“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.
Frank Tells Us What to Do 108
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.”
Frank Defends Himself 109
“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.
The Fourteenth Book 110
“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.
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.”
Time Out 111
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.