Kurt sat in his office around 9:30 in the evening. In one hand, he had a cigarette, and in the other a piece of paper. Bernie had given it to him earlier that day.
“We do have some other photographs of the poor man’s Steinmetz, and I may send them to you in my own sweet time.”
It was his letter to Uncle Alex, written in 1947, fifty years earlier, when he was still a young man. He was an old man now. Bernie was even older, of course. Old and sick. He had handed the letter to Kurt in Albany, where Kurt went every week by train to see his older brother as he faded away from lung cancer.
By now, Kurt was famous, very famous. But success had not come easily. After Player Piano, he was blocked for years. Scribner had sold the paperback rights to Bantam for $4,000, and the book that was going to earn him some literary respect was retitled Utopia 14 and released in a lurid mass-market edition, complete with a futuristic city and writhing half-dressed people on the cover. “Man’s revolt against a glittering, mechanized tomorrow,” it read, next to the cover price of thirty-five cents. Thus began the process of consigning Kurt Vonnegut novels to the shelf marked “science fiction,” a designation he would alternately embrace and bemoan.
For years, all he could produce were short stories to pay the mortgage, and even those were not plentiful enough. He took copywriting jobs, teaching jobs; he opened one of the nation’s first Saab dealerships. It failed. Cape Cod wasn’t quite ready for Saabs.
When he finally broke through his writer’s block and wrote The Sirens of Titan—published as a paperback original—he was still writing about the war. War remained the backdrop for his books for another fifteen years: battles, mortar attacks, artillery shellings, air assaults, ships firing cannons, bombs dropping on jungles and castles and cities, hordes of nameless refugees, legions of dead. He even designed and tried to market a military strategy board game called GHQ, with counters representing infantry, artillery, and paratroop units arrayed on a checkerboard, as if he were turning his story “All the King’s Horses” into an actual game, as if he were refighting the Battle of the Bulge.
He started and restarted his Dresden book, five times, ten times, more times than he cared to guess. He wrote it as a teleplay, a short story, a nonfiction essay. He was working on it when Cat’s Cradle was published in 1963, and ice-nine—along with the terms karass, foma, and wampeter—entered the language. He was working on it when he published Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, each admired by a few critics and contributing to his underground reputation. He was working on it when his sister, Alice, died of cancer, two days after her husband, Jim Adams, was killed in a freak train wreck on New Jersey Transit. He was working on it when he and Jane took in her four orphaned boys and suddenly had seven kids, as they always knew they would.
Finally, in the late 1960s, with the nation cycling through gloom and guilt and rage over events in Vietnam, Kurt was offered a teaching position at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The mood in the nation plus the literary stimulation of Iowa and the escape from his own routine broke the logjam that had lasted for a quarter century. He began to rewrite what he had always called Slaughterhouse-Five, wrestling the material that had haunted him since 1945 into his own unique novel form. He was finally able to use Norbert Wiener’s idea of “Newtonian time”—reversible time in which nothing new can ever happen—to full effect. When Billy Pilgrim begins to experience time as the Tralfamadorians do, it is not just a far-out concept of quantum physics but also the time we all live in, where at any moment we might be transported back to a former moment in our lives.
One of the last typescript drafts before Slaughterhouse-Five began with the line “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Above it, Kurt wrote one word by hand: “Listen.”
Growing up as the youngest child, he always yearned to say this to his parents and siblings. As the younger brother who wanted to be a writer, not a chemist, he had longed to say it to Bernard. As an adult, he finally learned to say it, learned to work his desire to say it into the style we now recognize as uniquely his.
At once an antiwar treatise and a psychological depiction of post-traumatic stress, Slaughterhouse-Five electrified readers and made Kurt a literary icon. His time in Iowa salvaged his reputation, assured his family’s financial future, and gave him what he had always wanted: a place in the literary pantheon. It was also where he launched an affair that would begin the process of ending his marriage to Jane. So it goes.
Recently, as Bernie lay dying in Albany, he had told Kurt that he didn’t think scientists made very good husbands. They were too focused on the fascinating things going on in their own heads.
You could say the same for writers, of course.
But Jane’s confidence in Kurt had shaped him, and her voice was there in the work. In Slaughterhouse-Five, he concluded one of the most compelling descriptions of a massacre ever written with the voice of a bird: the last word in the novel is “Po-tweet?” It summed up Jane’s undergraduate history thesis at Swarthmore: no sense can be made of history; no meaning can be gleaned from a massacre. The only thing to do is to listen to the birds.
And, like Dostoevsky’s Father Zossima, to ask forgiveness of them.
Two years after Kurt published Slaughterhouse-Five, newspapers broke a fantastic story: the CIA had been using cloud seeding as a weapon of war. Since 1966, U.S. planes had flown more than twenty-six hundred cloud-seeding missions over Indochina, spraying the clouds of Vietnam and Laos with aerosolized silver iodide. The intent was to make rain: rain to wash out river crossings and muddy up the Ho Chi Minh Trail, rain to slow supply lines and troop movements in North Vietnam. Like so many weather modification projects, the program had a sci-fi-like name: Operation Popeye.
Bernard was horrified to see his invention used in actual combat. But news of the missions led to an international outcry and, eventually, something he had always desired, a UN treaty banning the use of weather modification as a weapon of war.
By the time Bernie heard about Operation Popeye, he had left industrial science and become an academic. His career at Arthur D. Little in Cambridge had been spent investigating electrification in tornadoes and thunderstorms. In the summers, he continued to chase clouds and lightning in Socorro, based at what became the Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research. Then, in 1967, he accepted a faculty position at the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, founded six years earlier by Vincent Schaefer at the State University of New York at Albany. Along with several other former colleagues from the Project Cirrus team, Bernie became a professor and continued his research while teaching, nurturing young scientists with his passion for weather.
From Schenectady to Scituate to Albany, through childbirth and schooling, through children growing up and succeeding or struggling, through his wife’s death, and his son’s illness: through all those years, Bernie had kept Kurt’s letter to Uncle Alex. He must have found it funny. He liked a good joke as much as any of them. But maybe he found the letter touching too, a reminder of the younger sibling unable to resist a chance at a potshot, the jealous kid brother who lives on in kid brothers everywhere.
In 1985, MIT invited Kurt to give a speech. He must have been gratified to be invited to hold forth at his brother’s and father’s and grandfather’s alma mater. To make the scientists at one of the biggest science factories of all listen to him. He felt as if he might actually be able to do some good. So he told the graduating class about his brother, Bernard, a fellow graduate of MIT.
“My brother knew early on that he would be a research scientist, and so could not be self-employed,” he told them. To make a living, his brother was going to have to work for somebody else, to make someone else’s technological dreams come true. Bernie, he told them, got his doctorate on the eve of World War II:
If he had gone to work in Germany after that, he would have been helping to make Hitler’s dreams come true. If he had gone to work in Italy, he would have been helping to make Mussolini’s dreams come true. If he had gone to work in Japan, he would have been helping to make Tojo’s dreams come true. If he had gone to work in the Soviet Union, he would have been helping to make Stalin’s dreams come true. He went to work for a bottle manufacturer in Butler, Pennsylvania, instead. It can make quite a difference not just to you but to humanity: the sort of boss you choose, whose dreams you help come true.
It was a reprise, in some ways, of an address Kurt gave to the American Association of Physics Teachers in 1969 called “The Virtuous Physicist.” Scientists at several major research universities were protesting the misuse of science as a tool of war. After his talk, Kurt was asked by reporters what defined a virtuous physicist. He told them it was simple: “one who declines to work on weapons.”
Someone should write an oath for them, Kurt told the scientists at MIT nearly twenty years later. One modeled on the Hippocratic oath, something like “The regimen I adopt shall be for the benefit of all life on this planet, according to my own ability and judgment, and not for its hurt or for any wrong. I will create no deadly substance or device, though it be asked of me, nor will I counsel such.”
Bernie read and approved of Kurt’s talk before he gave it.
The year after Kurt spoke at MIT, Jane Vonnegut Yarmolinsky—she had married the Harvard law professor Adam Yarmolinsky—succumbed to cancer at the age of sixty-four. Not long before she died, Jane called Kurt. Their conversation was affectionate. Jane asked Kurt to tell her what would determine the moment of her death. Why ask him? “She may have felt like a character in a book by me,” Kurt wrote later. “In a sense she was.” Of course Jane was nobody’s fictional character but a living, breathing woman full of life and energy and purpose. Without her, the Kurt Vonnegut we know would never have existed. To a great extent, he was a character created by her. And yet what he said was somehow true to the times in which they made their home and raised their children. The men wrote the stories of their lives. The women played their parts in them.
Kurt told Jane that a ten-year-old boy would be standing at the end of Scudder’s Lane, the street where they had lived most of their years on Cape Cod. Standing on the boat ramp that reaches out into the pond, the boy would be sunburned and bored but happy. “I told Jane that this boy, with nothing better to do, would pick up a stone, as boys will. He would arc it over the harbor. When the stone hit the water, she would die.”
* * *
Did Bernie really make rain? Scientists have been debating the efficacy of cloud seeding ever since Vincent dispensed dry ice over Mount Greylock in 1946, but the general consensus today is that in certain conditions it works in a limited way. The huge modifications Irving promised never came to pass. Immediately after GE shut down Project Cirrus, the military conducted six large-scale experiments. Five yielded inconclusive results, and one showed a positive result: the seeding of supercooled stratus clouds with dry ice and silver iodide. Officers from the Office of Naval Research consulted with Irving Langmuir on these experiments, though they would not reveal any specifics, and the results were classified until 1957. Irving had by then completed his magnum opus: his final report on Project Cirrus. But the nearly six-hundred-page treatise was classified as well. When it was finally published as volume 11 of his Collected Works in 1962, Irving was dead; he had died in 1957, with the work he considered his legacy to humanity unknown to science. Today, he is well-known among chemists, but his popular reputation died with his dream of widespread weather control.
Bernie’s invention is the main legacy of Project Cirrus. Silver iodide remains the most widespread method of enhancing precipitation. Utilities in California have been using silver iodide to increase the winter snowpack in the Sierra Nevada since the early 1950s. The Desert Research Institute in Nevada has been using it to seed clouds since not long after that; currently, it has three operational programs in Nevada and California. In the 1960s, the Bureau of Reclamation conducted rainmaking experiments over reservoirs, with some apparent success, under the name Project Skywater. In the 1960s and 1970s, a joint U.S. Navy–Weather Bureau experiment called Project Stormfury attempted less successfully to modify hurricanes with seeding.
Research spending on weather modification dwindled after the 1970s. Factors blamed for the field’s decline include early overpromising, the lack of rigorous research, environmentalist campaigns against altering nature, and Reagan-era reductions in government funding. Another key element: the early 1980s were an exceptionally wet period in the United States. The weather modifiers have a saying for this: “Interest in cloud seeding is soluble in rainwater.”
Today’s changing climate has renewed interest in weather modification. In the West and the Great Plains, severe drought and diminishing aquifers have led water utilities, hydropower producers, agriculture groups, and ski resorts to fund cloud-seeding programs. In Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, California, Utah, and Nevada, rainmakers are hired to augment the snowpack. In Texas and Kansas, cloud seeders are at work to induce rain. In North Dakota, clouds are seeded to make them precipitate before they can produce crop-damaging hail. California, Nevada, and Arizona contribute funds to cloud-seeding projects over the Colorado River’s upper basin, in hopes of increasing their water supply.
And yet many people today believe that weather modification is a hoax: the early overselling of rainmaking somehow caused it, down the line, to be grouped in the public mind with conspiracy theories about mind-altering “chemtrails,” shock-jock speculation that the government manufactures tornadoes, and paranoid fantasies about “weather wars” involving earthquakes broadcast via the stratosphere. The reality is far less dramatic. A rigorous five-year randomized study sponsored by the Wyoming Water Development Commission and funded by the National Science Foundation is on track to yield results showing that seeding certain clouds can be expected to increase precipitation by about 10 to 15 percent.
As for Project Cirrus’s widespread periodicities and whether they resulted from Bernie’s little generator huffing away in New Mexico, the general consensus among those who’ve even heard of the experiment is that the periodicities were a freaky coincidence. The Weather Bureau meteorologist Roscoe Braham called Langmuir’s experiment “one of those tantalizing things.” The MIT meteorologist Henry Houghton called it “the most mysterious thing I have ever run up against … If it wasn’t chance, it was a totally new effect.” Another meteorologist in 1953 said the episode was “a great tragedy.”
“If Langmuir actually influenced the weather,” he said, “no one will believe him. If the periodicities were mere coincidence, nature played Langmuir a dirty trick.”
Of course, nature plays dirty tricks on us all the time, if by that we mean that it shimmies out of grasp, foiling our urge to master and sometimes our desire to know.
“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before,” writes Bokonon in Cat’s Cradle. “He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
“Perhaps if he had comprehended fully the magnitude of atmospheric phenomena,” the meteorologist Horace Byers wrote years later of Irving Langmuir, “he might have been discouraged from the start.” But in one way Langmuir—and Bernie too—understood the magnitude of atmospheric phenomena better than almost anyone. They understood that the atmosphere was such a huge, complex, and dynamic system that we would never nail it down with numbers. The weather, Langmuir wrote in his great work, “is not definitely determinate. It depends in large part and essentially upon meteorological events that originate from small and unpredictable beginnings, such as the location and concentration of freezing nuclei that may set off chain reactions.” Today we call this chaos.
Developed by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz beginning in 1960, chaos theory holds that in some huge systems—weather and other things like it—small contingencies cascade upward to produce large effects. Scientists named it “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” Norbert Wiener had already seen this in 1954, calling it “the self-amplification of small details in the weather map.” Langmuir’s theory of convergent and divergent phenomena was an early version of chaos theory, another startling intuitive achievement and one for which he has never been given credit. Langmuir and Wiener were right, and John von Neumann was wrong. The weather cannot be entirely solved by equation, because it is not deterministic. It’s all flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. The flutter of a butterfly’s wing can touch off whirlwinds ten thousand miles away.
It’s all an ocean, after all.
Weather prediction today combines von Neumann’s mathematical approach with Wiener and Langmuir’s probabilistic one. The weather can be predicted with a good degree of accuracy for about a week out. It can be predicted with somewhat less accuracy for up to two weeks. After that, it all falls apart, because the effects of very tiny disturbances multiply with great speed. Eventually, you get far enough out that statistics and probabilities smooth out the variations, and you can make largely accurate guesses about long-term climate, but in the zone between two weeks and two millennia it’s still a mystery. The computer did not turn out to be Laplace’s demon—the all-knowing consciousness of a clockwork universe—though hope that it might still morph into that being can sometimes be whiffed in the tech factories of Silicon Valley.
* * *
As for John von Neumann, in early 1955 he was appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission and moved to Washington. That June, he published an essay in Fortune called “Can We Survive Technology?” He outlined the sweeping technological advances about to transform the world: nearly free atomic energy, automation of everything, and global climate control. All of these advances, he acknowledged, had immense potential for harm as well as good. But that was the nature of science. To attempt to control or restrain it was impractical.
“For progress,” he wrote, “there is no cure.”
Kurt—and Bernie—would disagree. The cure for progress was simply remembering that we are human.
Not long after his essay appeared, von Neumann slipped and fell in a Washington hallway and was subsequently diagnosed with bone cancer, possibly due to his presence at so many early atomic tests. He died eighteen months later, under military guard with top clearance, for fear that in his agonized raving he should reveal military secrets. He was tormented beyond all reason by the fact that he, too, turned out to be frail, imperfect, inefficient, that for the progress of life there is no cure. Before he died, the lifelong atheist requested the ministrations of a priest.
* * *
Harry Wexler eventually gave up his opposition to the idea of weather control. In 1959, he attended a meeting on weather modification chaired by Edward Teller, who had become a believer. Three years later, Harry gave a paper called “On the Possibilities of Climate Control” at the AMS meeting in Boston. The subject of weather control, he told the audience, was “now becoming respectable to talk about.” Indeed, President Kennedy had called for international cooperation on climate control in his inauguration speech that year. The UN had also voiced hope that nations would cooperate on this front.
Wexler outlined some interventions in the climate that seemed to him feasible, given the greater climate understanding both satellites and computers were providing. But, he pointed out, “we are in weather control now whether we know it or not.” Wexler talked about the dangers of inadvertent damage to the ozone layer via ozone-depleting chemical reactions. He noted the fact that “we are releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other gases and particles to the lower atmosphere which may have serious effects on the radiation or heat balance which determine our present pattern of climate and weather.” He was still investigating these phenomena just months later when he died, tragically, of a heart attack at age fifty-one. His research was largely forgotten until the 1970s. It would be interesting to know what might have happened had such a forceful character been around to advocate investigating the dangers of chlorofluorocarbons and greenhouse gases more than a decade before the majority of scientists thought to do so.
In fact, the most significant legacy of Project Cirrus might be that it laid the foundation for studying human impacts on the climate, a field previously considered the domain of science fiction. In 1978, Bernie explained,
Project Cirrus’s investigations of ways that man can intentionally affect the weather cast a new light on how man’s activities might unintentionally have a large influence on weather processes. Along with the scientific study of deliberate weather modification, a new vigorous research activity is developing to explore how man may be affecting his environment by the gases, aerosols and heat he emits into the atmosphere in the course of his many activities … In recent years several international workshops on inadvertent weather modification have been held. These are undoubtedly only the first of many similar ones that will be held in the future on this subject.
* * *
GE continued to move to the right throughout the 1950s, blacklisting employees who wouldn’t cooperate fully with HUAC and gradually reining in its unions through tough negotiation tactics that came to be known as Boulwarism. Two years after Bernie left, GE hired an underemployed actor to serve as its public relations spokesman and to host the company television show GE Theater. Taken under the ideological wing of Lemuel Boulware, he was purged of his previous liberal convictions and indoctrinated in the virtues of unfettered markets. Ten years later, that actor, Ronald Reagan, would make a stunning speech in support of Barry Goldwater at the Republican National Convention, launching a conservative revolution and his own political career.
The nation by then had thrown itself so fully into the Cold War and the arms race that even the Republican president, Eisenhower, famously warned against letting the “military-industrial complex” have too much power. The hope shared by so many—including Kurt and Bernie—in the late 1940s, hope for peace through disarmament and world government, came to seem like a distant pipe dream. Kurt never stopped longing for America to be what he believed it could be—the progressive, freethinking nation that had given birth to the New Deal—and in his work he returned to the theme again and again. America, he wrote in novels and essays and newspaper columns, could live up to its promise if only people would embrace their better selves—the selves dedicated to equality and free speech and kindness and giving the downtrodden a hand. By the time Bernie gave him back the letter he had sent to Uncle Alex fifty years earlier, Kurt was growing disheartened. That old America, he told friends, was gone. In his novel Galápagos, in many ways a rewrite of Player Piano, he had proposed that humanity would only improve when humans evolved away from being big-brained tool users and into furry, fish-eating amphibians. As Bernie was dying, Kurt was working on Timequake, in which the entire planet is forced to repeat a whole decade, “betting on the wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person again, getting the clap again. You name it!” History is literally doomed to repeat itself, at least in a clockwork universe. The novel is a kind of thought experiment about what it might be like to inhabit a completely deterministic world. But, as if shaking off the ghost of John von Neumann, Kurt returned the world to its messy unpredictability in the end. There’s even a glimmer of hope in the mantra Kilgore Trout and a crew of volunteers use to spur people back into action once the timequake has ended and free will has returned: “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”
* * *
Bernard Vonnegut’s last published work was about art. During his research at Arthur D. Little, he had been introduced to a technique for making dendritic electrical discharge patterns on blocks of transparent plastic—little lightning bolts preserved in plastic like fossils in amber. Contemplation of the branching images had changed his thinking about lightning. Later, he and a colleague made convective flow patterns between sheets of plastic using aluminum paint and kerosene. Eventually, just for the fun of it, he began making permanent patterns by squeezing paint between two smooth surfaces—ceramic tile or glass or plastic—then pulling the surfaces apart.
“Physicists may already know enough about the behavior of liquids to predict the patterns that form, based on such variables as the rate at which the surfaces are pulled apart, the thickness of the liquid film, the viscosity and surface tension of the liquid and the angle at which it wets the surfaces,” he wrote in his piece. In other words, physicists would see this process as reducible to a series of equations, would understand the know-how. But what about the know-what? Would they note how it glowed?
Kurt would. Bernie sent some of his patterns to his brother and asked him, is this art? Kurt’s letter back reads as if he still occasionally relished the chance to lecture Bernie. “This is almost like telling you about the birds and the bees,” he began. Art, he told his brother, was in the eye of the beholder. Contemplating it was a social activity.
“You are a justly revered experimentalist,” Kurt wrote. “If you really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, ‘art’ or not, you must display them in a public place somewhere, and then try to judge whether or not strangers liked to look at them, were glad that you had made them. That is the way the game is played. Let me know what happens.”
Bernie’s dendritic prints might or might not have been art. But in calling his brother a “justly revered experimentalist,” Kurt was admitting something he had probably known for a long time: his brother was an artist. Bernard’s real art was in the pages of scientific journals. It was scrawled in his notebooks. It was in tubes and jars and Rube Goldberg contraptions cluttering his disaster of a desk. It was ice crystals glinting in the sunlight, gammas carved out of the clouds, a thunderstorm flipped on its back like a turtle. It was water summoned from a cloud-painted sky. There’s more art to science than most of us believe.
According to Kurt, at the end of his life Bernie cherished a collection of favorite quotations by Albert Einstein. One of them was “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”
Another was “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”
Bernie died not long after giving Kurt his old letter. Before dying, he told his brother, “If the superpowers decide to duke it out with silver iodide, I think I can live with that.”
Four days after Bernie died, Kurt finished the highly personal Timequake, his fourteenth novel, and the last he would ever write.
“I was the baby of the family,” he explained at the end. “Now I don’t have anybody to show off for anymore.”
Bernie’s son Terry died not long after him, losing a long struggle with cancer. Family members took both their ashes up in a small plane. They flew to the vicinity of Mount Greylock, where it all began, and scattered father and son into the clouds.
Kurt published a tribute to Bernie in The New York Times Magazine. Thinking back to those early days after Hiroshima, when the scientists first knew sin, Kurt declared that Bernard had “original virtue.” And then he described New York City’s rainmaking efforts of 1950, a story that somehow the city had forgotten. But Kurt had not. The deluge was beautiful. Sure, he allowed, it might have “washed away a lot of privies and gazebos or whatever. But it did fill the reservoirs to brimming.
“And what the heck,” he concluded. “It was only water.”