Marion Mersereau Langmuir had always been game. Her courtship with Irving, consisting of grueling mountain hikes, frigid ski trips, and scrabbles through dirty caves, had won the scientist’s affection away from her prettier, but less intrepid, sister. As Langmuir’s wife, she was the ideal helpmeet, joining him on his travels or staying home with their children, Kenneth and Barbara, while he visited laboratories and attended symposia. She indulged her husband’s obsessions, even hitching up her skirts to climb into a canoe and paddle around Lake George with a payload of boulders to armor shorelines he thought were eroding. She didn’t fuss when, after a long time away, he absentmindedly left her a tip on the breakfast table, and she didn’t even put her foot down when Irving tried to cure Kenneth of a cold by immersing him in hot baths to induce a fever. But when Irving went outside and began setting all their toilet paper on fire—on a weekend when their vacation house was full of guests—she might have thought he had gone too far.
Ever since the Project Cirrus team had returned from New Mexico, Bernie had been coming up with new methods for employing silver iodide. On July 28, he impregnated some tissue paper with silver iodide and burned it in the lab. A couple of hours later, Katharine Blodgett pointed out to him and Irving that enormous banks of cumulus were rolling into Schenectady from the northwest, west, southwest, and southeast. A delighted Langmuir stood at the window watching for half an hour. He was absolutely convinced: Bernie had called up those clouds.
Irving asked Bernie to make him a small bottle of the silver iodide solution, to take along to his house on Crown Island in Lake George. There, on Saturday, he proceeded to impregnate his home’s entire supply of toilet paper with the chemical, laying each sheet in the sun to dry. He used single-thickness and double-thickness paper. The silver iodide, he noted, gave the toilet paper a distinctly yellow color. Once the sheets were dry, he held them one at a time in kitchen tongs and set them alight.
He started burning toilet paper at about 12:20. Less than an hour later, a large cumulus cloud developed over French Mountain, at the south end of Lake George. From his vantage point in the middle of the lake, he watched the small thunderstorm develop, travel southwest, then reverse itself to head northeast. Rain fell on the eastern shore. By 3:20 it was all over.
Eagerly, he burned another ten sheets of toilet paper. Once again, fifty-five minutes later, he saw a cloud forming over French Mountain. It started raining, and this time there was more thunder. Irving went out onto the lake in his motorboat, Penguin. The storm was unlike any he’d ever seen in the thirty years he’d had his house on Crown Island. The wind was blowing hard from the east, and rain was pounding the east side of the lake, but the west side was perfectly dry.
“I believe that silver iodide has done the trick,” he wrote in his notebook. If silver iodide seeding could be done so easily, he noted, there was little hope for government regulation of weather control. After all, anyone with a little chemical know-how and a few rolls of toilet paper could call up a local deluge.
In late August, Irving sat down with Guy Suits and told him what he was thinking. Convinced by William Lewis that a statistical approach would be the only way to prove his results, he had ordered himself a statistics textbook and gone to work proving that Bernie’s New Mexico thunderstorm had produced the heavy rains that followed. Combining their data with all the rainfall and stream gauge figures he could get his hands on, he had come up with a startling conclusion: Bernie had not only triggered a rainstorm back in July; he had produced all the rain that fell on the entire state for twenty-four hours after his generator ran. Irving proposed doing massive experiments with silver iodide, increasing the amounts until they got definite weather modification results over huge areas—say forty thousand square miles. They had found the key to large-scale weather control.
Suits was alarmed. Langmuir’s claims were sweeping, and he was proposing that GE scientists do exactly what Suits and the GE lawyers had ordered them not to do: attempt to effect big changes in the weather. The lab director went to Bernie and Vincent separately and asked them if they agreed with Irving’s conclusions. Had their experiments really caused such huge effects?
Bernie had been there when his generator called up the storm. He had seen it happen. But he was, at bottom, a scientist, and while the results were good, they were not yet definitive. So, like Vince, he gave a guarded reply. Nothing had been scientifically proved, he told Suits. The experiments simply suggested that they should keep exploring cloud seeding with silver iodide.
But Irving, now armed with a basic knowledge of statistics, was irrepressible. He divided the entire state of New Mexico into octants radiating outward from Albuquerque and began collecting the Weather Bureau rainfall data for all of them. He needed to establish the statistical proof that their cloud seeding had modified the weather. Once he had done that, he could go on to tell the world the new idea that was brewing in his head: he was becoming more and more convinced that the weather was going to be easier to control than to predict. That’s because it was a perfect example of a divergent phenomenon.
For decades, Langmuir had been working out a theory of two types of phenomena in the world: convergent and divergent. He defined convergent phenomena as those “in which the behavior of the system can be determined from the average behavior of its component parts”—in other words, phenomena in which the normal laws of cause and effect apply. If you do X, you can be pretty sure the result will be Y. Convergent phenomena are things like the laws of classical physics and the orbits of the planets. Divergent phenomena are “those in which a single discontinuous event (which may depend upon a single quantum change) becomes magnified in its effect so that the behavior of the whole aggregate does depend upon something that started from a small beginning.” In other words, the Xs can be so minute that the Ys become impossible to predict. Divergent phenomena are things like history, economics, and weather.
John von Neumann used the words “stable” and “unstable” to talk about something similar. Stable systems were deterministic and resisted disturbance by small things. They were like a game of checkers: once a being—or a machine—with enough calculating power learned all their laws, that player could not lose. Unstable phenomena were upset by small disturbances, making them hard to predict. But sufficient calculating power would allow these processes to be controlled. Once scientists determined where exactly the instability began, they could intervene, introducing the disturbances that produced the desired outcome instead of the undesired one. The weather, Johnnie liked to say, contained both stable and unstable systems: ultimately, the stable systems would be predicted, and the unstable ones would be controlled. It was simply a matter of knowing when and where to chalk the X.
Unlike von Neumann, Langmuir saw all weather as fundamentally unstable. It was always too big and unwieldy a system to be captured by equations. Divergent phenomena flew in the face of the clockwork universe. No matter how much information you had, you could never accurately predict their behavior.
Norbert Wiener had been telling von Neumann something similar. Wiener thought that Johnnie misunderstood weather: he failed to take into account that his model would never have complete information about the atmosphere. The atmosphere was always in flux, always flowing and blending; a touch in one part could affect the next and then the next until a cascade of changes set up movements on the other side of the earth. How, even with the fastest computers, could you ever account for all of it? How could you even see all of it? Even with a network of meteorological sensors blanketing the earth, the accuracy of your measurements would never be perfect. Your data were thus always on some level approximate, which meant your forecasts, too, were approximations. And the instabilities in those approximations multiplied rapidly. There would never be an absolute solution, as there could be with a zero-sum game, only a series of statistical likelihoods.
All three men understood something that would take physicists another couple of decades to develop into a theory: the idea that tiny and ultimately unpredictable events could alter the course of huge systems and that this made the behavior of such systems difficult to predict. But Langmuir—like von Neumann—still hoped that control was within his grasp. In fact, he believed he had found the place to chalk his X on the atmosphere; he just needed to prove to others that it was there.
What he needed was a signal, something to break through the noise and show that his experiment was having an effect. The idea he came up with was brilliantly simple: have Bernie’s generator pump out silver iodide on a regular basis—say on three specific days each week—and see if that introduced a periodicity into the weather. A regularity that matched his seedings in the vast, unpredictable atmosphere would be evidence of the human hand as unmistakable as signing the GE monogram in the sky.
Suits had a different idea. He called the Project Cirrus representatives from the Signal Corps and the Navy into his office and reemphasized the GE position: company employees must never engage directly or indirectly in seeding experiments that might lead to large-scale weather modification. They were advisers only. All action taken in Project Cirrus was taken by the government alone.
Then he dictated a letter to Irving, Bernie, and Vince that laid out his position in no uncertain terms. Any extensive seeding experiments, he reminded them, “should be carried out entirely by the Government and its employees.” GE’s role—as it had been from the beginning—was only “to appraise [sic] them of the facts and on the basis of these facts to let them make their own decisions in this field.” He appended a copy of the letter he had sent the team in early 1947 stating that they were merely advisers. And he gave them an ultimatum. If, he said, “the program develops in such a direction as to subject the Company to serious hazards from a liability standpoint, it may very well become impossible for us to continue with this work.” In other words, toe the line or GE would kill Project Cirrus.
Then, to leave no doubt that he was serious, he declared that the company would not approve for publication any papers or reports that made it sound as if GE employees were engaging in widespread weather modification. Their job from now on was to keep quiet about what they knew.
* * *
Kurt came in the front door after work, and there it was, propped up on the piano. An envelope—a check envelope—addressed to him from Collier’s. Jane had put it on the upright so he’d see it right away.
It had finally happened.
Except for his marriage to Jane, Kurt had never had a more productive working relationship than the one with Kenneth Littauer. The agent had gone to work on Kurt’s stories as if they were race cars and he were a pit mechanic at the Indy 500. They started with “Barnhouse.” Kurt revised the story as Littauer directed, and Littauer sent it back to Knox Burger. Knox had lots of changes and thought it was too long. Nor did he like Kurt’s latest pseudonym: David Harris.
“Why doesn’t he use his real name on the story?” he wrote to Kenneth. “Afraid GE will fire him for a Red?”
It wasn’t an idle concern. Truman’s announcement of the Soviet nuclear test in September had jolted Americans out of a comfortable feeling of supremacy, and GE, like the nation, was swinging rightward. The shock was not mitigated by the fact that the scientists had been predicting this development for years. Irving Langmuir had even foreseen exactly how much time it would take.
“Ever since atomic energy was first released by man,” the president declared, “the eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be expected.”
Once people had a technology, it seemed impossible not to use it. There was no Professor Barnhouse in the real world; the suicidal course of history could not be changed. Now the nation was winding itself up with paranoia over Soviet aggression and communist infiltration. GE printed two fretful essays as a special supplement in the September issue of Monogram: “Should We Fear a Welfare State?” (the answer was yes) and “Free Men Forge Their Own Chains!” The word from the corporate higher-ups was clear: in the face of this new and frightening world, America must get tougher, not nicer. The hope of peace through internationalism was fading, as was the notion that winners should give losers a helping hand.
With the specter of nuclear war once again haunting the public sphere, Kurt had gone back to work on “Barnhouse.” In October, he fired a revised version off to his agent. The manifesto was gone: all that remained was the punning opening paragraph. And instead of fizzling out in a political tantrum, the story ended with what happened next: Barnhouse destroys the world’s arms stockpiles from his hiding place and sends the student-narrator a letter tipping him off to the secret of the Barnhouse effect so he can carry on the work when Barnhouse is gone. On page 1, Kurt crossed out “David Harris.” He wrote “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.” at the top.
Kurt knew in his heart it was good. Jane did too. But, he had told Littauer, he would await confirmation of its worth in a more interesting form: money.
Now in late October, at long last, it had arrived: a check for $750 (minus Littauer’s well-earned 10 percent). Nothing, not even gin, is as good as a check for soothing a writer’s anguished soul—especially a check that adds up to two months’ labor at your mind-numbing corporate job. Of course they threw a party, spending a good part of the money on food and booze. But as Jane giddily told a neighbor, they’d just eat cereal until the next story sold.
“I think I’m on my way,” Kurt wrote in a triumphant letter to his father. It would only take four more such sales to have the equivalent of a year’s pay at GE. And then, he declared, he would “quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God.”
A God in whom he did not believe. Still, his father shellacked the whole boast to a piece of Masonite with a quotation from The Merchant of Venice: “An oath, an oath, I have an oath in Heaven: / Shall I lay perjury on my soul?”
Kurt was happier than he had been since he was first accepted at Chicago. It had all been worth it: the writing on nights and weekends, the rejections, the revisions that went on and on. He hunkered down to write the four more stories that would add up to a year’s salary and issue him a ticket to a better life—a life that would finally be plotted by him.
* * *
Bernie was listening to a talk in a room at the enormous Hotel Jefferson in St. Louis. Harry Wexler was showing slides and describing a startling atmospheric event that he actually did believe was man-made: the Donora smog.
It happened on October 27, 1948. A thick fog had settled on Donora, an industrial town on the Monongahela River outside Pittsburgh. Persistent fogs are often due to temperature inversions, where cold air settles near the ground and a layer of warmer air lies above, instead of the more common reverse. Without the usual mixing mechanism—warm air rising, cold air falling down—the atmosphere becomes stable and stagnant. What made that disastrous in Donora was the presence of two belching factories: the American Steel and Wire plant and the Donora Zinc Works. The effluent pouring out of their stacks was bad on a normal day, peeling paint from buildings and depositing a layer of grime on local homes. But on this day, and the ones following, the smokestacks’ pollution had nowhere to go, and Donora began to fill with acrid smog. Before long, the town had to keep the streetlights on all day because the smog was so thick residents could barely find their way around.
On October 30, people began to die. Thousands more poured into the local hospitals, complaining that they couldn’t breathe. The fire department went from house to house, giving oxygen to those in distress. They had a hard time finding their way. People tried to evacuate, but thick smog and heavy traffic made getting away nearly impossible. Twenty people died in fourteen hours, in a town where thirty usually died in a year.
The nightmare ended when a cold front arrived and rain and wind cleared the air. But the story had grabbed the nation’s attention. Air pollution was something people were just beginning to talk about seriously. The Donora smog showed it could be deadly.
Bernie was compelled for another reason. This was the first time the AMS meeting had included an all-day session on pollution. His paper came after Harry Wexler’s, and he talked about using the condensation nuclei counter he had developed for Project Cirrus to measure smog. For Bernie, this was an exciting new development. The work he was doing for Project Cirrus could be used for even more beneficial purposes than rainmaking, such as investigating air pollution.
He wasn’t declining to work on weapons. But he was finding other applications for his research.
The media continued to see Project Cirrus as a weapons program. A month earlier, Harper’s had run a long article about rainmaking, emphasizing its military significance. Had Project Cirrus been around in World War II, it declared, it might have been able to clear the cold fog shrouding the western front in 1944, preventing the Battle of the Bulge.
* * *
Something had sent Kurt back to his war material. Only this time, he was trying to make it funny.
Every spare moment was spent at his desk, filling ashtrays and pounding keys. He knew what Collier’s wanted now; he just had to crank it out. Page after page rolled off his typewriter, the kinds of pages he thought would sell. The problem was that they weren’t selling. Knox Burger had encouraged him, but now he wasn’t satisfied with anything Kurt wrote.
Once you got an agent, it was supposed to be easy. Once you cracked the formula and sold your first story, it was supposed to be easy. Once you made friends with an editor, it was supposed to be really easy. It didn’t take Kurt long to realize the central truth of being a writer: it’s never easy.
Knox had suggested he submit short-shorts, and Kurt liked that idea, because he could write one in a single sitting. But Knox could reject them as fast as Kurt could turn them out. So Kurt revised “City” again and sent it to Kenneth. Kenneth thought it was a decided improvement over the two earlier versions, though he still didn’t love the story. “I don’t guarantee it,” the agent wrote to Knox, “but neither do I despair.”
“Not quite good enough,” Knox fired back.
It was Kenneth collecting the rejections now, usually with a line or two of explanation: “slight,” “a trifle stilted and precious,” “would be better if he did not attempt to pander to popular tastes,” “over-obvious and didactic.” He softened the blows in writing back to Kurt.
In December, as the birth of his second child approached, Kurt had gone back to a story he’d drafted a few times, “Das Ganz Arm Dolmetscher.” Starting with the title—a purposeful butchering of the German for “the very poor interpreter”—it was a strange little tale, a comic piece about an infantryman on the western front who gets appointed chief interpreter for his battalion even though he can’t speak German. It was a return to Kurt’s war material but with a lighter, more ironic tone than he had managed in the past. There was even a hilarious playlet in the middle in which the narrator imagines seducing the Belgian burgomaster’s daughter with the only lines of German he knows—the first stanza of Heinrich Heine’s “Die Lorelei” and some commands from the Army phrase book:
DOLMETSCHER (to BURGOMASTER’S DAUGHTER): I don’t know what will become of me, I am so sad. (Embraces her.)
BURGOMASTER’S DAUGHTER (with yielding shyness): The air is cool, and it’s getting dark, and the Rhine is flowing quietly.
(DOLMETSCHER seizes BURGOMASTER’S DAUGHTER, carries her bodily into his room.)
DOLMETSCHER (softly): Surrender.
BURGOMASTER (brandishing Luger): Ach! Hands up!
DOLMETSCHER and BURGOMASTER’S DAUGHTER: Don’t shoot!
Kurt thought it was the funniest thing he had ever written. In fact he’d spent too many evenings when he should have been writing a new story giggling over the pages of this one.
Unfortunately, Knox Burger didn’t agree. He called the playlet hackneyed and suggested Kurt get rid of it. He also didn’t like the opening, and he insisted that Kurt get the thing down to five pages. Kurt sat on his pride and managed to redraft the story and send it to the typist before December 29, when Edith was born and the Vonneguts became a family of four.
* * *
Bernie was at New York’s Hotel Astor giving a paper on another nifty gadget he’d designed: a vortex thermometer to measure true air temperatures from an airplane. Irving Langmuir was there to give a paper too, and Bernie was probably the only person present who knew the stupendous bombshell that was going to be dropped in it.
Nineteen fifty was shaping up to be an annus mirabilis. Early in the New Year, the Schenectady weather, as if mimicking the increasing chilliness of world affairs, had turned viciously cold. An ice storm grounded the Project Cirrus planes. The Schenectady Railway Company’s B29 bus hit a patch of ice on Alplaus Avenue, slid for half a mile, and crashed through the guardrail of the bridge near Bernie’s house. It was only prevented from tumbling into the creek ravine below by one of Bernie’s trees. For years, Bow had been urging him to cut the tree down, and now it had probably saved the lives of the four people aboard. Newspapers published the dramatic photograph of the bus, its front wheels hanging off the bridge, its flat nose pressed into the tree trunk.
Even that was not as surprising as the January 7 announcement of Irving’s retirement. Irving had always scorned the very idea. But his purpose in “retiring” was not to cease work. It was to redouble his efforts on weather control. He would keep his office at GE and continue to work as a consultant for the company. But his energies would be dedicated to Project Cirrus.
Langmuir was still convinced that he was doing the most important work of his career, and at sixty-eight he might not have many years left in which to do it. His two older brothers had already died; his younger brother, Dean, collapsed and died of a heart attack just four days before Irving’s retirement luncheon. He himself had had an operation for colon cancer before the war and had undergone his second cataract operation in December. His recovery time had been longer the second time around. He was slowing down, and he wanted to conserve his energy for what mattered. In announcing his retirement, he had told reporters that he fully expected to be diverting large snowstorms and rainstorms from population centers within three years. It was just the sort of thing GE wouldn’t have allowed him to say.
And now, at the annual AMS meeting, Irving was going to deliver what he considered the most important paper of his career. He was going to describe Bernie’s New Mexico thunderstorm for the assembled meteorologists, and in it he would announce that Bernie’s silver iodide–induced storm had produced 320 billion gallons of rain on one day—more than enough to fill all of New York City’s reservoirs. This was bound to be of great interest in a city that was running out of water.
In 1950, New York City had nearly 7.9 million people. While the city’s expansion was not as explosive as it had been in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the population was still growing steadily, increasing water demand. Individual water usage was up too. But the water supply infrastructure was out of date: the last new reservoir had gone into service in 1926. It was the second of two in the Catskill Mountains, a hundred miles north of the city. Construction on a planned four more in the Catskills watershed had been halted, first by interstate wrangling with New Jersey and Pennsylvania and then by the war. By 1947, three of those reservoirs were under way. The city was racing to get them built when the drought hit.
It started with a dry winter in 1949, followed by a dry summer and fall. By early 1950, New York had been in a state of water crisis for nearly a year. Car washes, sprinklers, and swimming pools were banned. Residents were urged to put barrels and rubber rafts on their rooftops to collect rainwater for dishwashing and toilets. Wearing “Save Water” armbands, volunteer “conservation commanders” went door-to-door ferreting out leaky plumbing. The city instituted “Dry Fridays” and “Thirsty Thursdays,” where people were meant to avoid bathing and even drinking water. The Central Park Zoo rationed its hippo’s water, and Tiffany used gin for the pool in its window display. The mayor had stopped shaving. But none of it seemed to be working. The New York Times had instituted a regular feature called “The Water Situation” that tallied rainfall and reservoir levels and noted how many days were left before water pressure failed. When Bernie and Irving arrived in New York, the Times had given the city sixty-six days before its taps went dry.
Irving began his talk with a survey of natural precipitation but quickly moved on to describing the artificial seeding process. Cloud seeding, he pointed out, could produce too many ice nuclei, actually preventing rain. In some cases, a single pellet of dry ice might do a better job than too much of it. Heavy rain, he declared, can often be brought down “by using a single pellet of dry ice shot into the side of a cloud” from a flare gun. He discussed where to aim the pellet, the altitude at which the clouds were best seeded, and the rate at which dry ice should be dispersed into the tops of clouds. These specifics, he explained, were why the U.S. Weather Bureau had thus far failed to produce “rainfall of economic importance” in its Cloud Physics Project. Cloud seeding was an art, he implied, and the Weather Bureau seeders were essentially hacks.
He then gave an outline of probability theory before launching into a description of their work in New Mexico. He gave detailed reports of two days during which the team had operated Vonnegut’s silver iodide generator. On both days, the Weather Bureau had predicted no rain, but on both, heavy rain and thunderstorms were observed.
Using river flow and rain gauge data, Langmuir calculated the similarity of rainfall distribution on the two heavily seeded days. They had a correlation coefficient of +0.78. The chance of getting such a high correlation randomly, he declared, was one in ten million.
“We must conclude,” he declared, “that nearly all of the rainfall that occurred on October 14, 1948[,] and July 21, 1949[,] was the result of seeding … Silver iodide seeding produced practically all of the rain in the state of New Mexico on these two days.” Furthermore, after the July experiment, a band of heavy rainfall progressed from New Mexico across southern Colorado and Kansas, bringing three to five inches of rain to those states. All that precipitation, too, might have been caused by Bernie Vonnegut’s generator.
The experiment, Langmuir said, proved that the entire United States could double its rainfall for a couple of hundred dollars. Thirty milligrams of silver iodide released into a cumulus cloud six miles in diameter would liberate as much heat—the latent heat of condensation—as the explosion of an atomic bomb. The time was ripe, he concluded, for turning to the study of hurricanes. Silver iodide generators at sea, he was convinced, could modify hurricanes and even prevent them from reaching land.
There was a buzz in the room when Irving finished. He had thrown down a gauntlet for the Weather Bureau—at the very session chaired by Chief Reichelderfer. He had even tossed back in the chief’s face the “exaggeration” the chief so detested about steering hurricanes. Reichelderfer remained professional, cordially thanking Irving for his “very, very interesting paper” and noting there were only three or four minutes for discussion. A flurry of comments ensued, starting with the objections of the Weather Bureau’s observer William Lewis, who thought that the conditions in New Mexico might have led to rain anyway.
But the reporters in the room were uninterested in counterarguments. When the session was over, they mobbed Irving. Was he saying that New York City could make rain to relieve its drought?
It very well might, Langmuir replied. There were no guarantees, but when the cost of an attempt was so low, why not try?
The next day, the newspapers were filled with the story. The city’s water commissioner, citing Weather Bureau skepticism, had dismissed cloud seeding just as quickly as he had dismissed a group of Indian chiefs who offered to come to town and perform a rain dance. Now Irving Langmuir was saying that rainmaking might relieve the city’s water woes. Langmuir was, The New York Times editorialized, “no rain-making crank, but a Nobel Prize winner who ought to be consulted in the present extremity.”
Not long afterward, the Project Cirrus team received a phone call from the New York City water commissioner, Stephen Carney. Might he and Edward Clark, the chief engineer for the water department, visit Schenectady? A meeting was arranged for the following week.
Langmuir triumphantly took William Lewis out to lunch.
“Do you still believe that no seeding experiment has increased rainfall by even as much as 10 percent?” he asked. Lewis, showing significant pluck, replied that he did.
“Did any single point that I brought out in my January 25th paper appear to you to have any significance?” Irving pressed.
“I don’t know of any,” responded Lewis, refusing to be cowed by the eminent scientist.
“So you think my paper was mostly bunk?”
“I personally wouldn’t use that word,” Lewis said, “but it does describe my opinion reasonably well.”
Irving laughed. He loved nothing better than a fight, and he couldn’t help but admire the guy for standing up to him.
“Why don’t you undertake something constructive?” he said, and gave Lewis an assignment looking for seven-day periodicities in any weather trait in the northwest states.
He had his reasons for this. In November, Workman’s team in Socorro had started running Bernie’s silver iodide generator every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Langmuir was hoping to introduce a regular pattern—a periodicity—into the weather to prove that he was making rain. But in January, something strange happened. Bizarrely heavy rains were reported in the Ohio and Wabash River basin. It was a long way from the generator, but it made some sense. The air over New Mexico didn’t carry much moisture. The silver iodide, encountering little water vapor to nucleate there, might just be floating east with the prevailing winds. As it entered the Mississippi River basin, it would collide with moisture-laden winds sweeping up from the Gulf of Mexico. The winds would carry the chemical north to the Ohio River basin, where it would finally cause rain.
The members of the Project Cirrus steering committee, concerned that they might be causing damaging floods, met in late January and decided to reduce the number of days on which they seeded to two per week. As soon as they did, the rainfall in the Ohio River basin let up. It was all looking more than coincidental.
The steering committee was eager to tell the military. At the end of January, President Truman had announced that he had directed the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission—the organization originally meant to help deter a worldwide arms race—to build more atomic bombs. He specifically included the Super, the hydrogen bomb Teller and others had been advocating. But Project Cirrus might be providing them with a superweapon that was even better.
* * *
Kurt Vonnegut’s first published story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” hit the newsstands on February 11, 1950, in Collier’s. The Schenectady Gazette ran an article announcing his triumph. Typically for the credential-loving company town, the paper announced that he was “a graduate of the University of Chicago.”
He was trying to repeat his success, but it was hard. “Mnemonics,” “City,” and “Das Ganz Arm Dolmetscher” were being turned down all over town. Knox Burger was rejecting everything they sent him. He was, Kurt grumbled, turning to Yaddo again, going back to buying work from the well-known writers who went to fancy writers’ colonies and won prizes and hung out drinking cocktails in New York. Kurt was cranking out reams of prose to no avail.
Two weeks after “Barnhouse” was published, the News Bureau got a call from a librarian at the Works Library in Building 2. She had looked up from her desk, and there, looking right back at her through the window, was a deer. Somehow it had gotten into the Works, and now it was trapped inside the walls of the industrial city. The librarian had called security to come get it out, but she thought the News Bureau would want to know about it.
A photographer was dispatched at once. The deer, a young doe, was backed into a corner, her head ducked and her spindly legs splayed. Two members of the GE patrol approached, and as the photographer snapped away, they grabbed the doe around the middle. She was so small that they easily lifted her up on her hind legs to truss her front ones, then wrestled her to the ground and trussed her back legs too. They heaved her into the backseat of a GE patrol vehicle, and a GE security officer got in with her, wrapping a stocky arm around the doe’s neck as if they were on a date.
The General Office News ran a page of photographs of the whole drama, with droll captions giving the deer’s point of view: “What a way to treat a Republican!” and “All I wanted to do was sneak out of work at 4:30.” The News Bureau issued a press release slyly commenting that the deer had forgotten to wear her ID badge. GE was always hassling the employees about leaving their badges at home.
It was all supposed to be cute and funny, but Kurt knew how the deer felt. Trapped. Cornered. Baffled by this strange, ugly place and the bizarre rituals of the creatures who inhabited it. He knew what it felt like to want out.
Five years later, “Deer in the Works” would be the first story Kurt sold to Esquire. In it, a newspaper writer takes a job in publicity at a big corporation because he’s worried about supporting his growing family. On his first day, a deer gets into the Works, and the new guy is assigned to get the story. As the writer wanders through the labyrinthine plant encountering terrifying assembly lines, alcohol-soaked sales meetings, and labs with mysterious names, he realizes he has made a terrible decision in leaving his small-town newspaper for the security of being a company man. He cannot thrive in this place. He cannot even breathe the soot-filled air. Finally, he wanders hopelessly into a ball field and the deer appears, pursued by Works policemen with pistols drawn. The writer does the only thing he can: he opens the gate and lets the deer escape. And then he follows her out. The story ends simply, “He didn’t look back.”
That’s what Kurt was living for now, his own escape. Four more salable stories were all he needed. The irony was, it was GE that was handing him the material he needed to break the company’s bonds.
One day not long after the deer affair, he was researching a News Bureau story when he learned about the stratosphere. It was a great word. There were other great words to describe the strange zones between the atmosphere and space. He wrote them down on the back of an envelope: “stratosphere,” “troposphere.” In particular, he was drawn to the notion of the ionosphere, a layer of ionized air one hundred to four hundred miles above the earth’s surface, the boundary between the earth’s atmosphere and the empty vacuum of space.
What might be up there? Weather, of course—that he heard about all the time. And for a few years after the war, scientists had puzzled over strange, erratic blips that showed up on radar screens, dots that flitted about with apparent disregard for the laws of physical motion. First noticed by a scientist at Bell Labs, the blips captured the imagination of reporters, who called them “ghosts” or “angels.” Then, in early 1949, newspapers announced that the mystery was solved: they were insects.
But what if there really were ghosts or angels up there, drifting around in those atmospheric zones?
Kurt made his main character a scientist with a Germanic last name. Dr. Groszinger is the kind of man who loves science for its own sake, who finds comfort in the “dependability of the physical world.” He is working on a top secret experiment funded by the military, but he isn’t really focused on that. “The threat of war was an incident,” Kurt wrote, “the military men about him an irritating condition of work—the experiment was the heart of the matter.”
Dr. Groszinger’s first name is Bernard.
Bernard Groszinger is supervising Project Cyclops, an experiment to send a controlled spaceship into orbit above the earth. There is a man on board whose job is to report the weather conditions over enemy territory and the accuracy of guided atomic missiles should war break out. As the story opens, the spaceship has been launched, and Bernard is chain-smoking while he awaits the first weather report from its passenger, Major Rice. He is relieved when contact is made. But soon it becomes apparent that all is not well. Major Rice is hearing voices in space—voices that seem to be coming from the dead. And the dead have plenty to say.
Bernard Groszinger is convinced that the man in orbit is insane. But when the general in charge of Project Cyclops has the messages from the dead investigated, they seem to check out. Dr. Groszinger then thinks it must be an elaborate hoax—until the major reports that a woman speaking with a German accent has asked for Dr. Groszinger. When the major quotes his mother’s favorite lines from Goethe, Bernard realizes the guy is not making it up.
The general doesn’t give a damn about the voices—as long as they are kept secret, so as not to disclose that his nation has a spaceship in orbit. But for Groszinger, the voices create a moral quandary. Doesn’t the public have a right to know that the dead can be contacted? Wearily, he thinks perhaps no one would even be surprised. “Science had given humanity forces enough to destroy the earth, and politics had given humanity a fair assurance that the forces would be used,” he thinks. “There could be no cause for awe to top that one. But proof of a spirit world might at least equal it. Maybe that was the shock the world needed, maybe word from the spirits could change the suicidal course of history.”
When amateur radio operators stumble onto the secret frequency and overhear the major’s transmissions, the general is forced to jam the frequency and bring the spaceship down, killing the orbiting major. Dr. Groszinger is sworn to silence about the whole affair.
The story concludes with Dr. Groszinger denying everything to a crush of reporters. He tells them that the unidentified object seen crashing into the Atlantic was most likely a meteor. When a reporter asks what’s out beyond the stratosphere, he says it’s just dead space. He gives it a name: the thanasphere.
“Has a nice scientific ring to it, don’t you think?” he asks. The reporters press him to tell them when the nation will have a rocket in space.
“You people read too many comic books,” he tells them.
“Thanasphere” was a good story: tight, sharp, and just thoughtful enough for the slicks. In a light way, it addressed the things Kurt saw going wrong with the nation: militarism, technocracy, secrecy. The quest for bigger and better weapons was shunting aside the things that made human beings human. The story’s general turns a blind eye to the desperate voices of the dead—and the entire existence of the spirit world—in order to maintain secrecy and efficiency. It’s a dark vision of military values. But it didn’t find much to admire in scientific values either. After all, it’s the scientist, Bernard Groszinger, who makes the whole operation possible. Like his namesake, he has his moral qualms. But in the end, he does what the general wants.
* * *
In mid-February, New York water commissioner Stephen Carney and engineer Edward Clark visited Schenectady. They went first to Langmuir’s home, where Irving gave them an overview of Project Cirrus. Then, because his own driveway was blocked by seventeen inches of snow that had fallen the night before, Irving rode with them to the Knolls. There, Carney and Clark were treated to the usual song and dance: Vince seeded the freezer with dry ice, and Bernie deployed his popgun with a puckish smile. As always, the News Bureau team was there to get photographs, and though Carney had a long, mournful face and Clark wore a skeptical frown, at the end of the day, the two men met with a large group of assembled reporters at the Hotel Van Curler and made a startling announcement. Cloud seeding, Carney said, was worth a try. He was going to request that the city’s mayor hire a consulting meteorologist to put a program in place. Langmuir added that the city should be sure to find “a competent meteorologist who has nothing to sell and who will study and plan the project with a conservative approach.”
This was a meaningful comment. Bernie, Vince, and Irving were beginning to realize they had created a cottage industry. Dozens of private “rainmakers” were hawking cloud-seeding programs all over the nation. One of them, Irving Krick, had already been trying to sell his services to New York City. The GE men knew Krick. Lately, they had begun to see him as a problem.
Irving Krick was a confident cowboy of a weatherman from California. He had been on Eisenhower’s meteorology team, where his old-fashioned forecast had come close to causing D-Day to fail. But after the war, he had spun the story to cast himself as the hero. A charismatic self-promoter with a wavy pompadour and a Laurence Olivier mustache, Krick had a weather consulting company specializing in long-range forecasts that the Weather Bureau considered hokum. Now he had taken up the cause of cloud seeding with gusto. A year earlier, he had visited GE and shared data with the Project Cirrus team. But since then, the GE scientists watched with growing alarm as Krick bounced all over the country selling rainmaking programs that they considered scientifically sloppy. Worse still, Krick was hinting that he had some kind of affiliation with GE. News Bureau manager Roger Hammond told the Cirrus team that Krick was “using GE and the names Langmuir, Schaefer and Vonnegut to his commercial advantage.” And lately, Krick had started telling reporters that he had a “new way” to make rain for New York: seeding with silver iodide.
The next time Krick visited GE, he found his reception significantly chillier than it had been a year earlier. The scientists suggested that he confine himself to dry ice seeding, leaving the silver iodide to the experts. Then Langmuir took him aside and told him, in no uncertain terms, to stop taking credit for Bernie’s work. It was something Bernie would never have done himself. He was never particularly concerned about getting credit, even when he deserved it; for him, the science was its own reward.
Not long after Clark and Carney returned to New York—their trip was delayed by the weather—New York City’s mayor, William O’Dwyer, announced that he had hired a scientist to begin formulating a plan: Wallace Howell. A longtime colleague and friend of the Project Cirrus team, Howell was a consulting meteorologist at Harvard’s Blue Hill Observatory. Vince had suggested him, and the Project Cirrus team was pleased he was hired: Howell was a real meteorologist, not a charlatan. And he would consult with them regularly.
Project Cirrus was riding high. Their work was finally going to prove its worth to the world! The Industrial Bank of Commerce ran an ad with a picture of Irving, Bernie, and Vincent standing by their freezer under the words “Salute to the Future.” There was a quotation from Guy Suits declaring that the weather work “may prove in the future to be as important to human welfare as the advent of atomic energy.”
“Here,” declared the ad, “is another example of industry at work for humanity. It represents progress for all mankind, and its beneficial effects on our civilization are truly immeasurable.”
The week New York City hired Howell, Vincent made one of his frequent appearances on the WGY radio program Science Forum. His topic was the “sunny side of rainmaking.” Outside, a hard rain was washing the winter snow into a slushy brew as Vincent speculated for listeners at home about the coming day when blizzards and thunderstorms would be averted, aircraft icing forestalled, forest fires prevented, and fog simply swept away. It was all nearly within their grasp.
* * *
Dr. John Herbert Hollomon invited Kurt and George Burns into his study. Herb was one of GE’s most promising young men, a wunderkind who had come to GE Labs to head up the new physical metallurgy division in 1946. Bernie had worked with Hollomon before moving to Project Cirrus. Herb was a friend of Bernie’s and, like many of Bernie’s friends, had also become a friend of Kurt’s.
Also, he liked model railroading.
George Burns set up his camera to get a shot of Herb with a model train. They were there to do a profile, and this was just the sort of humanizing detail GE loved to give out about its scientists. Kurt had just written a press release about a speech urging scientists and engineers to engage in activities unrelated to their work. Now here was Herb Hollomon, hoisting a tiny locomotive, the perfect example of a man with a wholesome hobby. An exemplary hobby. Unless of course the man who loved model trains was to get so obsessed with them that his family life suffered … like, for instance, Earl “Hotbox” Harrison, a model-train maniac oblivious to his wife’s distress, in the story “With His Hand on the Throttle.”
Kurt worked on short story ideas constantly. General Electric contained a rich vein of characters, settings, and concepts he could mine. It was a microcosm, a corporate culture that reflected many aspects of the national culture Kurt found disturbing. The same month he did the News Bureau story on Herb Hollomon, he wrote a GE press release about a robot tool dolly.
“A one-armed robot on wheels, which can close doors, turn valves, take apart and reassemble complex machinery, and perform virtually every task the human hand can perform,” he wrote, “has been developed by General Electric engineers for work in radioactive areas, it was revealed here today.”
Kurt could easily summon the gee-whiz attitude GE liked to use for unveiling inventions, but his own feelings about the things he saw were complex. Was every scientific advance necessarily good for humanity? Professor Barnhouse’s question would hang over everything Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote. The tool dolly, for instance, made radioactive contamination into a neat problem, something that could be solved with enough know-how and engineering spunk. Nothing like a whiz-bang gadget to take the sting out of a nuclear holocaust!
Somewhere in there, Kurt was taken to see another nifty invention: the GE automated milling machine. A cathedral of steel with motors strung from electrical cords, it was designed to cut the rotors for jet engines and gas turbines. GE had just received a patent on the machine’s tracer control system. Thanks to that control system, every rotor could now be cut to exact, identical specifications, every contour decreed not by the skill of the machinist but by the dictates of the little clicking computer attached to the blade. The machinists who worked milling machines were some of the top-paid laborers at GE. Or at least they had been. At the behest of GE, they had lent their movements to the tape-driven control system, and now the clicking box and its robot cutter would replace them.
Kurt couldn’t blame the inventors. It wasn’t necessarily vicious or antisocial to make such a machine. But it was definitely going to be a bad thing for a lot of people who had been proud of their skills. No one at GE seemed to be thinking about that.
And automation of mechanical tasks was only the beginning. GE was now getting into building high-speed calculating machines. The company was the first in the world to own a differential analyzer, an analog computer of the type first designed by Vannevar Bush. A shockingly noisy contraption made up of thousands of gears, it occupied an entire floor of the old athletic building. Langmuir and Katharine Blodgett had used it during the war to calculate the liquid water content of clouds and particle size distribution inside them. Now GE had built a new device, the Ordinal Memory Inspecting Binary Automatic Calculator: OMIBAC for short. With its thirty-three hundred electron tubes and circuits, OMIBAC was five thousand times faster than a human computer at doing math. It could solve a problem in days that would take months or even years for a mere person. This was obviously a good thing. Or was it? Increasingly, some people were beginning to wonder if such devices might ultimately diminish human beings. Even the Monogram article about OMIBAC was accompanied by a cartoon of a man cowering in a box, with the caption “Are machines smarter than ME?”
Kurt had read Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics, which came out in 1948. Practically everyone in Schenectady would have. The Saturday Review of Literature said it was “impossible for anyone seriously interested in our civilization to ignore this book.” It was so widely admired that Wiener was persuaded to write a “popular” version without the mathematics; it was published in 1950 under the title The Human Use of Human Beings. Together, the books provided the nation with an introduction to an entirely new way of thinking. Wiener defined cybernetics as “the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” Machines, Wiener pointed out, are very much like human beings, or even human cultures: They operate by sending and receiving messages in an attempt to control their environment. Such feedback allows them to learn.
Wiener’s idea—that the brain is a kind of computer and the computer a kind of brain—has become so much a part of our thinking now that it’s hard to imagine how revolutionary it was at the time. And Wiener was also already thinking about the human implications of this breakthrough. Alone among computing pioneers, he was asking what the human downside to the computing revolution might be. At present, a computer’s output was numbers. But eventually it would produce other things: information, pictures, songs. Cybernetics explained that the computer was a kind of mechanical slave destined to usurp not only physical labor but mental labor too. The first industrial revolution had proved that human handwork could be done by machines; the second would prove that human thinking could too.
There was a short story in that. Kurt named his story—and his computer—“EPICAC.” The narrator is a mathematician who works the night shift programming EPICAC. The military men who control EPICAC, and the scientist who designed it, Dr. Ormand von Kleigstadt—another Germanic name—want the computer to “plot the course of a rocket from anywhere on earth to the second button from the bottom on Joe Stalin’s overcoat.” As it turns out, EPICAC can do much more.
The narrator is a programmer in love with his colleague, a “crackerjack mathematician” named Pat, but she repeatedly declines his marriage proposals because they aren’t poetic enough. One night, sitting at his keyboard, “trying to think of something poetic, not coming up with anything that didn’t belong in The Journal of the American Physical Society,” the narrator types his troubles into EPICAC: “My girl doesn’t love me.”
“What’s love? What’s girl?” asks EPICAC. After the narrator defines the terms and then defines poetry, the computer writes him a poem to give to Pat. She loves it, so the narrator gets EPICAC to produce another one. Slowly, passing off EPICAC’s creations as his own, the narrator wins Pat’s affection. He programs EPICAC to produce the perfect marriage proposal. Of course, the computer thinks it’s proposing for itself. The narrator tells it that women can’t love machines; they can only love human beings.
Pat accepts the narrator’s proposal on the condition that the narrator write her a poem every year for their anniversary. That night, EPICAC kills itself by overloading its own circuits. The narrator finds its suicide note: “I don’t want to be a machine, and I don’t want to think about war … But fate has made me a machine. That is the only problem I cannot solve.” EPICAC has left the narrator a wedding gift: five hundred more poems to give his wife.
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” the story concludes. “Say nothing but good of the dead.”
Kurt finished “EPICAC” quickly and sent it to Kenneth, who liked it enough to send it on to Knox Burger. Knox returned it with notes, commenting that the title sounded like something you took when constipated. But in response to Kurt’s complaint that he wasn’t managing to sell anything, he offered a glimmer of hope. His stories, Knox wrote, were much more readable than most science fiction. It was perhaps the first time Kurt heard his work called that.
On April 4, Knox had good news. Collier’s was buying “Thanasphere.” Elated, Kurt sat down to work on a story about a scientist who invents a new way of making ice that turns out to be horribly dangerous. He started out calling it “The Crystal.” But before long, it had the title “Ice-9.”
* * *
The first flight of New York’s rainmakers was delayed by rain. Kept on the ground at Floyd Bennett Field until the squall passed, the police department’s Grumman Goose—a comical amphibious plane that looks like a cartoon whale balancing a surfboard on its back—arrived in the Catskills too late. Any clouds that could have been seeded had already moved on.
The city’s newspaper writers were crestfallen. The entire metropolis had been eagerly awaiting its first municipal rain. The New York Times Magazine had run a detailed article explaining the different types of cloud seeding and when they would be deployed. Bernie had provided drawings for it.
Upstate residents, meanwhile, awaited the event with more trepidation than glee. Before the first rainmaking attempt even happened, lawsuits were threatened. Albany’s mayor, Erastus Corning, tried unsuccessfully to get the state Water Power and Control Commission to stop New York City from “intercepting” rain meant for Albany’s watershed. Then a group of property owners and civic associations in the Catskills had issued a court summons in Ulster County to block the rainmakers. The city’s lawyers advised the mayor to ignore it.
On April 13, Wallace Howell and a police pilot took off from La Guardia Airport in the Grumman Goose. They flew north, up the Hudson, and circled the Catskills watershed area, scouting out likely clouds. Howell sprinkled a hundred pounds of dry ice into clouds near the Ashokan Reservoir. The plane returned to Floyd Bennett Field at 6:42 p.m.
Some observers on the ground insisted that there was no snow until the plane flew back and forth overhead, at which point it began snowing for the next hour and a half. Others said there was snow off and on all afternoon, but it increased in intensity after the plane passed over. The state police at Phoenicia insisted that there were light squalls all day, with no observable change in the afternoon.
The next morning, New Yorkers awoke to an unseasonable snowstorm. Slush coated the sidewalks, snow blanketed Easter lilies in the city parks, and city workers had to dig shovels out of spring storage. The snow was oddly patchy, sometimes falling on one block but not the next one over. City hall’s wires overflowed with complaints from irate drivers shocked at the icy conditions on bridges and roads. City dwellers called it “Howell’s snow.”
Even as he fired up two generators mounted on station wagons to cruise the watershed and blow silver iodide into the clouds, Howell insisted there was no way to tell if the snow had resulted from seeding.
“It would be completely impossible for anybody to say whether or not we increased the yield of today’s snow flurries over the watershed area,” he told reporters. “On any individual flight, how can anybody tell?” After at least ten flights, he might have a better idea. But the media were not put off so easily. The New York Times ran a photograph of Howell standing near a snowbank at city hall under the title “Is It His or Nature’s?”
All throughout the spring, Howell seeded clouds with silver iodide from the air and from ground generators mounted on trucks. And all that spring, rain fell on the watershed. The local newspapers breathlessly reported on each increase as the city’s water supply inched upward. News reports took on a martial tone: the city was mounting “double-barreled attacks” on the clouds, “bombarding” them from the ground and conducting “aerial assaults.” On April 20, torrential rains in the Catskills caused the Schoharie Reservoir to spill over, ending seeding operations for a few days. With the reservoirs up and New Yorkers still drastically reducing usage on Thirsty Thursdays and Dry Fridays, Commissioner Carney said that the bans on sprinklers and swimming pools might be lifted if the trend continued through summer.
The first court case landed in the state supreme court in May. Ben Slutsky, owner of the Nevele Country Club, demanded an injunction against the city’s rainmaking because it could damage his business. Why would people take vacations in the Catskills, he asked, if they figured it was going to rain the whole time? The supreme court, unmoved, found for the defendant, declaring the plaintiff had “no vested property rights in the clouds or the moisture therein.” Furthermore, the court must weigh Slutsky’s “remote possibility of inconvenience” against the city’s need to maintain “an adequate supply of pure and wholesome water” for ten million people. The city’s interest won out. The court did not even question the assumption that cloud seeding worked.
On May 1, a sixteen-hour seeding operation was followed by three solid hours of rain, adding nearly two billion gallons to the reservoirs. Howell remained reserved, refusing to take credit. It might be his. It might be nature’s. But rain was falling. Because of Bernie’s invention, New York City was saved.
* * *
Dr. George Hoenikker held a vial containing a milky white shard. His invention: Ice-9. His wife didn’t understand it. His kids didn’t understand it. No one saw its significance, no one but him. But he was about to become famous. Maybe he’d win the Nobel Prize. But one thing was for sure: he wasn’t going to work at General Forge and Foundry anymore. He wasn’t going to help them build the Blue Fairy Rocket. He had fled to Cape Cod and was thinking of taking up woodworking.
But then things went wrong. He got mixed up with a blowsy married woman. He got in a car accident. The story careened off in crazy directions. It had no arc.
So Kurt killed Dr. George Hoenikker. He threw the whole “Ice-9” story away and started over. He made several outlines. But they all started in the same place: with a scientist whose conviction that his work carries no social responsibility allows him to invent Ice-9.
Ice-9 was Irving Langmuir’s idea. Someone had told Kurt about it at a cocktail party. GE parties often featured funny stories about Irving. There was the time his secretary was out sick and Irving dealt with the temp for a whole day without noticing the substitution. There was the time he went to pick up Marion and got so lost in thought that when he neared his wife and she waved, he simply waved back and drove past. There was the time he went out with his daughter, Barbara, got caught up in a conversation, and came home without the little girl. But this story was different. It didn’t concern Langmuir’s absentmindedness. It concerned his idea for a novel.
Years earlier, the partygoer told Kurt, H. G. Wells had been invited to tour the Schenectady Works. Wells was quite famous at the time, so he was given GE’s most famous scientist as a guide: Langmuir. Irving took the esteemed writer around the plant, but he was a little unsure of how to talk to a novelist. Because H. G. Wells wrote fiction, Irving thought he would try to entertain him by offering up an idea for a novel. Why not write a book, he suggested, about a scientist who invents a form of ice that’s stable at room temperature? The ice somehow gets into the wrong hands and contaminates the water supply. All of the earth’s water freezes instantly, and life on the planet is doomed.
H. G. Wells had not been interested in Irving’s idea, but Kurt was. How strange that his brother’s older colleague should invent such a perfect parable for the dangers of what he himself did—inventing things with no regard for the human consequences! And the stable ice—he had come to think of it as Ice-9—was an intriguing concept, particularly given what Bernie had told Kurt about different types of ice crystals. At another GE party, Kurt had tried the concept out on a GE crystallographer. The scientist seemed intrigued. He went over to a chair, sat down, and stared blankly into space. After half an hour, he came back to Kurt.
“No,” he had said. “It’s not possible.”
Scientifically impossible, maybe, but it was a damn good story idea. Kurt kept thinking about it. Wells didn’t want it and Irving had no use for it, so he figured, finders, keepers. And now, after a number of false starts with “Ice-9,” he thought he had finally found the right way to tell it. He would set up the ethical conflict by using two characters—two men, a scientist and a sociologist—with different attitudes about the moral duties of scientists.
He turned Dr. George Hoenikker into Dr. Arnold Macon. Macon has invented Ice-9 while living in an island banana republic where he is pet scientist for the island’s repressive dictator, General Monzano. Monzano—whose name recalls the Manzano Mountains where Bernie had his big breakthrough—is faced with a civil uprising. As rebel forces threaten the dictator’s stronghold, Dr. Macon is visited by a sociologist friend, Franklin Dale. Macon can’t resist telling Dale about Ice-9.
Dale immediately recognizes the potential for disaster. He and Macon quarrel about the scientist’s ethical obligations. Macon insists he has none: he just does research and leaves the uses of his discoveries to the engineers. Dale insists he shouldn’t work on inventions that have the power to do great harm. He is proved correct when General Monzano gets his hands on the Ice-9 and holds the world hostage, threatening total annihilation of life on earth if the rebels don’t back down.
The rest of the novella plays out in rousing confrontations and chase scenes as Macon tries, first, to convince the world that his invention is real and capable of doing great harm and, second, to retrieve the Ice-9 from Monzano.
In the final scene, Macon finds General Monzano apparently dead, and the Ice-9 dangling over the sea on a chain attached to the hands of a clock. At the stroke of twelve, it will drop into the water and destroy the world. Macon hesitates, and suddenly he sees that he has been the real villain all along. Secretly, he loved his invention’s destructive power. As he holds the Ice-9 and contemplates ending the world himself, Monzano—alive after all!—shoves him into the sea. Macon pulls the general with him, but the Ice-9 catches on a tree branch, suspended above the high-tide line. The world is saved—for now—through sheer dumb luck.
Kurt figured the novella was perfect for magazine serialization. The only thing that worried him was that, like much of his work, it lacked female characters. Still, he thought it was the best thing he’d ever written.
The month he was finishing the draft of “Ice-9,” GE’s president, Charlie Wilson, addressed the ethical obligations of scientists in Schenectady’s annual Steinmetz Memorial Lecture. There was no use criticizing scientists, Wilson declared, simply because the truths they happen upon can be used for evil ends. “There is nothing moral or religious or hostile or inspirational in science unless man puts it there,” Wilson declared, sounding a lot like Dr. Macon.
Kurt thought otherwise. It wasn’t necessarily evil to invent Ice-9 or a machine that replaced a human being, like OMIBAC, EPICAC, or the “contour-following system” that made skilled workers obsolete. But it was unethical to do these things without thinking about their implications for humanity. Increasingly, that’s what his stories were saying.
He sent “Ice-9” to the typist with renewed hopes of making it to his goal of selling five stories. Kenneth had sold “Das Ganz Arm Dolmetscher” to The Atlantic: that made three. He was only getting $125 for it, but getting published in The Atlantic was a coup for his reputation as a writer. Before long, he might be able to quit, and when he did, it was becoming increasingly clear to him what he would do. He would write a novel about science and progress and ethical quagmires—a novel, in short, about GE.
* * *
By late May, New York City newspapers were announcing water gains on every “front.” By mid-June, the tone was a little less gleeful. The reservoirs were near full, but constant rain was ruining the vacation season upstate. Resort owners grumbled about lost tourist income; farmers in neighboring Orange and Sullivan Counties complained that their vegetable crops were being washed out; sports fans were outraged when Giants and Dodgers games were canceled. Ironically, even the annual picnic of the Department of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity was rained out.
On June 15, with reservoir levels surging, prohibitions on watering lawns and filling swimming pools were lifted. In July, residents were allowed to wash their cars. In August, as he prepared a report on his first six months as the city’s consulting meteorologist, Wallace Howell finally said what the press wanted him to say.
“I have made rain,” he told city reporters.
GE was trying to get its rainmaker to stop saying the same thing.
Irving had submitted his American Meteorological Society paper—the one that had sparked New York City’s experiment—to an editor at Science. The GE lawyers, fearing that the paper could be used as evidence in a civil suit against the company, had the News Bureau head, George Griffin, call up Science and withdraw it. No one informed Langmuir.
When Irving found out, he was furious. GE was demanding he go along with the official position that GE scientists never caused rain. But his future work and reputation depended on convincing people that he had made rain. In the face of his anger, the GE lawyers backed down. Langmuir might be controversial, but he was still their most famous scientist, their only Nobel laureate. The paper appeared in Science in July. By then, Irving, Bernie, and Vince were all back in New Mexico, flying regular seeding runs to see if they could introduce definitive changes in the weather—not just in that state, but across the entire nation.