Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - The Sirens of Titan

"I have to whisper," said Miss Wiley playfully, "or somebody will want to lock me up in the crazy house." She put her hand to her mouth, directing her loud whisper to Beatrice. "Flying saucer," she said.

The men had marched to the parade ground to the sound of a snare drum. The snare drum had this to say to them:

Rented a tent, a tent, a tent;

Rented a tent, a tent, a tent.

Rented a tent!

Rented a tent!

Rented a, rented a tent.

They were an infantry division of ten thousand men, formed in a hollow square on a natural parade ground of solid iron one mile thick. The soldiers stood at attention on orange rust. They shivered rigidly, being as much like iron as they could be - both officers anti men. Their uniforms were a rough-textured, frosty green - the color of lichens.

The army had come to attention in utter silence. No audible or visible signal had been given. They had come to attention as a man, as though through a stupendous coincidence.

The third man in the second squad of the first platoon of the second company of the third battalion of the second regiment of the First Martian Assault Infantry Division was a private who had been broken from lieutenant-colonel three years before. He had been on Mars for eight years.

When a man in a modern army is broken from field grade to private, it is likely that he will be old for a private, and that his comrades in arms, once they get used to the fact that he isn't an officer any more, will, out of respect for his failing legs, eyes, and wind, call him something like Pops, or Gramps, or Unk.

The third man in the second squad of the first platoon of the second company in the third battalion of the second regiment of the First Martian Assault Infantry Division was called Unk. Unk was forty years old. Unk was a well-made man - a light heavyweight, dark-skinned, with poet's lips, with soft brown eyes in the shaded caves of a Cro-Magnon brow ridge. Incipient baldness had isolated a dramatic scalplock.

An illustrative anecdote about Unk:

One time, when Unk's platoon was taking a shower, Henry Brackman, Unk's platoon sergeant, asked a sergeant from another regiment to pick out the best soldier in the platoon. The visiting sergeant, without any hesitation, picked Unk, because Unk was a compact, nicely muscled, intelligent man among boys.

Brackman rolled his eyes. "Jesus - you'd think so, wouldn't you?" he said. "That's the platoon f - kup."

"You kidding me?" said the visiting sergeant.

"Hell no, I ain't kidding you," said Brackman. "Look at him - been standing there for ten minutes, and hasn't touched a piece of soap yet. Unk! Wake up, Unk!"

Unk shuddered, stopped dreaming under the tepid drizzle of the shower head. He looked questioningly at Brackman, bleakly co-operative.

"Use some soap, Unk!" said Brackman. "For Chrissakes, use some soap!"

Now, on the iron parade ground, Unk stood at attention in the hollow square like all the rest.

In the middle of the hollow square was a stone post with iron rings fixed to it. Chains had been drawn rattling through the rings - had been drawn tight around a red-haired soldier standing against a post. The soldier was a clean soldier - but he was not a neat soldier, for all the badges and decorations had been stripped off his uniform, and he had no belt, no necktie, no snow-white puttees.

Everybody else, including Unk, was all spiffed up. Everybody else looked very nice indeed.

Something painful was going to happen to the man at the stake - something from which the man would want to escape very much, something from which he was not going to escape, because of the chains.

And all the soldiers were going to watch.

The event was being given great importance.

Even the man at the stake was standing at attention, being the best soldier he knew how to be, under the circumstances.

Again - no audible or visible order was given, but the ten thousand soldiers executed the movement of parade rest as a man.

So did the man at the stake.

Then the soldiers relaxed in ranks, as though given the order at ease. Their obligations under this order were to relax, but to keep their feet in place, and to keep silent. The soldiers were free to think a little now, and to look around and to send messages with their eyes, if they had messages and could find receivers.

The man at the stake tugged against his chains, craned his neck to judge the height of the stake to which he was chained. It was as though he thought he might escape by use of the scientific method, if only he could find out how high the stake was and what it was made of.

The stake was nineteen feet, six and five thirty-seconds inches high, not counting the twelve feet, two and one-eighth inches of it embedded in the iron. The stake had a mean diameter of two feet, five and eleven third-seconds inches, varying from this mean, however, by as much as seven and one thirty-second inches. The stake was composed of quartz, alkali, feldspar, mica, and traces of tourmaline and hornblende. For the information of the man at the stake: He was one hundred and forty-two million, three hundred and forty-six thousand, nine hundred and eleven miles from the Sun, and help was not on its way.

The red-haired man at the stake made no sound, because soldiers at ease were not permitted to make sounds. He sent a message with his eyes, however, to the effect that he would like to scream. He sent the message to anyone whose eyes would meet his. He was hoping to get the message to one person in particular, to his best friend - to Unk. He was looking for Unk.

He couldn't find Unk's face.

If he had found Unk's face, there wouldn't have been any blooming of recognition and pity on Unk's face. Unk had just come out of the base hospital, where he had been treated for mental illness, and Unk's mind was almost a blank. Unk didn't recognize his best friend at the stake. Unk didn't recognize anybody. Unk wouldn't have even known his own name was Unk, wouldn't even have known he was a soldier, if they hadn't told him so when they discharged him from the hospital.

He had gone straight from the hospital to the formation he was in now.

At the hospital they told him again and again and again that he was the best soldier in the best squad in the best platoon in the best company in the best battalion in the best regiment in the best division in the best army.

Unk guessed that was something to be proud of.

At the hospital they told him he had been a pretty sick boy, but he was fully recovered now.

That seemed like good news.

At the hospital they told him what his sergeant's name was, and what a sergeant was, and what all the symbols of ranks and grades and specialties were.

They had blanked out so much of Unk's memory that they even had to teach him the foot movements and the manual of arms all over again.

At the hospital they even had to explain to Unk what Combat Respiratory Rations or CRR's or goofballs were - had to tell him to take one every six hours or suffocate. These were oxygen pills that made up for the fact that there wasn't any oxygen in the Martian atmosphere.

At the hospital they even had to explain to Unk that there was a radio antenna under the crown of his skull, and that it would hurt him whenever he did something a good soldier wouldn't ever do. The antenna also would give him orders and furnish drum music to march to. They said that not just Unk but everybody had an antenna like that - doctors and nurses and four-star generals included. It was a very democratic army, they said.