Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [65]
Unk and Boaz had been on Mercury for three Earthling years when Unk found Kazak’s footprints in the dust on the floor of a cave corridor. Mercury had carried Unk and Boaz twelve and a half times around the Sun.
Unk found the prints on a floor six miles above the chamber in which the dented, scarred, and rock-bound space ship lay. Unk didn’t live in the space ship any more, and neither did Boaz. The space ship served merely as a common supply base to which Unk and Boaz returned for provisions once every Earthling month or so.
Unk and Boaz rarely met. They moved in very different circles.
The circles in which Boaz moved were small. His abode was fixed and richly furnished. It was on the same level as the space ship, only a quarter of a mile away from it.
The circles in which Unk moved were vast and restless. He had no home. He traveled light and he traveled far, climbing ever higher until he was stopped by cold. Where the cold stopped Unk, the cold stopped the harmoniums, too. On the upper levels where Unk wandered, the harmoniums were stunted and few.
On the cozy lower level where Boaz lived, the harmoniums were plentiful and fast-growing.
Boaz and Unk had separated after one Earthling year together in the space ship. In that first year together, it had become clear to both of them that they weren’t going to get out unless something or somebody came and got them out.
That had been clear, even though the creatures on the walls continued to spell out new messages emphasizing the fairness of the test to which Unk and Boaz were being subjected, the ease with which they might escape, if only they would think a little harder, if they would only think a little more intricately.
"THINK!" the creatures would say.
Unk and Boaz separated after Unk went temporarily insane. Unk had tried to murder Boaz. Boaz had come into the space ship with a harmonium, which was exactly like all the other harmoniums, and he’d said, "Ain’t he a cute little feller, Unk?"
Unk had gone for Boaz’s throat.
Unk was naked when he found the dog tracks. The lichen-green uniform and black fiber boots of the Martian Assault Infantry had been scoured to threads and dust by the touch of stone.
The dog tracks did not excite Unk. Unk’s soul wasn’t filled with the music of sociability or the light of hope when he saw a warm-blooded creature’s tracks, saw the tracks of man’s best friend. And he still had very little to say to himself when the tracks of a well-shod man joined those of the dog.
Unk was at war with his environment. He had come to regard his environment as being either malevolent or cruelly mismanaged. His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand—passive resistance and open displays of contempt.
The footprints seemed to Unk to be the opening moves in one more fat-headed game his environment wanted to play. He would follow the tracks, but lazily, without excitement. He would follow them simply because he had nothing else scheduled for the time.
He would follow them.
He would see where they went.
His progress was knobby and ramshackle. Poor Unk had lost a lot of weight, and a lot of hair, too. He was aging fast. His eyes felt hot and his skeleton felt rickety.
Unk never shaved on Mercury. When his hair and beard got so long as to be a bother, he would hack away wads of thatch with a butcherknife.
Boaz shaved every day. Boaz gave himself a haircut twice an Earthling week with a barber kit from the space ship.
Boaz, twelve years younger than Unk, had never felt better in his life. He had gained weight in the caves of Mercury—and serenity, too.
Boaz’s home vault was furnished with a cot, a table, two chairs, a punching bag, a mirror, dumbbells, a tape recorder, and a library of recorded music on tape consisting of eleven hundred compositions.
Boaz’s home vault had a door on it, a round boulder with which he could plug the vault’s mouth. The door was necessary, since Boaz was God Almighty to the harmoniums. They could locate him by his heartbeat.
Had he slept with