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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.
Felix Hoenikker had put the chip in a little bottle; and he put the bottle in his pocket.
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.
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 ch...
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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.
What was to become of those three chips was, I am convinced, a principal concern of my karass.
“That was one of his hobbies,”
“Photographing how cannonballs are stacked on different courthouse lawns.
Apparently how they’ve got them stacked in that picture is very unusual.”
compared with the average person of today, he was as different as a man from Mars.”
“Maybe he really was a Martian,”
“That would certainly go a long way toward explaining his t...
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The custodian at the cemetery gate told me how to find the Hoenikker burial plot.
“It’s got the biggest marker in the place.”
The marker was an alabaster phallus twenty feet high and three feet thick. It w...
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“how’s that for a suitable memorial to a father of the atom bomb?”
“If that’s Mother,”
“what in hell could they have raised over Father?”
He made an obscene suggestion as to what the appropriat...
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AS WE WERE LEAVING the cemetery the driver of the cab worried about the condition of his own mother’s grave. He asked if I would mind taking a short detour to look at it.
And the driver asked me if I would mind another brief detour, this time to a tombstone salesroom across the street from the cemetery.
As Bokonon says:
“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
“Any relation to Dr. Asa Breed, the director of the Research Laboratory?”
“His brother.”
“It’s a small...
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“When you put it in a cemete...
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“Did you sell him that monument for his wife?”
“I sold his kids that.
He never got around to putting any kind of marker on her grave. And then, after she’d been dead for a year or more, Hoenikker’s three kids came in here—the b...
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They wanted the biggest stone money could buy, and the two older ones had poems they’d written. They ...
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They used to come and look at it and put flowers on it I-don’t-know-how-many-times a year.”
“It must have cost a lot.”
“Nobel Prize money b...
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Two things that money bought: a cottage on Cape Cod a...
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Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
But all I could say as a Christian then was,
“Life is sure funny s...
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“And sometimes it...
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said Marvin...
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I ASKED MARVIN BREED if he’d known Emily Hoenikker,
Sure, I knew her.
We went to Ilium High together.
Her father owned the Ilium M...
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She could play every musical instrume...
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