Bernard entered the East Ballroom of the giant Curtis Hotel in downtown Minneapolis, his name tag stuck to his left lapel, and took his seat on the dais. The panel on cloud seeding at the October AMS meeting was packed. Members of the public as well as meteorologists crowded the room: Minnesota’s farmers wanted to know how to make rain.
Joining Bernie to give papers that afternoon were Irving Krick, Wallace Howell, Robert Elliott, and Paul MacCready—commercial rainmakers, all of them. The only other serious researcher listed on the docket was Sol Resnick, a professor at Colorado A&M. But there was a last-minute addition to the roster—Herbert C. S. Thom, statistical expert from the Weather Bureau, added through bureau machinations.
Bernie was going to outline the construction of his spray-nozzle smoke generator for dispensing silver iodide. The commercial rainmakers were giving papers much more ambitious in scope. Wallace Howell was surveying methods of evaluating artificial rainmaking programs. Paul MacCready was reporting on fantastically successful cloud-seeding operations over ten thousand square miles of Arizona. Robert Elliott was showing time-lapse movies demonstrating the effects of using differing amounts of silver iodide. And Krick, in typically enterprising fashion, was holding forth on the topic most likely to interest the locals: the economic benefits of rainmaking, including dollar-for-dollar returns in crop yields and better grazing conditions that western farmers could expect if they hired someone like him.
After all that, Professor Resnick was going to report on a study showing that rainmaking didn’t work, and Herbert Thom would denounce the methods of statistical analysis that suggested it did.
This was the absurd position Bernie found himself in. He wasn’t one of the boosters, the salesmen who drove the Weather Bureau mad with their unsubstantiated claims. He wasn’t even as big an advocate as Langmuir, who was now declaring that cloud seeding was probably causing most of the nation’s weather glitches by altering cyclonic development. Langmuir had finally succeeded in getting the Project Cirrus generators in Socorro turned off and was expecting the periodicity to vanish, finally proving irrefutably that silver iodide was its cause.
But if Bernie wasn’t an unthinking promoter, he wasn’t a naysayer either, one of the people Irving called “wet blankets” who made it their mission to prove that rainmaking was hokum. Bernie believed that it probably worked and that they should quit bickering and get down to investigating possible unintended results. Because ever since the Great Plains floods, Bernie had been growing more alarmed.
Earlier that month, Bernie had voluntarily attended the Project Cirrus steering committee meeting. Afterward, he wrote a letter to the Signal Corps’ Dr. Michael Ference, head of the committee. He had attended the meeting, he said, because he was concerned about the possible relationship between cloud seeding and floods. Langmuir was convinced there was a connection, and the Weather Bureau was convinced there wasn’t. Bernie didn’t quite know what to think, but he thought the floods that summer had been tragic. If they were preventable, it was even more tragic.
Bernie politely suggested that Project Cirrus release a measured statement. He thought it could be worded so that it simply pointed out potential dangers without provoking controversy. It was important that people racing to use this new technology understand that it might have unintended human consequences.
“Project Cirrus is supported by the public, and it seems to me that it is very clearly our responsibility to inform the public to the best of our ability,” he wrote. “If we fail to do this now, and new floods occur which can possibly be attributed to the cloud seeding, I think we will rightfully share in the blame and deserve the harshest criticism.”
The kind of criticism, that is, that he was reading in almost every story his brother wrote.
“I have taken the liberty of expressing my views to you despite the fact that I am not a member of the Steering Committee,” Bernie wrote in closing, “because I feel I have a share in the responsibility involved.”
He was sticking his neck out because he wanted to do what was right. He wouldn’t let love of his invention blind him to his duty to humanity.
Bernie still loved the science. But here in Minneapolis, it was more obvious than ever that the very topic of rainmaking caused people to behave in completely unscientific ways. They either became fanatical crusaders or closed-minded skeptics. They either hoped to profit from it before the science was complete or refused to believe any science that didn’t fit with their preconceived ideas. Where were the calm voices of reason that might keep real harm from being done?
It was not unlike what was going on in the nation, in the world in fact. Russia was evil, and America was good. Or, if you were Russian, the Soviet Union was good, and America was evil. Politics was not even a battleground anymore; it had become a kind of puppet theater where caricatures of goodness browbeat caricatures of evil, and no one wanted to hear the more complex story told.
Science—real science—was always a complex story. It was rare for things to be black-and-white, for evidence to be irrefutable and results to be obvious to all. Science was a conversation; it was the back-and-forth dialogue that mattered. When the dialogue degenerated into fanaticism and politics, it no longer functioned as science. Finding the truth and mapping the best course of action became impossible.
Bernie gave his paper on the spray-nozzle generator to the assembled meteorologists and farmers. He would publish it, giving co-authorship to Kiah Maynard. But it would be his last published paper on making rain.
* * *
Collier’s special issue, “Preview of the War We Do Not Want,” hit newsstands in late October. The cover depicted a sorrowful but grimly determined American MP standing in front of a colorful map of the Soviet Union. The word “occupied” was stamped on the Ukraine, and a UN flag was planted on Moscow. The list of writers underneath the picture was impressive: Robert Sherwood, Arthur Koestler, Walter Winchell, Edward R. Murrow, J. B. Priestley, Philip Wylie. It would have been nice to see Kurt Vonnegut Jr. among them. But in the place of “The Commandant’s Desk” was a limp story by John Savage called “Trouble at Tuaviti,” in which a brave American missionary and his loyal Pacific Islanders foil a Soviet sneak attack.
Kurt read the issue with growing distaste. The whole magazine treated atomic war as something that could be won—that would be won, naturally, by the United States. And then everything would come out okay in the end, because for America everything always did. The issue was lavishly illustrated: Washington, D.C., after a nuclear bomb assault; parachutists dropping into the Ural Mountains; Grand Central Terminal after a bombing; women packing a Moscow stadium for the first post-Soviet fashion show—because of course after atomic war has devastated the planet, the first thing a woman’s mind turns to is hemlines and hats. Collier’s must be raking in the profits, because the issue was packed with advertising: General Motors, Body by Fisher, Pall Mall, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Firestone, Frigidaire, and of course GE, using the prospect of World War III to sell washing machines.
Kurt particularly disliked Philip Wylie’s story, “Philadelphia Phase,” a sentimental love triangle between an American officer, his blue-blooded girlfriend, and a Russian immigrant, set in a nuclear-war-ravaged Philly. It turns out the Russian girl has been made sterile by radiation, so she kills herself, leaving the hero to go back to his Main Line sweetheart. Boy gets girl, even amid the inconvenience of atomic holocaust.
“The Commandant’s Desk” had been true to the grating inhumanity of war and the moral hazards of occupation. It had treated soldiers as complicated human beings and war as a threat to our better selves. That, Kurt knew, was why his name wasn’t flying off the newsstands with the rest of them.
But he couldn’t spend time worrying about it. He had more important work to do. Scribner’s Harry Brague, who was editing Player Piano, had written to say that he loved the new inserts about the shah of Bratpuhr. He assured Kurt that this was going to be a good novel, a novel Scribner would be proud to publish. And while not pressuring him exactly—the publisher did want him to write the best book he could—he informed Kurt that in order to make the spring list, the book needed to be in Scribner’s hands by November 15. That was less than a month away, and there was still quite a lot to go. Paul Proteus had come to his crossroads, the place where he would have to decide whether he was a company man or a rebel. He would either inform on the revolution or join it.
When he started the novel, Kurt had not known what Paul would do. He had made several outlines. Ed Finnerty would become a revolutionary, but Paul would side with the machines. Or Finnerty would rebel, and Paul would reluctantly testify against him. Or Finnerty would persuade Paul to join the revolution, and Anita would testify against Ed to get Paul back.
By October, he had made up his mind. He was going further than any of his previous endings. Dr. Paul Proteus, having quit his job, would accept the role of leader of the revolution and would refuse to inform on his fellow rebels, even though he would lose everything for it—his wife, career, friends, status.
It was his first scientist character since Professor Barnhouse who would refuse to let love of his invention blind him to his duty to humanity.
He brought it all to a head at the Meadows. Here was a chance to expose the absurdity of Camp General Electric, that craven corporate pep rally on Association Island, and he used all the ammunition he had. The men arrive at the island by boat, just as in real life. They line up for flag-raising ceremonies under the old oak—counterpart to GE’s treasured elm. They are divided into four color teams and attend a play that seems to be directly based on Lemuel Boulware’s skit for 1948, the summer Vince Schaefer and the News Bureau’s Roger Hammond attended. The loudspeaker at the Meadows blasts songs from the Association Island songbook.
As he wrote the Meadows section, Kurt wove in two new storylines that were also rooted in his GE experience. In one, Dr. Ewing Halyard of the State Department gets a letter informing him that he never completed his physical education requirements at Cornell, invalidating his undergraduate degree. With no bachelor’s degree, “he had never been entitled to his Ph.D., his classification numbers, or, more to the point, to his pay check.” Halyard is put on probation until he can make up the missing credits. He goes to Cornell, only to discover that the head of the athletic department is still angry about a letter Halyard wrote to the alumni magazine complaining about the football team’s rowdy postgame behavior at an establishment called Club Cybernetics. The coach takes his opportunity for payback, flunking Halyard on his PE exam. Halyard will never get his degree, and he will lose his job because of it.
In another section, the shah of Bratpuhr experiences a bout of lust. He begins shouting untranslated but obviously indecent suggestions to women from the window of his limousine: “Pitty fit-fit, sibi Takaru? Niki fit-fit. Akka sahn nibo fit-fit, simi Takaru?” A reluctant Halyard prepares to play pimp; he’s done it before. But then a woman hearing the shah’s catcalls agrees to get in the car. She seems like a normal American housewife, and Halyard tries to tell her that she has made a mistake. The woman says she knows exactly what she’s doing. “He was asking for something, wasn’t he?” Halyard says yes. “There’s been no misunderstanding,” she tells them. She has agreed to prostitute herself because her husband has been fired. Four days earlier he had the classification number W-441, or “fiction novice.” He turned in a book that was beautifully written, but twenty-seven pages too long, almost ten points above the acceptable “readability quotient,” and with an anti-machine theme.
“So he was ordered into public-relations duty,” she concludes.
“So the story has a happy ending after all,” Halyard says.
“Hardly. He refused,” the wife tells them. Halyard is shocked that a man would rather have his wife prostitute herself than go into public relations. “I’m proud to say,” the woman replies, “that he’s one of the few men on earth with a little self-respect left.”
That was him, of course, the novel bending back on itself to suggest that Player Piano might be the very book—twenty-seven pages too long, ten points beyond readability, with an anti-machine theme—written by a writer husband who despises PR. It was the first of Vonnegut’s many surprise cameos—Hitchcock-like—in his own novels. Together the two tangential stories—Halyard’s and the writer’s—reflected the anxieties that had colored his time at GE. Kurt lacked the degree that made him worthy of his rank and pay scale, and he had been improperly consigned to public relations, a job he ultimately refused. His novel thus raised and vanquished the twin demons that had haunted him at GE: the fear that he didn’t fit in, and the fear that he did.
And he did it at the same time that he was resolving his feelings about Paul Proteus, the scientist inventor, the golden boy of the Ilium Works who must choose between an easy life as a company man and what he knows in his heart is right. When he is captured in a raid on a Ghost Shirt meeting, Paul is given a stark choice. He can claim he was acting as a spy and name the leaders of the revolution. Or he can confess to having joined the revolution, forever destroying his chance of returning to his comfortable place among the elite. Paul recognizes the mythic quality of his decision:
Here it was again, the most ancient of roadforks, one that Paul had glimpsed before, in Kroner’s study, months ago. The choice of one course or the other had nothing to do with machines, hierarchies, economics, love, age. It was a purely internal matter. Every child older than six knew the fork, and knew what the good guys did here, and what the bad guys did here …
Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn’t—no matter when, no matter what.
Paul Proteus would end the novel as a good guy. He would claim his position as leader of the Ghost Shirt Society and happily accept the manifesto written in his name by one of the revolution’s leaders, the political science professor Ludwig von Neumann.
Ludwig von Neumann is so unlike John von Neumann it seems likely his name was selected for irony. When the revolution backfires, it’s he who bemoans the fact that the revolutionaries failed to destroy EPICAC. His manifesto ends with an incantatory list of affirmations of what is human in human beings:
I hold, and the members of the Ghost Shirt Society hold:
That there must be virtue in imperfection, for Man is imperfect, and Man is a creation of God.
That there must be virtue in frailty, for Man is frail, and Man is a creation of God.
That there must be virtue in inefficiency, for Man is inefficient, and Man is a creation of God.
That there must be virtue in brilliance followed by stupidity, for Man is alternately brilliant and stupid, and Man is a creation of God.
You perhaps disagree with the antique and vain notion of Man’s being a creation of God.
But I find it a far more defensible belief than the one implicit in intemperate faith in lawless technological progress—namely, that man is on earth to create more durable and efficient images of himself, and, hence, to eliminate any justification at all for his own continued existence.
Imperfection, frailty, inefficiency, stupidity: these were precisely the qualities John von Neumann had dedicated his life to eradicating not just in meteorology but in every human endeavor.
Kurt mailed the final manuscript to his editor Harry Brague with a stipulation. If Scribner liked the novel and decided to publish, it must never publicize his relationship with General Electric. The company, he explained, was holding a hostage: Bernie. He did not want his brother’s career put at risk because of something he had written.
For the first time in his life, Kurt found himself in the position of looking out for his older brother.
* * *
More than four hundred people crammed into New York’s Roosevelt Hotel for the January 1952 AMS meeting. But to those who were paying attention, the tide had turned. The Weather Bureau campaign was beginning to vanquish belief in rainmaking.
The Weather Bureau scientists were taking a more diplomatic tone; ever since the disaster of the May Senate hearings, McDonald’s pounding fist had been thudding in Chief Reichelderfer’s head. Congress controlled the bureau’s budget: the negative press after McDonald’s outburst had cost it real money! The campaign was now being conducted mostly behind the scenes. Weather Bureau analysts were double-checking all the Project Cirrus data, and Harry Wexler was ever present in the background, quietly making sure anyone who was exposed to Project Cirrus heard the Weather Bureau’s side of things too. Most important, Weather Bureau statisticians were working to disprove Langmuir’s claims.
Langmuir was unconcerned. He didn’t mind that his AMS meeting talk on the seven-day periodicities was scheduled for a panel with two Weather Bureau statisticians. He actually thought their work would help him to prove that his seeding had caused the weather periodicities. In fact, it was doing the opposite. For all his brilliance, Langmuir had failed to see the irremediable flaw in his method pinpointed by the bureau statisticians. Langmuir’s calculations of probabilities for rainfall in seeded areas assumed that rain in one area could be considered independently of rain in the next—that in looking for patterns, he could treat rainfall levels as if they were random numbers. But rain in one place is probabilistically related to rain in a place nearby; a touch in one place eddies and flows, setting up a touch in the next, and so on, until you have reached the other side of the earth.
It was the statisticians who would, in the end, cast the Project Cirrus research into doubt and consign Irving Langmuir, once the nation’s most famous chemist, to a marginal place in the history of science. Irving did not see it coming. He did not see that his whole way of doing science—his generalist, do-it-yourself, paper-clip-and-string mode of Victorian science—had become a liability. Science was being sorted into silos, and interaction between them was strictly regulated. As a chemist who had strayed into meteorology and then statistics, his failure to stick to his specialty branded him an outlier, someone who could safely be ignored.
Only one group of people considered him relevant. Recently, two officers from the Joint Chiefs of Staff had approached Irving and said they’d like to meet him in Schenectady to discuss military applications of weather control. Happily, he gave them his contact information. He had already renewed his security clearance, expecting he would soon be working directly with the military. Word was getting around that GE planned to discontinue Project Cirrus as of July, the end of the current contract. Under the reign of “Razor Ralph” Cordiner, the company was being reorganized into business units—even the Research Lab. Lab managers were given orders to organize teams of researchers to carry out prescribed projects—projects that were likely to lead to monetary results for GE. Doc Whitney’s question, “Are you having fun today?” was no longer the watchword in the House of Magic.
After the AMS meeting, Irving returned to his island on Lake George, where he was now conducting most of his work. Visitors and colleagues who wanted to talk to him had to write in advance, because he had no telephone on the island. Then they would go to the Adirondack town of Bolton Landing, where arrangements would be made for Langmuir’s Chris-Craft, Wendy, to bring them across Lake George to the laureate’s leafy Neverland.
* * *
What are people for? Kurt was pondering that on Christmas Eve. The line was the very heart of the novel, the most succinct statement of his theme, and his editor Harry Brague had cut it out.
Editors!
Player Piano wound down with a failed revolution. After refusing to rat out the insurgents, Paul is tried for treason. During his trial, the Ghost Shirt Society starts an uprising, freeing Paul and aiming to take the world back for humanity. But the attack on the machines rapidly turns into a free-for-all. Drunk on destruction—and on liberated booze—the people smash everything from the Ilium Works assembly lines to bakeries and sewage disposal plants. Weakly, Paul, Finnerty, and the other leaders try to stop them from destroying the useful machines, but it’s hopeless. There is no middle ground between fanatical love of the system and fanatical hate. Technology is either an absolute good or an absolute evil: the more complex story Paul wanted to tell is lost in the joyous upheaval of the downtrodden taking charge of their destinies.
Homestead is isolated by government troops, who refuse to come in and help clean up the mess until the revolution’s leaders are handed over. Paul and the others briefly hope to build a truly human existence: to chop wood and grow food and build shelters. But, in a final irony, as soon as the frenzy of ruin has given way to the cold light of day, people miss the machines. The revolution’s leaders come upon a group gathered around a smashed vending machine that once dispensed a soda called Orange-O. Everyone has always hated Orange-O, but they are cheering on a comrade as he repairs the machine. The people, it seems, are doomed to reassemble the very world that had oppressed them.
Remarkably prescient, Player Piano foresaw a world divided between well-educated whiz-kid executives who believe technology is the answer to every human problem and alienated service workers showered with shiny new techno-gadgets in place of real roles as citizens. At the center of this world is the computer, deified by the paternalistic, paranoid culture of the modern corporation. Previous dystopian novels taught readers to look for hope in the success of the revolution—or despair in its failure. Winston Smith’s revolution fails in 1984, leading to his brutal torture and “re-education.” Bernard Marx’s attempt to escape the system in Brave New World leads to his exile. The dark irony of Player Piano is that no torture, no exile, is required. Before the revolution’s smoke has even cleared, the rebels are at work rebuilding the very technology they revolted against, because technology tells far too seductive a lie. It tells us we can transcend our banal physical limitations; we can travel at the speed of sound, think at the speed of light, live forever in a shiny digital Eden. We humans, the novel implies, will always crave Orange-O machines and computers and video games and iPhones and self-driving cars, even if we suspect that these false gods are robbing us of our humanity.
Disconsolately, Paul and the other leaders turn themselves over to the state.
The original draft of Player Piano concluded with a scene between Ewing J. Halyard and the shah of Bratpuhr. Halyard decides to escape demotion by immigrating to Bratpuhr with the shah. But the shah explains that he will be a slave there if he can’t rotate his navel. Halyard rages at the ridiculousness of assigning status based on something so pointless, but the shah is implacable. So Halyard performs his last duty as a member of the State Department, offering the shah and Bratpuhr an American “modernization” package that will endow them with all the machines and computers necessary to re-create the American economy. The shah refuses, instead giving Halyard one more question for EPICAC: “What are people for?”
That question was the one Kurt wanted to leave ringing in the reader’s head. But early in November, Kenneth Littauer had called to say that Harry Brague didn’t like Kurt’s ending at all. The whole book contract hung in the balance. Kurt flew down to New York to meet with Harry in person and figure out a better conclusion. Together, the writer and the editor decided that it was wrong for the book to end on Halyard. The protagonist was Paul; the story should end with him.
Kurt wrote a new conclusion to follow the shah’s departure, an epilogue in which, seventeen years after the failed revolution, Paul Proteus is released from prison and comes home to his farmhouse to find his former boss Kroner waiting to welcome him. Paul has spent his incarcerated years as the prison librarian, and his embrace of classic literature has given him a new, more spiritual view of life. He recognizes that the world will always change, and he just hopes humans can hold on to their spiritual values despite the relentless forward march of technology.
Harry Brague didn’t hate the new conclusion, and at long last he issued Kurt a contract for the book. But after reading it a few times, the editor wondered if the epilogue was necessary. In fact, he thought Kurt could dispense with the last two chapters, ending the novel on the willing surrender of Paul and other leaders of the revolution. It would be a starker ending, and more serious. Kenneth Littauer thought it would make the novel feel pessimistic, but Kurt liked the idea. It might leave people wondering, arguing: Was the ending happy or sad? Was the writer an optimist or a pessimist? Was there hope for humanity? He wanted his novel, like Orwell’s or Huxley’s or Koestler’s, to start conversations, arguments even.
But he was unwilling to lose the shah’s question for EPICAC: What are people for?
The question is reminiscent of the penultimate chapter of Norbert Wiener’s Human Use of Human Beings. “Our papers have been making a great deal of American ‘know-how’ ever since we had the misfortune to discover the atomic bomb,” Wiener wrote. “There is one quality more important than know-how and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is ‘know-what’: by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.” In order to explain the difference between “know-how” and “know-what,” Wiener gave the example of a “prominent American engineer” who bought an expensive player piano. But the engineer was not interested in the music; he was interested in the piano’s mechanism. “For this gentleman,” Wiener wrote, “the player piano was not a means of producing music, but a means of giving some inventor the chance of showing how skillful he was at overcoming certain difficulties in the production of music.”
On perhaps the last innocently joyous night of his life, just before he heard that Hitler had invaded Poland, Kurt had spent an evening with his buddies at Woolaroc Ranch in Oklahoma, smoking cigars and loading rolls of music into the player piano. They hadn’t been interested in the piano’s mechanism, in the know-how of it. They had been interested in hearing the tunes while they hung out, a tribe of three, enjoying one another’s company. Like his brother, Kurt loved music: jazz and classical and the Beatles—it all partakes of the know-what, the higher truth that gives beauty and purpose to human existence. It’s the music, not the mechanism, that people are for.
So, on Christmas Eve, Kurt found a place earlier in the book where the shah’s question “What are people for?” could be reinserted, and he typed up an insert and mailed it to Harry Brague. And with that, his first novel was complete.
Kurt was so excited for the book to come out he could hardly stand it. He was eager for the royalties to start rolling in. He needed the money. Harry told him to sit tight and put the book out of his head. Get going on the next one, he advised. The only thing left to do now was to write a dedication, if he wanted one. Kurt sent one back right away: “For Jane—God bless her.”
When the galleys of his first book arrived in March, he thought they were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He wrote to Harry suggesting a few people to whom Scribner should send advance copies of the book, hoping they might help spread the word. One of them was Norbert Wiener.
* * *
John von Neumann’s computer was a thing of beauty. There it sat, eight feet long, six feet high, and two feet wide—a Corvette in a world that until now had only seen 18-wheelers. At a mere thousand pounds, it was smaller and sleeker than Harry Wexler had ever imagined a computer could be. It had twenty-three hundred vacuum tubes and forty raked cylinders along its sides and would be faster than ENIAC by far, doing 2,000 multiplications or 100,000 additions per second. It would whip through a twenty-four-hour forecast in a mere three hours.
In other words, it had roughly as much computing power as the kind of handheld calculator you might find in a cereal box today. And it was going to revolutionize computing.
It was May 1952, and von Neumann and his engineers were still working out the kinks, but the computer was finally operating. And unlike ENIAC, it didn’t break down all the time. The summer before, it had run smoothly for sixty straight days doing a large thermonuclear calculation. Soon it was going to start in on the weather. The Meteorology Project’s mathematical model had been growing increasingly complex, but the team believed it was sophisticated enough to predict cyclogenesis. As Harry Wexler had suggested, they were going to test the new equations by attempting to predict the formation of the 1950 Thanksgiving Storm.
A year from now, the computer would successfully forecast the cyclogenesis that led to the Thanksgiving Storm of 1950, proving that the so-called Rainmakers’ Flood was a predictable act of nature. But even now, before that triumph, when Harry looked at the computer, he felt the satisfaction of having reached a peak he had only vaguely discerned during the long ascent. The days of predicting the weather using history and human intuition were about to end. Imperfection, frailty, and inefficiency were not part of Johnnie’s new machine. The atmosphere could be understood deterministically. It could be reduced to equations and solved. And after the atmosphere, what next? The computer would continue to grow speedier and smarter, would solve more and more human problems. Harry Wexler was looking at the future not just of weather but of technology. The future of science. Of humanity. He was seeing a world just like that of Player Piano, but unlike Kurt, he had no problem with it.
One of the project engineers later summed up the magnitude of that moment in history. “A tidal wave of computational power was about to break and inundate everything in science and much elsewhere,” he wrote, “and things would never be the same.”
* * *
Guy Suits had asked Bernie to come see him. Bernie figured it was about his future at GE.
Project Cirrus was officially shut down. GE was getting out of weather modification; the liabilities were too big and the profit potential too small. Vincent and Bernie were unhappy about it, but there was nothing they could do. Under the new regime of Razor Ralph, they had to work on what they were told to work on.
The most fun Bernie had had at work lately was trying to “play” a germanium crystal on the Project Cirrus facsimile machine. It hadn’t worked. The etched surface of germanium had a complicated structure, like a record, but the facsimile machine was not sensitive enough to pick up its signal. It had been worth a try. Purified germanium was a semiconductor, and its structure had been of great interest to the entire world since 1948, when scientists at Bell Labs had introduced the world to a new device that used a germanium semiconductor: the transistor.
Transistors! These tiny, pea-sized devices were all anyone could talk about. Smaller, faster, more durable, and more efficient than vacuum tubes, transistors were going to revolutionize electronics. It was the dawning of a new age for that industry, which experts predicted would soon grow to rival the chemical industry. Forget about better living through chemistry: better living through electronics was the future now. Power transfer, communications, lighting—even thinking was going to be done by transistors one day. There would be televisions half the current size! Radios that could fit in your pocket! Computers that could sit on a desk! They were all just around the corner because of Bell Labs’ new invention.
Everyone wanted in on the promising new product, and GE was no exception. Research Lab scientists were being redeployed to the semiconductor section, Bernie among them. Vincent, too, was told that he should consider taking up semiconductors now that GE was divesting itself of weather.
Bernie wrote up his research in Research Lab Report RL-723: “Variations in the Contact Resistance of a Copper Point Moving over Etched Surface of Germanium Crystal.” Diodes were interesting, but his heart wasn’t in semiconductors and transistors. And he didn’t want to be told what to research.
He had begun to look around for other jobs. He was corresponding with Bill Hubert, formerly with Project Cirrus, who was now at the Institute of Meteorology in Stockholm. The institute wanted a good cloud physics man to come to Stockholm for a few months. Bill had suggested Bernie, and Bernie was tempted. But Sweden was a big trip for the family, and he had also received a job offer from Arthur D. Little, a private research company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Arthur D. Little conducted research in many different fields, and its scientists had more control of what they worked on than scientists at the GE Research Lab did now.
Guy Suits had clearly gotten wind of the fact that Bernie was thinking of leaving GE. When Bernie got to his office, Suits had a speech prepared. It was a big step Bernie was thinking of taking, he said. He hoped Bernie wouldn’t take the decision to leave GE lightly. After all, there were a lot of factors to weigh.
“One of the things you must consider,” he declared, “is your equity in the pension plan.”
Here it was again, that same fork in the road that had confronted his brother. Of course, the choice at hand had nothing to do with pension plans, Quarter Century Clubs, appliances, or clambakes. It was purely an internal matter. Every kid past sixteen knew this fork, what the good guys did here, and the bad guys. Good guys stayed true to their love of science, their pursuit of knowledge for the good of humanity. Bad guys were venal. They made choices based on money.
Bernie knew at that moment, listening to Guy Suits, that he had made his decision and that it was the right one. He would leave GE, which in 1952 was no longer the company that had hired him in 1945. It had changed, radically. But then, so too had the nation.
And so, in fact, had he.
* * *
Kurt was crushed: Norbert Wiener hated Player Piano.
It was the latest in a series of small crises in the run-up to the publication that had left Kurt a nervous wreck. First he spent a couple of weeks worrying that a soda company somewhere might actually make something called Orange-O and that it would sue him for saying no one liked it. He had persuaded Harry Brague to have the Scribner lawyers look into it. The lawyers could find no evidence of a real Orange-O.
Then he had somehow got it in his head that Scribner was holding off publishing the book until fall, nearly a year after he’d completed it, and he freaked out, fearing he wouldn’t get any royalties until he and his family had starved. Harry assured him that the book was slated for late summer. Somewhat reassured, Kurt retired to his study to write promotional taglines and sketch ideas for the cover. He sent these to Harry, who ignored them, along with Kurt’s concepts for marketing campaigns and avowals that his next book would be better.
But this latest blow was the worst of all. Norbert Wiener had written Scribner a scathing letter. Kurt thought Wiener would love the novel! After all, Wiener’s ideas were threaded throughout the whole book. Kurt even had Paul Proteus credit him with the idea of the second industrial revolution. He’d asked Scribner to send Wiener the book because he thought the mathematician would take it as a kind of tribute. Instead, Wiener accused Kurt of setting the novel in a dystopian future in order to avoid indicting what was actually happening in science today.
It was a problem Kurt would bump into over and over in his career. People would read his work as some sort of futuristic science fantasy, persisting in seeing his books as comic space operas and druggy head trips, when he thought he was writing pointed social satire.
In 1973, David Standish would ask him in Playboy why he had turned to science fiction for his first novel. Kurt told him about working at General Electric and seeing things like the automated milling machine.
“So science fiction seemed like the best way to write about your thoughts on the subject,” Standish pressed.
“There was no avoiding it,” Kurt said, “since the General Electric Company was science fiction.”
It’s unclear what set Wiener off, though he was notoriously touchy about his ideas being co-opted, often declaring himself “not a Wienerian.” Yet Kurt had captured exactly the moral questions raised in Cybernetics and The Human Use of Human Beings, questions Wiener would continue to explore in later works like God and Golem Inc. It may be that some of Wiener’s hostility resulted from jealousy. He had literary aspirations himself—he published science fiction stories in the MIT magazine Tech Engineering News and would write a novel in 1959—and Kurt had conveyed many of Wiener’s ideas in a form more accessible and enjoyable than the mathematician’s own.
Wiener seemed most upset by the fact that Kurt had used his friend John von Neumann’s name for one of the novel’s revolutionaries. In his letter, he told the folks at Scribner to tell Vonnegut “he cannot with impunity … play fast and loose with the names of living people.” This of course is balderdash: writers play fast and loose with the names of living people all the time. What really upset Wiener might have been that Professor Ludwig von Neumann—described as “a slight, disorderly old man who had taught political science at Union College in Schenectady”—might better have been called Ludwig Wiener. Ludwig von Neumann sounds absolutely Wienerian when he declares in his Ghost Shirt manifesto, “Without regard for the wishes of men, any machines or techniques or forms of organization that can economically replace men do replace men. Replacement is not necessarily bad, but to do it without regard for the wishes of men is lawlessness.”
After Scribner forwarded Wiener’s letter, Kurt and Jane spent a couple of days fantasizing about suitably mean retorts. Then Kurt wrote Wiener a chilly note thanking him for troubling himself with Player Piano and stating that he felt his indictment of contemporary science should be clear. He apologized for having innocently given offense, claiming he had picked the name von Neumann at random. He might have thought he did, but Kurt never picked names at random. He pulled them from his personal store of words with private significance. Senator Warren Foust in “Barnhouse” was likely suggested by Commander Elwood Faust, one of Project Cirrus’s key pilots. Winston Niles Rumfoord of The Sirens of Titan and Bertram Copeland Rumfoord of Slaughterhouse-Five were almost surely born of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, who endowed the Rumford Prize won by Irving Langmuir. George M. Helmholtz, a recurring character in Vonnegut’s stories, invokes the mathematician Hermann von Helmholtz, whose equation was utilized in much of the Project Cirrus work. GE names, like GE ideas, would surface persistently and evocatively in everything Kurt ever wrote.
In mid-August, Player Piano landed in bookstores across the country—except for those in Schenectady. Not one bookstore in GE’s company town would agree to stock it; every bookseller made an improbable excuse. Bernie had received his copy, signed with love from Kurt. He had probably already read it when the review in The New York Times Book Review came out. On August 17, 1952, the eminent critic Granville Hicks praised the book’s humor, calling Kurt a “sharp-eyed satirist.”
“It is a little like Brave New World,” Hicks wrote, “except that Mr. Vonnegut keeps his future closer to the present than Aldous Huxley succeeded in doing, and his satire therefore focuses more sharply on the contemporary situation. The machines he is talking about are not gadgets he has dreamed up; they are in existence, as he is careful to point out.”
The next day was Bernie’s last day at the GE Research Lab. Between the final edits and the Orange-O freak-out, the Wiener letter and The New York Times, somewhere in there Bernard Vonnegut had walked into the office of Guy Suits and handed in his official resignation.
Later, he would say that his career at GE ended when he went on vacation and someone cleaned off his desk. Whether or not the story was true, it was an elegant way of expressing the choice he had made at his own crossroads, a choice to trust his own messy, imperfect spirit over the order and efficiency of GE. Confident he was doing the right thing, Bernie turned in his keys, his all-hours pass, his patent notebook, his lab supplies, his meters and instruments, and his K parking permit, and he walked out of the Knolls Research Lab. He didn’t look back.
The secretary carefully filled out his termination sheet, noting his new address: 704 Country Way, North Scituate, Massachusetts. His new home was close to the ocean and close to Kurt and Jane.
For the first time in his life, Bernie was following in his brother’s footsteps, instead of the other way around.
* * *
In June 1953, a mile-wide tornado plowed through Worcester, Massachusetts. Tornadoes in Massachusetts are rare, and the storm cell that spawned this one was so huge that people on Cape Cod could see it as it churned northeast, killing ninety-four people and leaving ten thousand more homeless in the eighty-four minutes it took to get to the coast. Later it was called the Worcester Twister and given a rare F4 rating on the Fujita scale.
As news of the storm broke, Bernie went down to the beach in Scituate with his camera to watch the giant stomp across the Boston area. The storm was about 160 kilometers away, but he could see its electrical discharges filling the sky. Blinking his eyes as fast as he could, he couldn’t get a glimpse of the storm not lit up by lightning. The release of all that energy must be heating the air and creating updrafts, which could explain the storm’s size. He estimated the storm’s top to be about twenty kilometers up, in the stratosphere, which would mean its vertical winds were traveling upward at a hundred meters a second. The lightning was still going like gangbusters when the storm reached the shore and headed out to sea.
He was as awed as he had been as a kid, when he snuck out of the house in Chatham and went down to the ocean. He was witnessing a firestorm made by nature. Scientists didn’t even know if the winds caused the lightning or the lightning caused the winds. But Bernie had an intuition that electrical charge might play a larger role than people thought.
The original impulse behind Project Cirrus was a simple mystery: What makes clouds give rain? But the query about the natural world had nearly been lost in a whirlwind of controversy and competing desires. The military men wanted weapons, the commercial rainmakers wanted profits, GE wanted free publicity, and the meteorologists wanted to protect their turf.
In 1953, Congress appointed the new Advisory Committee on Weather Control to investigate, once more, whether the government should conduct research on the topic. Bernie was asked to write a report for the committee. Five years later, when congressional hearings were held, he asked to testify. Of his own volition, he wrote up a statement on House Bill 86. The bill, he said, was based on a false premise: that anyone could know what kind of research would lead to weather control. In fact, he told them, Vince’s original experiment had been driven by the desire to understand how nature works, not by a desire to control it.
“I believe the best way to achieve weather control,” he wrote, “will be to sponsor basic research in the physical sciences necessary to the understanding of weather.”
That same year, Commander William Kotsch of the U.S. Navy wrote to Bernie asking for a copy of his report on the uses of weather as a weapon. Bernie sent him a copy of the report he wrote for the Advisory Committee on Weather Control. But the commander was bound to be disappointed, he said. He dealt “very sketchily” with the use of weather as a weapon.
In fact, he didn’t mention it at all.
After leaving GE for Arthur D. Little, Bernie would sometimes accept funding from the military. But never again would he work on something that had obvious military applications. Instead, he began developing a new theory about thunderstorms, proposing that updrafts and downdrafts caused electrical charge in thunderclouds and that electrical charge led to rain, instead of vice versa. One of his cleverest experiments concerned the fact that thunderstorms almost always have a positive charge at the top and a negative charge at the bottom. One summer in New Mexico, Bernard and his colleague Charlie Moore strung a two-kilometer wire between two mountains to release negative charge. When thunderstorms came through and encountered the negative charge, they reversed their polarity. Over the course of two weeks, Bernie and Charlie Moore created three storms that discharged positive charge to the ground—electrical storms turned electrically upside down. It was perhaps his best joke on nature. Bernie spent much of the rest of his life marshaling evidence for his theory about electrical charge in thunderstorms, but he once admitted he wasn’t really driven by the need to prove it.
“I’m [just] trying to find out,” he said, “what’s going on.”
He no longer wanted to control. He wanted to know. And the purpose of knowing was not, in the end, to banish mystery. It was to appreciate it. To note how it glows.
* * *
In May 1954, Kurt tried and failed to get a job at Time Inc. He was broke. Player Piano had received a few polite notices but had not sold well and had quickly faded from view. It had not made his fortune or his name. Worse, Collier’s had stopped buying his stories. The short story market was shrinking. And Jane was pregnant with their third child. Desperate for income, he sent Harry Brague at Scribner all he had, six chapters of a book he was now calling Cat’s Cradle.
That month, Collier’s published a sensational cover story called “Weather Made to Order?” Written by Howard Orville, chair of the Advisory Committee on Weather Control, the piece trotted out all of the most dramatic claims about the coming era of man-made weather: hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms would be quelled; deserts and dust bowls would bloom; forest fires and floods would be prevented. Weather would be used as a weapon, deluging enemies with rain or causing them to starve by preventing it. According to Collier’s, this was all laudable, American enterprise at its finest.
Knox Burger was not at Collier’s anymore; he had left to become a book editor at Dell. Kurt’s last two stories for Collier’s, “Poor Little Rich Town” and “With His Hand on the Throttle,” were both GE based, the first about a GE-type efficiency expert and his attempt to streamline life in a small village and the second about a model railroad fanatic inspired by Herb Hollomon. But the magazine market for fiction was rapidly drying up as popular entertainment was increasingly delivered by television. Collier’s itself would cease publication in 1957.
Kurt could see that clearly enough, and he had turned to writing plays. He had even purchased a television and was starting to write teleplays in the hope of breaking into the new medium. But they weren’t selling. And he couldn’t seem to get very far with the new novel. Ever since the disappointing debut of Player Piano, Kurt had been racked with writer’s block. Harry Brague had encouraged him, trying to convince him that the novel’s reception had actually been good and that he should sit down and write a new one before the public forgot his name. He had even advanced Kurt $500 on the unspecified next novel when Kurt was desperate for cash. It didn’t help.
Harry Brague didn’t quite know what to make of the six chapters Kurt sent of Cat’s Cradle. In fact, it would take ten years and two more books before the former “Ice-9” would morph into Kurt Vonnegut’s breakthrough book. Kurt would fix its problems by stepping back and turning the straightforward adventure story into a story about stories, an adventure stumbled into by a writer-narrator called Jonah who is trying to research a book about the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He wants to call it The Day the World Ended.
In the final version, Dr. George Hoenikker becomes Dr. Felix Hoenikker, “father of the atomic bomb” and inventor of the even more dangerous ice-nine. Dr. Hoenikker is already dead as the book opens, but Jonah researches his book by tracking down Hoenikker’s three children and traveling to Ilium, New York, home to the Research Lab of General Forge and Foundry, where Felix Hoenikker worked. The Research Lab is described as a kind of playground, where “men are paid to increase knowledge … the most valuable commodity on earth.” Felix Hoenikker is its star scientist, viewed by the Research Lab’s main client, the Pentagon, as “a sort of magician who could make America invincible with a wave of his wand.”
As Jonah explores Ilium, he collects stories about Dr. Hoenikker, many of which are versions of stories about Irving Langmuir. Dr. Hoenikker played cat’s cradle with his son Newt—one of Langmuir’s favorite games to play with children. Hoenikker once left a tip for his wife, as Irving had for Marion; he was known to declare, as Kurt had heard Irving say, that any scientist who couldn’t explain his work to a child was a charlatan. A secretary at General Forge and Foundry tells Jonah that Dr. Hoenikker once challenged her to tell him something that was absolutely true, to which she replied, “God is love.” This is what Clare Boothe Luce told Irving Langmuir when they were chatting before appearing on the radio together and he challenged her to think of a statement that was true but not provable. But Langmuir’s comment on the exchange was “She sure had me there!” Kurt has Felix Hoenikker reply, “What is God? What is love?”
The connections between Felix Hoenikker and Irving Langmuir made it clear that, as Kurt would frequently declare in years to come, the absentminded scientist was based on his brother’s former boss. But Felix Hoenikker’s last gift to humanity—ice-nine, “a new way for the atoms of water to stack and lock, to freeze”—that invention was Bernie’s.
“Suppose,” explains Dr. Asa Breed, vice president in charge of the Research Laboratory of General Forge and Foundry,
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 … And suppose … 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.
Dr. Breed tells Jonah to imagine the many ways oranges could be stacked in a crate, or cannonballs piled on a courthouse lawn. It was exactly how Bernie had explained cloud nucleation to Kurt.
One of the things critics rarely understand about Cat’s Cradle is that it is not about the misuse of science. It’s about the failure of people to understand the significance of a scientific advance. The threat in the book is not that scientists will produce something dangerous but that the community won’t recognize it when they do. Felix Hoenikker is a bad guy not because he invented ice-nine but because he failed to warn anyone about it. Only creators can really understand the hazards of what they create: it’s their moral obligation to make sure the rest of the world understands them too.
At GE, Kurt had witnessed his brother trying to do just that.
In putting the story in the mouth of the anthropologist-like Jonah, Kurt made the major breakthrough of shifting the emphasis from Dr. Felix Hoenikker to his three children: Franklin, the genius scientist with “a wiry pompadour … that arose to an incredible height”; Angela, the tall sister who plays the clarinet brilliantly; and Newt, the glum midget who paints pictures. It’s not hard to see the similarity between the names Hoenikker and Vonnegut, or the way in which the Hoenikkers are versions of the three Vonnegut siblings: Bernard, the genius scientist; Alice, the ethereal artist; and Kurt, the glum wordsmith painting clowns as the world goes to hell.
His other main breakthrough was to bring in the outlawed religion of Bokononism. In short, evocatively titled chapters—each about the length of a press release—Kurt gets Jonah and the Hoenikker siblings, each carrying a shard of ice-nine, to the island of San Lorenzo. The banana republic is run, as it was in early drafts, by the dictator Papa Monzano, but it has a new element: Bokonon and his made-up faith.
The conclusion of Cat’s Cradle echoes the earliest drafts of “Ice-9”: the novel ends with apocalypse. Papa Monzano has gotten hold of some of Felix’s ice-nine, and he takes it to kill himself. When the San Lorenzo air force bombs his palace, his body slips into the sea, and the world’s water supply is converted to ice-nine by chain reaction. An epic cyclone reduces most of the planet to rubble. Jonah and his love object, Mona, survive by hiding in a bomb shelter constructed in the palace dungeon. When they emerge, most of the population is dead; for the sad remnant left behind, it’s only a matter of time until they accidentally ingest some ice-nine and their own water molecules seize up. Angela Hoenikker dies when, unconcerned, she picks up a clarinet and plays. Just as in the Vonnegut family by then—Alice died of breast cancer in 1958—the Hoenikker brothers are all that remains of the family. As human history draws to its close, Franklin, the scientist, builds an ant farm and passes his days marveling at ant behavior. When provoked, he issues a “peevish lecture on all the things that people could learn from ants.” It’s a scene reminiscent of the end of “The Petrified Ants,” a story never published in Kurt’s lifetime, where the exiled brothers Josef and Peter marvel at the adaptability of the insects.
“Men could learn a lot from ants, Peter my boy,” Josef tells his younger brother.
“They have, Josef, they have,” Peter replies. “More than they know.”
In Cat’s Cradle, as in “The Petrified Ants,” Kurt used a pair of brothers to address the moral duties of scientists. But in the earlier story, the siblings were meant to be contrasted with each other: the older one morally compromised by conformity, the younger one an individualist working to maintain his integrity. In Cat’s Cradle, the brothers are equally compromised—they both carry shards of ice-nine—and equally ineffective at saving the world. Newt, the younger brother, occupies himself much as Franklin does in the apocalypse. He too is just farting around waiting to die, making paintings with scavenged paint. There’s no wisdom to be gleaned from the end of the world, from destruction on a global scale.
The real hero of Cat’s Cradle is Bokonon, the prophet who admits that his wisdom is based on lies but whose invented religion gives human beings comfort. Like the Ghost Shirt Society in Player Piano and the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent in The Sirens of Titan, Bokononism provides an alternative to the sterile technological belief in truth personified by Felix Hoenikker. It uses false myths and harmless lies—foma—to encourage humans to love one another, to acknowledge their connectedness, and to spend their short time on earth with grace and compassion.
In crafting the creed of Bokononism—for which he would finally, years later, be granted his anthropology degree from the University of Chicago—Kurt found perhaps his best embodiment of the truth he had learned all those years ago in The Brothers Karamazov: If God did not exist, human beings would have to invent him. And if that’s the case, why not invent a kind and loving God, a God who encourages us to find the sacred in nothing more, and nothing less, than our own human selves?
“Let us remember how good it was once here, when we were all together,” Alyosha says at the end of Dostoevsky’s novel, “united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are.” He is appealing to the boys to embrace their best natures in his absence because he is leaving, about to accompany his brother Dmitri to Siberia.
“You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home,” he says. “People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.”
That was the line that Jane’s Swarthmore professor had shared with her and that she shared with Kurt on their honeymoon. Kurt always kept that piece of paper. It reminded him of the sacredness of memory. He had his own sacred memory preserved from childhood, the memory of his childhood swim across Lake Maxinkuckee. Thanks to the way the human mind lets us travel in time, he could revisit that lake anytime he wanted. He could dive in and swim across it just as he had done as a child, his arms and legs churning like an engine, the waves sliding off his body, a body that always looked best, he thought, in the water. In the water, he was beautiful. In the freshwater lake, he was at home. The water would buoy him up, and he would swim, happy to be swimming in what to him was an ocean, the second-largest lake in Indiana, with his sister and his brother at his side.