- •Vice-president in Charge of Volcanoes 9
- •I thought the worst of everyone, and I knew some pretty sordid things about Dr. Asa Breed, things Sandra had told me.
- •I asked Dr. Breed how many people were trying to reach the General Forge and Foundry Company by eight o'clock, and he told me thirty thousand.
- •I smiled at one of the guards. He did not smile back. There was nothing funny about national security, nothing at all.
- •I was surprised and mawkishly heartbroken. I am always moved by that seldom-used treasure, the sweetness with which most girls can sing.
- •I asked Marvin Breed if he'd known Emily Hoenikker, the wife of Felix; the mother of Angela, Frank, and Newt; the woman under that monstrous shaft.
- •I admitted I was.
- •If you wish to study a _granfalloon_,
- •I talked to the Mintons about the legal status of Franklin Hoenikker, who was, after all, not only a big shot in "Papa" Monzano's government, but a fugitive from United States justice.
- •I was so gay and mean,
- •I looked up _Monzano, Mona Aamons_ in the index, and was told by the index to see Aamons, Mona.
- •I was in the bar with Newt and h. Lowe Crosby and a couple of strangers, when San Lorenzo was sighted. Crosby was talking about pissants. "You know what I mean by a pissant?"
- •I looked for Mona, found that she was still serene and had withdrawn to the rail of the reviewing stand. Death, if there was going to be death, did not alarm her.
- •Irrelevantly, I found that I had to know at once who the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy had been.
- •I asked the driver who the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy had been. The boulevard we were going down, I saw, was called the Boulevard of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy.
- •I undertook to explain the deeper significance of the cat's cradle, since Newt seemed disinclined to go through that song and dance again.
- •Is a form of treason.
- •I thought at first that this was a fairly comical suggestion. But then, from Angela's reaction, I learned that the suggestion was serious and practical.
- •I told Angela and Newt about it.
- •I looked at Mona, meltingly, and I thought that I had never needed anyone as much as I needed her.
- •I laughed.
- •Inwardly, I agreed to become the next President of San Lorenzo.
- •I got off the floor, sat in a chair, and started putting my shoes and socks back on.
- •I had stopped ruling. "I see you do," I said.
- •I See the Hook 95
- •I asked him what particular Christian sect he represented, and I observed frankly that the chicken and the butcher knife were novelties insofar as my understanding of Christianity went.
- •I did not drink the rum.
- •I asked who the caricaturist was and learned that he was Dr. Vox Humana, the Christian minister. He was at my elbow.
- •I turned to Castle the elder. "Sir, how does a man die when he's deprived of the consolations of literature?"
- •I'm not quite sure why we hid him. I think it must have been to simplify the tableau.
- •I supposed that the ceremonies might as well begin, and I told Frank to suggest to Ambassador Horlick Minton that he deliver his speech.
- •It separated me from my fellow men.
- •I made up a tune to go with that and I whistled it under my breath as I drove the bicycle that drove the fan that gave us air, good old air.
- •I Am Slow to Answer 121
- •I let my mind go blank. I closed my eyes. It was with deep, idiotic relief that I leaned on that fleshy, humid, barn-yard fool.
- •In the background of this cozy conversation were the nagging dah-dah-dahs and dit-dit-dits of an automatic sos transmitter Frank had made. It called for help both night and day.
- •I hated to see Hazel finishing the flag, because I was all balled up in her addled plans for it. She had the idea that I had agreed to plant the fool thing on the peak of Mount McCabe.
Is a form of treason.
"Bokonon suggested the hook, too, as the proper punishment for Bokononists," he said. "It was something he'd seen in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's." He winked ghoulishly. "That was for zest, too."
"Did many people die on the hook?"
"Not at first, not at first. At first it was all make-believe. Rumors were cunningly circulated about executions, but no one really knew anyone who had died that way. McCabe had a good old time making bloodthirsty threats against the Bokononists--which was everybody.
"And Bokonon went into cozy hiding in the jungle," Castle continued, "where he wrote and preached all day long and ate good things his disciples brought him.
"McCabe would organize the unemployed, which was practically everybody, into great Bokonon hunts.
"About every six months McCabe would announce triumphantly that Bokonon was surrounded by a ring of steel, which was remorselessly closing in.
"And then the leaders of the remorseless ring would have to report to McCabe, full of chagrin and apoplexy, that Bokonon had done the impossible.
"He had escaped, had evaporated, had lived to preach another day. Miracle!"
Why McCabe's Soul Grew Coarse 79
"McCabe and Bokonon did not succeed in raising what is generally thought of as the standard of living," said Castle. "The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever.
"But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud."
"So life became a work of art," I marveled.
"Yes. There was only one trouble with it."
"Oh?"
"The drama was very tough on the souls of the two main actors, McCabe and Bokonon. As young men, they had been pretty much alike, had both been half-angel, half-pirate.
"But the drama demanded that the pirate half of Bokonon and the angel half of McCabe wither away. And McCabe and Bokonon paid a terrible price in agony for the happiness of the people--McCabe knowing the agony of the tyrant and Bokonon knowing the agony of the saint. They both became, for all practical purposes, insane."
Castle crooked the index finger of his left hand. "And then, people really did start dying on the _hy-u-o-ook-kuh_."
"But Bokonon was never caught?" I asked.
"McCabe never went that crazy. He never made a really serious effort to catch Bokonon. It would have been easy to do."
"Why didn't he catch him?"
"McCabe was always sane enough to realize that without the holy man to war against, he himself would become meaningless. 'Papa' Monzano understands that, too."
"Do people still die on the hook?"
"It's inevitably fatal."
"I mean," I said, "does 'Papa' really have people executed that way?"
"He executes one every two years--just to keep the pot boiling, so to speak." He sighed, looking up at the evening sky. "Busy, busy, busy."
"Sir?"
"It's what we Bokononists say," he said, "when we feel that a lot of mysterious things are going on."
"You?" I was amazed. "A Bokononist, too?"
He gazed at me levelly. "You, too. You'll find out."
The Waterfall Strainers 80
Angela and Newt were on the cantilevered terrace with Julian Castle and me. We had cocktails. There was still no word from Frank.
Both Angela and Newt, it appeared, were fairly heavy drinkers. Castle told me that his days as a playboy had cost him a kidney, and that he was unhappily compelled, per force, to stick to ginger ale.
Angela, when she got a few drinks into her, complained of how the world had swindled her father. "He gave so much, and they gave him so little."
I pressed her for examples of the world's stinginess and got some exact numbers. "General Forge and Foundry gave him a forty-five-dollar bonus for every patent his work led to," she said. "That's the same patent bonus they paid anybody in the company." She shook her head mournfully. "Forty-five dollars--and just think what some of those patents were for!"
"Um," I said. "I assume he got a salary, too."
"The most he ever made was twenty-eight thousand dollars a year."
"I'd say that was pretty good."
She got very huffy. "You know what movie stars make?"
"A lot, sometimes."
"You know Dr. Breed made ten thousand more dollars a year than Father did?"
"That was certainly an injustice."
"I'm sick of injustice."
She was so shrilly exercised that I changed the subject. I asked Julian Castle what he thought had become of the painting he had thrown down the waterfall.
"There's a little village at the bottom," he told me. "Five or ten shacks, I'd say. It's 'Papa' Monzano's birthplace, incidentally. The waterfall ends in a big stone bowl there.
"The villagers have a net made out of chicken wire stretched across a notch in the bowl. Water spills out through the notch into a stream."
"And Newt's painting is in the net now, you think?" I asked.
"This is a poor country--in case you haven't noticed," said Castle. "Nothing stays in the net very long. I imagine Newt's painting is being dried in the sun by now, along with the butt of my cigar. Four square feet of gummy canvas, the four milled and mitered sticks of the stretcher, some tacks, too, and a cigar. All in all, a pretty nice catch for some poor, poor man."
"I could just scream sometimes," said Angela, "when I think about how much some people get paid and how little they paid Father--and how much he gave." She was on the edge of a crying jag.
"Don't cry," Newt begged her gently.
"Sometimes I can't help it," she said.
"Go get your clarinet," urged Newt. "That always helps."