Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan

THE SIRENS OF TITAN "Tell me one good thing you ever did In your Iife." - Winston NilesRumfoord In the beginning, God became the Heaven and the Earth.... And God said, 'Let Me be light,' and He was light. The WinstonN/les Rumfoord Authorized Revised Bible For a delicious tea snack, try young harmoniums rolled into tubes and filled with Venusian cottage cheese. The BeatriceRumfoord Galactic Cookbook In terms of their souls, the martyrs of Mars died not when they attacked Earth but when they were recruited for the Martian war machine. The Winston Niles Rumfoord Pocket History of Mars I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm. Boaz in Sarah Home Canby's Unk and Boaz in the Caves ofMercury "I am at a loss to understand why German batball is not an event, possibly a key event, in the Olympic Games." Winston NilesRumfoord "There is no reason why good can not triumph as often as evil.

The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia." Winston Niles Rumfoord "In a punctual way of speaking, good-bye." Winston NilesRumfoordThe Sirens ofTitanKurt Vonnegut Jr. Copyright 1959 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Victor Gollancz Edition published 1962 Coronet edition 1967Second impression 1972Third impression 1973Fourth impression 1974Fifth impression 1975The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation toany real person or actual happening This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which this is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Printed and bound in Great Britain for Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughton, St. Paul's House, Warwick Lane, London, EC4P4AH By Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd Aylesbury, Bucks ISBN 0 340 02876 9 "Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress." RANSOM K. FERN

For Alex Vonnegut, Special Agent,with love All persons, places, and events in this book are real.

Certain speeches and thoughts are necessarily constructions by the author. No names have been changed to protect the innocent, since God Almighty protects the innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.

"I guess somebody up there likes me." MALACHI CONSTANT Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them. They could not name even one of the fifty-three portals to the soul.

Gimcrack religions were big business. Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about. Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.

These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death. Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions. Only inwardness remained to be explored. Only the human soul remained terra incognita. This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom.

What were people like in olden times, with their souls as yet unexplored? The following is a true story from the Nightmare Ages, falling roughly, give or take a few years, between the Second World War and the Third Great Depression. There was a crowd. The crowd had gathered because there was to be a materialization. A man and his dog were going to materialize, were going to appear out of thin air wispily at first, becoming, finally, as substantial as any man and dog alive. The crowd wasn't going to get to see the materialization. The materialization was strictly a private affair on private property, and the crowd was emphatically not invited to feast its eyes.

The materialization was going to take place, like a modern, civilized hanging, within high, blank, guarded walls. And the crowd outside the walls was very much like a crowd outside the walls at a hanging. The crowd knew it wasn't going to see anything, yet its members found pleasure in being near, in staring at the blank walls and imagining what was happening inside. The mysteries of the materialization, like the mysteries of a hanging, were enhanced by the wall; were made pornographic by the magic lantern slides of morbid imaginations magic lantern slides projected by the crowd on the blank stone walls. The town was Newport, Rhode Island, U.S.A., Earth, Solar System, Milky Way. The walls were those of the Rumfoord estate.

Ten minutes before the materialization was to take place, agents of the police spread the rumor that the materialization had happened prematurely, had happened outside the walls, and that the man and his dog could be seen plain as day two blocks away. The crowd galloped away to see the miracle at the intersection. The crowd was crazy about miracles. At the tail end of the crowd was a woman who weighed three hundred pounds. She had a goiter, a caramel apple, and a gray little six-year-old girl. "Wanda June," she said, "if you don't start acting right, I'm never going to take you to a materialization again." The materializations had been happening for nine years, once every fifty-nine days. "Wanda June," she said, "if you don't start acting right, I'm never going to take you to a materialization again." The materializations had been happening for nine years, once every fifty-nine days.

The most learned and trustworthy men in the world had begged heartbrokenly for the privilege of seeing a materialization. No matter how the great men worded their requests, they were turned down cold. The refusal was always the same, handwritten by Mrs. Rumfoord's social secretary. Mrs. Winston Niles Rumfoord asks me to inform you that she is unable to extend the invitationyou request.

She is sure you will understand her feeling in the matter: that the phenomenon youwish to observe is a tragic family affair, hardly a fit subject for the scrutiny of outsiders, nomatter how nobly motivated their curiosities. Mrs. Rumfoord and her staff answered none of the tens of thousands of questions that were put to them about the materializations. Mrs. Rumfoord felt that she owed the world very little indeed in the way of information. She discharged that incalculably small obligation by issuing a report twenty-four hours after each materialization.

Her report never exceeded one hundred words. It was posted by her butler in a glass case bolted to the wall next to the one entrance to the estate. The one entrance to the estate was an Alice-in-Wonderland door in the west wall. The door was only four-and-a-half feet high. It was made of iron and held shut by a great Yale lock. The wide gates of the estate were bricked in.

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