Курт Воннегут - Player Piano (Utopia 14)

"Coming! Coming!" cried the old man, and jogged unhappily toward the moving train as fast as his brittle legs would carry him. He caught the handrail, swung aboard, and stood panting in the vestibule. He fumbled for his ticket, dropped it into the mechanism on the door. The mechanism considered it, found everything in order, pulled back the door bolt, and let him into the frieze and cast-iron monument to tobacco.

He settled, winded, in the seat next to Paul's. "Son-of-a-bitch won't even wait a second for an old man," he said bitterly.

"It's a machine," said Paul. "All automatic."

"Don't mean he ain't a son-of-a-bitch."

Paul nodded appreciatively.

"Used to be conductor on this line."

"Oh?" The man had the florid, righteous look of a specialized bore, and Paul wasn't interested in listening to him.

"Yes, forty-one years," he said. "For-tee-wunnn years!"

"Huh!"

"For-tee-wunnnn. Two times twenty plus one. And I'd like to see one of them machines deliver a baby."

"Huh! You delivered a baby, eh?"

"Yep. Little boy. By coincidence I done it in the men's room." He chuckled richly. "For-tee-wunnnn years!"

"Huh."

"And I never seen the machine yet that'd watch out for a little girl three years old all the way from St. Louis to Poughkeepsie."

"Nope. Guess not," said Paul. He filed this remark away for his next meeting with Bud Calhoun. He could see the device now - sort of an Iron Maiden, without the spikes, of course, and electronic, of course, that would grasp a little girl firmly at St. Louis, and eject her into the arms of relatives at Poughkeepsie.

"For-tee-wunnnn years! With machines you get quan -titty, but you don't get qual -itty. Know what I mean?"

"Yup," said Paul.

" Carthage ," said the tape recording. " The stop is Carthage. Next station, Deer River ."

Paul settled back against the unyielding seat with a sigh of relaxation, and closed his eyes in a pretense of sleep.

"For-tee-wunnnn years! These machines never help an old lady down the steps."

In time the old conductor ran out of examples of man's superiority over machines and took to anticipating the tape recording's station calling, casually, contemptuously, as though any fool could do it. "Deer River. The stop is Deer River. Next station, Castorland."

" Deer River. The stop is Deer River ," said the tape recording. " Next station, Castorland ."

"Ha! What'd I tell you?"

Paul actually did drop off to sleep fitfully, and at last, at Constableville, he saw his companion slipping his ticket into the door slot and being let off. Paul checked his ticket to make sure it wasn't bent or torn, that it would unlock the door at Ilium. He'd heard tales of addled old ladies locked aboard cars for days for having misplaced their tickets, or for having missed their stops. Hardly a newspaper was printed that didn't have a human interest story about car clean-up crews from the Reeks and Wrecks liberating somebody.

The old displaced conductor disappeared into the Constableville night, and Paul wondered at what thorough believers in mechanization most Americans were, even when their lives had been badly damaged by mechanization. The conductor's plaint, like the lament of so many, wasn't that it was unjust to take jobs from men and give them to machines, but that the machines didn't do nearly as many human things as good designers could have made them do.

"Constableville. The stop is Constableville. Next station, Remsen."

A poker game was going on in the facing seats behind Paul, and a superannuated first sergeant, zebra-like under symbols for patience, individual bloodlettings, and separations from home, was telling tales of the last war - of the Last War.

"Jesus," he said, riffling through the deck absently, as though his mind were a thousand miles away, "there we was, and there they was. Imagine the men's room there's a hogback, with the bastards dug in deep on the reverse slope." The recruits looked at the men's room through narrowed, battle-wise eyes, and the sergeant shuffled the cards some more. "The night before, a lucky shot knocked out the generator."

"Holy cow!" said a recruit.

"You can say that again," said the sergeant. "Anyway - five-card stud, nothing wild - there we were with no juice, eighteen of us facing five hundred of them. The microwave sentinels, the proximity mines, the electric fence, the fire-control system, the remote-control machine gun nests - pfft! No juice, Queen, ace, ace, and dealer gets a deuce. Bet the first ace.

"Well, boys - a dime to me? Raise it a dime just to make things interesting. Well, boys, then the fun started. At seven hundred hours they tried a hundred-man patrol on us, to see what we had. And we had nothin'! And communications was cut to hell, so we couldn't call for nothin'. All our robot tanks'd been pulled out to support a push the 106th was makin', so we was really alone. Snafu. So, I sent Corporal Merganthaler back to battalion for help. - Two queens, no help, two aces, and dealer catches another lousy deuce. Bet the aces. So over they come, screamin' bloody murder, and us with nothing but our goddamn rifles and bayonets workin'. Looked like a tidal wave comin' over at us. - Aces check? Aw, hell, deuces'll try a dime. - Just then, up comes Merganthaler with a truck and generator he's moonlight-requisitioned from the 57th. We hooked her into our lines, cranked her up, and my God, I wish you could of seen it. The poor bastards fryin' on the electric fence, the proximity mines poppin' under 'em, the microwave sentinels openin' up with the remote-control machine-gun nests, and the fire-control system swiveling the guns and flamethrowers around as long as anything was quiverin' within a mile of the place. And that's how I got the Silver Star."

Paul shook his head slightly as he listened to the sergeant's absurd tale. That, then, was the war he had been so eager to get into at one time, the opportunity for basic, hot-tempered, hard-muscled heroism he regretted having missed. There had been plenty of death, plenty of pain, all right, and plenty of tooth-grinding stoicism and nerve. But men had been called upon chiefly to endure by the side of the machines, the terrible engines that fought with their own kind for the right to gorge themselves on men. Horatio on the bridge had become a radio-guided rocket with an atomic warhead and a proximity fuse. Roland and Oliver had become a pair of jet-driven computers hurtling toward each other far faster than the flight of a man's scream. The great tradition of the American rifleman survived only symbolically, in volleys fired into the skies over the dead in thousands of military cemeteries. Those in the graves, the front-line dead, were heirs to another American tradition as old as that of the rifleman, but once a peaceful tradition - that of the American tinker.

"Gosh! Sarge, how come you never went after a commission?"

"Me go back to college at my age? I'm not the school kind, sonny. Gettin' that B.S. was enough for me. Two more years and an M.A. for a pair of lousy gold bars? Naaaaaah! - And a queen, and no help, and a jack, and no help, and a five, and no help, and dealer gets a - what do you know? Three deuces. Looks like my lucky day, boys."

"Middleville. The stop is Middleville. Next station, Herkimer."

"Sarge, d'ya mind talkin' about your wound stripes?"

"Hmmm? No - guess not. This 'un's for a dose of Gamma rays at Kiukiang. This 'un's - lemme see - radioactive dust in the bronchial tubes at Afyon Karahisar. And this little bastard - uh -trenchfoot at Kransystav."

"Sarge, what was the best piece you ever had?"

"A little redheaded half-Swede, half-Egyptian in Farafangana," said the Sarge without hesitation.

"Boy! I hope that's where they send me."