A German measured Billy's upper right arm with his thumb and forefinger, asked a
companion what sort of an army would send a weakling like that to the front. They
looked at the other American bodies now, pointed out a lot more that were nearly as bad
as Billy's.
One of the best bodies belonged to the oldest American by far, a high school teacher
from Indianapolis. His name was Edgar Derby. He hadn't been in Billy's boxcar. He'd
been in Roland Weary's car, had cradled Weary's head while he died. So it goes. Derby
was forty-four years old. He was so old he had a son who was a marine in the Pacific
theater of war.
Derby had pulled political wires to get into the army at his age. The subject he had
taught in Indianapolis was Contemporary Problems in Western Civilization. He also
coached the tennis team, and took very good care of his body.
Derby's son would survive the war. Derby wouldn't. That good body of his would be
filled with holes by a firing squad in Dresden in sixty-eight days. So it goes.
The worst American body wasn't Billy's. The worst body belonged to a car thief from
Cicero, Illinois. Ms name was Paul Lazzaro. He was tiny, and not only were his bones
and teeth rotten, but his skin was disgusting. Lazzaro was polka-dotted all over with
dime-sized scars. He had had many plagues of boils.
Lazzaro, too, had been on Roland Weary's boxcar, and had given his word of honor to
Weary that he would find some way to make Billy Pilgrim pay for Weary's death. He was
looking around now, wondering which naked human being was Billy.
The naked Americans took their places under many showerheads along a white-tiled
wall. There were no faucets they could control. They could only wait for whatever was
coming. Their penises were shriveled and their balls were retracted. Reproduction was
not the main business of the evening.
An unseen hand turned a master valve. Out of the showerheads gushed scalding rain.
The rain was a blow-torch that did not warm. It jazzed and jangled Billy's skin without
thawing the ice in the marrow of his long bones.
The Americans' clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas. Body lice and
bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions. So it goes.
And Billy zoomed back in time to his infancy. He was a baby who had just been
bathed by his mother. Now his mother wrapped him in a towel, carried him into a rosy
room that was filled with sunshine. She unwrapped him, laid him on the tickling towel,
powdered him between his legs, joked with him, patted his little jelly belly. Her palm on
his little jelly belly made potching sounds.
Billy gurgled and cooed.
And then Billy was a middle-aged optometrist again, playing hacker's golf this timeon
a blazing summer Sunday morning. Billy never went to church any more. He was
hacking with three other optometrists. Billy was on the green in seven strokes, and it was
his turn to putt.
It was an eight-foot putt and he made it. He bent over to take the ball out of the cup,
and the sun went behind a cloud. Billy was momentarily dizzy. When he recovered, he
wasn't on the golf course any more. He was strapped to a yellow contour chair in a white
chamber aboard a flying saucer, which was bound for Tralfamadore.
'Where am I?' said Billy Pilgrim.
'Trapped in another blob of amber, Mr. Pilgrim. We are where we have to be just nowthree
hundred million miles from Earth, bound for a time warp which will get us to
Tralfamadore in hours rather than centuries.'
'How-how did I get here?'
'It would take another Earthling to explain it to you. Earthlings are the great explainers,
explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved
or avoided. I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of Rocky
Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or
explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all,
as I've said before, bugs in amber.'
'You sound to me as though you don't believe in free will,' said Billy Pilgrim.
'If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings,' said the Tralfamadorian, 'I
wouldn't have any idea what was meant by "free will." I've visited thirty-one inhabited
plants in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is
there any talk of free will.'
Five
Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the
creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it
is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And
Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them
as great millipedes with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other,' says
Billy Pilgrim.
Billy asked for something to read on the trip to Tralfamadore. His captors had five
million Earthling books on microfilm, but no way to project them in Billy's cabin. They
had only one actual book in English, which would be placed in a Tralfamadorian
museum. It was Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann.
Billy read it, thought it was pretty good in spots. The people in it certainly had their
ups-and-downs, ups-and-downs. But Billy didn't want to read about the same ups-anddowns
over and over again. He asked if there wasn't, please, some other reading matters
around.
'Only Tralfamadorian novels, which I'm afraid you couldn't begin to understand,' said
the speaker on the wall.
'Let me look at one anyway.'
So they sent him in several. They were little things. A dozen of them might have had
the bulk of Valley of the Dolls-with all its ups-and-downs, up-and-downs.
Billy couldn't read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books
were laid out-in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the
clumps might be telegrams.
'Exactly,' said the voice.
'They are telegrams?'
'There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of-symbols is a
brief, urgent message describing a situation, a scene., We Tralfamadorians read them all
at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the
messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at
once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no
beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we
love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.'
Moments after that, the saucer entered a time warp, and Billy was flung back into his
childhood. He was twelve years old, quaking as he stood with his mother and father on
Bright Angel Point, at the rim of Grand Canyon. The little human family was staring at
the floor of the canyon, one mile straight down.
'Well,' said Billy's father, manfully kicking a pebble into space, 'there it is.' They had
come to this famous place by automobile. They had had several blowouts on the way.
'It was worth the trip,' said Billy's mother raptly. 'Oh, God was it ever worth it.'
Billy hated the canyon. He was sure that he was going to fall in. His mother touched
him, and he wet his pants.
There were other tourists looking down into the canyon, too, and a ranger was there to
answer questions. A Frenchman who had come all the way from France asked the ranger
in broken English ff many people committed suicide by jumping in.
'Yes, sir,' said the ranger. 'About three folks a year.' So it goes.
And Billy took a very short trip through time,, made a peewee jump of only ten days,
so he was still twelve, still touring the West with his family. Now they were down in
Carlsbad Caverns, and Billy was praying to God to get him out of there before the ceiling
fell in.
A ranger was explaining that the Caverns had been discovered by a cowboy who saw a
huge cloud of bats come out of a hole in the ground. And then he said that he was going
to mm out all the lights., and that it would probably be the first time in the lives of most
people there that they had ever been in darkness that was total.
Out went the lights. Billy didn't even know whether he was still alive or not. And then
something ghostly floated in air to his left. It had numbers on it. His father had taken out
his Pocket watch. The watch had a radium dial.
Billy went from total dark to total light, found himself back in the war, back in the
delousing station again. The shower was over. An unseen hand had turned the water off.
When Billy got his clothes back, they weren't any cleaner, but all the little animals that
had been living in them were dead. So it goes. And his new overcoat was thawed out and
limp now. It was much too small for Billy. It had a fur collar and a g of crimson silk, and
had apparently been made for an impresario about as big as an organ-grinder's monkey. It
was full of bullet holes.
Billy Pilgrim dressed himself. He put on the little overcoat, too. It split up the back,
and, at the shoulders, the sleeves came entirely free. So the coat became a fur-collared
vest. It was meant to flare at its owners waist, but the flaring took place at Billy's armpits.
'Me Germans found him to be one of the most screamingly funny things they had seen in
all of the Second World War. They laughed and laughed.
And the Germans told everybody else to form in ranks of five, with Billy as their pivot.
Then out of doors went the parade, and through gate after gate again. 'Mere were more
starving Russians with faces like radium dials. The Americans were livelier than before.
The jazzing with hot water had cheered them up. And they came to a shed where a
corporal with only one arm and one eye wrote the name and serial number of each
prisoner in a big, red ledger. Everybody was legally alive now. Before they got their
names and numbers in that book, they were missing in action and probably dead.
So it goes.
As the Americans were waiting to move on, an altercation broke out in their rear-most
rank. An American had muttered something which a guard did not like. The guard knew
English, and he hauled the American out of ranks knocked him down.
The American was astonished. He stood up shakily, spitting blood. He'd had two teeth
knocked out. He had meant no harm by what he'd said, evidently, had no idea that the
guard would hear and understand.
'Why me?' he asked the guard.
The guard shoved him back into ranks. 'Vy you? Vy anybody?' he said.
When Billy Pilgrim's name was inscribed in the ledger of the prison camp, he was
given a number., too, and an iron dogtag in which that number was stamped. A slave
laborer from Poland had done the stamping. He was dead now. So it goes.
Billy was told to hang the tag' around his neck along with his American dogtags, which
he did. The tag was like a salt cracker, perforated down its middle so that a strong man
could snap it in two with his bare hands. In case Billy died, which he didn't, half the tag
would mark his body and half would mark his grave.
After poor Edgar Derby, the high school teacher, was shot in Dresden later on, a doctor
pronounced him dead and snapped his dogtag in two. So it goes.
Properly enrolled and tagged, the Americans were led through gate after gate again. In
two days' time now their families would learn from the International Red Cross that they
were alive.
Next to Billy was little Paul Lazzaro, who had promised to avenge Roland Weary.
Lazzaro wasn't thinking about vengeance. He was thinking about his terrible bellyache.
His stomach had shrunk to the size of a walnut. That dry, shriveled pouch was as sore as
a boil.
Next to Lazzaro was poor, doomed old Edgar Derby, with his American and German
dogs displayed like a necklace, on the outside of his clothes. He had expected to become
a captain, a company commander, because of his wisdom and age. Now here he was on
the Czechoslovakian border at midnight.
'Halt,' said a guard.
The Americans halted. They stood there quietly in the cold. The sheds they were
among were outwardly like thousands of other sheds they had passed. There was this
difference, though: the sheds had tin chimneys, and out of the chimneys whirled
constellations of sparks.
A guard knocked on a door.
The door was flung open from inside. Light leaped out through the door, escaped from
prison at 186,000 miles per second. Out marched fifty middle-aged Englishmen. They
were singing "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here' from the Pirates of Penzance'.
These lusty, ruddy vocalists were among the first English-speaking prisoners to be
taken in the Second World War. Now they were singing to nearly the last. They had not
seen a woman or a child for four years or more. They hadn't seen any birds, either. Not
even sparrows would come into the camp.
The Englishmen were officers. Each of them had attempted to escape from another
prison at least once. Now they were here, dead-center in a sea of dying Russians.
They could tunnel all they pleased. They would inevitably surface within a rectangle of
barbed wire, would find themselves greeted listlessly by dying Russians who spoke no
English, who had no food or useful information or escape plans of their own. They could
scheme all they pleased to hide aboard a vehicle or steal one, but no vehicle ever came
into their compound. They could feign illness, if they liked, but that wouldn't earn them a
trip anywhere, either. The only hospital in the camp was a six-bed affair in the British
compound itself.
The Englishmen were clean and enthusiastic and decent and strong. They sang
boomingly well. They had been singing together every night for years.
The Englishmen had also been lifting weights and chinning themselves for years. Their
bellies were like washboards. The muscles of their calves and upper arms were like
