Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Page B

ring and be his companion for life.

    Billy said, “Hello,” to her, and she asked him if he wanted some candy, and he said, “No, thanks.”
    She asked him how he was, and he said, “Much better, thanks.” She said that everybody at the Optometry School was sorry he was sick and hoped he would be well soon, and Billy said, “When you see ’em, tell ’em, ‘Hello.’”
    She promised she would.

    She asked him if there was anything she could bring him from the outside, and he said, “No. I have just about everything I want.”
    “What about books?” said Valencia.
    “I’m right next to one of the biggest private libraries in the world,” said Billy, meaning Eliot Rosewater’s collection of science fiction.
    Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation, asked him what he was reading this time.
    So Rosewater told him. It was
The Gospel from Outer Space
, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
    But the Gospels actually taught this:
    Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected
. So it goes.

    The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most PowerfulBeing in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:
    Oh, boy—they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
    And that thought had a brother: “
There are
right people
to lynch
.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

    The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really
was
a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
    So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
    And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down.He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this:
From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

    Billy’s fiancée had finished her Three Musketeers Candy Bar. Now she was eating a Milky Why.
    “Forget books,” said Rosewater, throwing that particular book under his bed. “The hell with ’em.”
    “That sounded like an interesting one,” said Valencia.
    “Jesus—if Kilgore Trout could only
write
!” Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout’s unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.

    “I don’t think Trout has ever been out of the country,” Rosewater went on. “My God—he writes about Earthlings all the time, and they’re all Americans. Practically nobody on Earth is an American.”
    “Where does he live?” Valencia asked.
    “Nobody knows,” Rosewater replied. “I’m the only person who ever heard of him, as far as I can tell. No two books have the same publisher, and every time I write him in care of a publisher, the letter comes back because the publisher has failed.”
    He changed the subject now, congratulated Valencia on her