Player Piano

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“I thought you’d be pretty close

to the edge by now. That’s why I came here.”

“So you are in rough shape. Wonderful! Let’s get out of this damn party. We’ve got to talk.”

“There’s Irish whisky for you in a brown bag in the front hall,” said Paul, and he left Finnerty lying there.

he supposed bitterly, he must have created a wise and warm Finnerty in his imagination, an image that had little to do with the real man.

Ilium was a training ground, where fresh graduates were sent to get the feel of industry and then moved on to bigger things. The staff was young, then, and constantly renewing itself.

“How are you, Paul?” he said warmly. The quizzical set of his

thick eyebrows indicated that this was a question, not a salutation. The tone was one Kroner used when inquiring into someone’s condition after a siege of pneumonia or worse.

Baer was a social cretin, apparently unaware that he was anything but suave and brilliant in company.

There was little in the Division that hadn’t been master-minded by Baer, who here seemed to Kroner what a fox terrier seems to a St. Bernard.

Baer embodied the knowledge and technique of industry; Kroner personified the faith, the near-holiness, the spirit of the complicated venture.

Paul counted around the table—twenty-seven managers and engineers, the staff of the Ilium

Works and their wives, less the evening shift.

Paul had expected that Finnerty would be able to give him something—what,

to assuage the nameless, aching need that had been nagging him almost, as Shepherd had apparently told Kroner, to the point of distraction.

Paul had never known what to make of Shepherd,

variously grim or elated over triumphs or failures no one else seemed to notice, but always stoical about the laws that governed the game. He asked no quarter, gave no quarter, and made very little difference to Paul, Finnerty, or any of his other associates. He was a fine engineer, dull company, and doggedly

master of his fate and not his brother’s keeper.

Shepherd had lost a round, and now, grimly respectful of the mechanics of the competitive system, he wanted to pay the forfeit for losing and get on to the next episode, which he was, as always, determined to win.

If you convert the horsepower of one of the bigger steel-mill motors into terms of manpower, you’ll find that the motor does more work than the entire slave population of the United States at the time of the Civil War could do—and do it twenty-four hours a day.”

Moreover—Paul’s thoughts were coming alive as though refreshed by a cool wind—there was enchantment in what Finnerty had done, a thing almost as inconceivable and beautifully simple as suicide: he’d quit.

Paul missed what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn.

“Dee-veesh-ee-own—” cried the Division Commander through a loudspeaker. “Reg-ee-ment—” bawled four regimental commanders. “ ’Tal-ee-own—” cried twelve battalion commanders. “Cump-neee—” shouted thirty-six company commanders. “Batt-reeee—” shouted twelve battery commanders.

“P’toon—” muttered a hundred and ninety-two platoon commanders.

a bum with no money looking for an easy lay and not getting it in his own country or not getting a good lay anyway but still a pretty good lay compared to no lay at all but anyway there was more to living than laying and he’d like a little glory by God and there might be laying and glory overseas

Bud’s job code number on a keyboard, and seconds later having the machine deal him seventy-two cards bearing the names of those who did what Bud did for a living—what

Bud’s machine now did better. Now, personnel machines all over the country would be reset so as no longer to recognize the job as one suited for men.

Bud was in a baffling mess, and Paul didn’t see how he could help him. The machines knew the Ilium Works had its one allotted lubrication engineer, and they wouldn’t tolerate a second.

Bud was beyond help. As an old old joke had it, the machines had all the cards.

graduation came, a machine took a student’s grades and other performances and integrated them into one graph—the profile.

the economy had, for efficiency’s sake, become monolithic. The question had arisen: who was to run it, the bureaucrats, the heads of business and industry, or the military? Business and bureaucracy had stuck together long enough to overwhelm the military

since then worked side by side, abusively and suspiciously, but, like Kroner and Baer, each unable to do a whole job without the other.

“A psychiatrist could help. There’s a good man in Albany.” Finnerty shook his head.

want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”

There are malcontents, eh?” “Two that we know of,” said Finnerty.

in a way I wish I hadn’t met you two. It’s much more convenient to think of the opposition as a nice homogeneous, dead-wrong mass. Now I’ve got to muddy my thinking with exceptions.”

ads about the American system, meaning managers and engineers, that made America great. When you finished one, you’d think the managers and engineers had given America everything: forests, rivers, minerals, mountains, oil—the works.

Elon Musk would say they did.

hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days,

Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them.

“What about the scientists?

“They simply add to knowledge. It isn’t knowledge that’s making trouble, but the uses it’s put to.”

Things, gentlemen, are ripe for a phony Messiah, and when he comes, it’s sure to be a bloody business.”

Here comes Trump...

a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth—hell, dignity.

knew with all his heart that the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn’t see how history could possibly have led anywhere else.

All I know is, you’ve got to act like it has, or you might as well throw in the towel. Don’t know, my boy. Guess I should, but I don’t. Just do my job.

It was to hell with them, to hell with everything. This secret detachment gave him a delightful sense of all the world’s being a stage.

Emerson came to jail to see him. ‘Henry,’ he said, ‘why are you here?’ And Thoreau said, ‘Ralph, why aren’t you here?’ ”

“You shouldn’t let fear of jail keep you from doing what you believe in.” “Well, it doesn’t.” Paul reflected that the big trouble, really, was finding something to believe in.

The crisis was coming, he knew, when he would have to quit or turn informer, but its approach was unreal, and, lacking a decisive plan for meeting it, he forced a false tranquillity on himself—a vague notion that everything would come out all right in the end, the way it always had for him.

to Miami Beach,