Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [48]
The imagined strength he got from the good-luck piece made him strong enough to trust nobody, to go on as he had for so long, angry and alone. "I’m living," he said. "I’m all right," he said. "Go to hell."
Unk took a step backward. The corners of his mouth pulled down. "Go to hell?" he whispered.
"I tell everybody to go to hell," said the boy. He was trying to be kind, but he wearied of the effort at once. "Can I go out and play batball now?"
"You’d tell your own father to go to hell?" murmured Unk. The question echoed back through Unk’s emptied memory to an untouched corner where bits of his own strange childhood still lived. His own strange childhood had been spent in daydreams of at last seeing and loving a father who did not want to see him, who did not want to be loved by him.
"I—I deserted from the army to come here—to find you," said Unk.
Interest flickered in the boy’s eyes, then died. "They’ll get you," he said. "They get everybody."
"I’ll steal a space ship," said Unk. "And you and your mother and I will get on it, and we’ll fly away!"
"To where?" said the boy.
"Some place good!" said Unk.
"Tell me about some place good," said Chrono.
"I don’t know. We’ll have to look!" said Unk.
Chrono shook his head pityingly. "I’m sorry," he said. "I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. You’d just get a lot of people killed."
"You want to stay here?" said Unk.
"I’m all right here," said Chrono. "Can I go out and play batball now?"
Unk wept.
His weeping appalled the boy. He had never seen a man weep before. He never wept himself "I’m going out to play!" he cried wildly, and he ran out of the office.
Unk went to the window of the office. He looked out at the iron playground. Young Chrono’s team was in the field now. Young Chrono joined his teammates, faced a batter whose back was to Unk.
Chrono kissed his good-luck piece, put it in his pocket. "Easy out, you guys," he yelled hoarsely. "Come on, you guys—let’s kill him!"
Unk’s mate, the mother of young Chrono, was an instructress in the Schliemann Breathing School for Recruits. Schliemann breathing, of course, is a technique that enables human beings to survive in a vacuum or in an inhospitable atmosphere without the use of helmets or other cumbersome respiratory gear.
It consists, essentially, of taking a pill rich in oxygen. The bloodstream takes on this oxygen through the wall of the small intestine rather than through the lungs. On Mars, the pills were known officially as Combat Respiratory Rations, in popular parlance as goofballs.
Schliemann breathing is at its simplest in a benign but useless atmosphere like that of Mars. The breather goes on breathing and talking in a normal manner, though there is no oxygen for his lungs to take in from the atmosphere. All he has to remember is to take his goofballs regularly.
The school in which Unk’s mate was an instructress taught recruits the more difficult techniques necessary in a vacuum or in a harmful atmosphere. This involves not only pill-taking, but plugging one’s ears and nostrils, and keeping one’s mouth shut as well. Any effort to speak or to breathe would result in hemorrhages and probably death.
Unk’s mate was one of six instructresses at the Schliemann Breathing School for Recruits. Her classroom was a bare, windowless, whitewashed room, thirty feet square. Ranged around the walls were benches.
On a table in the middle was a bowl of goofballs, a bowl of nose and ear plugs, a roll of adhesive plaster, scissors, and a small tape recorder. Purpose of the tape recorder was to play music during the long periods in which there was nothing to do but sit and wait patiently for nature to take its course.
Such a period had been reached now. The class had just been dosed with goofballs. Now the students had to sit quietly on the benches and listen to music and wait for the goofballs to reach their small intestines.
The tune being played had been pirated recently from an Earthling broadcast.