Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

“After a while Angela came looking for me. She lifted up one side of the bush and said, ‘So there you are!’ She asked Frank what he thought he was doing, and he said, ‘Experimenting.’ That’s what Frank always used to say when people asked him what he thought he was doing. He always said, ‘Experimenting.’

“Angela was twenty-two then. She had been the real head of the family since she was sixteen, since Mother died, since I was born. She used to talk about how she had three children — me, Frank, and Father. She wasn’t exaggerating, either. I can remember cold mornings when Frank, Father, and I would be all in a line in the front hail, and Angela would be bundling us up, treating us exactly the same. Only I was going to kindergarten; Frank was going to junior high; and Father was going to work on the atom bomb. I remember one morning like that when the oil burner had quit, the pipes were frozen, and the car wouldn’t start. We all sat there in the car while Angela kept pushing the starter until the battery was dead. And then Father spoke up. You know what he said? He said, ‘I wonder about turtles.’ ‘What do you wonder about turtles? Angela asked him. ‘When they pull in their heads,’ he said, ‘do their spines buckle or contract?’

“Angela was one of the unsung heroines of the atom bomb, incidentally, and I don’t think the story has ever been told. Maybe you can use it. After the turtle incident, Father got so interested in turtles that he stopped working on the atom bomb. Some people from the Manhattan Project finally came out to the house to ask Angela what to do. She told them to take away Father’s turtles. So one night they went into his laboratory and stole the turtles and the aquarium. Father never said a word about the disappearance of the turtles. He just came to work the next day and looked for things to play with and think about, and everything there was to play with and think about had something to do with the bomb.

“When Angela got me out from under the bush, she asked me what had happened between Father and me. I just kept saying over and over again how ugly he was, how much I hated him. So she slapped me. ‘How dare you say that about your father?’ she said. ‘He’s one of the greatest men who ever lived! He won the war today! Do you realize that? He won the war!’ She slapped me again.

“I don’t blame Angela for slapping me. Father was all she had. She didn’t have any boy friends. She didn’t have any friends at all. She had only one hobby. She played the clarinet.

“I told her again how much I hated my father; she slapped me again; and then Frank came out from under the bush and punched her in the stomach. It hurt her something awful. She fell down and she rolled around. When she got her wind back, she cried and she yelled for Father.

“ ‘He won’t come,’ Frank said, and he laughed at her. Frank was right. Father stuck his head out a window, and he looked at Angela and me rolling on the ground, bawling, and Frank standing over us, laughing. The old man pulled his head indoors again, and never asked later what all the fuss had been about. People weren’t his specialty.

“Will that do? Is that any help to your book? Of course, you’ve really tied me down, asking me to stick to the day of the bomb. There are lots of other good anecdotes about the bomb and Father, from other days. For instance, do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamogordo? After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is Sin?’

“All the best,

“Newton Hoenikker”

Newt added these three postscripts to his letter:

“P.S. I can’t sign myself ‘Fraternally yours’ because they won’t let me be your brother on account of my grades. I was only a pledge, and now they are going to take even that away from me.

“P.P.S. You call our family ‘illustrious,’ and I think you would maybe be making a mistake if you called it that in your book. I am a midget, for instance — four feet tall. And the last we heard of my brother Frank, he was wanted by the Florida police, the F.B.I., and the Treasury Department for running stolen cars to Cuba on war-surplus L.S.T.’s. So I’m pretty sure ‘illustrious’ isn’t quite the word you’re after. ‘Glamorous’ is probably closer to the truth.

“P.P.P.S. Twenty-four hours later. I have reread this letter and I can see where somebody might get the impression that I don’t do anything but sit around and remember sad things and pity myself. Actually, I am a very lucky person and I know it. I am about to marry a wonderful little girl. There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look. I am proof of that.”

Newt did not tell me who his girl friend was. But about two weeks after he wrote to me everybody in the country knew that her name was Zinka — plain Zinka. Apparently she didn’t have a last name.

Zinka was a Ukrainian midget, a dancer with the Borzoi Dance Company. As it happened, Newt saw a performance by that company in Indianapolis, before he went to Cornell. And then the company danced at Cornell. When the Cornell performance was over, little Newt was outside the stage door with a dozen long-stemmed American Beauty roses.

The newspapers picked up the story when little Zinka asked for political asylum in the United States, and then she and little Newt disappeared.

One week after that, little Zinka presented herself at the Russian Embassy. She said Americans were too materialistic. She said she wanted to go back home.

Newt took shelter in his sister’s house in Indianapolis. He gave one brief statement to the press. “It was a private matter,” he said. “It was an affair of the heart. I have no regrets. What happened is nobody’s business but Zinka’s and my own.”

One enterprising American reporter in Moscow, making inquiries about Zinka among dance people there, made the unkind discovery that Zinka was not, as she claimed, only twenty-three years old.

She was forty-two — old enough to be Newt’s mother.

I loafed on my book about the day of the bomb.

About a year later, two days before Christmas, another story carried me through Ilium, New York, where Dr. Felix Hoenikker had done most of his work; where little Newt, Frank, and Angela had spent their formative years.

I stopped off in Ilium to see what I could see.

There were no live Hoenikkers left in Ilium, but there were plenty of people who claimed to have known well the old man and his three peculiar children.

I made an appointment with Dr. Asa Breed, Vice-president in charge of the Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company. I suppose Dr. Breed was a member of my karass , too, though he took a dislike to me almost immediately.

“Likes and dislikes have nothing to do with it,” says Bokonon — an easy warning to forget.

“I understand you were Dr. Hoenikker’s supervisor during most of his professional life,” I said to Dr. Breed on the telephone.

“On paper,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“If I actually supervised Felix,” he said, “then I’m ready now to take charge of volcanoes, the tides, and the migrations of birds and lemmings. The man was a force of nature no mortal could possibly control.”

Dr. Breed made an appointment with me for early the next morning. He would pick me up at my hotel on his way to work, he said, thus simplifying my entry into the heavily-guarded Research Laboratory.