Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - The Sirens of Titan

Now the moment had arrived.

The fire engine that had carried the Space Wanderer down from the Church of the Space Wanderer on Cape Cod was clanging and shrieking outside the booths.

The trolls in the twilight of the booths refused to peek.

The cannon roared within the walls.

Rumfoord and his dog, then, had materialized - and the Space Wanderer was passing in through the Alice-in-Wonderland door.

"Probably some broken-down actor he hired from New York," said Brackman.

This got no response from anyone, not even from Chrono, who fancied himself the chief cynic of the booths. Brackman didn't take his own suggestion seriously - that the Space Wanderer was a fraud. The concessionaires knew all too well about Rumfoord's penchant for realism. When Rumfoord staged a passion play, he used nothing but real people in real hells.

Let it be emphasized here that, passionately fond as Rumfoord was of great spectacles, he never gave in to the temptation to declare himself God or something a whole lot like God.

His worst enemies admit that. Dr. Maurice Rosenau, in his Pan-Galactic Humbug or Three Billion Dupes says:

Winston Niles Rumfoord, the interstellar Pharisee, Tartufe, and Cagliostro, has taken pains to declare that he is not God Almighty, that he is not a close relative of God Almighty, and that he has received no plain instructions from God Almighty. To these words of the Master of Newport we can say Amen! And may we add that Rumfoord is so far from being a relative or agent of God Almighty as to make all communication with God Almighty Himself impossible so long as Rumfoord is around!

Ordinarily, talk by the Martian veterans in the shuttered booths was sprightly - bristling with entertaining irreverence and tips on selling trashy religious artides to boobs.

Now, with Rumfoord and the Space Wanderer about to meet, the concessionaires found it very hard not to be interested.

Sergeant Brackman's good hand went up to the crown of his head. It was the characteristic gesture of a Martian veteran. He was touching the area over his antenna, over the antenna that had once done all his important thinking for him. He missed the signals.

"Bring the Space Wanderer here!" blatted Rumfoord's voice from the Gabriel horns on the walls.

"Maybe - maybe we should go," said Brackman to Bee.

"What?" murmured Bee. She was standing with her back to the closed shutters. Her eyes were shut. Her head was down. She looked cold.

She always shivered when a materialization was taking place.

Chrono was rubbing his good-luck piece slowly with the ball of his thumb, watching a halo of mist on the cold metal, a halo around the thumb.

"The hell with 'em - eh, Chrono?" said Brackman.

The man who sold twittering mechanical birds swung his wares overhead listlessly. A farm wife had stabbed him with a pitchfork in the Battle of Toddington, England, had left him for dead.

The International Committee for the Identification and Rehabilitation of Martians had, with the help of fingerprints, identified the bird man as Bernard K. Winslow, an itinerant chicken sexer, who had disappeared from the alcoholic ward of a London hospital.

"Thanks very much for the information," Winslow had told the committee. "Now I don't have that lost feeling any more."

Sergeant Brackman had been identified by the Committee as Private Francis J. Thompson, who had disappeared in the dead of night while walking a lonely guard post around a motor pooi in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, U.S.A.

The committee had been baffled by Bee. She had no fingerprints on record. The Committee believed her to be either Florence White, a plain and friendless girl who had disappeared from a steam laundry in Cohoes, New York, or Darlene Simpkins, a plain and friendless girl who had last been seen accepting a ride with a swarthy stranger in Brownsville, Texas.

And down the line of booths from Brackman and Chrono and Bee were Martian husks who had been identified as Myron S. Watson, an alcoholic, who had disappeared from his post as a wash room attendant at Newark Airport . . . as Charlene Heller, assistant dietitian of the cafeteria of Stivers High School in Dayton, Ohio . . . as Krishna Garu, a typesetter still wanted, technically, on charges of bigamy, pandering, and nonsupport in Calcutta, India . . . as Kurt Schneider, also an alcoholic, manager of a failing travel agency in Bremen, Germany.

"The mighty Rumfoord - " said Bee.

"Pardon me?" said Brackman.

"He snatched us out of our lives," said Bee. "He put us to sleep. He cleaned out our minds the way you dean the seeds out of a jack-o'-lantern. He wired us like robots, trained us, aimed us - burned us out in a good cause." She shrugged.

"Could we have done any better if he'd left us in charge of our own lives?" said Bee. "Would we have become any more - or any less? I guess I'm glad he used me. I guess he had a lot better ideas about what to do with me than Florence White or Darlene Simpkins or whoever I was.

"But I hate him all the same," said Bee.

"That's your privilege," said Brackman. "He said that was the privilege of every Martian."

"There's one consolation," said Bee. "We're all used up. We'll never be of any use to him again."

"Welcome, Space Wanderer," blatted Rumfoord's oleomargarine tenor from the Gabriel horns on the wall. "How meet it is that you should come to us on the bright red pumper of a volunteer fire department. I can think of no more stirring symbol of man's humanity to man than a fire engine. Tell me, Space Wanderer, do you see anything here - anything that makes you think you may have been here before?"

The Space Wanderer murmured something unintelligible.

"Louder, please," said Rumfoord.

"The fountain - I remember that fountain," said the Space Wanderer gropingly. "Only - only - "

"Only?" said Rumfoord.

"It was dry then - whenever that was. It's so wet now," said the Space Wanderer.

A microphone near the fountain was now tuned into the public address system, so that the actual babble, spatter and potch of the fountain could underline the Space Wanderer's words.

"Anything else familiar, oh, Space Wanderer?" said Rumfoord.

"Yes," said the Space Wanderer shyly. "You."

"I am familiar?" said Rumfoord archly. "You mean there's a possibility that I played some small part in your life before?"

"I remember you on Mars," said the Space Wanderer. "You were the man with the dog - just before we took off."

"What happened after you took off?" said Rumfoord.

"Something went wrong," said the Space Wanderer. He sounded apologetic, as though the series of misfortunes were somehow his own fault. "A lot of things went wrong."

"Have you ever considered the possibility," said Rumfoord, "that everything went absolutely right?"

"No," said the Space Wanderer simply. The idea did not startle him, could not startle him - since the idea proposed was so far beyond the range of his jerry-built philosophy.

"Would you recognize your mate and child?" said Rumfoord.

"I - I don't know," said the Space Wanderer.

"Bring me the woman and the boy who sell Malachis outside the little iron door," said Rumfoord. "Bring Bee and Chrono."

The Space Wanderer and Winston Niles Rumfoord and Kazak were on a scaffold before the mansion. The scaffold was at eye-level for the standing crowd. The scaffold before the mansion was a portion of a continuous system of catwalks, ramps, ladders, pulpits, steps, and stages that reached into every corner of the estate.

The system made possible the free and showy circulation of Rumfoord around the grounds, unimpeded by crowds. It meant, too, that Rumfoord could offer a glimpse of himself to every person on the grounds.

The system was not suspended magnetically, though it looked like a miracle of levitation. The seeming miracle was achieved by means of a cunning use of paint. The underpinnings were painted a flat black, while the superstructures were painted flashing gold.