Vonnegut, Kurt – Cat’s Cradle

Breed was a pink old man, very prosperous, beautifully dressed. His manner was civilized, optimistic, capable, serene. I, by contrast, felt bristly, diseased, cynical. I had spent the night with Sandra.

My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur.

I thought the worst of everyone, and I knew some pretty sordid things about Dr. Asa Breed, things Sandra had told me.

Sandra told me everyone in Ilium was sure that Dr. Breed had been in love with Felix Hoenikker’s wife. She told me that most people thought Breed was the father of all three Hoenikker children.

“Do you know Ilium at all?” Dr. Breed suddenly asked me.

“This is my first visit.”

“It’s a family town.”

“Sir?”

“There isn’t much in the way of night life. Everybody’s life pretty much centers around his family and his home.”

“That sounds very wholesome.”

“It is. We have very little juvenile delinquency.”

“Good.”

“Ilium has a very interesting history, you know.”

“That’s very interesting.”

“It used to be the jumping-off place, you know.”

“Sir?”

“For the Western migration.”

“Oh.”

“People used to get outfitted here.”

“That’s very interesting.”

“Just about where the Research Laboratory is now was the old stockade. That was where they held the public hangings, too, for the whole county.”

“I don’t suppose crime paid any better then than it does now.”

“There was one man they hanged here in 1782 who had murdered twenty-six people. I’ve often thought somebody ought to do a book about him sometime. George Minor Moakely. He sang a song on the scaffold. He sang a song he’d composed for the occasion.”

“What was the song about?”

“You can find the words over at the Historical Society, if you’re really interested.”

“I just wondered about the general tone.”

“He wasn’t sorry about anything.”

“Some people are like that.”

“Think of it!” said Dr. Breed. “Twenty-six people he had on his conscience!”

“The mind reels,” I said.

When Automobiles Had Cut-glass Vases 14

My sick head wobbled on my stiff neck. The trolley tracks had caught the wheels of Dr. Breed’s glossy Lincoln again.

I asked Dr. Breed how many people were trying to reach the General Forge and Foundry Company by eight o’clock, and he told me thirty thousand.

Policemen in yellow raincapes were at every intersection, contradicting with their white-gloved hands what the stop-and-go signs said.

The stop-and-go signs, garish ghosts in the sleet, went through their irrelevant tomfoolery again and again, telling the glacier of automobiles what to do. Green meant go. Red meant stop. Orange meant change and caution.

Dr. Breed told me that Dr. Hoenikker, as a very young man, had simply abandoned his car in Ilium traffic one morning.

“The police, trying to find out what was holding up traffic,” he said, “found Felix’s car in the middle of everything, its motor running, a cigar burning in the ash tray, fresh flowers in the vases …”

“Vases?”

“It was a Marmon, about the size of a switch engine. It had little cut-glass vases on the doorposts, and Felix’s wife used to put fresh flowers in the vases every morning. And there that car was in the middle of traffic.”

“Like the Marie Celeste,” I suggested.

“The Police Department hauled it away. They knew whose car it was, and they called up Felix, and they told him very politely where his car could be picked up. Felix told them they could keep it, that he didn’t want it any more.”

“Did they?”

“No. They called up his wife, and she came and got the Marmon.”

“What was her name, by the way?”

“Emily.” Dr. Breed licked his lips, and he got a faraway look, and he said the name of the woman, of the woman so long dead, again. “Emily.”

“Do you think anybody would object if I used the story about the Marmon in my book?” I asked.

“As long as you don’t use the end of it.”

“The end of it?”

“Emily wasn’t used to driving the Marmon. She got into a bad wreck on the way home. It did something to her pelvis …” The traffic wasn’t moving just then. Dr. Breed closed his eyes and tightened his hands on the steering wheel.

“And that was why she died when little Newt was born.”

Merry Christmas 15

The Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company was near the main gate of the company’s Ilium works, about a city block from the executive parking lot where Dr. Breed put his car.

I asked Dr. Breed how many people worked for the Research Laboratory. “Seven hundred,” he said, “but less than a hundred are actually doing research. The other six hundred are all housekeepers in one way or another, and I am the chiefest housekeeper of all.”

When we joined the mainstream of mankind in the company street, a woman behind us wished Dr. Breed a merry Christmas. Dr. Breed turned to peer benignly into the sea of pale pies, and identified the greeter as one Miss Francine Pefko. Miss Pefko was twenty, vacantly pretty, and healthy—a dull normal.

In honor of the dulcitude of Christmastime, Dr. Breed invited Miss Pefko to join us. He introduced her as the secretary of Dr. Nilsak Horvath. He then told me who Horvath was. “The famous surface chemist,” he said, “the one who’s doing such wonderful things with films.”

“What’s new in surface chemistry?” I asked Miss Pefko. “God,” she said, “don’t ask me. I just type what he tells me to type.” And then she apologized for having said “God.”

“Oh, I think you understand more than you let on,” said Dr. Breed.

“Not me.” Miss Pefko wasn’t used to chatting with someone as important as Dr. Breed and she was embarrassed. Her gait was affected, becoming stiff and chickenlike. Her smile was glassy, and she was ransacking her mind for something to say, finding nothing in it but used Kleenex and costume jewelry.

“Well … ,” rumbled Dr. Breed expansively, “how do you like us, now that you’ve been with us—how long? Almost a year?”

“You scientists think too much,” blurted Miss Pefko. She laughed idiotically. Dr. Breed’s friendliness had blown every fuse in her nervous system. She was no longer responsible. “You all think too much.”

A winded, defeated-looking fat woman in filthy coveralls trudged beside us, hearing what Miss Pefko said. She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

The fat woman’s expression implied that she would go crazy on the spot if anybody did any more thinking.

“I think you’ll find,” said Dr. Breed, “that everybody does about the same amount of thinking. Scientists simply think about things in one way, and other people think about things in others.”

“Ech,” gurgled Miss Pefko emptily. “I take dictation from Dr. Horvath and it’s just like a foreign language. I don’t think I’d understand—even if I was to go to college. And here he’s maybe talking about something that’s going to turn everything upside-down and inside-out like the atom bomb.

“When I used to come home from school Mother used to ask me what happened that day, and I’d tell her,” said Miss Pefko. “Now I come home from work and she asks me the same question, and all I can say is—” Miss Pefko shook her head and let her crimson lips flap slackly— “I dunno, I dunno, I dunno.”

“If there’s something you don’t understand,” urged Dr. Breed, “ask Dr. Horvath to explain it. He’s very good at explaining.” He turned to me. “Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.”

“Then I’m dumber than an eight-year-old,” Miss Pefko mourned. “I don’t even know what a charlatan is.”

Back to Kindergarten 16

We climbed the four granite steps before the Research Laboratory. The building itself was of unadorned brick and rose six stories. We passed between two heavily-armed guards at the entrance.

Miss Pefko showed the guard on the left the pink confidential badge at the tip of her left breast.

Dr. Breed showed the guard on the right the black top-secret badge on his soft lapel. Ceremoniously, Dr. Breed put his arm around me without actually touching me, indicating to the guards that I was under his august protection and control.

I smiled at one of the guards. He did not smile back. There was nothing funny about national security, nothing at all.

Dr. Breed, Miss Pefko, and I moved thoughtfully through the Laboratory’s grand foyer to the elevators.

“Ask Dr. Horvath to explain something sometime,” said Dr. Breed to Miss Pefko. “See if you don’t get a nice, clear answer.”

“He’d have to start back in the first grade—or maybe even kindergarten,” she said. “I missed a lot.”

“We all missed a lot,” Dr. Breed agreed. “We’d all do well to start over again, preferably with kindergarten.”

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