Cat's Cradle

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Father was all she had.

She didn’t have any friends at all.

“I told her again how much I hated my father; she slapped me again; and then Frank came out from under the bush...

do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamogordo? After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is sin?’

You call our family ‘illustrious,’ and I think you would maybe be making a mistake if you called it that in your book.

I am a midget, for instance—four feet tall.

And the last we heard of my brother Frank, he was wanted by the Florida police, the F.B.I., and the Treasury Department for running stole...

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look. I am proof of that.”

NEWT DID NOT TELL ME who his girl friend was. But about two weeks after he wrote to me everybody in the country knew that her name was Zinka—plain Zinka.

Zinka was a Ukrainian midget, a dancer with the Borzoi Dance Company.

One week after that, little Zinka presented herself at the Russian Embassy.

She said Americans were too materialistic. She said she wanted to go back home.

Zinka was not, as she claimed, only twenty-three years old. She was forty-two—old enough to be Newt’s mother.

The man was a force of nature no mortal could possibly control.”

“HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE our commencement speaker,”

“Dr. Hoenikker—the old man.”

“He didn’t show up.”

Dr. Breed,

he showed up, all out of breath, and he gave some kind of talk.”

“He said, the trouble with the world was …”

“The trouble with the world was,”

“that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said if everybody would study science more, there would...

“He said science was going to discover the basic secret...

the bartender...

“Didn’t I read in the paper the other day where they’d finally fo...

“I missed...

I mur...

“What is the secret of life?”

I asked.

“Protein,”

the bartender declared.

“They found out something abo...

Another guy came in, and he said he was quitting his job at the Research Laboratory; said anything a scientist worked on was sure to wind up as a weapon, one way or another.

Said he didn’t want to help politicians with their fugging wars anymore.

Name was ...

Said he was the boss of the Research Laboratory’s fugging son.”

Breed was a pink old man, very prosperous, beautifully dressed.

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

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

“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...

“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.”

They called up his wife, and she came and g...

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

“As long as you don’t use 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 …”

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

Her smile was glassy, and she was ransacking her mind for something to say, finding nothing in it but used Kleenex and costume jewelry.