Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

Dr. von Koenigswald, the humanitarian with the terrible deficit of Auschwitz in his kindliness account, was the second to die of ice-nine .

He was talking about rigor mortis, a subject I had introduced.

“Rigor mortis does not set in in seconds,” he declared. “I turned my back to ‘Papa’ for just a moment. He was raving…”

“What about?” I asked.

“Pain, ice, Mona — everything. And then ‘Papa’ said, ‘Now I will destroy the whole world.’ ”

“What did he mean by that?”

“It’s what Bokononists always say when they are about to commit suicide.” Von Koenigswald went to a basin of water, meaning to wash his hands. “When I turned to look at him,” he told me, his hands poised over the water, “he was dead — as hard as a statue, just as you see him. I brushed my fingers over his lips. They looked so peculiar.”

He put his hands into the water. “What chemical could possibly…” The question trailed off.

Von Koenigswald raised his hands, and the water in the basin came with them. It was no longer water, but a hemisphere of ice-nine .

Von Koenigswald touched the tip of his tongue to the blue-white mystery.

Frost bloomed on his lips. He froze solid, tottered, and crashed.

The blue-white hemisphere shattered. Chunks skittered over the floor.

I went to the door and bawled for help.

Soldiers and servants came running.

I ordered them to bring Frank and Newt and Angela to “Papa’s” room at once.

At last I had seen ice-nine!

I let the three children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker into “Papa” Monzano’s bedroom. I closed the door and put my back to it. My mood was bitter and grand. I knew ice-nine for what it was. I had seen it often in my dreams.

There could be no doubt that Frank had given “Papa” ice-nine . And it seemed certain that if ice-nine were Frank’s to give, then it was Angela’s and little Newt’s to give, too.

So I snarled at all three, calling them to account for monstrous criminality. I told them that the jig was up, that I knew about them and ice-nine . I tried to alarm them about ice-nine’s being a means to ending life on earth. I was so impressive that they never thought to ask how I knew about ice-nine .

“Feast your eyes!” I said.

Well, as Bokonon tells us: “God never wrote a good play in His Life.” The scene in “Papa’s” room did not lack for spectacular issues and props, and my opening speech was the right one.

But the first reply from a Hoenikker destroyed all magnificence.

Little Newt threw up.

And then we all wanted to throw up.

Newt certainly did what was called for.

“I couldn’t agree more,” I told Newt. And I snarled at Angela and Frank, “Now that we’ve got Newt’s opinion, I’d like to hear what you two have to say.”

“Uck,” said Angela, cringing, her tongue out. She was the color of putty.

“Are those your sentiments, too?” I asked Frank. “ ‘Uck?’ General, is that what you say?”

Frank had his teeth bared, and his teeth were clenched, and he was breathing shallowly and whistlingly between them.

“Like the dog,” murmured little Newt, looking down at Von Koenigswald.

“What dog?”

Newt whispered his answer, and there was scarcely any wind behind the whisper. But such were the acoustics of the stonewalled room that we all heard the whisper as clearly as we would have heard the chiming of a crystal bell.

“Christmas Eve, when Father died.”

Newt was talking to himself. And, when I asked him to tell me about the dog on the night his father died, he looked up at me as though I had intruded on a dream. He found me irrelevant.

His brother and sister, however, belonged in the dream. And he talked to his brother in that nightmare; told Frank, “You gave it to him.

“That’s how you got this fancy job, isn’t it?” Newt asked Frank wonderingly. “What did you tell him — that you had something better than the hydrogen bomb?”

Frank didn’t acknowledge the question. He was looking around the room intently, taking it all in. He unclenched his teeth, and he made them click rapidly, blinking his eyes with every click. His color was coming back. This is what he said.

“Listen, we’ve got to clean up this mess.”

“General,” I told Frank, “that must be one of the most cogent statements made by a major general this year. As my technical advisor, how do you recommend that we , as you put it so well, ‘clean up this mess’?”

Frank gave me a straight answer. He snapped his fingers. I could see him dissociating himself from the causes of the mess; identifying himself, with growing pride and energy, with the purifiers, the world-savers, the cleaners-up.

“Brooms, dustpans, blowtorch, hot plate, buckets,” he commanded, snapping, snapping, snapping his fingers.

“You propose applying a blowtorch to the bodies?” I asked.

Frank was so charged with technical thinking now that he was practically tap dancing to the music of his fingers. “We’ll sweep up the big pieces on the floor, melt them in a bucket on a hot plate. Then we’ll go over every square inch of floor with a blowtorch, in case there are any microscopic crystals. What we’ll do with the bodies — and the bed…” He had to think some more.

“A funeral pyre!” he cried, really pleased with himself. “I’ll have a great big funeral pyre built out by the hook, and we’ll have the bodies and the bed carried out and thrown on.”

He started to leave, to order the pyre built and to get the things we needed in order to clean up the room.

Angela stopped him. “How could you?” she wanted to know.

Frank gave her a glassy smile. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

“How could you give it to a man like ‘Papa’ Monzano?” Angela asked him.

“Let’s clean up the mess first; then we can talk.”

Angela had him by the arms, and she wouldn’t let him go. “How could you!” She shook him.

Frank pried his sister’s hands from himself. His glassy smile went away and he turned sneeringly nasty for a moment — a moment in which he told her with all possible contempt, “I bought myself a job, just the way you bought yourself a tomcat husband, just the way Newt bought himself a week on Cape Cod with a Russian midget!”

The glassy smile returned.

Frank left; and he slammed the door.

“Sometimes the pool-pah ,” Bokonon tells us, “exceeds the power of humans to comment.” Bokonon translates pool-pah at one point in The Books of Bokonon as “shit storm” and at another point as “wrath of God.”

From what Frank had said before he slammed the door, I gathered that the Republic of San Lorenzo and the three Hoenikkers weren’t the only ones who had ice-nine . Apparently the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had it, too. The United States had obtained it through Angela’s husband, whose plant in Indianapolis was understandably surrounded by electrified fences and homicidal German shepherds. And Soviet Russia had come by it through Newt’s little Zinka, that winsome troll of Ukrainian ballet.

I was without comment.

I bowed my head and closed my eyes; and I awaited Frank’s return with the humble tools it would take to clean up one bedroom — one bedroom out of all the bedrooms in the world, a bedroom infested with ice-nine .