"Vonnegut, Kurt - Cat's Cradle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

Newt's Thing with Zinka 8


Newt did not tell me who his girl friend was. But about two weeks after he wrote to me everybody in the country knew that her name was Zinka--plain Zinka. Apparently she didn't have a last name.
Zinka was a Ukrainian midget, a dancer with the Borzoi Dance Company. As it happened, Newt saw a performance by that company in Indianapolis, before he went to Cornell. And then the company danced at Cornell. When the Cornell performance was over, little Newt was outside the stage door with a dozen long-stemmed American Beauty roses.
The newspapers picked up the story when little Zinka asked for political asylum in the United States, and then she and little Newt disappeared.
One week after that, little Zinka presented herself at the Russian Embassy. She said Americans were too materialistic. She said she wanted to go back home.
Newt took shelter in his sister's house in Indianapolis. He gave one brief statement to the press. "It was a private matter," he said. "It was an affair of the heart. I have no regrets. What happened is nobody's business but Zinka's and my own."
One enterprising American reporter in Moscow, making inquiries about Zinka among dance people there, made the unkind discovery that Zinka was not, as she claimed, only twenty-three years old.
She was forty-two--old enough to be Newt's mother.









Vice-president in Charge of Volcanoes 9


I loafed on my book about the day of the bomb.
About a year later, two days before Christmas, another story carried me through Ilium, New York, where Dr. Felix Hoenikker had done most of his work; where little Newt, Frank, and Angela had spent their formative years.
I stopped off in Ilium to see what I could see.
There were no live Hoenikkers left in Ilium, but there were plenty of people who claimed to have known well the old man and his three peculiar children.
I made an appointment with Dr. Asa Breed, Vice-president in charge of the Research Laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company. I suppose Dr. Breed was a member of my _karass_, too, though he took a dislike to me almost immediately.
"Likes and dislikes have nothing to do with it," says Bokonon--an easy warning to forget.
"I understand you were Dr. Hoenikker's supervisor during most of his professional life," I said to Dr. Breed on the telephone.
"On paper," he said.
"I don't understand," I said.
"If I actually supervised Felix," he said, "then I'm ready now to take charge of volcanoes, the tides, and the migrations of birds and lemmings. The man was a force of nature no mortal could possibly control."









Secret Agent X-9 10