Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - The Sirens of Titan

The authorities complained bitterly that the boy's big trouble was his mother. His mother loved him just the way he was.

"Only eight more minutes to get your Malachi, folks," said Bee. "Hurry, hurry, hurry."

Bee's upper front teeth were gold, and her skin, like the skin of her son, was the color of golden oak.

Bee had lost her upper front teeth when the space ship in which she and Chrono had ridden from Mars crash-landed in the Gumbo region of the Amazon Rain Forest. She and Chrono had been the only survivors of the crash, and had wandered through the jungles for a year.

The color of Bee's and Chrono's skins was permanent, since it stemmed from a modification of their livers, Their livers had been modified by a three-month diet consisting of water and the roots of the salpa-salpa or Amazonian blue poplar. The diet had been a part of Bee's and Chrono's initiation into the Gumbo tribe.

During the initiation, mother and son had been staked at the ends of tethers in the middle of the village, with Chrono representing the Sun and Bee representing the Moon, as the Sun and the Moon were understood by the Gumbo people.

As a result of their experiences, Bee and Chrono were closer than most mothers and sons.

They had been rescued at last by a helicopter. Winston Niles Rumfoord had sent the helicopter to just the right place at just the right time.

Winston Niles Rumfoord had given Bee and Chrono the lucrative Malachi concession outside the Alice-in-Wonderland door. He had also paid Bee's dental bill, and had suggested that her false front teeth be gold.

The man who had the booth next to Bee's was Harry Brackman. He had been Unk's platoon sergeant back on Mars. Brackman was portly and balding now. He had a cork leg and a stainless steel right hand. He had lost the leg and hand in the Battle of Boca Raton, He was the only survivor of the battle - and, if he hadn't been so horribly wounded, he would certainly have been lynched along with the other survivors of his platoon.

Brackman sold plastic models of the fountain inside the wall. The models were a foot high. The models had spring-driven pumps in their bases. The pumps pumped water from the big bowl at the bottom to the tiny bowls at the top. Then the tiny bowls spilled into the slightly larger bowls below and . . .

Brackman had three of them going at once on the counter before him. "Just like the one inside, folks," he said. "And you can take one of these home with you. Put it in the picture window, so all your neighbors'll know you've been to Newport. Put it in the middle of the kitchen table for the kids' parties, and fill it with pink lemonade."

"How much?" said a rube.

"Seventeen dollars," said Brackman.

"Wow!" said the rube.

"It's a sacred shrine, cousin," said Brackman, looking at the rube levelly. "Isn't a toy." He reached under the counter, brought out a model of a Martian space ship. "You want a toy? Here's a toy. Forty-nine cents. I only make two cents on it."

The rube made a show of being a judicious shopper. He compared the toy with the real article it was supposed to represent. The real article was a Martian space ship on top of a column ninety-eight feet tall, The column and space ship were inside the walls of the Rumfoord estate - in the corner of the estate where the tennis courts had once been.

Rumfoord bad yet to explain the purpose of the space ship, whose supporting column had been built with the pennies of school children from all over the world. The ship was kept in constant readiness. What was reputedly the longest free-standing ladder in history leaned against the column, led giddily to the door of the ship.

In the fuel cartridge of the space ship was the very last trace of the Martian war effort's supply of the Universal Will to Become.

"Uh huh," said the rube. He put the model back on the counter. "If you don't mind, I'll shop around a little more." So far, the only thing he had bought was a Robin Hood hat with a picture of Rumfoord on one side and a picture of a sailboat on the other, and with his own name stitched on the feather. His name, according to the feather, was Delbert. "Thanks just the same," said Delbert. "I'll probably be back."

"Sure you will, Delbert," said Brackman.

"How did you know my name was Delbert?" said Delbert, pleased and suspicious.

"You think Winston Niles Rumfoord is the only man around here with supernatural powers?" said Brackman.

A jet of steam went up inside the walls. An instant later, the voice of the great steam whistle rolled over the booths - mighty, mournful, and triumphant. It was the signal that Rumfoord and his dog would materialize in five minutes.

It was the signal for the concessionaires to stop their irreverent bawling of brummagem wares, to close their shutters.

The shutters were banged shut at once.

The effect of the closing inside the booths was to turn the line of concessions into a twilit tunnel.

The isolation of the concessionaires in the tunnel bad an extra dimension of spookiness, since the tunnel contained only survivors from Mars. Rumfoord had insisted on that - that Martians were to have first choice of the concessions at Newport. It was his way of saying, "Thanks."

There weren't many survivors - only fifty-eight in the United States, only three hundred and sixteen in the entire World; of the fifty-eight in the United States, twenty-one were concessionaires in Newport.

"Here we go again, kiddies," somebody said, far, far, far down the line. It was the voice of the blind man who sold the Robin Hood hats with a picture of Rumfoord on one side and a picture of a sailboat on the other.

Sergeant Brackman laid his folded arms on the half-partition between his booth and Bee's. He winked at young Chrono, who was lying on an unopened case of Malachis.

"Go to hell, eh, kid?" said Brackman to Chrono.

"Go to hell," Chrono agreed. He was cleaning his nails with the strangely bent, drilled and nicked piece of metal that had been his good-luck piece on Mars. It was still his good-luck piece on Earth.

The good-luck piece had probably saved Chrono's and Bee's lives in the jungle. The Gumbo tribesmen had recognized the piece of metal as an object of tremendous power. Their respect for it had led them to initiate rather than eat its owners.

Brackman laughed affectionately. "Yessir - there's a Martian for you," he said. "Won't even get off his case of Malachis for a look at the Space Wanderer."

Chrono was not alone in his apathy about the Space Wanderer. It was the proud and impudent custom of all the concessionaires to stay away from ceremonies - to stay in the twilit tunnel of their booths until Rumfoord and his dog had come and gone.

It wasn't that the concessionaires had real contempt for Rumfoord's religion. Actually, most of them thought the new religion was probably a pretty good thing. What they were dramatizing when they stayed in their shuttered booths was that they, as Martian veterans, had already done more than enough to put the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent on its feet.

They were dramatizing the fact of their having been all used up.

Rumfoord encouraged them in this pose - spoke of them fondly as his ". . . soldier saints outside the little door. Their apathy," Rumfoord once said, "is a great wound they suffered that we might be more lively, more sensitive, and more free."

The temptation of the Martian concessionaires to take a peek at the Space Wanderer was great. There were loudspeakers on the walls of the Rumfoord estate, and every word spoken by Rumfoord inside blatted in the ears of anyone within a quarter of a mile. The words had spoken again and again of the glorious moment of truth that would come when the Space Wanderer came.

It was a big moment true believers titillated themselves about - the big moment wherein true believers were going to find their beliefs amplified, clarified, and vivified by a factor of ten.