Cat's Cradle: A Novel Read online

  CAT'S CRADLE

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Science Fiction Masterworks Volume 75

  eGod

  For Kenneth Littauer,

  a man of gallantry and taste.

  Nothing in this book is true.

  “Live by the foma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”

  The Books of Bokonon. I: 5

  * Harmless untruths

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  1 THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED

  2 NICE, NICE, VERY NICE

  3 FOLLY

  4 A TENTATIVE TANGLING OF TENDRILS

  5 LETTER FROM A PRE-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

  34 VIN-DIT

  35 HOBBY SHOP

  36 MEOW

  37 A MODERN 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

  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 SCWEITZER

  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

  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

  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

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED

  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.

  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.

  2

  NICE, NICE, VERY NICE

  “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 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.

  3

  FOLLY

  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 Bokonon 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 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].

  4

  A TENTATIVE TANGLING OF TENDRILS

  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.

  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 free-lance 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 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—”

  5

  LETTER FROM A PRE-MED

  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 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 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 that 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 scrap-book 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.