Kurt Vonnegut - Cats Cradle

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Vonnegut, Kurt - Cats Cradle v1.0
CAT'S CRADLE
by Kurt Vonnegut
Copyright 1963 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Published by DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC., 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, N.Y.
10017 All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-440-11149-8
For Kenneth Littauer,
a man of gallantry and taste.
Nothing in this book is true.
"Live by the foma* that makes you brave and kind and healthy and happy."
--The Books of Bokonon. 1:5
*Harmless untruths
contents
1. The Day the World Ended
2. Nice, Nice, Very Nice
3. Folly
4. A Tentative Tangling of Tendrils
5. Letter from a Pie-med
6. Bug Fights
7. The Illustrious Hoenikkers
8. Newt's Thing with Zinka
9. Vice-president in Charge of Volcanoes
10. Secret Agent X-9
11. Protein
12. End of the World Delight
13. The Jumping-off Place
14. When Automobiles Had Cut-glass Vases
15. Merry Christmas
16. Back to Kindergarten
17. The Girl Pool
18. The Most Valuable Commodity on Earth
19. No More Mud
20. Ice-nine
21. The Marines March On
22. Member of the Yellow Press
23. The Last Batch of Brownies
24. What a Wampeter Is
25. The Main Thing About Dr. Hoenikker
26. What God Is
27. Men from Mars
28. Mayonnaise
29. Gone, but Not Forgotten
30. Only Sleeping
31. Another Breed
32. Dynamite Money
33. An Ungrateful Man
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34. Vin-dit
35. Hobby Shop
36. Meow
37. A Modem Major General
38. Barracuda Capital of the World
39. Fata Morgana
40. House of Hope and Mercy
41. A Karass Built for Two
42. Bicycles for Afghanistan
43. The Demonstrator
44. Communist Sympathizers
45. Why Americans Are Hated
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46. The Bokononist Method for Handling Caesar
47. Dynamic Tension
48. Just Like Saint Augustine
49. A Fish Pitched Up by an Angry Sea
50. A Nice Midget
51. O.K., Mom
52. No Pain
53. The President of Fabri-Tek
54. Communists, Nazis, Royalists,
Parachutists, and Draft Dodgers
55. Never Index Your Own Book
56. A Self-supporting Squirrel Cage
57. The Queasy Dream
58. Tyranny with a Difference
59. Fasten Your Seat Belts
60. An Underprivileged Nation
61. What a Corporal Was Worth
62. Why Hazel Wasn't Scared
63. Reverent and Free
64. Peace and Plenty
65. A Good Time to Come to San Lorenzo
66. The Strongest Thing There Is
67. Hy-u-o-ook-kuh!
68. Hoon-yera Mora-toorz
69. A Big Mosaic
70. Tutored by Bokonon
71. The Happiness of Being an American
72. The Pissant Hilton
73. Black Death
74. Cat's Cradle
75. Give My Regards to Albert Schweitzer
76. Julian Castle Agrees with Newt
that Everything Is Meaningless
77. Aspirin and Boko-maru
78. Ring of Steel
79. Why McCabe's Soul Grew Coarse
80. The Waterfall Strainers
81. A White Bride for the Son of a Pullman Porter
82. Zah-mah-ki-bo
83. Dr. Schlichter von Koenigswald Approaches
the Break-even Point
84. Blackout
85. A Pack of Foma
86. Two Little Jugs
87. The Cut of My Jib
88. Why Frank Couldn't Be President
89. Duffle
90. Only One Catch
91. Mona
92. On the Poet's Celebration of his First Boko-maru
93. How I Almost Lost My Mona
94. The Highest Mountain
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95. I See the Hook
96. Bell, Book, and Chicken in a Hatbox
97. The Stinking Christian
98. Last Rites
99. Dyot meet mat
100. Down the Oubliette Goes Frank
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101. Like My Predecessors, I Outlaw Bokonon
102. Enemies of Freedom
103. A Medical Opinion on the Effects of a Writers' Strike
104. Sulfathiazole
105. Pain-killer
106. What Bokononists Say When They Commit Suicide
107. Feast Your Eyes!
108. Frank Tells Us What to Do
109. Frank Defends Himself
110. The Fourteenth Book
111. Time Out
112. Newt's Mother's Reticule
113. History
114. When I Felt the Bullet Enter My Heart
115. As It Happened
116. The Grand Ah-whoom
117. Sanctuary
118. The Iron Maiden and the Oubliette
119. Mona Thanks Me
120. To Whom It May Concern
121. I Am Slow to Answer
122. The Swiss Family Robinson
123. Of Mice and Men
124. Frank's Ant Farm
125. The Tasmanians
126. Soft Pipes, Play On
127. The End
cat's cradle
The Day the World Ended 1
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
Jonah--John--if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still--not
because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has
compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and
motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan,
at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.
Listen:
When I was a younger man--two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000
quarts of booze ago.
When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be
called _The Day the World Ended_.
The book was to be factual.
The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the
day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then.
I am a Bokononist now.
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I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to teach me
the bittersweet lies of Bokonon. But Bokononism was unknown beyond the gravel
beaches and coral knives that ring this little island in the Caribbean Sea, the
Republic of San Lorenzo.
We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do
God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a
_karass_ by Bokonon, and the instrument, the _kan-kan_, that brought me into my own
particular _karass_ was the book I never finished, the book to be called _The Day
the World Ended_.
Nice, Nice, Very Nice 2
"If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very
logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your _karass_."
At another point in _The Books of Bokonon_ he tells us, "Man created the
checkerboard; God created the _karass_." By that he means that a _karass_ ignores
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national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.
It is as free-form as an amoeba.
In his "Fifty-third Calypso," Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:
Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen--
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice--
So many different people
In the same device.
Folly 3
Nowhere does Bokonon warn against a person's trying to discover the limits
of his _karass_ and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do. Bokonon
simply observes that such investigations are bound to be incomplete.
In the autobiographical section of _The Books of Bokanon_ he writes a
parable on the folly of pretending to discover, to understand:
I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to
design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The lady claimed to understand God
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and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand why anyone should be
puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be.
And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build,
she said to me, "I'm sorry, but I never could read one of those things."
"Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God," I said, "and,
when God finds a minute, I'm sure he'll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that
even you can understand."
She fired me. I shall never forget her. She believed that God liked people
in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to
look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed.
She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is
Doing, [writes Bokonon].
A Tentative Tangling of Tendrils 4
Be that as it may, I intend in this book to include as many members of my
_karass_ as possible, and I mean to examine all strong hints as to what on Earth we,
collectively, have been up to.
I do not intend that this book be a tract on behalf of Bokononism. I should
like to offer a Bokononist warning about it, however. The first sentence in _The
Books of Bokonon_ is this:
"All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies."
My Bokononist warning is this:
Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies
will not understand this book either.
So be it.
About my _karass_, then.
It surely includes the three children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the
so-called "Fathers" of the first atomic bomb. Dr. Hoenikker himself was no doubt a
member of my _karass_, though he was dead before my _sinookas_, the tendrils of my
life, began to tangle with those of his children.
The first of his heirs to be touched by my sinookas was Newton Hoenikker,
the youngest of his three children, the younger of his two sons. I learned from the
publication of my fraternity, _The Delta Upsilon Quarterly_, that Newton Hoenikker,
son of the Nobel Prize physicist, Felix Hoenikker, had been pledged by my chapter,
the Cornell Chapter.
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So I wrote this letter to Newt:
"Dear Mr. Hoenikker:
"Or should I say, Dear _Brother_ Hoenikker?
"I am a Cornell DU now making my living as a freelance writer. I am
gathering material for a book relating to the first atomic bomb. Its contents will
be limited to events that took place on August 6, 1945, the day the bomb was dropped
on Hiroshima.
"Since your late father is generally recognized as having been one of the
chief creators of the bomb, I would very much appreciate any anecdotes you might
care to give me of life in your father's house on the day the bomb was dropped.
"I am sorry to say that I don't know as much about your illustrious family
as I should, and so don't know whether you have brothers and sisters. If you do have
brothers and sisters, I should like very much to have their addresses so that I can
send similar requests to them.
"I realize that you were very young when the bomb was dropped, which is all
to the good. My book is going to emphasize the _human_ rather than the _technical_
side of the bomb, so recollections of the day through the eyes of a 'baby,' if
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you'll pardon the expression, would fit in perfectly.
"You don't have to worry about style and form. Leave all that to me. Just
give me the bare bones of your story.
"I will, of course, submit the final version to you for your approval prior
to publication.
"Fraternally yours--"
Letter from a Pre-med 5
To which Newt replied:
"I am sorry to be so long about answering your letter. That sounds like a
very interesting book you are doing. I was so young when the bomb was dropped that I
don't think I'm going to be much help. You should really ask my brother and sister,
who are both older than I am. My sister is Mrs. Harrison C. Conners, 4918 North
Meridian Street, Indianapolis, Indiana. That is my home address, too, now. I think
she will be glad to help you. Nobody knows where my brother Frank is. He disappeared
right after Father's funeral two years ago, and nobody has heard from him since. For
all we know, he may be dead now.
"I was only six years old when they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, so
anything I remember about that day other people have helped me to remember.
"I remember I was playing on the living-room carpet outside my father's
study door in Ilium, New York. The door was open, and I could see my father. He was
wearing pajamas and a bathrobe. He was smoking a cigar. He was playing with a loop
of string. Father was staying home from the laboratory in his pajamas all day that
day. He stayed home whenever he wanted to.
"Father, as you probably know, spent practically his whole professional life
working for the Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company in
Ilium. When the Manhattan Project came along, the bomb project, Father wouldn't
leave Ilium to work on it. He said he wouldn't work on it at all unless they let him
work where he wanted to work. A lot of the time that meant at home. The only place
he liked to go, outside of Ilium, was our cottage on Cape Cod. Cape Cod was where he
died. He died on a Christmas Eve. You probably know that, too.
"Anyway, I was playing on the carpet outside his study on the day of the
bomb. My sister Angela tells me I used to play with little toy trucks for hours,
making motor sounds, going 'burton, burton, burton' all the time. So I guess I was
going 'burton, burton, burton,' on the day of the bomb; and Father was in his study,
playing with a loop of string.
"It so happens I know where the string he was playing with came from. Maybe
you can use it somewhere in your book. Father took the string from around the
manuscript of a novel that a man in prison had sent him. The novel was about the end
of the world in the year 2000, and the name of the book was _2000 A.D._ It told
about how mad scientists made a terrific bomb that wiped out the whole world. There
was a big sex orgy when everybody knew that the world was going to end, and then
Jesus Christ Himself appeared ten seconds before the bomb went off. The name of the
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author was Marvin Sharpe Holderness, and he told Father in a covering letter that he
was in prison for killing his own brother. He sent the manuscript to Father because
he couldn't figure out what kind of explosives to put in the bomb. He thought maybe
Father could make suggestions.
"I don't mean to tell you I read the book when I was six. We had it around
the house for years. My brother Frank made it his personal property, on account of
the dirty parts. Frank kept it hidden in what he called his 'wall safe' in his
bedroom. Actually, it wasn't a safe but just an old stove flue with a tin lid. Frank
and I must have read the orgy part a thousand times when we were kids. We had it for
years, and then my sister Angela found it. She read it and said it was nothing but a
piece of dirty rotten filth. She burned it up, and the string with it. She was a
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mother to Frank and me, because our real mother died when I was born.
"My father never read the book, I'm pretty sure. I don't think he ever read
a novel or even a short story in his whole life, or at least not since he was a
little boy. He didn't read his mail or magazines or newspapers, either. I suppose he
read a lot of technical journals, but to tell you the truth, I can't remember my
father reading anything.
"As I say, all he wanted from that manuscript was the string. That was the
way he was. Nobody could predict what he was going to be interested in next. On the
day of the bomb it was string.
"Have you ever read the speech he made when he accepted the Nobel Prize?
This is the whole speech: 'Ladies and Gentlemen. I stand before you now because I
never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to
school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a
very happy man. Thank you.'
"Anyway, Father looked at that loop of string for a while, and then his
fingers started playing with it. His fingers made the string figure called a 'cat's
cradle.' I don't know where Father learned how to do that. From _his_ father, maybe.
His father was a tailor, you know, so there must have been thread and string around
all the time when Father was a boy.
"Making the cat's cradle was the closest I ever saw my father come to
playing what anybody else would call a game. He had no use at all for tricks and
games and rules that other people made up. In a scrapbook my sister Angela used to
keep up, there was a clipping from _Time_ magazine where somebody asked Father what
games he played for relaxation, and he said, 'Why should I bother with made-up games
when there are so many real ones going on?'
"He must have surprised himself when he made a cat's cradle out of the
string, and maybe it reminded him of his own childhood. He all of a sudden came out
of his study and did something he'd never done before. He tried to play with me. Not
only had he never played with me before; he had hardly ever even spoken to me.
"But he went down on his knees on the carpet next to me, and he showed me
his teeth, and he waved that tangle of string in my face. 'See? See? See?' he asked.
'Cat's cradle. See the cat's cradle? See where the nice pussycat sleeps? Meow.
Meow.'
"His pores looked as big as craters on the moon. His ears and nostrils were
stuffed with hair. Cigar smoke made him smell like the mouth of Hell. So close up,
my father was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. I dream about it all the time.
"And then he sang. 'Rockabye catsy, in the tree top'; he sang, 'when the
wind blows, the cray-dull will rock. If the bough breaks, the cray-dull will fall.
Down will come craydull, catsy and all.'
"I burst into tears. I jumped up and I ran out of the house as fast as I
could go.
"I have to sign off here. It's after two in the morning. My roommate just
woke up and complained about the noise from the typewriter."
Bug Fights 6
Newt resumed his letter the next morning. He resumed it as follows:
"Next morning. Here I go again, fresh as a daisy after eight hours of sleep.
The fraternity house is very quiet now. Everybody is in class but me. I'm a very
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privileged character. I don't have to go to class any more. I was flunked out last
week. I was a pre-med. They were right to flunk me out. I would have made a lousy
doctor.
"After I finish this letter, I think I'll go to a movie. Or if the sun comes
out, maybe I'll go for a walk through one of the gorges. Aren't the gorges
beautiful? This year, two girls jumped into one holding hands. They didn't get into
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the sorority they wanted. They wanted Tri-Delt.
"But back to August 6, 1945. My sister Angela has told me many times that I
really hurt my father that day when I wouldn't admire the cat's cradle, when I
wouldn't stay there on the carpet with my father and listen to him sing. Maybe I did
hurt him, but I don't think I could have hurt him much. He was one of the
best-protected human beings who ever lived. People couldn't get at him because he
just wasn't interested in people. I remember one time, about a year before he died,
I tried to get him to tell me something about my mother. He couldn't remember
anything about her.
"Did you ever hear the famous story about breakfast on the day Mother and
Father were leaving for Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize? It was in _The Saturday
Evening Post_ one time. Mother cooked a big breakfast. And then, when she cleared
off the table, she found a quarter and a dime and three pennies by Father's coffee
cup. He'd tipped her.
"After wounding my father so terribly, if that's what I did, I ran out into
the yard. I didn't know where I was going until I found my brother Frank under a big
spiraea bush. Frank was twelve then, and I wasn't surprised to find him under there.
He spent a lot of time under there on hot days. Just like a dog, he'd make a hollow
in the cool earth all around the roots. And you never could tell what Frank would
have under the bush with him. One time he had a dirty book. Another time he had a
bottle of cooking sherry. On the day they dropped the bomb Frank had a tablespoon
and a Mason jar. What he was doing was spooning different kinds of bugs into the jar
and making them fight.
"The bug fight was so interesting that I stopped crying right away--forgot
all about the old man. I can't remember what all Frank had fighting in the jar that
day, but I can remember other bug fights we staged later on: one stag beetle against
a hundred red ants, one centipede against three spiders, red ants against black
ants. They won't fight unless you keep shaking the jar. And that's what Frank was
doing, shaking, shaking, the jar.
"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
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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
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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"
The Illustrious Hoenikkers 7
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's Thing with Zinka 8
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
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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.
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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.
Vice-president in Charge of Volcanoes 9
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."
Secret Agent X-9 10
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.
So I had a night to kill in Ilium. I was already in the beginning and end of
night life in Ilium, the Del Prado Hotel. Its bar, the Cape Cod Room, was a hangout
for whores.
As it happened--"as it was _meant_ to happen," Bokonon would say--the whore
next to me at the bar and the bartender serving •me had both gone to high school
with Franklin Hoenikker, the bug tormentor, the middle child, the missing son.
The whore, who said her name was Sandra, offered me delights unobtainable
Page 10
Vonnegut, Kurt - Cats Cradle v1.0
outside of Place Pigalle and Port Said. I said I wasn't interested, and she was
bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out,
we had both overestimated our apathies, but not by much.
Before we took the measure of each other's passions, however, we talked
about Frank Hoenikker, and we talked about the old man, and we talked a little about
Asa Breed, and we talked about the General Forge and Foundry Company, and we talked
about the Pope and birth control, about Hitler and the Jews. We talked about
phonies. We talked about truth. We talked about gangsters; we talked about business.
We talked about the nice poor people who went to the electric chair; and we talked
about the rich bastards who didn't. We talked about religious people who had
perversions. We talked about a lot of things.
We got drunk.
The bartender was very nice to Sandra. He liked her. He respected her. He
told me that Sandra had been chairman of the Class Colors Committee at Ilium High.
Every class, he explained, got to pick distinctive colors for itself in its junior
year, and then it got to wear those colors with pride.
"What colors did you pick?" I asked.
"Orange and black."
"Those are good colors."
"I thought so."
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"Was Franklin Hoenikker on the Class Colors Committee, too?"
"He wasn't on anything," said Sandra scornfully. "He never got on any
committee, never played any game, never took any girl out. I don't think he ever
even talked to a girl. We used to call him Secret Agent X-9."
"X-9?"
"You know--he was always acting like he was on his way between two secret
places; couldn't ever talk to anybody."
"Maybe he really _did_ have a very rich secret life," I suggested.
"Nah."
"Nah," sneered the bartender. "He was just one of those kids who made model
airplanes and jerked off all the time."
Protein 11
"He was suppose to be our commencement speaker," said Sandra.
"Who was?" I asked.
"Dr. Hoenikker--the old man."
"What did he say?"
"He didn't show up."
"So you didn't get a commencement address?"
"Oh, we got one. Dr. Breed, the one you're gonna see tomorrow, he showed up,
all out of breath, and he gave some kind of talk."
"What did he say?"
"He said he hoped a lot of us would have careers in science," she said. She
didn't see anything funny in that. She was remembering a lesson that had impressed
her. She was repeating it gropingly, dutifully. "He said, the trouble with the world
was . . ." She had to stop and think.
"The trouble with the world was," she continued hesitatingly, "that people
were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said if everybody would study
science more, there wouldn't be all the trouble there was."
"He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life someday,"
the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. "Didn't I read in the paper
the other day where they'd finally found out what it was?"
"I missed that," I murmured.
"I saw that," said Sandra. "About two days ago."
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Vonnegut, Kurt - Cats Cradle v1.0
"That's right," said the bartender.
"What _is_ the secret of life?" I asked.
"I forget," said Sandra.
"Protein," the bartender declared. "They found out something about protein."
"Yeah," said Sandra, "that's it."
End of the World Delight 12
An older bartender came over to join in our conversation in the Cape Cod
Room of the Del Prado. When he heard that I was writing a book about the day of the
bomb, he told me what the day had been like for him, what the day had been like in
the very bar in which we sat. He had a W. C. Fields twang and a nose like a prize
strawberry.
"It wasn't the Cape Cod Room then," he said. "We didn't have all these
fugging nets and seashells around. It was called the Navajo Tepee in those days. Had
Indian blankets and cow skulls on the walls. Had little tom-toms on the tables.
People were supposed to beat on the tom-toms when they wanted service. They tried to
get me to wear a war bonnet, but I wouldn't do it. Real Navajo Indian came in here
one day; told me Navajos didn't live in tepees. 'That's a fugging shame,' I told
him. Before that it was the Pompeii Room, with busted plaster all over the place;
but no matter what they call the room, they never change the fugging light fixtures.
Never changed the fugging people who come in or the fugging town outside, either.
The day they dropped Hoenikker's fugging bomb on the Japanese a bum came in and
tried to scrounge a drink. He wanted me to give him a drink on account of the world
was coming to an end. So I mixed him an 'End of the World Delight.' I gave him about
a half-pint of creme de menthe in a hollowed-out pineapple, with whipped cream and a
cherry on top. 'There, you pitiful son of a bitch,' I said to him, 'don't ever say I
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