Free Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Page A

car, and black outside the car, which seemed to be going about two miles an hour. The car never seemed to go any faster than that. It was a long time between clicks, between joints in the track. There would be a click, and then a year would go by, and then there would be another click.
    The train often stopped to let really important trains bawl and hurtle by. Another thing it did was stop on sidings near prisons, leaving a few cars there. It was creeping across all of Germany, growing shorter all the time.

    And Billy let himself down oh so gradually now, hanging onto the diagonal cross-brace in the corner in order to make himself seem nearly weightless to those he was joining on the floor. Heknew it was important that he make himself nearly ghostlike when lying down. He had forgotten why, but a reminder soon came.
    “Pilgrim—” said a person he was about to nestle with, “is that
you?
”
    Billy didn’t say anything, but nestled very politely, closed his eyes.
    “God damn it,” said the person. “That
is
you, isn’t it?” He sat up and explored Billy rudely with his hands. “It’s you, all right. Get the hell out of here.”
    Now Billy sat up, too—wretched, close to tears.
    “Get out of here! I want to sleep!”
    “Shut up,” said somebody else.
    “I’ll shut up when Pilgrim gets away from here.”
    So Billy stood up again, clung to the cross-brace. “Where
can
I sleep?” he asked quietly.
    “Not with me.”
    “Not with me, you son of a bitch,” said somebody else. “You yell. You kick.”
    “I do?”
    “You’re God damn right you do. And whimper.”
    “I do?”
    “Keep the hell away from here, Pilgrim.” And now there was an acrimonious madrigal, with parts sung in all quarters of the car. Nearly everybody, seemingly, had an atrocity story of something Billy Pilgrim had done to him in his sleep. Everybody told Billy Pilgrim to keep the hell away.

    So Billy Pilgrim had to sleep standing up, or not sleep at all. And food had stopped coming in through the ventilators, and the days and nights were colder all the time.

    On the eighth day, the forty-year-old hobo said to Billy, “This ain’t bad. I can be comfortable anywhere.”
    “You can?” said Billy.
    On the ninth day, the hobo died. So it goes. His last words were, “You think this is bad? This ain’t bad.”
    There was something about death and the ninth day. There was a death on the ninth day in the car ahead of Billy’s too. Roland Weary died—ofgangrene that had started in his mangled feet. So it goes.
    Weary, in his nearly continuous delirium, told again and again of the Three Musketeers, acknowledged that he was dying, gave many messages to be delivered to his family in Pittsburgh. Above all, he wanted to be avenged, so he said again and again the name of the person who had killed him. Everyone on the car learned the lesson well.
    “Who killed me?” he would ask.
    And everybody knew the answer, which was this: “Billy Pilgrim.”

    Listen—on the tenth night the peg was pulled out of the hasp on Billy’s boxcar door, and the door was opened. Billy Pilgrim was lying at an angle on the corner-brace, self-crucified, holding himself there with a blue and ivory claw hooked over the sill of the ventilator. Billy coughed when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for every action there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction.
    This can be useful in rocketry.
    •  •  •
    The train had arrived on a siding by a prison which was originally constructed as an extermination camp for Russian prisoners of war.
    The guards peeked inside Billy’s car owlishly, cooed calmingly. They had never dealt with Americans before, but they surely understood this general sort of freight. They knew that it was essentially a liquid which could be induced to flow slowly toward cooing and light. It was