Cat's Cradle (5 page)

“What did Dr. Hoenikker say?”

“In his playful way, and
all
his ways were playful, Felix suggested that there might be a single grain of something—even a microscopic grain—that could make infinite expanses of muck, marsh, swamp, creeks, pools, quicksand, and mire as solid as this desk.”

Dr. Breed banged his speckled old fist on the desk. The desk was a kidney-shaped, sea green steel affair. “One Marine could carry more than enough of the stuff to free an armored division bogged down in the Everglades. According to Felix, one Marine could carry enough of the stuff to do that under the nail of his little finger.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You would say so, I would say so—practically everybody would say so. To Felix, in his playful way, it was entirely possible. The miracle of Felix—and I sincerely hope you’ll put this in your book somewhere—
was that he always approached old puzzles as though they were brand new.”

“I feel like Francine Pefko now,” I said, “and all the girls in the Girl Pool, too. Dr. Hoenikker could never have explained to me how something that could be carried under a fingernail could make a swamp as solid as your desk.”

“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.”

“T
HERE 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 a 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 layer 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.”

W
HEN OLD
D
R
. B
REED
, 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!”

“T
HERE
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! Good-bye!”

D
R
. B
REED 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 pocket. 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.

W
HICH 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
—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
.

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
.

S
O 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 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.

“D
ID 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.”

T
HE 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:

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.”