Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - The Sirens of Titan

Unk wept.

His weeping appalled the boy. He had never seen a man weep before. He never wept himself. "I'm going out to play!" he cried wildly, and he ran out of the office.

Unk went to the window of the office. He looked out at the iron playground. Young Chrono's team was in the field now. Young Chrono joined his teammates, faced a batter whose back was to Unk.

Chrono kissed his good-luck piece, put it in his pocket. "Easy out, you guys," he yelled hoarsely. "Come on, you guys - let's kill him!"

Unk's mate, the mother of young Chrono, was an instructress in the Schliemann Breathing School for Recruits. Schliemann breathing, of course, is a technique that enables human beings to survive in a vacuum or in an inhospitable atmosphere without the use of helmets or other cumbersome respiratory gear.

It consists, essentially, of taking a pill rich in oxygen. The bloodstream takes on this oxygen through the wall of the small intestine rather than through the lungs. On Mars, the pills were known officially as Combat Respiratory Rations, in popular parlance as goofballs.

Schliemann Breathing is at its simplest in a benign but useless atmosphere like that of Mars. The breather goes on breathing and talking in a normal manner, though there is no oxygen for his lungs to take in from the atmosphere. All he has to remember is to take his goofballs regularly.

The school in which Unk's mate was an instructress taught recruits the more difficult techniques necessary in a vacuum or in a harmful atmosphere. This involves not only pill-taking, but plugging one's ears and nostrils, and keeping one's mouth shut as well. Any effort to speak or to breathe would result in hemorrhages and probably death.

Unk's mate was one of six instructresses at the Schliemann Breathing School for Recruits. Her classroom was a bare, windowless, whitewashed room, thirty feet square. Ranged around the walls were benches.

On a table in the middle was a bowl of goofballs, a bowl of nose and ear plugs, a roll of adhesive plaster, scissors, and a small tape recorder. Purpose of the tape recorder was to play music during the long periods in which there was nothing to do but sit and wait patiently for nature to take its course.

Such a period had been reached now. The class had just been dosed with goofballs. Now the students had to sit quietly on the benches and listen to music and wait for the goofballs to reach their small intestines.

The tune being played had been pirated recently from an Earthling broadcast. It was a big hit on Earth - a trio composed for a boy, a girl, and cathedral bells. It was called "God Is Our Interior Decorator." The boy and girl sang alternate lines of the verses, and joined in close harmony on the choruses.

The cathedral bells whanged and clanged whenever anything of a religious nature was mentioned.

There were seventeen recruits. They were all in their newly issued lichen-green undershorts. The purpose of having them strip was to permit the instructress to see at a glance their external bodily reactions to Schliemann breathing.

The recruits were fresh from amnesia treatments and antenna installations at the Reception Center Hospital. Their hair had been shaved off, and each recruit had a strip of adhesive plaster running from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck.

The adhesive plaster showed where the antenna had been put in.

The recruits' eyes were as empty as the windows of abandoned textile mills.

So were the eyes of the instructress, since she, too, had recently had her memory cleaned out.

When they released her from the hospital, they told her what her name was, and where she lived, and how to teach Schliemann breathing - and that was about all the factual information they gave her. There was one other item: they told her she had an eight-year-old son named Chrono, and that she could visit him at his school on Tuesday evenings, if she liked.

The name of the instructress, of Chrono's mother, of Unk's mate, was Bee. She wore a lichen-green sweatsuit, white gym shoes, and, around her neck, a whistle on a chain and a stethoscope.

There was a rebus of her name on her sweatshirt.

She looked at the clock on the wall. Enough time had passed for the slowest digestive system to carry a goofball to the small intestine. She stood, turned off the tape recorder, and blew her whistle.

"Fall in!" she said.

The recruits had not yet had basic military training, so they were incapable of falling in with precision. Painted on the floor were squares within which the recruits were to stand in order to form ranks and files pleasing to the eye. A game resembling musical chairs was now played, with several empty-eyed recruits scuffling for the same square. In time, each found a square of his own.

"All right," said Bee, "take your plugs and plug up your noses and ears, please."

The recruits had been carrying the plugs in their clammy fists. They plugged their noses and ears.

Bee now went from recruit to recruit, making certain that all ears and nostrils were sealed.

"All right," she said, when her inspection was done. "Very good," she said. She took from the table the roll of adhesive plaster. "Now I am going to prove to you that you don't need to use your lungs at all, as long as you have Combat Respiratory Rations - or, as you'll soon be calling them in the Army, goofballs." She moved through the ranks, snipping off lengths of adhesive, sealing mouths with them. No one objected. When she got through, no one had a suitable aperture through which to issue an objection.

She noted the time, and again turned on the music. For the next twenty minutes there would be nothing to do but watch the bare bodies for color changes, for the dying spasms in the sealed and useless lungs. Ideally, the bodies would turn blue, then red, then natural again within the twenty minutes - and the rib cages would quake violently, give up, be still.

When the twenty-minute ordeal was over, every recruit would know how unnecessary lung-breathing was. Ideally, every recruit would be so confident in himself and goofballs, when his course of instruction was over, that he would be ready to spring out of a space ship on the Earthling moon or on the bottom of an Earthling ocean or anywhere, without wondering for a split second what he might be springing into.

Bee sat on a bench.

There were dark circles around her fine eyes. The circles had come after she left the hospital, and they had grown more somber with each passing day. At the hospital, they had promised her that she would become more serene and efficient with each passing day. And they had told her that, if through some fluke she should not find this to be the case, she was to report back to the hospital for more help.

"We all need help from time to time," Dr. Morris N. Castle had said. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. Some day I may need your help, Bee, and I won't hesitate to ask for it."

She had been sent to the hospital after showing her supervisor this sonnet, which she had written about Schliemann breathing:

Break every link with air and mist,

Seal every open vent;

Make throat as tight as miser's fist,

Keep life within you pent.

Breathe out, breathe in, no more, no more,

For breathing's for the meek;

And when in deathly space we soar,

Be careful not to speak.

If you with grief or joy are rapt,

Just signal with a tear;

To soul and heart within you trapped

Add speech and atmosphere.

Every man's an island as in

lifeless space we roam.

Yes, every man's an island:

island fortress, island home.

Bee, who had been sent to the hospital for writing this poem, had a strong face - high cheek-boned and haughty. She looked strikingly like an Indian brave. But whoever said so was under an obligation to add quickly that she was, all the same, quite beautiful.