【正文】 ed like spoons. Now the train began to creep eastward. Somewhere in there was Christmas. Billy Pilgrim nestled like a spoon with the hobo on Christmas night, and he fell asleep, and he traveled in time to 1967 againto the night he was kidnapped by a flying saucer from Tralfamadore. Four Billy Pilgrim could not sleep on his daughters wedding night. He was forty four. The wedding had taken place that afternoon in a gaily striped tent in Billy39。 t need to be jiggled to sleep. Valencia was snoring like a bandsaw. T he poor woman didn39。s partners in the New Holiday Inn. There was a full moon. Billy got out of bed in the moonlight. He felt spooky and luminous felt as though he were wrapped in cool fur that was full of static electricity. He looked down at his bare feet. They were ivory and blue. Billy now shuffled down his upstairs hallway, knowing he was about to be kidnapped by a flying saucer. The hallway was zebrastriped with darkness and moonlight. The moonlight came into the hallway through doorways of the empty rooms of Billy39。s room. Her drawers were dumped. her closet was empty. Heaped in the middle of the room were all the possessions she could not take on a honeymoon. She had a Princess telephone extension all her ownon her windowsill Its tiny night light stared at Billy. And then it rang. Billy answered. There was a drunk on the other end. Bi 39。 Listen on the tenth night the peg was pulled out of the hasp on Billy39。s car owlishly, cooed calmingly. They had never dealt w ith 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 nighttime. The only light outside came from a single bulb which hung from a polehigh and far away. All was quiet outside, except for the guards, who cooed like doves. And the liquid began to flow. Gobs of it built up in the doorway, plopped to the ground. Billy was the nexttolast human being to reach the door. The hobo was the last. The hobo could not flow, could not plop. He wasn39。t. want to drop from the car to the ground. He sincerely believed that he would shatter like glass. So the guards helped him down, cooing still. T hey set him down facing the train. I t was such a dinky train now. There was a lootive, a tender, and three little boxcars. The last boxcar was the railroad guards39。t hay after all. They were overcoats taken from prisoners who were dead. So it goes. It was the guards39。s fur collar. Billy glanced dully at the coats of his neighbors. T heir coats all had brass buttons or tinsel or piping or numbers or stripe s or eagles or moons or stars dangling from them. They were soldiers39。t anything warm or lively to attract themmerely long, low, narrow sheds by the thousands, with no lights inside. Somewhere a dog barked. With the help of fear and echoes and winter silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong. Billy and the rest were wooed through gate after gate, and Billy saw his first Russian. The man was all alone in the nighta ragbag with a round, flat face that glowed like a radium dial. Billy passed w ithin a yard of him. There was barbed wire between them. The Russian did not wave or speak, but he looked directly into Billy39。s upper right arm with his thumb and forefinger, asked a panion what sort of an army would send a weakling like that to the front. They looked at the other American bodies now, pointed out a lot more that were nearly as bad as Billy39。t been in Billy39。d been in Roland Weary39。s head while he died. So it goes. Derby was forty four years old. He was so old he had a son who was a marine in the Pacific theater of war. Derby had pulled political w ires to get into the army at his age. The subject he had taught in Indianapolis was Contemporary Problems in Western Civilization. He also coached the tennis team, and took very good care of his body. Derby39。t. That good body of his would be filled with holes by a firing squad in Dresden in sixty eight days. So it goes. The worst American body wasn39。s. The worst body belonged to a car thief from Cicero, Illinois. Ms name was Paul Lazzar o. He was tiny, and not only were his bones and teeth rotten, but his skin was disgusting. Lazzaro was polkadotted all over with dimesized scars. He had had many plagues of boils. Lazzaro, too, had been on Roland Weary39。s death. He was looking around now, wondering which naked human being was Billy. The na ked Americans took their places under many showerheads along a whitetiled wall. There were no faucets they could control. They could only wait for whatever was ing. Their penises were shriveled and their balls were retracted. Reproduction was not the main business of the evening. An unseen hand turned a master valve. Out of the showerheads gushed scalding rain. The rain was a blowtorch that did not warm. It jazzed and jangled Billy39。 clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas. Body lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions. So it goes. And Billy zoomed back in time to his infancy. He was a baby who had just been bathed by his mother. Now his mother wrapped him in a towel, carried him into a rosy room that was filled with sunshine. She unwrapped him, laid him on the tickling towel, powdered him between his legs, joked with him, patted his little jelly belly. Her palm on his little jelly belly made potching sounds. Billy gurgled and cooed. And then Billy was a middleaged optometrist again, playing hacker39。t on the golf course any more. He was strapped to a yellow contour chair in a white chamber aboard a flying saucer, which was bound for Tralfamadore. 39。 said Billy Pilgrim. 39。 39。 39。ve said before, bugs in amber.39。You sound to me as though you don