Курт Воннегут - Player Piano (Utopia 14)

"You are completely 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 façades 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!Maître! "

"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!"

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, are 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, television 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 . . .