Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [32]
Everybody else, including Unk, was all spiffed up. Everybody else looked very nice indeed.
Something painful was going to happen to the man at the stake—something from which the man would want to escape very much, something from which he was not going to escape, because of the chains.
And all the soldiers were going to watch.
The event was being given great importance.
Even the man at the stake was standing at attention, being the best soldier he knew how to be, under the circumstances.
Again—no audible or visible order was given, but the ten thousand soldiers executed the movement of parade rest as a man.
So did the man at the stake.
Then the soldiers relaxed in ranks, as though given the order at ease. Their obligations under this order were to relax, but to keep their feet in place, and to keep silent. The soldiers were free to think a little now, and to look around and to send messages with their eyes, if they had messages and could find receivers.
The man at the stake tugged against his chains, craned his neck to judge the height of the stake to which he was chained. It was as though he thought he might escape by use of the scientific method, if only he could find out how high the stake was and what it was made of.
The stake was nineteen feet, six and five thirty-seconds inches high, not counting the twelve feet, two and one-eighth inches of it embedded in the iron. The stake had a mean diameter of two feet, five and eleven thirty-seconds inches, varying from this mean, however, by as much as seven and one thirty-second inches. The stake was composed of quartz, alkali, feldspar, mica, and traces of tourmaline and hornblende. For the information of the man at the stake: He was one hundred and forty- two million, three hundred and forty-six thousand, nine hundred and eleven miles from the Sun, and help was not on its way.
The red-haired man at the stake made no sound, because soldiers at ease were not permitted to make sounds. He sent a message with his eyes, however, to the effect that he would like to scream. He sent the message to anyone whose eyes would meet his. He was hoping to get the message to one person in particular, to his best friend—to Unk. He was looking for Unk.
He couldn’t find Unk’s face.
If he had found Unk’s face, there wouldn’t have been any blooming of recognition and pity on Unk’s face. Unk had just come out of the base hospital, where he had been treated for mental illness, and Unk’s mind was almost a blank. Unk didn’t recognize his best friend at the stake. Unk didn’t recognize anybody. Unk wouldn’t have even known his own name was Unk, wouldn’t even have known he was a soldier, if they hadn’t told him so when they discharged him from the hospital.
He had gone straight from the hospital to the formation he was in now.
At the hospital they told him again and again and again that he was the best soldier in the best squad in the best platoon in the best company in the best battalion in the best regiment in the best division in the best army.
Unk guessed that was something to be proud of
At the hospital they told him he had been a pretty sick boy, but he was fully recovered now.
That seemed like good news.
At the hospital they told him what his sergeant’s name was, and what a sergeant was, and what all the symbols of ranks and grades and specialties were.
They had blanked out so much of Unk’s memory that they even had to teach him the foot movements and the manual of arms all over again.
At the hospital they even had to explain to Unk what Combat Respiratory Rations or CRR’s or goofballs were—had to tell him to take one every six hours or suffocate. These were oxygen pills that made up for the fact that there wasn’t any oxygen in the Martian atmosphere.
At the hospital they even had to explain to Unk that there was a radio antenna under the crown of his skull, and that it would hurt him whenever he did something a good soldier wouldn’t ever do. The antenna also would give him orders and furnish drum music to march to. They said that not just Unk but everybody