Summary
A hysterical Valencia drives to the hospital where Billy
is recovering from the plane crash. She hits another car on the
way and drives from the scene of the accident without a functioning
exhaust system. She pulls up in front of the hospital and passes
out from carbon monoxide poisoning. Her face is bright blue. She
dies one hour later.
Billy is unconscious, time-traveling and oblivious to
his wife’s passing. In the next bed, an arrogant Harvard history
professor named Bertram Copeland Rumfoord is recovering from a skiing accident.
Rumfoord is the official Air Force historian, and he is working
on a condensed history of the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II.
He has to write a section on the smashing success of Dresden’s bombing,
despite the fact that some of his sources characterize it as an
unnecessary carnage.
When Billy first regains consciousness, everyone
thinks the accident has left him a vegetable. But behind his catatonic
facade he is preparing to tell the world about Tralfamadore and
to explain the true nature of time. Billy tells Rumfoord that he
was in Dresden for the firebombing, but the professor doesn’t want
to listen. Billy then travels back to a May afternoon in Dresden,
two days before the end of the war.
Many Germans have fled because they heard that the Russians were
coming. Billy and a few other prisoners find a green, coffin-shaped
wagon hitched to two horses, and they fill it with food and souvenirs.
Outside the slaughterhouse, Billy remains in the wagon and dozes
in the sun. It is a happy moment in his life. The sound of a middle-aged
German couple talking about the horses awakens him. The animals’
mouths are bleeding, their hooves are broken, and they are dying
of thirst. Billy has been oblivious to their poor condition until
now. The couple makes Billy get out and look at the animals, and
he begins to cry his first tears of the war.
Back in the hospital the next day, Rumfoord quizzes Billy
about Dresden. Billy’s daughter, Barbara, arrives and takes him
home. She places him under the care of a live-in nurse. Billy’s
message cannot wait any longer. He sneaks out and drives to New
York City to tell the world about Tralfamadore.
Once in the city, Billy goes to Times Square. He sees
four Kilgore Trout books in the window of an adult bookstore and
goes in to read them. One of the books is about an earthling man
and woman who are kidnapped by aliens and taken to a zoo on a faraway planet.
While inside the shop, Billy glimpses the headline of a pornographic
magazine: “What really became of Montana Wildhack?” He also sees
a few seconds of a pornographic movie starring a teenaged Montana.
