Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [37]
"Sarge, they wouldn’t dare do anything to Americans, would they?" The voice was youthful, unsure. "I mean, there’d be hell to pay if they hurt—"
"Shut up. Want to wake up Kelly’s kids and have them hear you running off at the mouth that way?" The voice was gruff, tired.
"They’ll turn us loose pretty quick, whaddya bet, Sarge?" insisted the young voice.
"Oh, sure, kid they love Americans around here. That’s probably what they wanted to talk to Kelly about, and they’re packing the beer and ham sandwiches into box lunches for us right now. All that’s holding things up is they don’t know how many with mustard, how many without. How d’ya want yours?"
"I’d just like to—"
"Shut up."
"Okay, I’d just—"
"Shut up."
"I’d just like to know what’s going on, is all." The young corporal coughed.
"Pipe down and pass that butt along," said a third voice irritably. "There’s ten good puffs left in it. Don’t hog the whole thing, kid." A few other voices muttered in agreement.
Colonel Kelly opened and closed his hands nervously, wondering how he could tell the fifteen human beings behind the door about the interview with Pi Ying and the lunatic ordeal they were going to have to endure. Pi Ying said that their fight against death would be no different, philosophically, from what all of them, except Kelly’s wife and children, had known in battle. In a cold way, it was true—no different, philosophically. But Colonel Kelly was more shaken than he had ever been in battle.
Colonel Kelly and the fifteen on the other side of the door had crash-landed two days before on the Asiatic mainland, after they had been blown off course by a sudden storm and their radio had gone dead. Colonel Kelly had been on his way, with his family, to a post as military attaché in India. On board the Army transport plane with them had been a group of enlisted men, technical specialists needed in the Middle East. The plane had come to earth in territory held by a Communist guerrilla chief, Pi Ying.
All had survived the crash—Kelly, his wife Margaret, his ten-year-old twin sons, the pilot and copilot, and the ten enlisted men. A dozen of Pi Ying’s ragged riflemen had been waiting for them when they climbed from the plane. Unable to communicate with their captors, the Americans had been marched for a day through rice fields and near-jungle to come at sunset to a decaying palace. There they had been locked in a subterranean room, with no idea of what their fates might be.
Now, Colonel Kelly was returning from an interview with Pi Ying, who had told him what was to become of the sixteen American prisoners. Sixteen—Kelly shook his head as the number repeated itself in his thoughts.
The guard prodded him to one side with his pistol and thrust the key into the lock, and the door swung open. Kelly stood silently in the doorway.
A cigarette was being passed from hand to hand. It cast its glow for an instant on each expectant face in turn. Now it lighted the ruddy face of the talkative young corporal from Minneapolis, now cast rugged shadows over the eye sockets and heavy brows of the pilot from Salt Lake, now bloomed red at the thin lips of the sergeant.
Kelly looked from the men to what seemed in the twilight to be a small hillock by the door. There his wife Margaret sat, with the blond heads of her sleeping sons cradled in her lap. She smiled up at him, her face misty white. "Darling—you’re all right?" Margaret asked quietly.
"Yes, I’m all right."
"Sarge," said the corporal, "ask him what Pi Ying said."
"Shut up." The sergeant paused. "What about it, sir— good news or bad?"
Kelly stroked his wife’s shoulder, trying to make the right words come—words to carry courage he wasn’t sure he had. "Bad news," he said at last. "Rotten news."
"Well, let’s have it," said the transport pilot loudly. Kelly supposed he was trying to reassure himself with the boom of his own voice, with brusqueness. "The worst he can do is kill us. Is that it?" He stood and dug his hands into his pockets.
"He wouldn’t dare!"