Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [49]
The cathedral bells whanged and clanged whenever anything of a religious nature was mentioned.
There were seventeen recruits. They were all in their newly issued lichen-green undershorts. The purpose of having them strip was to permit the instructress to see at a glance their external bodily reactions to Schliemann breathing.
The recruits were fresh from amnesia treatments and antenna installations at the Reception Center Hospital. Their hair had been shaved off, and each recruit had a strip of adhesive plaster running from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck.
The adhesive plaster showed where the antenna had been put in.
The recruits’ eyes were as empty as the windows of abandoned textile mills.
So were the eyes of the instructress, since she, too, had recently had her memory cleaned out.
When they released her from the hospital, they told her what her name was, and where she lived, and how to teach Schliemann breathing—and that was about all the factual information they gave her. There was one other item: they told her she had an eight-year-old son named Chrono, and that she could visit him at his school on Tuesday evenings, if she liked.
The name of the instructress, of Chrono’s mother, of Unk’s mate, was Bee. She wore a lichen-green sweat-suit, white gym shoes, and, around her neck, a whistle on a chain and a stethoscope.
There was a rebus of her name on her sweatshirt.
She looked at the clock on the wall. Enough time had passed for the slowest digestive system to carry a goofball to the small intestine. She stood, turned off the tape recorder, and blew her whistle.
"Fall in!" she said.
The recruits had not yet had basic military training, so they were incapable of falling in with precision. Painted on the floor were squares within which the recruits were to stand in order to form ranks and files pleasing to the eye. A game resembling musical chairs was now played, with several empty-eyed recruits scuffling for the same square. In time, each found a square of his own.
"All right," said Bee, "take your plugs and plug up your noses and ears, please."
The recruits had been carrying the plugs in their clammy fists. They plugged their noses and ears.
Bee now went from recruit to recruit, making certain that all ears and nostrils were sealed.
"All right," she said, when her inspection was done. "Very good," she said. She took from the table the roll of adhesive plaster. "Now I am going to prove to you that you don’t need to use your lungs at all, as long as you have Combat Respiratory Rations—or, as you’ll soon be calling them in the Army, goofballs." She moved through the ranks, snipping off lengths of adhesive, sealing mouths with them. No one objected. When she got through, no one had a suitable aperture through which to issue an objection.
She noted the time, and again turned on the music. For the next twenty minutes there would be nothing to do but watch the bare bodies for color changes, for the dying spasms in the sealed and useless lungs. Ideally, the bodies would turn blue, then red, then natural again within the twenty minutes—and the rib cages would quake violently, give up, be still.
When the twenty-minute ordeal was over, every recruit would know how unnecessary lung-breathing was. Ideally, every recruit would be so confident in himself and goofballs, when his course of instruction was over, that he would be ready to spring out of a space ship on the Earthling moon or on the bottom of an Earthling ocean or anywhere, without wondering for a split second what he might be springing into.
Bee sat on a bench.
There were dark circles around her fine eyes. The circles had come after she left the hospital, and they had grown more somber with each passing day. At the hospital, they had promised her that she would become more serene and efficient with each passing day.