Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - The Sirens of Titan

Now there was a sharp knock on Bee's door. Bee went to the door and opened it. "Yes?" she said.

In the deserted corridor stood a red and sweating man in uniform. The uniform had no insignia. Slung on the man's back was a rifle. His eyes were deep-set and furtive. "Messenger," he said gruffly. "Message for Bee."

"I'm Bee," said Bee uneasily.

The messenger looked her up and down, made her feel naked. His body threw off heat, and the heat enveloped her suffocatingly.

"Do you recognize me?" he whispered.

"No," she said. His question relieved her a little. Apparently she had done business with him before. He and his visit, then, were routine - and, in the hospital, she had simply forgotten the man and his routine.

"I don't remember you, either," he whispered.

"I've been in the hospital," she said. "I had to have my memory cleaned."

"Whisper!" he said sharply.

"What?" said Bee.

"Whisper!" he said.

"Sorry," she whispered. Apparently whispering was part of the routine for dealing with this particular functionary. "I've forgotten so much."

"We all have!" he whispered angrily. He again looked up and down the corridor. "You are the mother of Chrono, aren't you?" be whispered.

"Yes," she whispered.

Now the strange messenger concentrated his gaze on her face. He breathed deeply, sighed, frowned - blinked frequently.

"What - what's the message?" whispered Bee, "The message is this," whispered the messenger. "I am the father of Chrono. I have just deserted from the Army. My name is Unk. I am going to find some way for you, me, the boy, and my best friend to escape from here. I don't know how yet, but you've got to be ready to go at a moment's notice!" He gave her a hand grenade. "Hide this somewhere," he whispered. "When the time comes, you may need it."

Excited shouts came from the reception room at the far end of the corridor.

"He said he was a confidential messenger!" shouted a man.

"In a pig's eye he's a messenger!" shouted another. "He's a deserter in time of war! Who'd he come to see?"

"He didn't say. He said it was top secret!"

A whistle shrilled.

"Six of you come with me!" shouted a man. "We'll search this place room by room. The rest of you surround the outside!"

Unk shoved Bee and her hand grenade into the room, shut the door. He unslung his rifle, leveled it at the plugged and taped recruits. "One peep, one funny move out of any of you guys," he said, "and you'll all be dead."

The recruits, standing rigidly on their assigned squares on the floor, did not respond in any way.

They were pale blue.

Their rib cages were quaking.

The whole awareness of each man was concentrated in the region of a small, white, life-giving pill dissolving in the duodenum.

"Where can I hide?" said Unk. "How can I get out?" It was unnecessary for Bee to reply. There was no place to hide. There was no way out save through the door to the corridor.

There was only one thing to do, and Unk did it. He stripped to his lichen-green undershorts, hid his rifle under a bench, put plugs in his ears and nostrils, taped his mouth, and stood among the recruits.

His head was shaved, just like the heads of the recruits. And, like the recruits, Unk had a strip of adhesive plaster running from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck. He had been such a terrible soldier that the doctors had opened his head up at the hospital to see if he might not be suffering from malfunctioning antenna.

Bee surveyed the room with enchanted calm. She held the grenade that Unk had given her as though it were a vase with one perfect rose in it. Then she went to the place where Unk had hidden his rifle, and she put the grenade beside it - put it there neatly, with a decent respect for another's property.

Then she went back to her post at the table.

She neither stared at Unk nor avoided looking at him. As they told her at the hospital: she had been very, very sick, and she would be very, very sick again if she didn't keep her mind strictly on her work and let other people do the thinking and the worrying. At all costs, she was to keep calm.

The blustering false alarms of the men making the room-to-room search were approaching slowly.

Bee refused to worry about anything. Unk, by taking his place among the recruits, had reduced himself to a cipher. Considering him professionally, Bee saw that Unk's body was turning blue-green rather than pure blue. This might mean that he had not taken a goofball for several hours - in which case he would soon keel over

To have him keel over would certainly be the most peaceful solution to the problem he presented, and Bee wanted peace above all else.

She didn't doubt that Unk was the father of her child. Life was like that. She didn't remember him, and she didn't bother now to study him in order to recognize him the next time - if there was going to be a next time. She had no use for him.

She noted that Unk's body was now predominantly green. Her diagnosis had been correct, then. He would keel over at any minute.

Bee daydreamed. She daydreamed of a little girl in a starched white dress and white gloves and white shoes, and with a white pony all her own. Bee envied that little girl who had kept so clean.

Bee wondered who the little girl was.

Unk fell noiselessly, as limp as a bag of eels.

Unk awoke, found himself on his back in a bunk in a space ship. The cabin lights were dazzling. Unk started to yell, but a sick headache shushed him.

He struggled to his feet, clung drunkenly to the pipe supports of the bunk. He was all alone. Someone had put his uniform back on him.

He thought at first that he had been launched into space eternal.

But then he saw that the airlock was open to the outside, and that outside was solid ground.

Unk lurched out through the airlock and threw up. He raised his watering eyes, and saw that he was seemingly still on Mars, or on something a lot like Mars.

It was night time.

The iron plain was studded with ranks and files of space ships.

As Unk watched, a file of ships five miles long arose from the formation, sailed melodiously off into space.

A dog barked, barked with a voice like a great bronze gong.

And out of the night loped the dog - as big and terrible as a tiger.

"Kazak!" cried a man in the dark.

The dog stopped at the command, but he held link at bay, kept Unk flattened against the space ship with the threat of his long, wet fangs.

The dog's master appeared, the beam of a flashlight dancing before him. When he got within a few yards of Unk, he placed the flashlight under his chin. The contrasting beam and shadows made his face look like the face of a demon.

"Hello, Unk," he said. He turned the flashlight off, stepped to one side so that he was illuminated by the light spilling from the space ship. He was big, vaguely soft, marvelously self-assured. He wore the bloodred uniform and square-toed boots of a Parachute Ski Marine. He was unarmed save for a black and gold swaggerstick one foot long.

"Long time no see," he said. He gave a very small, v-shaped smile. His voice was a glottal tenor, a yodel.

Unk had no recollection of the man, but the man obviously knew Unk well - knew him warmly.

"Who am I, Unk?" said the man gayly.

Unk gasped. This had to be Stony Stevenson, had to be Unk's fearless best friend. "Stony?" he whispered.

"Stony?" said the man. He laughed. "Oh, God - " he said, "many's the time I've wished I was Stony, and many's the time I'll wish it again."

The ground shook. There was a whirlwind rush in the air. Neighboring space ships on all sides had leaped into the air, were gone.

Unk's ship now had its sector of the iron plain all to itself. The nearest ships on the ground were perhaps half a mile away.