Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

“They’d freeze. But there is no such thing as ice-nine .”

“And the oceans the frozen rivers fed?”

“They’d freeze, of course,” he snapped. “I suppose you’re going to rush to market with a sensational story about ice-nine now. I tell you again, it does not exist!”

“And the springs feeding the frozen lakes and streams, and all the water underground feeding the springs?”

“They’d freeze, damn it!” he cried. “But if I had known that you were a member of the yellow press,” he said grandly, rising to his feet, “I wouldn’t have wasted a minute with you!”

“And the rain?”

“When it fell, it would freeze into hard little hobnails of ice-nine — and that would be the end of the world! And the end of the interview, too! Good-bye!”

Dr. Breed was mistaken about at least one thing: there was such a thing as ice-nine .

And ice-nine was on earth.

Ice-nine was the last gift Felix Hoenikker created for mankind before going to his just reward.

He did it without anyone’s realizing what he was doing. He did it without leaving records of what he’d done.

True, elaborate apparatus was necessary in the act of creation, but it already existed in the Research Laboratory. Dr. Hoenikker had only to go calling on Laboratory neighbors — borrowing this and that, making a winsome neighborhood nuisance of himself — until, so to speak, he had baked his last batch of brownies.

He had made a chip of ice-nine . It was blue-white. It had a melting point of one-hundred-fourteen-point-four-degrees Fahrenheit.

Felix Hoenikker had put the chip in a little bottle; and he put the bottle in his jacket. And he had gone to his cottage on Cape Cod with his three children, there intending to celebrate Christmas.

Angela had been thirty-four. Frank had been twenty-four. Little Newt had been eighteen.

The old man had died on Christmas Eve, having told only his children about ice-nine .

His children had divided the ice-nine among themselves.

Which brings me to the Bokononist concept of a wampeter .

A wampeter is the pivot of a karass . No karass is without a wampeter , Bokonon tells us, just as no wheel is without a hub.

Anything can be a wampeter : a tree, a rock, an animal, an idea, a book, a melody, the Holy Grail. Whatever it is, the members of its karass revolve about it in the majestic chaos of a spiral nebula. The orbits of the members of a karass about their common wampeter are spiritual orbits, naturally. It is souls and not bodies that revolve. As Bokonon invites us to sing:

And wampeters come and wampeters go, Bokonon tells us.

At any given time a karass actually has two wampeters — o ne waxing in importance, one waning.

And I am almost certain that while I was talking to Dr. Breed in Ilium, the wampeter of my karass that was just coming into bloom was that crystalline form of water, that blue-white gem, that seed of doom called ice-nine .

While I was talking to Dr. Breed in Ilium, Angela, Franklin, and Newton Hoenikker had in their possession seeds of ice-nine , seeds grown from their father’s seed— chips, in a manner of speaking, off the old block.

What was to become of those three chips was, I am convinced, a principal concern of my karass .

So much, for now, for the wampeter of my karass .

After my unpleasant interview with Dr. Breed in the Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company, I was put into the hands of Miss Faust. Her orders were to show me to the door. I prevailed upon her, however, to show me the laboratory of the late Dr Hoenikker first.

En route, I asked her how well she had known Dr. Hoenikker. She gave me a frank and interesting reply, and a piquant smile to go with it.

“I don’t think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they’re talking about secrets they’ve been told or haven’t been told. They’re talking about intimate things, family things, love things,” that nice old lady said to me. “Dr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren’t the main things with him.”

“What were the main things?” I asked her.

“Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth.”

“You don’t seem to agree.”

“I don’t know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.”

Miss Faust was ripe for Bokononism.

“Did you ever talk to Dr. Hoenikker?” I asked Miss Faust.

“Oh, certainly. I talked to him a lot.”

“Do any conversations stick in your mind?”

“There was one where he bet I couldn’t tell him anything that was absolutely true. So I said to him, ‘God is love.’ ”

“And what did he say?”

“He said, ‘What is God? What is love?’ ”

“Um.”

“But God really is love, you know,” said Miss Faust, “no matter what Dr. Hoenikker said.”

The room that had been the laboratory of Dr. Felix Hoenikker was on the sixth floor, the top floor of the building.

A purple cord had been stretched across the doorway, and a brass plate on the wall explained why the room was sacred:

IN THIS ROOM, DR. FELIX HOENIKKER, NOBEL LAUREATE IN PHYSICS,

SPENT THE LAST TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS OF HIS LIFE.

“WHERE HE WAS, THERE WAS THE FRONTIER OF KNOWLEDGE.”

THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS ONE MAN IN THE

HISTORY OF MANKIND IS INCALCULABLE.

Miss Faust offered to unshackle the purple cord for me so that I might go inside and traffic more intimately with whatever ghosts there were.

I accepted.

“It’s just as he left it,” she said, “except that there were rubber bands all over one counter.”

“Rubber bands?”

“Don’t ask me what for. Don’t ask me what any of all this is for.”

The old man had left the laboratory a mess. What engaged my attention at once was the quantity of cheap toys lying around. There was a paper kite with a broken spine. There was a toy gyroscope, wound with string, ready to whirr and balance itself. There was a top. There was a bubble pipe. There was a fish bowl with a castle and two turtles in it.

“He loved ten-cent stores,” said Miss Faust.

“I can see he did.”

“Some of his most famous experiments were performed with equipment that cost less than a dollar.”

“A penny saved is a penny earned.”

There were numerous pieces of conventional laboratory equipment, too, of course, but they seemed drab accessories to the cheap, gay toys.

Dr. Hoenikker’s desk was piled with correspondence.

“I don’t think he ever answered a letter,” mused Miss Faust. “People had to get him on the telephone or come to see him if they wanted an answer.”

There was a framed photograph on his desk. Its back was toward me and I ventured a guess as to whose picture it was. “His wife?”

“No.”

“One of his children?”

“No.”

“Himself?”

“No.”

So I took a look. I found that the picture was of an humble little war memorial in front of a small-town courthouse. Part of the memorial was a sign that gave the names of those villagers who had died in various wars, and I thought that the sign must be the reason for the photograph. I could read the names, and I half expected to find the name Hoenikker among them. It wasn’t there.