Курт Воннегут - Player Piano (Utopia 14)

She was also more of a source of courage than he cared to admit.

She also had a sexual genius that gave Paul his one unqualified enthusiasm in life.

And Anita had also made possible, by her dogged attention to details, the luxury of his detached, variously amused or cynical outlook on life.

She was also all he had.

A vague panic welled up cold in his chest, driving away drowsiness when he would most have welcomed it. He began to see that he, too, would be in for a shock. He felt oddly disembodied, an insubstantial wisp, nothingness, a man who declined to be any more. Suddenly understanding that he, like Anita, was little more than his station in life, he threw his arms around his sleeping wife, and laid his head on the breast of his fellow wraith-to-be.

"Mmmmm?" said Anita. "Mmmmmmm?"

"Anita -"

"Mmm?"

"Anita, I love you." The compulsion was upon him to tell her everything, to mingle his consciousness with hers. But as he momentarily raised his head from the drugging warmth and fragrance of her bosom, cool, fresh air from the Adirondacks bathed his face, and wisdom returned. He said nothing more to her.

"I love you, Paul," she murmured.

DOCTOR PAUL PROTEUS was a man with a secret. Most of the time it was an exhilarating secret, and he extracted momentary highs of joy from it while dealing with fellow members of the system in the course of his job. At the beginning and close of each item of business he thought, "To hell with you."

It was to hell with them, to hell with everything. This secret detachment gave him a delightful sense of all the world's being a stage. Waiting until the time when he and Anita would be in mental shape to quit and start a better life, Paul acted out his role as manager of the Ilium Works. Outwardly, as manager, he was unchanged; but inwardly he was burlesquing smaller, less free souls who would have taken the job seriously.

He had never been a reading man, but now he was developing an appetite for novels wherein the hero lived vigorously and out-of-doors, dealing directly with nature, dependent upon basic cunning and physical strength for survival - woodsmen, sailors, cattlemen. . . .

He read of these heroes with a half-smile on his lips. He knew his enjoyment of them was in a measure childish, and he doubted that a life could ever be as clean, hearty, and satisfying as those in the books. Still and all, there was a basic truth underlying the tales, a primitive ideal to which he could aspire. He wanted to deal, not with society, but only with Earth as God had given it to man.

"Is that a good book, Doctor Proteus?" said Doctor Katharine Finch, his secretary. She'd come into his office carrying a large gray cardboard box.

"Oh - hello, Katharine." He laid the book down with a smile. "Not great literature; I'll promise you that. Pleasant relaxation is all. All about bargemen on the old Erie Ship Canal." He tapped the broad, naked chest of the hero on the book jacket. "Don't make men like that any more. Well, what's in the box? That for me?"

"It's your shirts. They just came by mail."

"Shirts?"

"For the Meadows."

"Oh, those things. Open them up. What color are they?"

"Blue. You're on the Blue Team this year." She laid the shirts on the desk.

"Oh, no!" Paul stood and held one of the deep blue T-shirts at arm's length. "Dear God in heaven - no!" Across the chest of each of the shirts, in blazing gold letters, was the word "Captain." "Katharine, they can't do this to me."

"It's an honor, isn't it?"

"Honor!" He exhaled noisily and shook his head. "For fourteen days, Katharine, I, Queen of the May and captain of the Blue Team, am going to have to lead my men in group singing, marches, greased-pole climbing, volley ball, horseshoes, softball, golf-ball driving, badminton, trapshooting, capture the flag, Indian wrestling, touch football, shuffleboard, and trying to throw the other captains into the lake. Agh!"

"Doctor Shepherd was very pleased."

"He always has been fond of me."

"No - I mean he was pleased about being a captain himself."

"Oh? Shepherd is a captain?" Paul's raised eyebrows were part of an old reflex, the wary reaction of a man who has been in the system for a good many years. Being chosen to captain one of the four teams was an honor, if a man gave a damn about such things. It was a way the higher brass had of showing favor, and, politically, Shepherd's having been chosen a captain was a striking business. Shepherd had always been a nobody at the Meadows, whose chief fame was as a pretty fair softball pitcher. Now, suddenly, he was a captain. "Which team?"

"Green. His shirts are on my desk. Green with orange lettering. Very vivid."

"Green, eh?" Well, if one cared about such things, Green was the lowest in the unofficial hierarchy of teams. It was one of those things that was understood without anyone's saying anything about it. Having looked this far into the piddling matter, Paul congratulated himself for having been named captain of the Blue, which, again, everybody seemed to feel was the team with the most tone. Not that it made any difference at all any more. Made none. Silly. To hell with it.

"They certainly give you enough shirts," said Katharine, counting. "Nine, ten, eleven, twelve."

"Nothing like enough. For two weeks you drink and sweat, drink and sweat, drink and sweat, until you feel like a sump pump. This is a day's supply at the outside."

"Uh-huh. Well, sorry, that's all there is in the box except this book." She held up the volume, which looked like a hymnal.

"Hi ho - The Meadows Songbook, " said Paul wearily. He leaned back and closed his eyes. "Pick a song, Katharine, any song, and read it aloud."

"Here's the song for the Green Team, Doctor Shepherd's team. To the tune of the William Tell Overture. "

"The whole overture?"

"That's what it says here."

"Well, go ahead and give it a try."

She cleared her throat, started to sing softly, thought better of it, and lapsed into plain reading:

"That'll put hair on your chest, Katharine."

"Oh, gosh but it'll be fun! You know you'll love it when you get up there."

Paul opened his eyes to see that Katharine was reading another song, and her eyes shone with excitement and she rocked her head from side to side. "What's that you're reading now?"

"Oh, I wish I were a man! I was just reading your song."

"My song?"

"The Blue Team's song."

"Oh - my song. By all means, let's hear it." She whistled a few bars of "Indiana," and then sang, this time heartily:

"Hmmm."

"And you will win, too. I know you will," said Katharine.

"You going to be at the Mainland?" The Mainland was a camp for wives and children, and women employees whose development wasn't yet complete, across the water from the Meadows, the island where the men went.

"That's as close as I can get to the real thing," said Katharine wistfully.

"That's close enough, believe me. Tell me, is Bud Calhoun going to be there?"

She colored, and he was instantly sorry he'd asked. "He had an invitation, I know," she said, "but that was before -" She shrugged unhappily. "And you know what the Manual says.