Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - The Sirens of Titan

He let Unk go, turned attention to the comic book again. His broad, brown, slab-muscled back amazed Unk. Living apart from Boaz, Unk had flattered himself into thinking he was a physical match for Boaz. He saw now what a pathetic delusion this had been.

The muscles in Boaz's back slid over one another in slow patterns that were counterpoint to the quick movements of his page-turning fingers. "You know so much about traps and things," said Boaz. "How you know there ain't some worse trap waiting for us if we go flying out of here?"

Before Unk could answer him, Boaz remembered that he had left the tape recorder playing and unguarded.

"Ain't nobody watching out for 'em at all!" he cried. He left Unk, ran to rescue the harmoniums.

While Boaz was gone, Unk made plans for turning the space ship upside. down. That was the solution to the puzzle of how to get out. That was what the harmoniums on the ceiling had said:

UNK, TURN SHIP UPSIDE DOWN.

The theory of turning the space ship over was sound, of course. The ship's sensing equipment was on its bottom. When turned over, the ship would be able to apply the same easy grace and intelligence to getting out of the caves that it had used in getting into- them.

Thanks to a power winch and the feeble tug of gravity in the caves of Mercury, Unk had the ship turned over by the time Boaz got back. All that remained to be done for the trip out was to press the on button. The upside-down ship would then blunder against the cave floor, give up, retreat from the floor under the impression that the floor was a ceiling.

It would go up the system of chimneys under the impression that it was going down. And it would inevitably find the way out, under the impression that it was seeking the deepest possible hole.

The hole it would eventually find itself in would be the bottomless, sideless pit of space eternal.

Boaz came into the upside-down ship, his arms loaded with dead harmoniums. He was carrying four quarts or more of the seeming dried apricots. Inevitably he dropped some. And, in stooping to pick them up reverently, he dropped more.

Tears were streaming down his face.

"You see?" said Boaz. He was raging heartbrokenly against himself. "You see, Unk?" he said. "See what happens when somebody just runs off and forgets?"

Boaz shook his head. "This ain't all of 'em," he said. "This ain't near all of 'em." He found an empty carton that had once contained candy bars. He put the harmonium corpses into that.

He straightened up, his hands on his hips. Just as Unk had been amazed by Boaz's physical condition, so was Unk now amazed by Boaz's dignity.

Boaz, when he straightened up, was a wise, decent, weeping, brown Hercules.

Unk, by comparison, felt scrawny, rootless, and soreheaded.

"You want to do the dividing, Unk?" said Boaz.

"Dividing?" said Unk.

"Goofballs, food, soda pop, candy," said Boaz.

"Divide it all?" said Unk. "My God - there's enough of everything for five hundred years." There had never been any talk of dividing things before. There had been no shortage, and no threat of a shortage of anything.

"Half for you to take with you, and half to leave here with me," said Boaz.

"Leave with you?" said Unk incredulously. "You're - you're coming with me, aren't you?"

Boaz held up his big right hand, and it was a tender gesture for silence, a gesture made by a thoroughly great human being. "Don't truth me, Unk," said Boaz, "and I won't truth you." He brushed away his tears with a fist.

Unk had never been able to brush aside the plea about truthing. It frightened him. Some part of his mind warned him that Boaz was not bluffing, that Boaz really knew a truth about Unk that could tear him to pieces.

Unk opened his mouth and closed it again.

"You come and tell me the big news," said Boaz. "'Boaz - ' you say, 'we're going to be free!' And I get all excited, and I drop everthing I'm doin', and I get set to be free.

"And I keep saying it over to myself about how I'm going to be free," said Boaz, "and then I try to think what that's going to be like, and all I can see is people. They push me this way, then they push me that - and nothing pleases 'em, and they get madder and madder, on account of nothing makes 'em happy. And they holler at me on account of I ain't made 'em happy, and we all push and pull some more.

"And then, all of a sudden," said Boaz, "I remember all the crazy little animals I been making so happy so easy with music. And I go find thousands of 'em lying around dead, on account of Boaz forgot all about 'em, he was so excited about being free. And ever' one of them lost lives I could have saved, if I'd have just kept my mind on what I was doing.

"And then I say to myself," said Boaz, "'I ain't never been nothing good to people, and people never been nothing good to me. So what I want to be free in crowds of people for?'

"And then I knew what I was going to say to you, Unk, when I got back here," said Boaz.

Boaz now said it:

"I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I'm doing good, and them I'm doing good for know I'm doing it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home.

"And when I die down here some day," said Boaz, "I'm going to be able to say to myself, 'Boaz - you made millions of lives worth living. Ain't nobody ever spread more joy. You ain't got an enemy in the Universe.'" Boaz became for himself the affectionate Mama and Papa he'd never had. "'You go to sleep now,'" he said to himself, imagining himself on a stone deathbed in the caves. "'You're a good boy, Boaz,'" he said. "'Good night.'"

It was a Tuesday afternoon. It was springtime in the northern hemisphere of Earth.

Earth was green and watery. The air of earth was good to breathe, as fattening as cream.

The purity of the rains that fell on Earth could be tasted. The taste of purity was daintily tart.

Earth was warm.

The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.

The daintily tart rain fell on a green place where there was a great deal of death. It fell on a New World country churchyard. The churchyard was in West Barnstable, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, U.S.A. The churchyard was full, the spaces between its naturally dead chinked tight by the bodies of the honored war dead. Martians and Earthlings lay side by side.

There was not a country in the world that did not have graveyards with Earthlings and Martians buried side by side. There was not a country in the world that had not fought a battle in the war of all Earth against the invaders from Mars.

All was forgiven.

All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.