back and see Jesus. It worked, and he saw Jesus when Jesus was
only twelve years old. Jesus was learning the carpentry trade from his father.
Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on papyrus of a
device they wanted built by sunrise the next morning. It was a cross to be used in the
execution of a rabble-rouser.
Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work. And the rabble-rouser
was executed on it.
So it goes.
The bookstore was run by seeming quintuplets, by five short, bald men chewing unfit
cigars that were sopping wet. They never smiled, and each one had a stool to perch on.
They were making money running a paper-and-celluloid whorehouse.
They didn't have hard-ons. Neither did Billy Pilgrim. Everybody else did. It was a
ridiculous store, all about love and babies.
The clerks occasionally told somebody to buy or get out, not to just look and look and
look and paw and paw. Some of the people were looking at each other instead of the
merchandise.
A clerk came up to Billy and told him the good stuff was in the back, that the books
Billy was reading were window dressing. 'That ain't what you want, for Christ's sake,' he
told Billy 'What you want's in back.'
So Billy moved a little farther back, but not as far as the part for adults only. He moved
because of absentminded politeness, taking a Trout book with him-the one about Jesus
and the time machine.
The time-traveler in the book went back to Bible times to find out one thing in
particular: Whether or not Jesus had really died on the cross, or whether he had been
taken down while still alive, whether he had really gone on living. The hero had a
stethoscope along.
Billy skipped to the end of the book, where the hero mingled with the people who were
taking Jesus down from the cross. The time-traveler was the first one up the ladder,
dressed in clothes of the period, and he leaned close to Jesus so people couldn't see him
use the stethoscope, and he listened.
There wasn't a sound inside the emaciated chest cavity. The Son of God was as dead as
a doornail.
So it goes.
The time-traveler, whose name was Lance Corwin, also got to measure the length of
Jesus, but not to weigh him. Jesus was five feet and three and a half inches long.
Another clerk came up to Billy and asked him if he was going to buy the book or not,
and Billy said that he wanted to buy it, please. He had his back to a rack of paperback
books about oral-genital contacts from ancient Egypt to the present and so on, and the
clerk supposed Billy was reading one of these. So he was startled when he saw what
Billy's book was. He said, 'Jesus Christ, where did you find this thing?' and so on, and he
had to tell the other clerks about the pervert who wanted to buy the window dressing. The
other clerks already knew about Billy. They had been watching him, too.
The cash register where Billy waited for his change was near a bin of old girly
magazines. Billy looked at one out of the corner of his eye, and he saw this question on
its cover: What really became of Montana Wildhack?
So Billy read it. He knew where Montana Wildhack really was, of course. She was
back on Tralfamadore, taking care of the baby, but the magazine, which was called
Midnight Pussycats, promised that she was wearing a cement overcoat under fathoms of
saltwater in San Pedro Bay.
So it goes.
Billy wanted to laugh. The magazine., which was published for lonesome men to jerk
off to, ran the story so it could print pictures taken from blue movies which Montana had
made as a teenagers Billy did not look closely at these. They were grainy things, soot and
chalk. They could have been anybody.
Billy was again directed to the back of the store and he went this time. A jaded sailor
stepped away from a movie machine while the film was still running. Billy looked in, and
there was Montana Wildhack alone on a bed, peeling a banana. The picture clicked off.
Billy did not want to see what happened next, and a clerk importuned him to come over
and see some really hot stuff they kept under the counter for connoisseurs.
Billy was mildly curious as to what could possibly have been kept hidden in such a
place. The clerk leered and showed him. It was a photograph of a woman and a Shetland
pony. They were attempting to have sexual intercourse between two Doric columns, in
front of velvet draperies which were fringed with deedlee-balls.
Billy didn't get onto television in New York that night., but he did get onto a radio talk
show. There was a radio station right next to Billy's hotel. He saw its call letters over the
entrance of an office building, so he went in. He went up to the studio on an automatic
elevator, and there were other people up there, waiting to go in. They were literary critics,
and they thought Billy was one, too. They were going to discuss whether the novel was
dead or not. So it goes.
Billy took his seat with the others around a golden oak table, with a microphone all his
own. The master of ceremonies asked him his name and what paper he was from. Billy
said he was from the Ilium Gazette.
He was nervous and happy. 'If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming,' he told himself, 'just
ask for Wild Bob.'
Billy put his hand up at the very first part of the program but he wasn't called on right
away. Others got in ahead of him. One of them said that it would be a nice time to bury
the novel, now that a Virginian, one hundred years after Appomattox, had written Uncle
Tom's Cabin. Another one said that people couldn't read well enough anymore to turn
print into exciting situations in their skulls, so that authors had to do what Norman Mailer
did, which was to perform in public what he had written. The master of ceremonies asked
people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modem society, and
one critic said, 'To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white wars.' Another one
said, 'To describe blow-jobs artistically.' Another one said, 'To teach wives of junior
executives what to buy next and how to act in a French restaurant.'
And then Billy was allowed to speak. Off he went, in that beautifully trained voice of
his, telling about the flying saucers and Montana Wildhack and so on.
He was gently expelled from the studio during a commercial. He went back to his hotel
room, put a quarter into the Magic Fingers machine connected to his bed, and he went to
sleep. He traveled in time back to Tralfamadore.
'Time-traveling again?' said Montana. It was artificial evening in the dome. She was
breast-feeding their child.
'Hmm?' said Billy.
'You've been time-traveling again. I can always tell.'
'Um.'
'Where did you go this time? It wasn't the war. I can tell that, too. '
'New York.'
'The Big Apple.'
'Hm?'
'That's what they used to call New York.'
"Oh.'
'You see any plays or movies?'
'No-I walked around Times Square some, bought a book by Kilgore Trout.'
'Lucky you.' She did not share his enthusiasm for Kilgore Trout.
Billy mentioned casually that he had seen part of a blue movie she had made. Her
response was no less casual. It was Tralfamadorian and guilt-free:
'Yes-' she said, 'and I've heard about you in the war, about what a clown you were. And
I've heard about the high school teacher who was shot. He made a blue movie with a
firing squad.' She moved the baby from one breast to the other, because the moment was
so structured that she had to do so.
There was a silence.
'They're playing with the clocks again,' said Montana, rising, preparing to put the baby
into its crib. She meant that their keepers were making the electric clocks in the dome go
fast, then slow, then fast again., and watching the little Earthling family through
peepholes.
There was a silver chain around Montana Wildhack's neck. Hanging from it, between
her breasts, was a locket containing a photograph of her alcoholic mother-grainy thing,
soot and chalk. It could have been anybody. Engraved on the outside of the locket were
these words:
GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY
TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I
CANNOT CHANGE, COURAGE
TO CHANGE THE THINGS
I CAN, AND WISDOM
ALWAYS TO TELL THE
DIFFERENCE.
Ten
Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year
round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.
And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science
in Vietnam. So it goes.
My father died many years ago now-of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man.
He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.
On Tralfamadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn't much interest in Jesus Christ. The
Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles
Darwin-who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements.
So it goes.
The same general idea appears in The Big Board by Kilgore Trout. The flying saucer
creatures who capture Trout's hem ask him about Darwin. They also ask him about golf.
If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live
forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still-if I
am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of
those moments are nice.
One of the nicest ones in recent times was on my trip back to Dresden with my old war
buddy, O'Hare.
We took a Hungarian Airlines plane from East Berlin. The pilot had a handlebar
mustache. He looked like Adolph Menjou. He smoked a Cuban cigar while the plane was
being fueled. When we took off, there was no talk of fastening seat belts.
When we were up in the air, a young steward served us rye bread and salami and butter
and cheese and white wine. The folding tray in front of me would not open out. The
steward went into the cockpit for a tool, came back with a beer-can opener. He used it to
pry out the tray.
There were only six other passengers. They spoke many languages. They were having
nice times, too. East Germany was down below, and the lights were on. I imagined
dropping bombs on those lights, those villages and cities and towns.
O'Hare and I had never expected to make any money-and here we were now,
extremely well-to-do.
'If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming,' I said to him lazily, 'just ask for Wild Bob.'
O'Hare had a little notebook with him, and printed in the back of it were postal rates
and airline distances and the altitudes of famous mountains and other key facts about the
world. He was looking up the population of Dresden, which wasn't in the notebook, when
he came across this, which he gave me to read:
On an average, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day. During that
same day, 10,000 persons, in an average, will have starved to death or died from
malnutrition. So it goes. In addition, 123,000 persons will die for other reasons. So it
goes. This leaves a net gain of about 191,000 each day in the world. The Population
Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000
before the year 2000.
'I suppose they will all want dignity,' I said.
'I suppose,' said O'Hare.
Billy Pilgrim was meanwhile traveling back to Dresden, too, but not in the present. He
was going back there in 1945, two days after the city was destroyed. Now Billy and the
rest were being marched into the ruins by their guards. I was there. O'Hare was there. We
had spent the past two nights in the blind innkeeper's stable. Authorities had found us
there. They told us what to do. We were to borrow picks and shovels and crowbars and
wheelbarrows from our neighbors. We were to march with these implements to such and
such a place in the ruins, ready to go to work.
There were cades on the main roads leading into the ruins. Germans were stopped
there. They were not permitted to explore the moon.
Prisoners of war from many lands came together that morning at such and such a place
