Vonnegut, Kurt – Cat’s Cradle

“I told you what a good explainer Felix was …”

“Even so …”

“He was able to explain it to me,” said Dr. Breed, “and I’m sure I can explain it to you. The puzzle is how to get Marines out of the mud—right?”

“Right.”

“All right,” said Dr. Breed, “listen carefully. Here we go.”

Ice-nine 20

“There are several ways,” Dr. Breed said to me, “in which certain liquids can crystallize—can freeze—several ways in which their atoms can stack and lock in an orderly, rigid way.”

That old man with spotted hands invited me to think of the several ways in which cannonballs might be stacked on a courthouse lawn, of the several ways in which oranges might be packed into a crate.

“So it is with atoms in crystals, too; and two different crystals of the same substance can have quite different physical properties.”

He told me about a factory that had been growing big crystals of ethylene diamine tartrate. The crystals were useful in certain manufacturing operations, he said. But one day the factory discovered that the crystals it was growing no longer had the properties desired. The atoms had begun to stack and lock—to freeze—in different fashion. The liquid that was crystallizing hadn’t changed, but the crystals it was forming were, as far as industrial applications went, pure junk.

How this had come about was a mystery. The theoretical villain, however, was what Dr. Breed called “a seed.” He meant by that a tiny grain of the undesired crystal pattern. The seed, which had come from God-only-knows-where, taught the atoms the novel way in which to stack and lock, to crystallize, to freeze.

“Now think about cannonballs on a courthouse lawn or about oranges in a crate again,” he suggested. And he helped me to see that the pattern of the bottom layers of cannonballs or of oranges determined how each subsequent layer would stack and lock. “The bottom layer is the seed of how every cannonball or every orange that comes after is going to behave, even to an infinite number of cannonballs or oranges.”

“Now suppose,” chortled Dr. Breed, enjoying himself, “that there were many possible .ways in which water could crystallize, could freeze. Suppose that the sort of ice we skate upon and put into highballs—what we might call ice-one—is only one of several types of ice. Suppose water always froze as ice-one on Earth because it had never had a seed to teach it how to form ice-two, ice-three, ice-four … ? And suppose,” he rapped on his desk with his old hand again, “that there were one form, which we will call ice-nine—a crystal as hard as this desk—with a melting point of, let us say, one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit, or, better still, a melting point of one-hundred-and-thirty degrees.”

“All right, I’m still with you,” I said.

Dr. Breed was interrupted by whispers in his outer office, whispers loud and portentous. They were the sounds of the Girl Pool.

The girls were preparing to sing in the outer office.

And they did sing, as Dr. Breed and I appeared in the doorway. Each of about a hundred girls had made herself into a choirgirl by putting on a collar of white bond paper, secured by a paper clip. They sang beautifully.

I was surprised and mawkishly heartbroken. I am always moved by that seldom-used treasure, the sweetness with which most girls can sing.

The girls sang “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” I am not likely to forget very soon their interpretation of the line:

“The hopes and fears of all the years are here with us tonight.”

The Marines March On 21

When old Dr. Breed, with the help of Miss Faust, had passed out the Christmas chocolate bars to the girls, we returned to his office.

There, he said to me, “Where were we? Oh yes!” And that old man asked me to think of United States Marines in a Godforsaken swamp.

“Their trucks and tanks and howitzers are wallowing,” he complained, “sinking in stinking miasma and ooze.”

He raised a finger and winked at me. “But suppose, young man, that one Marine had with him a tiny capsule containing a seed of ice-nine, a new way for the atoms of water to stack and lock, to freeze. If that Marine threw that seed into the nearest puddle …”

“The puddle would freeze?” I guessed.

“And all the muck around the puddle?”

“It would freeze?”

“And all the puddles in the frozen muck?”

“They would freeze?”

“And the pools and the streams in the frozen muck?”

“They would freeze?”

“You bet they would!” he cried. “And the United States Marines would rise from the swamp and march on!”

Member of the Yellow Press 22

“There is such stuff?” I asked.

“No, no, no, no,” said Dr. Breed, losing patience with me again. “I only told you all this in order to give you some insight into the extraordinary novelty of the ways in which Felix was likely to approach an old problem. What I’ve just told you is what he told the Marine general who was hounding him about mud.

“Felix ate alone here in the cafeteria every day. It was a rule that no one was to sit with him, to interrupt his chain of thought. But the Marine general barged in, pulled up a chair, and started talking about mud. What I’ve told you was Felix’s offhand reply.”

“There—there really isn’t such a thing?”

“I just told you there wasn’t!” cried Dr. Breed hotly. “Felix died shortly after that! And, if you’d been listening to what I’ve been trying to tell you about pure research men, you wouldn’t ask such a question! Pure research men work on what fascinates them, not on what fascinates other people.”

“I keep thinking about that swamp …”

“You can stop thinking about it! I’ve made the only point I wanted to make with the swamp.”

“If the streams flowing through the swamp froze as ice-nine, what about the rivers and lakes the streams fed?”

“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! Goodbye!”

The Last Batch of Brownies 23

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.

What a Wampeter Is 24

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:

Around and around and around we spin,

With feet of lead and wings of tin.

And wampeters come and wampeters go, Bokonon tells us.

At any given time a karass actually has two wampeters—one 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.

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