Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [13]
The limousine was back, and so was the crowd.
The police held open a narrow path to the limousine door. Constant scuttled down it, reached the limousine. The path closed like the Red Sea behind the Children of Israel. The cries of the crowd, taken together, were a collective cry of indignation and pain. The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing.
Men and boys began to rock Constant’s limousine.
The chauffeur put the limousine in gear, made it creep through the sea of raging flesh.
A bald man made an attempt on Constant’s life with a hot dog, stabbed at the window glass with it, splayed the bun, broke the frankfurter—left a sickly sunburst of mustard and relish.
"Yah, yah, yah!" yelled a pretty young woman, and she showed Constant what she had probably never showed any other man. She showed him that her two upper front teeth were false. She let those two front teeth fall out of place. She shrieked like a witch.
A boy climbed on the hood, blocking the chauffeur’s view. He ripped off the windshield wipers, threw them to the crowd. It took the limousine three-quarters of an hour to reach a fringe of the crowd. And on the fringe were not the lunatics but the nearly sane.
Only on the fringe did the shouts become coherent.
"Tell us!" shouted a man, and he was merely fed up—not enraged.
"We’ve got a right!" shouted a woman. She showed her two fine children to Constant.
Another woman told Constant what it was the crowd felt it had a right to. "We’ve got a right to know what’s going on!" she cried.
The riot, then, was an exercise in science and theology—a seeking after clues by the living as to what life was all about.
The chauffeur, seeing at last a clear road before him, pressed the accelerator to the floor. The limousine zoomed away.
A huge billboard flashed by. LET’S TAKE A FRIEND TO THE CHURCH OF OUR CHOICE ON SUNDAY! it Said.
2
CHEERS IN THE WIREHOUSE
"Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic."
—WINSTON NILES RUMFOORD
THE LIMOUSIN zoomed north out of Newport, turned down a gravel road, kept a rendezvous with a helicopter that was waiting in a pasture.
The purpose of Malachi Constant’s switch from the limousine to the helicopter was to prevent anyone’s following him, to prevent anyone’s discovering who the bearded and bespectacled visitor to the Rumfoord estate had been.
No one knew where Constant was.
Neither the chauffeur nor the pilot knew the true identity of their passenger. Constant was Mr. Jonah K. Rowley to both.
"Mist’ Rowley, suh—?" said the chauffeur, as Constant stepped out of the limousine.
"Yes?" said Constant.
"Wasn’t you scared, suh?" said the chauffeur.
"Scared?" said Constant, sincerely puzzled by the question. "Of what?"
"Of what?" said the chauffeur incredulously. "Why, of all them crazy people who liked to lynch us."
Constant smiled and shook his head. Not once in the midst of the violence had he expected to be hurt. "It hardly helps to panic, do you think?" he said. In his own words he recognized Rumfoord’s phrasing—even a little of Rumfoord’s aristocratic yodel.
"Man—you must have some kind of guardian angel—lets you keep cool as a cucumber, no matter what," said the chauffeur admiringly.
This comment interested Constant, for it described well his attitude in the midst of the mob. He took the comment at first as an analogy—as a poetic description of his mood. A man who had a guardian angel would certainly have felt just as Constant had—
"Yes, suh!" said the chauffeur. "Sumpin’ sure must be lookin’ out for you!"
Then it hit Constant: This was exactly the case.
Until that moment of truth, Constant had looked upon his Newport adventure as one more drug-induced hallucination—as one more peyotl party—vivid, novel, entertaining, and of no consequence whatsoever.
The little door