Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

Somewhere, in the violet, velvet oblivion, I heard Angela say something to me. It wasn’t in her own defense. It was in defense of little Newt. “Newt didn’t give it to her. She stole it.”

I found the explanation uninteresting.

“What hope can there be for mankind,” I thought, “when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?”

And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon , which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?”

It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book . It consists of one word and a period.

This is it:

“Nothing.”

Frank came back with brooms and dustpans, a blowtorch, and a kerosene hot plate, and a good old bucket and rubber gloves.

We put on the gloves in order not to contaminate our hands with ice-nine . Frank set the hot plate on the heavenly Mona’s xylophone and put the honest old bucket on top of that.

And we picked up the bigger chunks of ice-nine from the floor; and we dropped them into that humble bucket; and they melted. They became good old, sweet old, honest old water.

Angela and I swept the floor, and little Newt looked under furniture for bits of ice-nine we might have missed. And Frank followed our sweeping with the purifying flame of the torch.

The brainless serenity of charwomen and janitors working late at night came over us. In a messy world we were at least making our little corner clean.

And I heard myself asking Newt and Angela and Frank in conversational tones to tell me about the Christmas Eve on which the old-man died, to tell me about the dog.

And, childishly sure that they were making everything all right by cleaning up, the Hoenikkers told me the tale.

The tale went like this:

On that fateful Christmas Eve, Angela went into the village for Christmas tree lights, and Newt and Frank went for a walk on the lonely winter beach, where they met a black Labrador retriever. The dog was friendly, as all Labrador retrievers are, and he followed Frank and little Newt home.

Felix Hoenikker died — died in his white wicker chair looking out at the sea — while his chldren were gone. All day the old man had been teasing his children with hints about ice-nine , showing it to them in a little bottle on whose label he had drawn a skull and crossbones, and on whose label he had written: “Danger! Ice-nine! Keep away from moisture!”

All day long the old man had been nagging his children with words like these, merry in tone: “Come on now, stretch your minds a little. I’ve told you that its melting point is a hundred fourteen-point-four degrees Fahrenheit, and I’ve told you that it’s composed of nothing but hydrogen and oxygen. What could the explanation be? Think a little! Don’t be afraid of straining your brains. They won’t break.”

“He was always telling us to stretch our brains,” said Frank, recalling olden times.

“I gave up trying to stretch my brain when I-don’t-know-how-old-I-was,” Angela confessed, leaning on her broom. “I couldn’t even listen to him when he talked about science. I’d just nod and pretend I was trying to stretch my brain, but that poor brain, as far as science went, didn’t have any more stretch than an old garter belt.”

Apparently, before he sat down in his wicker chair and died, the old man played puddly games in the kitchen with water and pots and pans and ice-nine . He must have been converting water to ice-nine and back to water again, for every pot and pan was out on the kitchen countertops. A meat thermometer was out, too, so the old man must have been taking the temperature of things.

The old man meant to take only a brief time out in his chair, for he left quite a mess in the kitchen. Part of the disorder was a saucepan filled with solid ice-nine . He no doubt meant to melt it up, to reduce the world’s supply of the blue-white stuff to a splinter in a bottle again — after a brief time out.

But, as Bokonon tells us, “Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.”

“I should have know he was dead the minute I came in,” said Angela, leaning on her broom again. “That wicker chair, it wasn’t making a sound. It always talked, creaked away, when Father was in it — even when he was asleep.”

But Angela had assumed that her father was sleeping, and she went on to decorate the Christmas tree.

Newt and Frank came in with the Labrador retriever. They went out into the kitchen to find something for the dog to eat. They found the old man’s puddles.

There was water on the floor, and little Newt took a dishrag and wiped it up. He tossed the sopping dishrag onto the counter.

As it happened, the dishrag fell into the pan containing ice-nine .

Frank thought the pan contained some sort of cake frosting, and he held it down to Newt, to show Newt what his carelessness with the dishrag had done.

Newt peeled the dishrag from the surface and found that the dishrag had a peculiar, metallic, snaky quality, as though it were made of finely-woven gold mesh.

“The reason I say ‘gold mesh,’ ” said little Newt, there in “Papa’s” bedroom, “is that it reminded me right away of Mother’s reticule, of how the reticule felt.”

Angela explained sentimentally that when a child, Newt had treasured his mother’s gold reticule. I gathered that it was a little evening bag.

“It felt so funny to me, like nothing else I’d ever touched,” and Newt, investigating his old fondness for the reticule. “I wonder whatever happened to it.”

“I wonder what happened to a lot of things,” said Angela. The question echoed back through time — woeful, lost.

What happened to the dishrag that felt like a reticule, at any rate, was that Newt held it out to the dog, and the dog licked it. And the dog froze stiff.

Newt went to tell his father about the stiff dog and found out that his father was stiff, too.

Our work in “Papa’s” bedroom was done at last.

But the bodies still had to be carried to the funeral pyre. We decided that this should be done with pomp, that we should put it off until the ceremonies in honor of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy were over.

The last thing we did was stand Von Koenigswald on his feet in order to decontaminate the place where he had been lying. And then we hid him, standing up, in “Papa’s” clothes closet.

I’m not quite sure why we hid him. I think it must have been to simplify the tableau.

As for Newt’s and Angela’s and Frank’s tale of how they divided up the world’s supply of ice-nine on Christmas Eve — it petered out when they got to details of the crime itself. The Hoenikkers couldn’t remember that anyone said anything to justify their taking ice-nine as personal property. They talked about what ice-nine was, recalling the old man’s brain-stretchers, but there was no talk of morals.

“Who did the dividing?” I inquired.

So thoroughly had the three Hoenikkers obliterated their memories of the incident that it was difficult for them to give me even that fundamental detail.

“It wasn’t Newt,” said Angela at last. “I’m sure of that.”

“It was either you or me,” mused Frank, thinking hard.

“You got the three Mason jars off the kitchen shelf,” said Angela. “It wasn’t until the next day that we got the three little Thermos jugs.”